Last Saturday, Bruce Willis’ agents denied that the aphasia-stricken actor had sold his image to the Deepcake company; Current US law doesn’t even allow it today. There are myriad moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and economic bifurcations in the possibility of such a transaction. Some of them were examined by Ari Folman in the first half of the very interesting The Congress, when Robin Wright Penn, plagued by old age – this reality has turned from industry to illness – digitizes her body, her voice and her face forever young version of her continued interpretive films. Robin Wright Penn, the brand. Bruce Willis, the Avatar. In South Korea, the documentary film Meeting You was released, in which a mother managed to give her daughter, who died at the age of seven, a last hug via virtual reality. Ramón Gómez de la Serna already predicted that the dead would begin to walk before Hell was full (as in The Day of the Living Dead). The Korean documentary reflects a technological possibility that can alleviate grief or make it never end.
We must die to give others a chance to live. Our time is finite; always was. Prolonging an actor’s life beyond their disappearance means losing ourselves to the actors who are to come. There was a generation that believed there was no better actress than Theda Bara. But her parents thought Sarah Bernhardt was better. Those who saw Mary Pickford didn’t believe there would be anything better after that. The same happened to those who heard Greta Garbo speak afterwards. Those who gave Rita Hayworth so much applause didn’t get it. One day Audrey Hepburn left the building and Liza Minelli lived in it. Jessica Lange took the chair. The stars aren’t the same, but things are never the same. They never were. When death is stopped, no one is born.
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