(This was written a year ago, just re-discovered in my computer.)
Spoiler alert!
Reading a magazine article this morning got me to thinking
about Scarlett Johansson in “Under the Skin” that we saw last night. The
article discussed the fine points of digitizing real human faces for movies,
and it made me realize that her blank look in most scenes was likely intended
to suggest a digitized face. She had few expressions, which would be likely if
she were an avatar, simply because of the logistics of instilling emotion in
such a being—that is, in today’s technology. People are working hard at
duplicating human faces in digital representations, but it’s a big job. Not
impossible, just hard. (Think of reproducing a five-o’clock shadow on a man who
is in constant motion.) The article said that a 3-D scan of a face can take
teraflops of computing power. So, I think, they tried to make her look like a
contemporary digital avatar trying to look human. It’s all about the intended
audience (us, today).
Scarlett is rather stone faced anyway—most of her humanness
is in her mouth, and the obvious pliability of her skin. She spends a lot of
time applying lipstick to those luscious lips. Only once do I remember her
smiling, and that was surely Scarlett Johansson. In retrospect, I’d love to see
her in that role trying out different expressions in the mirror, instead of
just gazing at herself. But it might look too realistic for her character as we
come to know her. In twenty years, audiences will be more sophisticated, and
insist on more reality in their digital characters.
My favorite scene was when she discovers she has a vagina.
There should have been whoops from the audience. My most disappointing scene
was when she (unmasked) sits and contemplates her own avatar face in her lap.
It should have been digitized—which given our present level of technology would
have looked “close to real,” instead of her real face superimposed in
post-production. But the scene reminded me of the scene in Hamlet where he
contemplates Yorick’s skull. I noticed a lot of such subtle allusions in the
film, but it’s hard to remember them in daylight.
No comments:
Post a Comment