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| Rosamund Pike in a scene from Johnny English Reborn |
Rosamund Pike is right to call out digital 'tweaks' ... but aren't we all at it?
The deceit of unreal perfection is no longer Hollywood’s alone. Deep-fake is everywhere
Barbara ElleSaturday 27 February 2021
If Rosamund Pike isn’t “good enough” , then where does that leave the rest of us? The actor says that her breasts were enlarged by Photoshop for a publicity poster for the 2011 Johnny English Reborn film. Looking at the image, they do seem markedly bigger. Of course it had to be her breasts that were blown up like party balloons. In the same image, no one appears to have said: “Put Rowan Atkinson’s crotch on display, and make it bulge.”
Pike says she got the poster stopped, which might surprise people. Actresses are supposed to be grateful for these digital “tweakments”: “Thank you, camera-gods, for making me even prettier!”
Pike, most would agree, is extremely beautiful, but apparently that isn’t enough. Traditionally, the deal with Hollywood was that it used the best-looking people and made us feel inferior. We mostly accepted this with a philosophical shrug. Yes, it was a bit weird sometimes that “deadbeat dads” resembled Mark Wahlberg, and “unlucky in love losers” looked like Cameron Diaz, but we could cope. It’s all fantasy, innit? Now even stone-cold beauties have to be upgraded and embellished to the point where, as Pike says, “we are losing our grip on what we actually look like”.
Celebrity Photoshopping is nothing new, but it’s worth checking in occasionally to see what kind of ripple effects it’s having in the real world. Pike also talked about apps such as Facetune, which people use for perfecting photos on social media, dating sites, and everywhere else. I wouldn’t use these myself but it doesn’t do to get snotty about it. Anyone who’s ever selected one photo over another is complicit to a degree in editing their own image. Still, some people overdo it until they’re borderline unrecognisable. What happens when they meet people in real-life – do they have to take along signs, like at an airport pick-up? Do they feel the need to apologise: “I’m sorry I have human skin, and not a synthetic patina of airbrushed dewiness”? You have to wonder whether the endorphin hit of online perfection is worth all the real-life humiliation.
It’s fast getting to the point where it feels unreasonable to solely blame the famous and the industries that promote them. These days, people are going to plastic surgeons wanting to resemble their own modified avatars from selfies, rather than celebrities. If you like, the fiction of Hollywood perfection has been democratised. Indeed, it’s interesting how, even as “improved” celebrities are mocked, or, as with Pike, call it out themselves, the modification of our own images continues unhindered, save for the occasional “#nofilter” humblebrag. It’s gone beyond old-school catfishing (pretending to be someone else) to the point where people are essentially deep-faking themselves. And it’s all just a bit of fun. Until it isn’t. The desire to look better is all too human but are we inexorably moving towards the moment when we lose our grip on what we actually look like?
Poor old Elon Musk. He hardly has two beans left to rub together
Stop worrying about your petty, selfish concerns for one moment, and think of Elon Musk. Musk, the self-styled Willy Wonka of electric cars, is no longer the richest man on the planet. Although he recently clobbered Amazon’s Jeff Bezos into second place on the rich list, shares in Tesla have now fallen, wiping £10bn off his fortune.
I know, it’s very sad isn’t it? To think of Elon so horrifically diminished. It’s even sadder to think that Elon’s big gob may have had something to do with it. The same big gob that thought it was appropriate to label a British diver a “pedo” when the diver dared to criticise Musk’s offer of a submarine-thingie to help rescue some trapped children and their football coach from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. But I digress.
Tesla recently invested $1.5bn in bitcoin, sending the cryptocurrency’s price soaring. However, Tesla shares later fell in price, perhaps because of the association with the volatile bitcoin. Think of Musk as, perchance, he sits in a dimmed room, muttering “Rosebud” into the clammy darkness. We all think we have problems but, clearly, they are nothing compared to those of Citizen Musk, who is now down to his last $183bn.
A DIY smear test is no fun, but far better than nothing
I can’t have been alone in thinking it’s hard enough being a woman without DIY smear tests. In what is being touted as a “gamechanger”, NHS England is to trial DIY smear testing kits, giving more than 31,000 women the opportunity to do them at home.
Women have been missing smear tests because the pandemic has caused delays, but also because they find the tests embarrassing and/or uncomfortable.
My first thought was – let’s try to phrase this delicately – how much poking about would it entail? Regular smears take cells from the cervix: were women supposed to be jabbing all the way up there by themselves in their bathrooms? Thankfully, the DIY kits only require that you swab the vagina. The swab would then be sent off to be tested for HPV, which causes 99% of cervical cancers. So that’s a relief. My eyes should stop watering sometime next year.
For many women, perhaps home-testing is the future – it’s already done in Denmark and Australia – though it also raises a few questions. As the DIY kit doesn’t take cells from the cervix, would it be as effective? Could this test lead to more false-negatives (or false-positives)? If the DIY kit does the same job as a regular smear test, could we eventually do away with the greased speculum option altogether? Asking for a friend.
One concern could be that the home-testing option might not be enough to encourage those women who already avoid smear tests. Some might not do the home kits either. So there are a few issues. It would be great if home smear tests do turn out to be a gamechanger. But the main thing is to get tested. Wherever, however, please just do it.
Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
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