The other day I saw a magazine ad that deserved a good, hard second look. A weary-looking man was standing in front of his car dragging his 10-foot-long arm behind him on his driveway. I do not lie. His right arm was normal size, but his left, presumably from all the hard work he’d been doing scrubbing his car (actually, I can’t remember what the ad was selling) had been stretched to unbelievable proportions. Except that it wasn’t unbelievable. The photo was digitally massaged until his arm had taken on the appearance of a long, skin-coloured snake. But it was perfect in every other respect, and there lay his hand on the asphalt.
Now, being in the newspaper business, where advertising is our bread and butter, I should be the last to complain about this seemingly innocuous photo. But there was just something about it that disturbed me, and I had trouble getting the image out of my head.
In fact, this technological phenomenon has crept up on us all slowly, but the almost limitless ability we now have to alter photo images, whether still or moving, is allowing us to create an alternative reality that must scare the diapers off young kids who are not prepared for the scenes when they come on the TV. Take, for example, the cough remedy ad of a while back where a man, with a baby’s head on his shoulders, is shown in his pyjamas climbing the stairs to his bedroom, the moral being that men turn into big babies when they’re sick, which we do. Innocent enough, maybe, but the digital enhancement was perfect: there on the screen was a 200-hundred-pound man with the head of an infant.
Then there are the teens who are shown eating some sort of popsicles and soon, you guessed it, their heads spontaneously burst into the particular fruit each of them is sucking on. One becomes a lemon, another a lime, another a strawberry, etc. They have perfectly normal bodies with large fruits where their heads ought to be. Again, what does a two-year-old think when he sees this? That his head could turn into an apple if he drinks that juice? Or how about the boy whose tongue, for what reason I have forgotten, darts out of his head and travels from room to room, ending up many, many metres long before it predictably zooms back into his gob.
The examples go on and on and sometimes it seems there is hardly a print ad or TV commercial that hasn’t been altered. The people who are caught eating a certain triangular chocolate when the side of their cheek bulges out in angles. The basketball player who leaves his ball bouncing on the sidewalk while he goes in and does his banking so quickly that he is able to pick up where he left off when he exits the establishment, without the ball having ceased bouncing. All cats and dogs and other animals now have the ability to form their mouths perfectly for the words their voice-over is giving them.
All of this, of course, is good-humoured, with nothing sinister about it. Its use in ads is just an extension of the movies where weird and wonderful things like this – only more far out and funny – have been taking over for years. I don’t know if it would be possible to find a movie now which did not make some use of the magical powers of digital alterations and enhancements in their editing suites.
When the movie Titanic was made, a scene showing hundreds of people on the upper deck of the sinking ship was developed without the help of that many extras. A few dozen people were filmed from a distance and their images digitally cloned over and over to come up with the crowded deck, and we were none the wiser.
It’s an exciting new world, for sure, but a scary one too. Soon, no photograph, videotape, film or audiotape will be able to be trusted as any sort of reliable source for anything. Not in court, not in the news media, not in any other arena where we are hoping to convince others that our evidence and therefore our word is true.
If this all sounds like complaining, I have to argue it isn’t. I love the high-tech animation used in movies such as Shrek and its sequel. I loved it when Hank Williams Jr., who was two years old when his famous country singing father died, was able, as a grown man and a performer himself, to make a convincing video with his dad. He and Hank Sr. sang There’s a Tear in My Beer together on stage in the video, side by side with their guitars and Hank Sr.’s band. And I loved it when this new technology put the deceased John Lennon back with the Beatles for two new songs and videos a few years back.
I just don’t want to see guys with 10-foot-long arms, is all.
©2005 Jim Hagarty
[the_ad_placement id=”top-of-page”]
