It’s on a Sandisk Card in Silicon Valley

For a few years, a question has been rolling around in my mind. I’ve been wondering what would happen when CGI got so good audiences were no longer able to distinguish animated characters from actors. Think about it. Why would you pay an aging, grey, saggy George Clooney 20 million dollars to make a movie, when for a fraction of the price, you could get a perpetually toned and tanned CGI character who is never late to the set, doesn’t go to rehab, and doesn’t have to be insured?

We just saw another Indiana Jones movie hit the silver screen. It was pretty bad, but it made money anyway, and because Harrison Ford looked old even when he was young, the 27-year hiatus didn’t completely ruin his credibility. But clearly, the movie’s makers would have had more and better options had he not aged. And think about James Bond. Sean Connery was fired because he looked awful in Diamonds are Forever. Then we suffered through Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. It wasn’t until Pierce Brosnan was hired that the series became watchable again. What if they had had a CGI Bond on a hard drive somewhere? Forty years of top-quality Bond, without interruption. Something to think about.

Enter Emily. Have you seen her? She’s completely artificial. And she’s hot. She’s a pretty young actress who will never wrinkle or go gray, and she was created by a company called Image Metrics. You can see her here.

Emily never gets sick. She never sleeps. Her body is amazing. She doesn’t charge extra for nudity. She can dance. She can play any instrument. She can fly; no wires. If she can be taught to act–not that lofty a goal–she’ll be superior to 95% of Hollywood’s flesh and blood actresses. She may never have the charisma of a top-flight actress, but then neither does Angelina Jolie. Whose naked body was recently replaced by that of a CGI character, in Beowulf. She’s a nice-looking woman, but she never saw the day she could compare to the body the nerds made for her.

Men won’t care if male actors are replaced. That’s how men are. We’re not threatened by idealized role models. In fact, we prefer them. Feminists, however, will howl like never before, when Emily’s descendants start populating movie screens. Their tiny waists and perfect breasts will draw shrieks of rage from female liberals everywhere. If you think they were mad when Barbie was nine inches tall and came in a box, wait until she starts making movies. Wait until spoiled actresses find themselves competing with teams of mostly-male programmers. And what if they’re outsourced Indian programmers, who work for twenty bucks a day? Oh, man.

In a fairly short time, movies with completely realistic all-CGI casts will be within our reach. It won’t happen next week, but it won’t take twenty years, either. What’s going to happen to SAG? How are you going to force studios to pay extras and supporting cast members well, when they can be replaced with sprites? In long shots, it has already been done, many times. They did it in Titanic, which is an old movie now. In a few years, they’ll be able to do it for every character in a movie. Think of all the black, red-shirted ensigns who got vaporized on Star Trek. In the future, those guys will be clip art.

One of the sad things about Hollywood is that writers, who are chiefly responsible for all the magic, are cheated and underpaid. Stars, who are usually fungible, are overpaid. Will that situation continue to exist? In a hundred years, it may be possible to replace a writer with a machine. But actors are going to have real electronic competition much sooner.

Another question: how liberal will Hollywood be, if the population of performers is dramatically reduced? Imagine Hollywood without its hordes of far-left fringe nuts. Hollywood’s politics would be dictated by management. Are the executives, directors, and producers as uniformly liberal as the actors? I wonder.

Here’s a funny thing to consider. Using CGI actors is incredibly green. They don’t fly in private jets. They don’t ride in limos. They don’t have giant portable homes on wheels, the way real actors do, to keep them happy between takes. They can do many types of scenes without expensive, carbon-intensive sets. Why, it would be immoral to continue using real actors. It would be an environmental atrocity. Like Barbra Streisand’s house. Think of all the mansions that would no longer need to exist!

I’m all for CGI. Anything that takes power and money away from venal, toxic people is fine by me. Now if they start replacing audiences with CGI characters, all bets are off. Then I’ll be concerned.

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Here’s a link to the real Emily’s site.