This week there has been talk about three films.
The first two are The Hunger Games —a saga, actually—and Marie Antoinette, by Sofia Coppola. Both have inspired a small revolution in networks that began when the influencer Haley Kalil uploaded a video, dressed in the opulence of the French queen, interpreting the moment in the film where the infamous “let them eat cakes” falsely attributed to the monarch is said after being informed of the hunger of her people. It was recorded at the doors of the Met Gala, where an unbridled spectacle of extreme fame and wealth was taking place, while a few meters away, on the street, people were protesting against the genocide in Gaza. The generation Z He couldn’t take it anymore and has begun to unfollow en masse both the author of the video and the celebrities who have not commented on the conflict. They compare the situation with The Hunger Games, where an elite lives outside the dramatic reality of the rest. The third movie is Her, by Spike Jonze, where Scarlett Johansson is the voice of an artificial intelligence that breaks the heart of its owner. It is talked about because Open AI has presented an update to ChatGPT capable of chatting in real time. The voice of the launch videos It is similar to that of the actress, and sometimes whispers and flirts. Altman announced the breakthrough inHer”.
How is such clairvoyance of cinema possible? The conspiracy theory of idea seeding and “negative primacy” says that those who pull the strings advance what awaits us via Hollywood so that when it arrives it seems plausible to us. It’s all simpler: Marie Antoinette talks about the present, not the past; and the goal of The Hunger Games, Her, and much of science fiction is not about predicting the future, but about criticizing the moment. We do not remember the failed works, but those that succeed create social expectations to which those who collect them and return them to the collective unconscious are no strangers.
In the two cases we are dealing with there may not be even a trace of self-fulfilling prophecies. About the revolution against the influencersI remember what Carrère wrote in Yoga about the power of fantastic stories of adolescence: “I haven’t forgotten any. Why do I like them so much? Why do they reach me so intensely? Why is it the genre of stories that helps me understand mine?” But you are right Sara Riveiro in X when he says that you have to “learn to empathize with people without reminding you of characters from youth books.” About ChatGPT and HerSomething makes me suspicious. That movie does not end well, as he warns Brian Barrett in Wired, which asks tech overlords to see through to the end the works that inspire them. Why would a stakeholder like Sam Altman want to use a dystopia as a utopia? One explanation may be human stupidity, or the lack of real culture of Silicon Valley elites. Another is that by exalting their risks they also want to magnify their abilities: if ChatGPT is as dangerous as Scarlett Johansson, it must be impressive. It is the same technique he used when he toured the world warning that his product could destroy humanity. Both potential risks exist (falling in love with an AI! ending humanity!), but what is truly dangerous are the terrible mistakes we allow an immature product to make in the present, allowing us to be confused by pure marketing disguised as a narrative.
_
