The other day, I was watching a commercial and, before long, became sorely afraid. There was something about the person selling me the product—some supplement called Fatty15—facing the camera full on. I felt like I should know her, but of course I didn’t. Whose face was this? The pitchwoman’s high brow, her dark eyes, and her well-defined cheeks looked very familiar to me, like the features of a friend I hadn’t seen in many aging years. I figured, Here I go again, duped and bewildered by some chintzy A.I. I’m always seeing ads or videos, from feed to feed, fronted by these computerized beings whose vacant faces—chipped bowls of mismatched vittles, pilfered from all over—are meant to stoke unearned pangs of recognition.
But wait: suddenly I had it. This wasn’t some robot temptress. The woman in the ad was Ricki Lake! You know, the former daytime-talk-show host to whom, say, Kelly Clarkson and Drew Barrymore owe ritual thanks for helping to popularize the strange form in which they have worked. I know Lake’s face better than I really ought to, having sat, as a kid, on so many afternoons at my late uncle’s side on the couch as he idly parleyed about her contentious topic du jour and pointed out which members of the studio audience could use a makeover, whether makeovers were the point of the episode or not. Now Lake is an uncommonly candid presence on Instagram, disclosing the details of a facelift she had two years ago—was this why I couldn’t place her at first?—and serving as a spokeswoman for Fatty15, the product whose TV spot had sent me racking my brain and gently spiralling.
I’m always seeing things these days whose relationship to reality I can’t immediately parse. Lots of ads on YouTube are selling some kind of questionable insurance, or telling you how to sue someone successfully. There’s some bland man in a bland suit, lecturing you across some bland table about the money you could get if you’d only follow his advice. On he drones, so repetitive in rhythm and timbre that you can’t help but realize—but too late; you’ve already passively been digesting his spiel—that this isn’t a guy, this is pixels.
One afternoon, already feeling wary of commercials—whose unreal relation to everyday life far predates the rise of A.I.—I was served an ad for legal services, promising cash for people involved in accidents of various kinds. The bald guy lecturing me on how to get the money looked real enough, but the question of his true being kept rattling around my increasingly paranoid mind. The camera kept cutting to images of success, or cautionary portraits: people looking distraught, or flipping through reams of bureaucratic paper, or crowing about their new lease on life after grasping back from the system, say, seventy-two thousand bucks. Tucked away at the end of the commercial was a bunch of reality-oriented legalese:
Maybe this sad-silly episode gave Schrader—the director of one of my favorite movies of the past few decades, “First Reformed”—an even worse idea than seeking companionship over a platform with a name like that of a children’s cartoon. The next day, he said that he would make his film “Three Guns at Dawn” under another name and new concept with the help of an all-A.I. cast. Apparently, no breathing Black actor would touch the script, in which, according to Schrader several days later, “there are no good Black people.” Maybe a squad of “charming bots” won’t harbor so many scruples.
The days leading up to autumn in New York are their own study in reality and illusion. First, there’s fashion week, with its constant propositions—partly frivolous, but, perhaps because of the billions of dollars on the line in the luxury market, dead serious, too—that a bit of escapist farce might round out a well-lived life. This year, Prada sent a brilliant bouquet of skirts in thrilling colors down the runway. They were rosy pink and schoolboy blue and, in the case of another number I liked, the color of a lime left out a day too long: hues almost as vivid as that of the sky over the mountains framing Anna Pigeon’s dogged head.
Not long after the much praised Prada show, an unsettling video popped up on my Instagram feed. The designer’s co-creative directors, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, are set against an orange backdrop, on either side of a microphone hanging from a ceiling we can’t see. They’re dancing with a limber insouciance native to hip-hop but—and this is a guess—perhaps alien to these eminences, one of whom happens, in real life, to be a seventy-seven-year-old billionaire. But this video isn’t real life. Simons’s and Prada’s visages had been spirited awkwardly into a music video of “Hotel Lobby” by Quavo and the late Takoff, two members of Migos, the great Atlanta hip-hop group. Just look it up: it’s a big meme now. People are pasting all kinds of pairs into the video. Call me trad: I’d rather see Migos at the mike and designers waving shyly on the runway after the show.
Then, too, there’s the United Nations General Assembly, with its great big black S.U.V.-fuls of world leaders, all clamoring to win a bit of attention for their countries, and for themselves. The other day, I walked west on Forty-second Street, from Grand Central to Times Square, admiring perversely the mess of traffic and bodies that the convening there always manages to create. Earlier that day, several politicians and celebrities, knowing intimately the power of cameras, how they suggest reality by way of their proliferating broadcasts, had got themselves arrested while protesting the appearance of Bibi Netanyahu at the U.N.’s podium, with its instantly recognizable backdrop of sober green marble.
(During his speech, Netanyahu, always game to hurl skewed assertions—supposed truths like Schrader’s “charming bots”—intimated that Zohran Mamdani was not only an antisemite but “buddies” with Hamas. Unlike an ambulance-chasing lawyer, Netanyahu doesn’t need to offer any fine print hedging against the bright stridency of his guarantees.)
As I crossed Fifth Avenue, I saw a kid wearing nice clothing and a skinny mustache give his phone to a woman on the corner. He showed her where to aim it. He walked away from her, and then, in the dead middle of the crowded street, spun around and put on a very serious face, now loping back toward the camera like a model lost but determined in the throng. He was real; the people everywhere around him were real. The situation—his icy glare, the perfect framing—was a bit of stagecraft amid chaos. It offered information about a character he had put on. I assume it’ll end up on Instagram. ♦
