In his short story The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, Gabriel Garcia Marquez narrates about the people in a poor fishing village who find a dead man’s body on the beach. Preparing the corpse for burial, they discover the stranger’s strong limbs and handsome face and silently compare the grandeur they see in him to their own lives. They give him the most splendid funeral they can and, as they realise how desolate and small their village appears, they resolve to make their doors wider, paint their houses bright colours, and plant nice smelling flowers everywhere.
The story is an exemplar of magical realism, but it also illustrates the importance of imagination as an essential human quality, inseparable from how we experience real phenomena such as pain and irreversible events like birth or death. The concept of a nation as an «imaginary community,» for example, indicates that imagination is also a necessary element of how humans live together.
Ambiguities before and now
I believe it is important to be aware of this role of imagination today, in view of what has been labelled the post-truth world. Modernity’s positivist belief in the «objective» world where the truth is easily separable from fiction that still prevails, at least in the Global North, is not of much help. The permeation is a two-way process. Just like we experience reality through imagination, our imagination is permeated by the reality of our existence, such as class and race differences. The feature-length documentary essay Reality Frictions by Steve Anderson, which will have its premiere at the Madrid International Film Festival in September and investigates the collisions of reality and fiction in Hollywood cinema, is an entertaining and serious reminder of this.
Cinema has been a privileged terrain for the investigation of the intersections of reality and fiction exactly because of its’ intrinsic ambiguity – as a technology of the «writing of light,» it’s a notorious means of the «objective» reproduction of reality, but as the cultural content, its’ distinctions between fiction and nonfiction are contingent and thus strictly codified. Mocumentary is the genre of films that exploit the codes of nonfiction content to create fake nonfiction content (The Blair Witch Project, 1999 or Dark Side of the Moon, 2002), but Anderson’s film essay reveals a much larger and much more complex realm. The time has never been more right for such an investigation. While the positivist view relied on the distinction between the images as misleading and the data as trustworthy, today, the data, as big data gathered and used for AI-generated content, is the true source of lies and manipulation.
Just like we experience reality through imagination, our imagination is permeated by the reality of our existence, such as class and race differences.
Caché
One of the most obvious examples of how imagination governs the perception of reality is the belief in democracy and free speech. While it was generally known that both were more ideals than real facts, the saying that parliamentary democracy is not the best, but it is the best among the existing political systems compensated well for the defects of this system in the previous centuries, in particular among those in power. Those not in power were convinced by more sophisticated non-violent mechanisms, which Althusser called ideology or Gramsci, hegemony. The critical voices of the scholars of decolonisation, such as the philosopher Franz Fanon and filmmaker Med Hondo, have not been heard. Even when, for example, Michael Haneke made Caché (2005), referring to the massacre of 1961, when the Parisian police killed hundreds of Algerian protesters in the final years of the Algerian War of Independence, the event itself remained, as before, caché. Hidden. The film community celebrated the neo-noir psychological thriller and showed little concern about the people whose right to free speech has been brutally taken away.
Computational Propaganda
The tragic death of internet activist Aaron Swartz and the persecution of Julian Assange and Wikileaks ended the hopes that digital media would contribute to making democracy, free speech, and human rights in general more universally available. Scholars are talking about «net delusion» and openly claim that internet platforms and social media have turned the «information society» into a «disinformation society.» Parallel to the erosion of news media, the demise of liberal democracies has taken place throughout the world, and it is highly probable that digital disinformation has been a critical factor in democracy’s decline. While legacy media, be it in the form of state, public, or private media, also contributed to the rapid spread of disinformation in the past decades, the political manipulation that occurs over the internet has been such that it is rightfully termed «computational propaganda.» It is carried out on social media, blogs, forums, and other websites that involve participation and discussion and is based on data mining and algorithmic bots. Data mining is used to collect data about the user’s behaviour to present to each user the content they will most probably agree with. This is done by bots, autonomous programs that can interact with users. Bots are created with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, which allow bots to adapt to different environments and post as real people. They have often been used in electoral campaigns to manipulate and influence the opinion of the voters. Recent research indicates that over 80 states are performing computational propaganda, and over 50 of them are using automated bots on social networks.
Data mining is used to collect data about the user’s behaviour to present to each user the content they will most probably agree with.
Stochastic Parrots
The possibility of using AI for creating text, images, music, audio, and video made the creation of deceiving and manipulative content even more accessible. The situation was further complicated by the most heavily promoted form of AI at the moment, generative AI, which involves large language models (LLMs). Contrary to the anthropomorphic promotion through chatbot interfaces, Emily M. Bender called these models «stochastic parrots» and said they do not «understand» language in a human-like way. GPT-based systems mimic observed patterns in language probabilistically and cannot ensure the veracity of these outputs or track their provenance. The best-performing models are riddled with bias and stereotypes from content scraped from the internet, including racist, sexist, and scientifically discredited physiognomic behaviour.
The experts warn that the situation is made worse because of the lack of proper regulation; for example, the overrepresentation of biased and hegemonic viewpoints in trained models, if documented, would allow for potential accountability, while the undocumented training data perpetuates harm without recourse. In addition to the appropriate laws, the implementation of advanced technologies and algorithms to detect manipulative content has also been identified as a possible solution. But the key, at the moment, is to improve media literacy and help audiences better orient themselves in the media environment permeated by digital propaganda, generative AI, and synthetic imaging. Anderson’s comprehensive, entertaining, and perceptive praise of the cinema spectators who «have long traversed the boundaries of believability, developing nuanced skills for navigating the pleasured and paradoxes that emerge when reality and fiction collide» is a timely proof that such outcome is not impossible.
Reality Frictions
Anderson is an award-winning media artist and a scholar of technologies of vision. This film’s project «came into focus» a year ago when he discussed «documentary intrusions» with the Visible Evidence documentary film community, which reacted enthusiastically and provided him with plenty of new examples. The scope of the cinematic illustrations of the fluid intertwining of fiction and reality in mainstream cinema, presented in this film, is breathtaking. Comprised among these more than 150 examples are some true rarities, such as the inclusion of Bruce Lee’s funeral as a plot device in his final film, Game of Death (1978). But Anderson also addressed the classical instances, for example, the analysis of the Kunuk Uncovered (Alexander Buono, Rhys Thomas, 2015), the parody of what is officially considered «the first» documentary, Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), as well as the contemporary fascination with films about historical personalities (just think about the biopics presented at the Venice film festival this year, from Pablo Larraín’s film about the singer Maria Callas to The Brutalist, the film about the architect László Tóth by Brady Corbet). Anderson efficiently managed this multiplicity thanks to his initial acknowledgement of the informative qualities of visual media. In his own words, «As a child, I knew that the characters and stories on screen were not real, but I learned about the world watching them.» He embraced the fact that the relationship between reality and fiction is ever more complex, and the variations of the ambition of nonfiction and fiction cinema to represent reality are ever more numerous and delicate. Reality Frictions is an eulogy of audiences’ capacities to navigate the ways in which the real and the imaginary intertwine in traditional media, as well as a powerful inspiration for finding new ways to navigate the digital contents of today, using the power of imagination.
