We spend a night pasting our faces onto celebrities, a free trial of an app called Reface we when dawn breaks clear and cold delete. I admit the heart’s doing a fresh little soar as its face is piped onto Winslet’s, as the body spreads its wings on the totally fucked ship. So I admit on the nose to see myself in someone famous, so on the face like the rolled-up album rankings that hit the stoop each weekend. The union busted, the last local journalist at the Plain Dealer’s beat constrained to listicling top tens live from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nothing beats computers ok. We don’t know who pays the subscription. However we crawl out of our skin watching the music video for Genesis’s “Land of Confusion” don’t we also revel in the next evening already holding out its handful of based-ons, its claymation parade of recommended trophied heads.
It is recommended we watch The Running Man, in which Schwarzenegger runs for his life on a game show populated by operatic assassins and the mild bored grandmothers who abet them, by framed convicts and the lawyers who uphold public-private indemnity in their lucrative executions. The film opens in 2017, thirty years into its first audiences’ future. The plot of The Running Man hinges on deep fakes. An overdub synced to surveillance video captured from an unlikely near-total range of angles frames Schwarzenegger as lone actor in the state-ordered massacre of a starving crowd. Years later, courtesy Reface-esque video editing, Jesse Ventura hoists Arnold onto a spike, ending the televised run for his life. In fact someone else is dead. In fact both actors will be voted in. In the film the national broadcast is seized, the unedited footage of an actual death aired. When the primetime audiences turn as one from the assassins, can tell the difference between themselves and their assassins, is this not another video edit. If we know what we see we’ll know how to act. Or more like deep fake me once, shame on you, deep fake me twice who am I, where, why. It takes a twelve-digit code to unlock the national broadcast transmission, whereas to deactivate the invisible fence of the open-air labor camp located near LA requires only four. For lack of any one, what occurs at the perimeter occurs in the full light of day, irreversible.
In 2017, we attend the screening of a short film shot from a helicopter, shot with infrared thermal imaging in the first year of Operation Enduring Freedom. A man runs across highway traffic, scales fences, fords waterways, the ground for miles blue beneath him. Does he lose the helicopter by submerging in a copse of trees, does the helicopter await his resurfacing. The film reminds me what I think I know: the hated helicopter will outlast whoever stands below its spinning spokes. I don’t remember how it goes. Does it end, the pursuit, the necessary evasion, or eventually lights shift and someone is credited: “Running Man.” Mic handed to the crew member in attendance: the miles the running man ran the night before the helicopter was due back and to whom. Outside real pursuit how to evade it. Another shot: the long arm of a parking gate rising and lowering on an empty lot.
Alyssa Perry
Alyssa Perry’s writing appears in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, The Canary, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. Perry is an editor at Rescue Press and teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.