More on Political Deepfakes, and Covering the Milk Club Forum
Along with a related film recommendation
Deepfake It Until You Make It
Last week, we covered Supervisor Dean Preston’s May 13 hearing on the implications of deepfakes for elections, and some developments occurred. The board unanimously adopted a resolution he authored to support the state legislation mentioned at the hearing. Those bills passed out of the state Assembly yesterday, some unanimously, and are on their way the the Senate.
Preston also mentioned that he was discussing with the City Attorney's office “strengthening local laws to address this,” saying that announcements on the matter “would come soon.”
What to Watch: So How Long Ago Did We Start Worrying About Deepfakes?
I first saw Looker at the tender age of 16, and it was probably the first film to capture my imagination about what was then called “computer graphics.” I didn’t necessarily seek it out - it had a rather heavy rotation on Home Box Office back in the day.
It was one of the first productions of The Ladd Company, best known for Blade Runner. It had a large budget for the time and was one of the first films to feature CGI with 3D shading (released in 1981; Tron would come out later that year). It also had expensive stunt sequences and a fairly decent cast. But critics panned it as a trashy, hammy thriller dressed up in gadgetry (and it is, in the fashion of the pre-Jurassic Park Michael Chrichton production that it is), and it did poorly at the box office.
The film’s plot revolves around the development of advanced CGI that reliably and uncannily simulates human figures on a television screen—in other words, deepfakes. In 1981. Spokesmodels hired for the project are instructed to get cosmetic surgery to fine-tune their already photographically perfect features, and then they end up dead. A successful plastic surgeon is unwittingly caught up in the plot and gets framed for some of the deaths, so he goes on the run to solve the mystery.
The plot is essentially to make commercials using convincing human actors made entirely out of bits, a premise that may have seemed a bit too audacious then, so the plot combines it with the old overblown trope of subliminal messaging. By the time the trial spots for a political candidate come out at the film’s climax, the audience has already been hit over the head a million times message-wise. The technology for the subliminal messaging also figures in one of the film’s gadgets, a strobe pistol (the prop for it was made from a Heckler & Koch grenade launcher) that freezes victims in time, with either deadly or hilarious consequences.
Albert Finney does his best impression of Roger Moore in one of his side-gig films from the 70s, such as Crossplot; the unwitting hero who just dives into the matter rather than run for help from the pros, as anyone with half a brain would do. Susan Dey (from The Partridge Family and LA Law) does her best as the only one of the spokesmodel characters with anything more than two dimensions. James Coburn pretty much plays himself as the villain. His final disposition is, shall we say, effervescently hilarious.
Looker starts with a classic thriller formula from a previous generation, of the gifted amateur suddenly thrust into a nefarious plot that is entirely over the protagonist’s head, ala Hitchcock’s North by Northwest or Stanley Donen’s Charade, and tries to merge it with the cynical and chaotic cool of the 80’s. You could pull off that for an episode of Remington Steele or Max Headroom, but this was supposed to be a movie.
But time and context change things, and a recent re-watch proved rewarding. Scenes that were unintentionally funny at the time are now appreciated for their accidental prescience and likely intentional wit and timing.
Looker doesn’t seem to be streaming free anywhere but is available as a cheap rental or purchase, and the SF Public Library has a couple of copies in its DVD collection. It’s worth a look.