Fantasyland #11 - Hall of Bruce Willis
Fantasyland #11 - Hall of Bruce Willis
Death to the column! Long live the column!
Earlier this week I read about the history behind the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and was hoping something would come up in the news that would allow me to write about it. Then it was announced on Thursday that Bruce Willis became the first actor to sell his likeness to a deepfake firm. And then on Saturday it was announced that he hadn’t. Current speculation being that despite this latest press release he has in fact sold his likeness but it was just announced too early, maybe… But more on that in a bit. First let’s go to Versailles.
So it’s 1678 and The Sun King Louis XIV decides that France needs to get into the mirror game, partly for vanity, but mostly because at the time Venice pretty much had the market cornered and were thus making huge sums of money. For some context on just how exclusive and expensive these Venetian mirrors were, they were pricier than Raphael’s paintings, sought after by royalty all across Europe, and Henry VIII even bought some in exchange for a warship. Basically, the Venetians had a good thing going. So, in an attempt to exert power and stake a claim in the market, Louis enticed some Venetian glaziers into his court and had them set up the first French mirror workshop. Its first commission being the phantasmagoric Hall of Mirrors: a 73m long, 12m high and 10m wide hall featuring 357 brand new French mirrors.
You can only imagine how overwhelming it must have been to stand in that room when it was first completed. To witness the infinity mirror effect of the folded doors, the sunlight reflecting a glowing white against the panels, candles warping astigmatically in the dark, and the massive paintings, scupltures and gold mouldings filling the room with such an excess of opulence that you wouldn’t quite know what to do with yourself.
Such were the Sun King’s intentions—inviting, upon its completion, an array of monarchs, rulers and dignitaries to bear witness to his latest display of wealth and power. Among these a Venetian delegation, already well aware of their workmen who had defected to the French court, and who were no doubt floored and irritated by what could only have been seen as an immense act of betrayal. A hell of a dick swinging move by Louis, an almighty ‘Fuck you and look at me’ for the ages.
So how does this relate to Bruce Willis possibly selling his likeness to a deepfake firm? Other than the very literal comparison that deepfake technology creates a mirror of someone, and how these conflicting press releases are inverted reflections of one another, there is also the fact that Willis’s team recently released the news that he was diagnosed with Aphasia, a speech disorder that strips you of your ability to understand words and render thought into spoken language. Perhaps then there’s a superficial comparison to be made between the overwhelming nature of witnessing the Hall of Mirrors for the first time all those years ago and the effect that Aphasia has on its sufferer.
Whether or not Willis has sold his likeness the fact is that soon enough someone else will, and regardless of who it is such sales are among the first of many steps to improving and normalising a deeply uncanny new technology. At this point it’s already obvious that politics, porn and celebrity are going to change drastically as a result of deepfakes, with their ability to convince the already gullible public into believing all sorts of things. Though currently an unsettling prospect, the more the technology improves the more it’ll be normalised and accepted as part of the culture. Unless, of course, it wreaks havoc with our perception and psyches, or, more likely, is recognised as a threat to powerful people, and is thus regulated and relegated to some form of digital parlour trick. But part of me doubts that. Part of me thinks that much like mirrors, once so beguiling and thrilling (which, undoubtedly, they still are) they’ll simply become part of the cultural furniture.
What fascinates me about deepfake technology is just how much consent is involved in people’s appreciation of it. Consent and desire. Take David Attenborough for instance, whenever he trends on Twitter and people start worrying that he’s died the conversation inevitably turns to something along the lines of: ‘Sure, it’s awful and sad that he’s going to die, but there’s so many recordings of him that at least we’ll be able to use AI to continue having him do voiceovers for documentaries.’ And people en masse seem to love and support this idea. Yet when Morgan Neville used AI to deepfake Anthony Bourdain’s voice in his heartwrenching 2021 documentary, Roadrunner, and had him read out an email that could only be seen as a precursor to his suicide, people felt betrayed, annoyed, disgusted and confused. Like it was this cheap trick to elicit emotion. Only had they not been told about its being AI generated would they have known? I recently rewatched the documentary with some friends who hadn’t seen it before and only told them about the AI voice after the fact. Until I pointed it out they genuinely hadn’t even considered its potential ‘falseness’ beyond a general ‘why was this recorded’ sort of thing. They didn’t feel particularly betrayed by it, but there was a sense of moral confusion in the room that was followed up by ‘well, actually, now that I think of it maybe it did sound a little stunted, or wrong, or something…’ But did it at the time? Or was that just their brains trying to reclaim a sense of reality for them?
Visually we aren’t yet as close to mental deception with deepfakes as we are with aural deception. And in many ways the effect that watching a deepfake, no matter how good it is, has on the viewer holds many similarities to Aphasia. It’s confusing. Like looking at a word and knowing it’s a word, and knowing that you know, or at least knew, what it means, but right now you can’t put your finger on it. And then the longer this goes on the more you distrust yourself. Is it the disease that’s confusing you, or are you just so accustomed to being confused that you no longer believe yourself? Is that a real video of the President saying something ridiculous, or is it fake? Is this really a leaked sextape or is it all made on a computer? It looks real. I think it’s real. But is it?
Samuel Beckett’s final poem deals with the Aphasia he briefly experienced as a result of a fall brought about by what doctors couldn’t decide was a stroke or Parkinsons. It exists, as most of Beckett’s works do, in French and English, always self-translated.
Never direct translations either, similar, sometimes, but in no way replications. You can read one and know it’s the other, but it’s always its own work, as a reflection is never the person it reflects, as a deepfake is never the person it recreates. What is the word is a mind repeating short phrases to itself about seeing, speaking and understanding, only not doing so, instead just speaking, needing to speak, needing to understand, needing to seem to understand, to need to be seen to seem to understand. Ultimately failing and only being able to ask what—what is the word. Only there’s no question mark attached to this, so is it really a question? Or is it a confused statement about the lack of understanding baked into so much of our reality? Perhaps what is often all you really can say. As you marvel in the Hall of Mirrors, questioning if someone or something is real, trying to make sense—but of what.
This column isn’t the place for excessive linguistic analysis, but the French version, written first and then translated after he’d forgotten writing it—due to the Aphasia—is called Comment dire (how to say), whereas in English it’s What is the word. So from that alone you can see that the two versions provide two very different but similar interpretations of the mind trying to make sense of something it recognises but can’t grasp.