Age: Just a Number? Hollywood, Hauntology and Entropy
“Hauntology”, first coined by Marxist film critic Mark Fisher, describes the cultural yearning for a lost future. In a society that engages so heavily in nostalgia, the constant harkening back to a “better” past, we sometimes fail to envision what a proper future might look like. Culture sometimes tends to become trapped in its own inertia, it cannot push forward when it revolves around the weight of years gone by.
This inescapable yearning for a future that we cannot quite have is being reflected more and more in our treatment of older actors still working today. There is an increasing desire to see trends, performances and genres that have lost prominence within Hollywood, reflected in popular films emerging on streaming sites nowadays. Sometimes, this comes to pass so strongly that filmmakers spend millions trying to evoke the past – totally transforming performers into visages of the past. Sometimes, cutting edge technology can even be used to bring people back from the dead.
In 2019, Martin Scorsese directed another 3-hour gangster epic starring 77-year-old Robert De Niro, who plays a character that we see at ages 24 through 80. Scorsese realised this vision by funding the development of a cutting-edge de-aging software (costing Netflix somewhere to the tune of $230 million).
So, what we have here are the newest possible innovations in filmic technology, being used to simulate how actors looked 50 years ago and projecting it onto a near octogenarian’s face.
Mark Fisher would have doubtless found The Irishman fascinating. Which is entirely fair – it is a particularly well-put together film. While the CGI used to create these younger visages of De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino is very impressive, the way the film was created should not just be chalked down to computer techniques.
Speaking on the creation of the film, Scorsese had this to say: “This isn’t just about lenses and computer imagery. It’s about posture, it’s about movement, it’s about clarity of the eyes, everything.” The actors refused to use facial markers, which further complicated the process, and the director did not want to use stunt doubles with the faces imposed onto them.
What this meant was that the venerated (but now elderly) Al Pacino had to do several extra takes of a scene where Jimmy Hoffa leaps from his chair because the team forgot he was meant to be “acting 49” in that particular scene.
It certainly has interesting implications in terms of what it means for the performances we see using these new techniques. To some degree, when you watch The Irishman, you are watching older performers piloting artificial avatars of their younger selves, the wrinkles and crevices of their faces digitally smoothed over while the actors redo take after take to try and act “young enough”.
64 years after his actual, physical death in a car crash, James Dean is set to star in a new film. Finding Jack, a Vietnam-set action drama from Magic City Films obtained the rights to use James Dean’s image from his family – with an intended release date of Veteran’s Day 2020.
There is an alleged $40,500,000 budget behind this title, and thanks to COVID-19 is still stuck in pre-production (which is strange, you would have thought a CGI ghost would not need to socially distance). Animating a dead actor for a film is not a new phenomenon, as Star Wars fans would know. It does raise some similar concerns as having elderly Robert DeNiro piloting a CGI golem of his younger self with regards to hauntology – are we becoming such slaves to nostalgia that we need to animate the dead for our entertainment.
While Magic City may have consent from Dean’s family to use his likeness, the company does not have the consent of James Dean (unsurprisingly, as he has been dead since 1955). When we look at great actors and actresses of note, we often look at a canon or career trajectory that the actor has forged for themselves. In fact, studios often partner with a particular actor to helm a film, as we saw with the DiCaprio/Warner Bros campaign to secure the Wolf of Wall Street film rights. To some degree, this ability to animate deceased performers has robbed them of their agency – there is no option for dead performers to curate their cinema careers.
The ethics of animating James Dean aside – there’s a moral/social undercurrent here: is the veneration of the past to such an expensive and all-encompassing degree healthy? What, if anything, is to be done?
The Irishman and Finding Jack present two distinct sides of Hollywood’s use of de-aging CGI technology. Finding Jack’s director has gone on record saying that James Dean is the perfect actor for the role. How can that be? He certainly did not audition. On the other hand, Scorsese’s choice to revisit the bygone days of his actors’ youths is reflected in the thematic expression of the film: we see the degrading memories of an older man flicker and flit through this exemplary revival of a near-extinct genre.
When we look at the way Hollywood tries to cling onto its past – we need to make sure it is being done for a reason. Otherwise, who else is there to stick up for poor, disembodied James Dean?
Written by Martin Docherty
Martin is a recently recovering English Graduate, hoping to rehabilitate himself by producing content about all the media he can. You can find him on the Movies and Martins podcast chatting about films and despairing at the Now You See Me films.