having vague thoughts about the relations between lore-brain, deepfake stunt casting, and the lack of a desire for performance and interpretation.
just to take the star wars deepfake casting as a single item (Cushing, Fisher, Jones, and Hamill) I initially thought these scenes were about a showing off of VFX tech, something that is very typical to star wars. I am put off by those scenes not just because of the uncanny valley of the images, but also how they aren't really about anything but the VFX performance. I don't remember a single word that came out of the digital mouths, regardless of the quality of the surrounding scene or movie.
aside from the labor point of view, which is just cast a damn actor that looks enough like the person it's fine people can suspend their disbelief, I hadn't thought much about those scenes in a while. but something else has tied this to lore-brain, the gamified understanding of modern intellectual property that seeks out wikis, easter eggs, post credit scenes, cameos. there's a lot going on with lore-brain but I think a core tenet is that everything in a media property requires some kind of validity, to be blessed as Lore by a higher power (generally a corporation). this kind of thinking tries to stamp out variations, or differing performances and interpretations, of scenes and characters. by definition lore-brain wants one single canon, and having two actors play the same role goes against this, so you end up with the deepfake.
it is apparently unthinkable that another actor would ever play Luke Skywalker. you cannot hire a James Earl Jones impersonator, his voice must be recreated with AI. I think this is less about the unwillingness of the audience to suspend disbelief as it's a bottom-up and top-down cyclone of enforcing Lore, and historical variations are preferably forgotten (see Hulk). The only exception to this that comes to mind is they rattle through Spiderman actors faster than I can keep up. anyway these aren't really fully thought out thoughts because I don't do media crit, but it all kinda rattled through my head at once
