The Composite Body: Action Stars and Embodiment in the Digital Age

8 The Composite Body Action Stars and Embodiment in the Digital Age Drew Ayers In an early scene from Terminator Genisys (2015), viewers are treated to a recreation of the scene in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic character was first introduced to audiences in The Terminator (1984). Genisys provides a shot‐for‐shot retelling of the arrival of the T‐800 (Schwarzenegger) from 2029 to the Los Angeles of 1984, including the T‐800’s appearance in a lightning‐filled crater in the pavement and his subsequent confrontation with a group of punks. At the moment when the naked T‐800 attempts to steal some clothing from these punks, Genisys branches off from the story of the 1984 film. Behind the T‐800, a hooded figure emerges from the darkness, carrying a sawed‐off shotgun. As the hooded figure approaches, he removes his hood, revealing an older, middle‐aged Schwarzenegger. (This character is later revealed to be “Pops,” another T‐800, reprogrammed and sent back to 1973 by an unknown entity in order to protect and raise Sarah Connor.) As this older T‐800 reveals himself and locks eyes with his younger version, he declares in his distinctive Schwarzenegger accent, “I’ve been waiting for you.” Because the producers of Genisys didn’t own the rights to the first film in the franchise, the digital visual effects (VFX) artists were required to remake this scene by employing a digital recreation of Schwarzenegger’s 1984 performance (Acuna, 2015). Using the facial casts of Schwarzenegger created for the production of the first film, a video library of body and facial movements from Schwarzenegger’s well‐ documented film and political career, and the motion data of stand‐in Brett Azar (an Australian bodybuilder), Genisys’s VFX team completely reimagined this iconic scene by building a body from scratch (Sperling, 2015). The meeting between the two T‐800s, therefore, is not only about rebooting a franchise but also about the relationship between analog and digital forces in A Companion to the Action Film, First Edition. Edited by James Kendrick. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 166 Drew Ayers contemporary action cinema. This confrontation of old and young, profilmic1 and digital bodies establishes the formal, narrative, and ideological themes of the film, and it serves as a case study for understanding the embodiment of the action hero in the digital age. A film like Genisys encapsulates the interaction between action cinema, embodiment, and VFX, and it reveals the extent to which action cinema and its stars are grappling with the complex interplay between the profilmic authenticity of action bodies and their digital substitutes and supplements. What we find in contemporary action cinema is an ambivalence toward embodiment and authenticity. On the one hand, the film industry and its audiences, in a general sense, have accepted the widespread practice of digital tinkering in every part of the production workflow. Ranging from spectacular uses of VFX like performance capture, massive crowd scenes, and epic battles to more mundane uses like color correction, lighting, and environmental tweaks, digital trickery has become a core component of contemporary image production, from image acquisition to post‐production to exhibition. On the other hand, cinema displays an anxiety about its authenticity, and action cinema in particular makes it a point to reassert the importance of the profilmic body amidst digital environments, crowds, and agents. Lisa Purse (2007), for example, in her analysis of “virtual action bodies” like Spider‐Man (Spider‐Man 2, 2004) and the Hulk (Hulk, 2003), argues that the “inherent visual instability” of these virtual bodies creates an “unease” in the reception of these films (13). Purse also states that the virtual body’s “inherent malleability generates anxieties that are rooted in primal cultural fears about metamorphosis and its characterization of the human body as mutable” (15). Within the history of action cinema, the body of the performer has been vital to authenticating the truth of the performance. From the stunts of Buster Keaton to the action‐comedy of Jackie Chan, the body‐ in‐motion has verified the authenticity of the screen action. This trend continued within the hardbody action cinema of the 1980s, which cast beefy actors like Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, figures whose muscular physiques index both the truth of their embodiment and the labor required to craft such bodies. In a dominant strain of contemporary VFX‐driven action cinema, however, the body of the performer, while inheriting the gym‐obsessed appearance of its 1980s forebears, doesn’t possess their same truth‐value. These are bodies situated within and supplemented by digital effects. The phenomenological authenticity of these composite, informational bodies is called into question through their location within a completely malleable screen image. Action cinema and its producers seem to have internalized this anxiety over phenomenological authenticity, as the extra‐textual promotional rhetoric of films like Furious 7 (2015), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) emphasizes the profilmic aspects of the films and downplays the digital components of the composite image. Material promoting The Force Awakens, for example, attempts to counter the widespread fan dissatisfaction with the heavy use of computer‐generated imagery (CGI) and VFX in the three Star Wars prequels (1999, 2002, 2005). The discourse surrounding the film has taken pains to emphasize its practical The Composite Body 167 special effects and the fact that it was shot on “real” 35mm film. A promotional video from Comic‐Con 2015 exemplifies this anxiety. The video begins with narration by Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), speaking to the analog desires and digital anxiety of the film: Real sets, practical effects; you’ve been here, but you don’t know this story. Nothing’s changed, really. I mean everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed. That’s the way you want it to be, really. To see the way the technology has evolved, and yet, keeping one foot in the pre‐digital world. (StarWars, 2015) Accompanying this narration are images of miniature models, location‐based sets, rubber costumes, and film moving through the gates of a real, live film camera. As with the meeting of profilmic Schwarzenegger and his younger digital counterpart, the goal of The Force Awakens promo reel is to link old and new, analog and digital worlds. It embraces our digital present (and future) while paying homage to our analog past.2 While this merging of analog and digital, at least superficially, appears to be harmonious, there is a deeper anxiety at work here, one that fears the loss of profilmic authenticity at the expense of the digital. In contemporary cinema, the body, like the digital image, has become a composite, a layered construction that can be altered and manipulated. Just as the digital image is malleable and moldable, so too is the body. Both the image and the bodies within the image are subject to the logic of the digital information age, which requires that all things be reduced to the common equivalent of code, equally exchangeable and transferable with each other. Within this context, bodies become simply another expression of code, something that can be layered and composited within the digital image. At various points in Genisys, Pops claims that he is “old, not obsolete.” More broadly, this is fundamentally the stance of the profilmic action body in relation to its digital doubles, and in Genisys specifically, the profilmic body attempts to reassert itself and counter the danger of its obsolescence in the face of its digital replacements. The profilmic body, in other words, has “been waiting for” its chance to denigrate and destroy its younger, sleeker, digital doppelgänger. Schwarzenegger’s presence in Genisys is important, as his long career has seen him transform from champion bodybuilder to 1980s hardbody action star, to 1990s comedic actor, to governor of California, and finally returned to his action cinema roots in films such as The Expendables trilogy (2010–2014, the brainchild of Sylvester Stallone), The Last Stand (2013), Escape Plan (2013), Sabotage (2014), and Genisys. Schwarzenegger’s body—both profilmic and digital—thus serves as a condensation of changes in action cinema’s approach to embodiment. In particular, The Terminator franchise functions as a metonym of these changes, and its evolving depiction of the relationship between humans and machines serves as a useful template for understanding the relationship between analog and digital forces within action cinema. From the 1980s industrial logic of the T‐800, to the 1990s postmodern logic of the liquid metal T‐1000, to the 168 Drew Ayers early‐twenty‐first‐century informational logic of the T‐3000 (Genisys’s human‐ machine hybrid), The Terminator franchise works through cultural anxieties regarding embodiment, disembodiment, and the digital mutability of the body. If the hardbody action films of the 1980s were marked by an excessive attention to the body, the VFX‐driven action films of today are marked by the seamless integration of the body into virtual spaces. After first exploring the instability of the action body in Genisys, this chapter concludes with a discussion of the posthumous performance (to borrow a term from Lisa Bode, 2010) of Paul Walker in Furious 7. Walker died in a car crash before filming of Furious 7 was finished, and Weta Digital’s VFX artists completed his performance using a combination of CGI and stand‐ins. Filmmakers have long had to grapple with the death of lead actors, and they have completed their films in a number of ways, utilizing both profilmic and digital techniques. To complete Bruce Lee’s performance in Game of Death (1978), the filmmakers used body doubles, footage from Lee’s funeral, voiceovers, and, famously, cardboard cutouts of Lee’s face. For Heath Ledger’s performance in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), director Terry Gilliam cast new actors to play Ledger’s character in the “magical mirror” portions of the film. After the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Parts 1 and 2 (2014, 2015) were completed through creative editing and swapping of lines of dialogue. Other actors’ performances have been completed using a combination of CGI facial replacement and profilmic stand‐ ins, including Brandon Lee in The Crow (1994) and Oliver Reed in Gladiator (2000). Still other performances have been repurposed for commercial ends—including Audrey Hepburn (Dove Chocolate), Marilyn Monroe (Dior, Snickers), Fred Astaire (Dirt Devil), and Orville Redenbacher (popcorn)—as well as for musical performances—holograms of Tupac and Michael Jackson. Walker’s posthumous performance in Furious 7 extends the logic of these antecedent reanimations, and the location of his composite body within a VFX‐heavy action film adds a new valence to the ontology of embodiment within the screen image. The “truth” of the contemporary action body lies not only in its muscular appearance but also in its ability to merge into the digital image, one component among many in the final composite. Today’s action heroes are heroic because their bodies can move seamlessly between the analog and the digital. From Hardbodies to Hybrids The trajectory of the action body—and its relationship to dominant cultural logics— from the 1980s to today has been much discussed in action film scholarship.3 In her now‐canonical book on 1980s action cinema, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, Susan Jeffords (1994) links the “hard bodies” of 1980s American action cinema (e.g. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Bruce Willis) to an ideological hardening of the American body politic. For Jeffords, “these hard bodies came to stand not only for a type of national character—heroic, aggressive, and determined—but The Composite Body 169 for the nation itself ” (25). Jeffords also draws connections between the fading industrial culture of 1980s America and Hollywood’s depiction of masculinity: The masculine characters that populated some of the [decade’s] most popular Hollywood films offered narratives against which American men and women could test, revise, affirm, or negate images of their own conceptions of masculinity, which, because of a changing economy, altering gender relations, increasingly tense race relations, reconfigurations of U.S. geographic distributions, a technologized militarism, and a reconfigured work force, were themselves in flux throughout this period. (11–12) At issue here is an attempt to reclaim a “lost” imaginary past of American exceptionalism— a time when men were men, racial hierarchies preserved social order, and the United States dominated global manufacturing—through images of white, hard‐bodied masculinity. The bodies of these heroes came to represent the last gasp of an industrial cultural logic, one that faded during the Carter years and was reclaimed in the cultural imaginary of the Reagan years. The hardness of the characters played by Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, and Jean‐Claude Van Damme was achieved, in a metonym of the industrial sector, through the literal pumping of iron. Bearing a musculature honed by the movement of metal, these hardbody heroes embodied the logic of factory manufacturing: they are tangible products of commerce, formed by a surplus of human labor, whose hardness is solidified through repetition of movement. This link between 1980s action heroism and a reclamation of American industry is made explicit in Die Hard (1988). The film takes place in the Nakatomi Plaza, the building of a Japanese corporation, which functions as a stand‐in for the widespread acquisition of American companies (notably car manufacturers) by Japanese investors throughout the 1980s.4 A group of German terrorists, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), occupy the Nakatomi building in order to rob its vault. Unbeknownst to Gruber, however, New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) is also in the building. Die Hard resolves with McClane, in all of his American swagger (he’s referred to as “Cowboy” by Gruber), defeating Gruber and his men, reclaiming the Nakatomi Plaza, and reuniting with his estranged wife, Holly. American ingenuity, toughness, and masculinity thus reassert themselves in the face of Japanese business interests. The hardbody restores order to the chaos of a social structure overturned by globalization, de‐industrialization, and feminism. As the 1980s transitioned into the 1990s, the industrial action body gave way to the postmodern action body.5 Much of the scholarship confronting this shift utilizes Terminator 2: Judgment Day (T2; 1991) as a case study exemplifying this transition. In the film, Schwarzenegger’s T‐8006 is sent back in time to 1995 in order to protect John Connor from a new model of Terminator, the T‐1000, which is composed of liquid metal and has the ability to shape‐shift. Whereas the T‐800 is easily comprehended as an industrial, machinic object, the T‐1000 is a more amorphous, phenomenologically unstable object, one that resists easy comprehension. The T‐800 170 Drew Ayers has visible inner workings, a tangible skeleton underneath flesh, and is clearly identifiable as performing a white masculinity. It is “a cybernetic organism” with “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton,”7 and its physicality is similar to that of a human. The T‐1000, conversely, is unstable, with no visible inner mechanics. It is pure surface, able to inhabit any identity, which, according to Thomas B. Byers (1995), situates it within a larger postmodern cultural logic: The contrast between the Terminator model T‐101 [also referred to as a T‐800] and the newer T‐1000 embodies the opposition between classical and late capitalism, between a production‐based industrial and a consumption‐based informational economy, between modern and postmodern culture, between paranoia and schizophrenia. (8) Within this schema, the action body loses its material grounding in manufacturing and becomes emblematic of a post‐industrial economy. In contrast to Schwarzenegger’s hardbody, the body of Robert Patrick (who plays the T‐1000) is much leaner and slighter, his ability to inhabit any identity echoing the flexibility of manufacturing in a post‐industrial information economy. At the conclusion of the film, however, an industrial cultural logic reasserts itself. Set in a strangely empty steel mill—an icon of industrial production—the T‐800 casts its adversary into a vat of molten metal, obliterating the T‐1000. American industrial production has defeated—if only within the imaginary of the film—the postmodern information economy. The special and visual effects animating the T‐800 and T‐1000 also connect to their different expressions of a cultural logic. In both the first and second films in the series, the T‐800 is primarily a profilmic object, materially present before the camera. Achieved through a combination of practical special effects—including make‐up, prosthetics, animatronics, and stop‐motion—the T‐800 is the product of a pre‐ digital era of filmmaking. The T‐1000, conversely, is an example of early digital visual effects, in particular, the technique of computer‐aided image morphing. The T‐1000 is a product of post‐production, an object that never existed before the camera, and it signals a hybridity and ontological instability of the image that has come to define digital production and post‐production. Before moving on to a discussion of this hybrid digital image, however, it is also important to point out how the characterization of the action hero changes from the 1980s to the 1990s, and in particular how the hardbody films work through different iterations of masculinity. Jeffords (1994) again links shifts in action hero representation to changes in presidential politics, in this case to the election of George H. W. Bush. Jeffords identifies a “schizophrenia” in Bush’s presidential identity—one she connects to the changing representations of masculinity in American cinema—as Bush tried to negotiate between the “hard‐bodied presidency” of Reagan with his own “kinder, gentler” approach (91, 95). After the end of the Cold War, as political focus moved from the foreign to the domestic, action heroes became interested in family matters. Philippa Gates (2010) echoes these claims, and she argues that, “while the 1980s were dominated by the hard‐bodied heroes, the 1990s saw a shift to more vulnerable heroes in a retrospective apology for the ‘masculinity’ of the The Composite Body 171 preceding decade” (276). A shift in tone from action to action‐comedy films facilitated this shift. As the 1990s began, action stars—with varying levels of success— took on comedic roles, often paired with a comedic sidekick, and their films made romantic subplots more central to their narratives (Ayers, 2008: 57–58). Schwarzenegger made this transition to comedic family man more successfully than most, and in her discussion of Kindergarten Cop (1990), Jeffords (1994) claims, “The emotionally and physically whole man of the eighties would rather be a father than a warrior” (142–143). T2 again serves as a valuable case study in relation to Jeffords’s analysis of shifting representations of masculinity. In The Terminator, Schwarzenegger played a single‐minded killer, untouched by emotion. In T2, his role changes. Schwarzenegger’s T‐800, its “emotion chip” newly activated, learns to value life, care deeply about relationships, and experience love (or at least a simulation of this emotion).8 The T‐800, as T2 makes quite clear, is a surrogate father figure for John Connor. The unattached, emotionally distant hardbody of the Reagan era thus gives way to the more emotionally vulnerable masculinity of the Bush era. The postmodern action body, in addition to its increasing emotional vulnerability and decreasing phenomenological stability, also becomes more self‐conscious of its status as spectacle. In her analysis of action films from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yvonne Tasker (1993) observes “a tendency of the Hollywood action cinema toward the construction of the male body as spectacle, together with an awareness of masculinity as performance,” which she links to postmodernity (230). For Tasker, the “work” required to craft the hardbodies relies on a labor that is no longer required in a post‐industrial economy. The muscles of the hardbodies are “dysfunctional” to the extent that they are “decoration” and serve no purpose other than spectacle, which is a traditionally “unmanly designation” (239). Elsewhere, I’ve commented on this spectacular display of male bodies, noting that, in films like Universal Soldier (1992), which features a lingering tilt shot of Van Damme’s nude backside, “the male hardbody is coded as a location for erotic desire” (Ayers, 2008: 51). The status of the male body‐as‐spectacle continues from these self‐conscious displays of the physical body to the spectacle of the male body enhanced by digital visual effects, and action bodies in the digital age possess a unique attitude toward their own materiality and phenomenology. As a symptom of a broader digital logic, action bodies must now be comfortable with seamlessly merging not only into digital environments but also with digital “prosthetics” and “make‐up.” Gone is the excessive attention to the materiality and labor of the hardbody,9 replaced by an emphasis on the ability of the body to merge into its digital surroundings. If the 1980s action hardbody evinced a commitment to a clear phenomenology, one marked by excessive profilmic physicality, then the contemporary action body possesses a hybrid ontology, one marked by both a profilmic physicality and post‐production mutability. This informational action body calls into question the ontology and phenomenological truth of the image, and the rhetoric surrounding a film like 300 (2006) exemplifies the anxiety produced by these bodies. The film 300 is notable both for its cast of highly muscled actors and for its use of completely simulated digital settings. 172 Drew Ayers In the lead‐up to the film’s release, much of the promotional material focused on the “300 Workout,” the diet and exercise regimen used by the actors to develop their physiques (Ayers, 2015: 106). Despite these accounts of the actors’ manual labor, however, commentary in the popular press questioned whether or not the bodies were “real” or the product of “CGI magic.” An article from CBS News, for example, takes a negative view of 300’s heavy use of CGI, casting doubt on the physicality of the actors’ bodies: Critics have called the new Spartan war picture 300 “groundbreaking,” which is funny because no ground was broken! It has real actors, but computers added the scenery. They might have added the muscles, too. (Johnson, 2007) In a subsequent story about lead 300 actor Gerard Butler, the Daily Mail noted, “Butler once again has a six pack, but this time without a hint of computer‐generated imagery” (2011). The simulated, digital nature of the film’s environments infected the reception of the film’s profilmic bodies. The sharp contrast between the digital environments and the hyperphysical bodies created confusion as to the ontology of each. This kind of commentary on the authenticity of the action body is notably absent in discussions of the Schwarzenegger or Stallone movies of the 1980s, where the truth of the actors’ labor appears to be widely accepted and verified by the profilmic presence of the body on screen.10 Schwarzenegger vs. Schwarzenegger: The Rise of the Composite Action Body Genisys works through these issues of the authenticity and ontology of the action body in the digital age, and it does so by forcing an interaction between profilmic and digital bodies, past and present, young and old. Contained all within the same film is the entire lifecycle of the hardbody, from its “pure” hardbody form (though digitally recreated), through its liquid metal malleability, to its culmination as a soft, nostalgic artifact, one more concerned with fatherhood than with fighting (and, importantly, formed by a combination of profilmic and digital sources). In a sense, Genisys is a self‐contained journey of the hardbody, from its 1980s industrial logic, through its 1990s postmodern logic, to its contemporary informational and networked logic. Marking Schwarzenegger’s first return to the franchise since Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)—not including the digital Schwarzenegger constructed for Terminator Salvation (2009)—Genisys offers a complete reimagining of the Terminator mythos established in the previous four films. The film upends the previously established timeline, and it offers a tongue‐in‐cheek portrayal of the franchise’s aging star. The Schwarzenegger of Genisys has clearly aged since his appearance in the first film 31 years earlier, and, rather than gloss over or attempt to hide the effects of aging on a 67‐year‐old human actor, Genisys makes this aging process central to the narrative. As a T‐800 model Terminator, the flesh of The Composite Body 173 Schwarzenegger’s character, Pops, ages as a human would, while his metal innards remain (mostly) operational. The film thus offers a narrative explanation for the older appearance of its leading actor. Aging plays a central role in the film, as the labyrinthine, time‐jumping narrative of Genisys takes place in six different time periods and multiple iterations of the timelines established in the previous films. Since Schwarzenegger’s role in the film spans from 1973 to 2017, he was also required to play both older and younger versions of himself. There are four different “generations” of Schwarzenegger in the film (see Figure 8.1): the 1973 version, the version sent back in time to 1984 from the first film, the now‐middle‐aged version from 1973 that meets his younger self in 1984, and an even older version in 2017. (Confused yet? The timelines in the film are as complicated as the VFX used to bring 1984 Schwarzenegger back to life.) While the 1984 version was created digitally, and the 1973 version is seen only briefly in medium shots (and appears to be the same digital recreation as the 1984 version), the alternate 1984 version and the 2017 version were created using old‐ fashioned make‐up. The alternate middle‐aged 1984 version of Schwarzenegger was de‐aged using make‐up, and the 2017 version—which appears to approximate Schwarzenegger’s real‐life age—was made to look older by stripping the actor’s hair of color (Tucker, 2015). Thus, not only do we witness the hardbody progress from youth to old age but we also see both profilmic and digital iterations of the body. Gone is the simple profilmic physicality of the 1980s hardbody, replaced by a complex embodiment of ages and ontology. In an era of digital workflows, profilmic bodies must necessarily adapt to their digital surroundings and counterparts. These bodies are informational bodies, motivated by a logic of digitality, and supplemented, enhanced, and replaced by digital information and imagery. The composite nature of not only the screen Figure 8.1 Four generations of Schwarzenegger. Top left to right: 1973, 1984 (recreation from the first film). Bottom left to right: 1984 (older T‐800), 2017. Source: Terminator Genisys (2015). Directed by Alan Taylor. Produced by Paramount Pictures/Skydance Media. Frame grab: author. 174 Drew Ayers image but also the screen body has become so widespread as to become unremarkable. Lisa Purse (2013) comments that The presence of digital artifacts within the frame renders the protagonist’s body as just one element of an often complexly digitally composited image, so that the body’s relationship to the space of action is controlled by the vision and skill of digital compositors, visual effects supervisors and other digital imaging specialists as well as by the director, cinematographer and editor. (53) Hye Jean Chung (2015) also remarks on the production of screen bodies from multiple interacting forces, noting that All animated bodies (hand‐drawn and CG) contain both visible and invisible traces of various human bodies: people used as visual reference, voice actors, animators, and so on. It is even more so with digital bodies, because they are layered nodes of multiple stages of work, such as modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, compositing, and an actor’s vocal, facial, and physical performances. (57) The composite body is formed from an assemblage of forces—both human and nonhuman—and contemporary action bodies are marked by their ability to navigate this terrain. The industrial labor required to create and authenticate the unique, individuated, profilmic hardbody has been replaced by the body’s ability to absorb the hybridity of competing production forces, and the authenticity of the body is measured by its success in withstanding the scrutiny of viewers accustomed to consuming digitally composited images. As skillful as today’s visual effects artists are at compositing a diversity of elements of varying provenance into a single, cohesive image, the “joins” between the elements are far from invisible.11 While VFX are getting closer and closer to the holy grail of photorealism, one VFX technology—facial de‐aging—reveals the fractures in the composite body. These images are often quite uncanny, especially since the films in which de‐aging VFX are employed tend to have older actors performing next to their younger digital selves, inviting a direct comparison between the aged profilmic body and the de‐aged digital body. Facial de‐aging has been employed in a number of contemporary films, with varying levels of success. Two examples include (less successfully) Jeff Bridges’s face in TRON: Legacy (2010) and (more successfully) Michael Douglas’s face in Ant‐Man (2015), but the technology has also been used in films including X‐Men: The Last Stand (2006) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).12 In TRON: Legacy, Bridges’s de‐aged face13 was grafted onto a stand‐in’s body, a practice also employed to create the Winklevoss Twins (Armie Hammer) in The Social Network (2010) and to create Cersei Lannister’s (Lena Headey) nude “walk of atonement” in the “Mother’s Mercy” episode of Game of Thrones (2015). In most of these cases, the face of one actor was grafted onto the body of a different actor, forming a vivid example of the composite body and the ways in which it accumulates input from different sources.14 The Composite Body 175 The technology used to de‐age Schwarzenegger in both Salvation and Genisys is a bit different from the facial de‐aging used in the films previously referenced, in that the bodies in both films were completely computer‐generated. In other examples of de‐aging, a digital face or the face of another actor is grafted onto a different profilmic body. In Salvation and Genisys, the entire body and face are digital animations, rather than being formed from a composite of profilmic and digital sources. The digital Schwarzeneggers in both films did, however, rely on face and body scans and performance capture data to compile the final image, creating a composite of profilmic and digital sources. Schwarzenegger didn’t have any direct involvement in Salvation, and his younger, digital double was modeled from a life mask created for the first Terminator film (Sofge, 2009). Along with the data gathered from this facial cast—an interesting amalgam of practical and digital effects—the digital recreation of a younger Schwarzenegger was mapped in post‐production onto a profilmic stand‐in (Sperb, 2012: 384). As with most VFX, the digital image of Schwarzenegger in Salvation was the result of compositing profilmic sources with digital data, though, as in Genisys, the profilmic stand‐in body was only used for reference and eventually erased and digitally re‐animated. The complexity of this kind of composite body is a hallmark of contemporary VFX images, and accompanying the interplay between profilmic and digital bodies is a cultural anxiety regarding the loss of the body’s physicality. Commenting on the collapsing distinction between analog and digital filmmaking, Lisa Purse (2007) argues that As the categorical specificity of animation and live‐action film becomes more unworkable than ever through the increasingly prevalent use of CGI, anxieties about the ontological and phenomenological status of digital images and composites sit alongside equally disturbing anxieties about the physical integrity of the human body … The pro‐filmic body is the most effective embodiment of such visual integrity: it appears perceptually real in almost all circumstances and operates to “guarantee” that the physical exertions displayed on screen have at least a correlative in the real world. As such, the pro‐filmic body and its evident materiality can serve to close down the anxieties around virtual, mutable beings that might have been triggered elsewhere in such films through the explicit use of digital animation (15–16). Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character serves as balm for this cultural anxiety. At the conclusion of Genisys, Pops is seemingly killed, his left arm torn from his torso and his body thrown from an exploding time machine into a vat of liquid metal. Unsurprisingly for fans of the series, Pops has indeed survived, resurrected by the liquid metal alloy introduced—and villainized—in T2. Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, holed up in a bunker in order to survive the explosion, both presume Pops has perished in the destruction of the time machine. Upon seeing a metal blade pierce the door of the bunker, Sarah and Kyle are accordingly horrified, as thus far in the film (and the franchise as a whole), liquid metal has only been associated with villains (and, for fans of the series, this shot echoes a similar shot of the T‐1000 176 Drew Ayers piercing elevator doors in T2). When the door opens, however, the film reveals that Pops has been resurrected and enhanced by the liquid metal technology. Running to embrace her surrogate father, Sarah exclaims, “Pops! I thought you were dead.” To which Pops responds, “No, just upgraded.” Pops, the most recent iteration of the T‐800 in the Terminator franchise, has indeed been upgraded from his original 1984 model. Not only has he intensified the paternal instincts developed in T2, he has also incorporated and tamed the threat of mutability posed by the T‐1000 model. The character of Pops is thus a transitional figure, bridging the mechanical, industrial, and profilmic physicality of the 1980s hardbody and the mutable, informational, and VFX‐supplemented body of the digital age. The figure of the mechanical T‐800 skeleton also functions as a bridge. Historically animated by practical effects (notably animatronics and stop‐motion animation), the contemporary T‐800 is now a digital simulation of its mechanical predecessor. The fact that the 67‐year‐old body of Schwarzenegger bears the weight of this cultural transition is notable, in that his body has served the purposes of various cultural logics: hardbody; sensitive, comedic father; and aging patriarch of the action cinema, now supplemented by VFX. Genisys also functions as a kind of reverse Oedipal drama, with the aging father destroying his younger counterpart. As recounted in the opening section of this chapter, the film opens with Pops killing his digital doppelgänger. This scene serves to reestablish the physicality of the body through the murder of its digital double. The uncanniness of digital reanimation—akin to the uncanniness of the T‐1000’s amorphous nature—is quashed by the return of the repressed, but now aged, hardbody. Older and wiser, Schwarzenegger has returned (importantly, from a political career) to the franchise that helped make him a household name, only to destroy the very image that made him famous. In a metaphorical move, Genisys represents the putting to bed of a profilmic hardbody physicality (ironically, a digital simulation of that physicality, which gives this scene a dual valence). In its place, Genisys installs a digitally composited body, one that remains ageless through its ability to incorporate digital visual effects. Ever adaptable, Schwarzenegger’s body represents the tenacity of white masculinity to survive cultural and economic changes. The 1984 scene, which features an older profilmic Schwarzenegger facing off against a younger digital Schwarzenegger, also raises important questions regarding the material properties and aging of the action hardbody. Some films, such as the three entries in The Expendables series, attempt to ignore the effects of aging on the action body, and these films are saturated with nostalgia for the 1980s hardbody films. The casts of these films are a who’s who of 1980s action stars, and while their bodies are older than they were 30 years ago, they are no less potent. They behave as though no time has passed, and aside from a few one‐liners about it, the age of the characters doesn’t really impact their ability to achieve their goals. Other aging action stars, however, have found success in making the aging process thematic to their films. Philippa Gates (2010) notes that Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, and Harrison Ford have experienced late‐career resurgences precisely because their films make a point to acknowledge their aging bodies. She also points The Composite Body 177 out that Stallone’s Rocky Balboa (2006) succeeded with audiences and critics, in part, because it “thematiz[ed] age rather than resist[ed] it” (280). The same is also true of Creed (2015). In this film, Rocky not only uses his age and experience to train the up‐and‐coming Adonis Creed (son of Apollo Creed) but also engages in his own battle with cancer. Stallone’s performance in Creed was widely praised, earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Oscar nomination in the same category. Genisys follows this same template in making the aging body of Schwarzenegger central to its narrative. In fact, as discussed previously, the 1984 scene demonstrates the triumph of the aging body over its younger counterpart. Throughout the film, Pops makes reference to his aging body, calling it “old, not obsolete,” and, at the end of the film, noting that his body has been “upgraded” with liquid metal technology (and also upgraded by digital visual effects). Returning to the idea of the composite, informational body, part of the strength of Schwarzenegger’s body in Genisys is its ability to exist simultaneously in a multitude of ages and in both profilmic and digital forms. At a meta‐filmic level, Schwarzenegger’s body maintains its power through its ability to channel, through digital visual effects, its younger self. Schwarzenegger thus benefits both from his youthful hardness as well as from his mature softness. His body’s ability to navigate both profilmic and digital terrains gives it a phenomenological presence that recalls the memory of his hardbody while also acknowledging the wisdom of age. The digital recreation of the 1984 Schwarzenegger body grants the 2015 Schwarzenegger body a material, hardbody authenticity that isn’t apparent on the surface of his 67‐year‐old body. In other words, the memory of 1984 Schwarzenegger—reanimated through digital technology— saturates the reception of 2015 Schwarzenegger, sharing some of its phenomenological presence and material weight. And the strength of this body is precisely its ability to move between ontological positions of profilmic and digital, navigating the information economy like any other line of code. However, it is not only the Terminator’s body that has aged: he has also gained an emotional maturity not present in the previous films. This trajectory began in T2, with the Terminator functioning as John Connor’s surrogate father, and the journey is completed with the Pops character in Genisys. We find in Pops a fully fledged father figure, one who raised Sarah Connor from a young age and reminisces over pictures, mementos, and drawings of Sarah during her absences. Pops also possesses the clichéd behavior of a father distrustful of his daughter’s new boyfriend. Finally, then, the performance of Schwarzenegger in Genisys completes the circuit of the informational composite body, and it indexes a shift in cultural ideologies concerning the body, identity, and networked technologies. Bodies within this informational logic are malleable and transient, able to travel along the lines of network communication. Biological “code” and computer “code” collapse into exchangeable concepts and, as Hye Jean Chung (2015) argues, “with various technologies working to translate human bodies into digital data, perceptions of the human body are accordingly modified to reflect this digital saturation” (62). 178 Drew Ayers Chung goes on to state that our bodies are now “radically hybrid,” but rather than producing a “sense of dread” at the loss of our unique individuation, this hybridity is now “associated with idealistic notions of liberation, reinvigoration, and regeneration” (62). The hybrid body is precisely the kind of action body found in Genisys, and the film argues for the viability of this kind of body in the twenty‐ first century. Existing in both profilmic and digital forms across a number of different ages, Schwarzenegger’s body in Genisys exhibits the ability to merge into the screen image, and its phenomenological power emerges, paradoxically, from its malleability and mutability, from its skillful exploitation of both analog hardbodies and digital informational bodies. Schwarzenegger’s older, profilmic character might have “been waiting for” his younger, digital double in order to defeat and dominate it, but this meeting ends up being more about integrating the digital action body into the profilmic action body. What Schwarzenegger was really “waiting for” was the opportunity to reintegrate his younger self into his older body in an attempt to achieve action film immortality. “The legacy of that angel”: Reanimating the Action Body VFX technologies are used not only to de‐age and recreate living action stars; they are also used to reanimate the bodies of actors who have passed away. As with digital de‐aging, digital resurrection both challenges and reworks the relationship between embodiment and authenticity in action cinema. The images these technologies produce create a circuit of exchange between actual and virtual embodiment, which fundamentally transforms the historical authenticity of hardbody action stars. The death of actor Paul Walker in a car crash in southern California in November 2013, during a break in filming Furious 7 (2015), created significant hurdles for the film’s completion. His character, Brian O’Conner, was one of the mainstays of the Fast & Furious franchise, serving as a central character in all but one of the franchise’s seven films (Walker did not star in Tokyo Drift [2006], the third film in the series). For a time, the filming of Furious 7 was put on hiatus, as the producers considered whether to complete the film and, if so, how they would do so without Walker to finish filming his scenes. After deliberating, Universal Pictures announced on Facebook that they would complete production of the film, combining the scenes Walker had completed, footage of stand‐ins (including Walker’s brothers), and VFX animation of Walker (Fast & Furious, 2014). When viewed in the context of the preceding discussion of the digital bodies of Genisys, Paul Walker’s reanimation in Furious 7 raises similar questions regarding the materiality, authenticity, and phenomenological (in)stability of the action body in the digital information age, as well as cultural anxieties that might arise in relationship to digital (dis)embodiment. In Furious 7 we find the apotheosis of the composite body. Constructed from profilmic footage, facial replacement, and digital animation, the posthumous performance of Walker in Furious 7 serves as a vivid case study of the mutability of the action body and the potential for digital immortality. The Composite Body 179 The ontological instability of Walker’s image within Furious 7 is precisely the kind of performance suited for the information age. For Jason Sperb (2012), this kind of digital reanimation speaks directly to issues of life and death: With the endlessly reproductive and malleable potential of digital imaging technologies, the ontological distinction between life and death becomes increasingly arbitrary, since there is no longer a finite collection of (past) performances to preserve. (389) He also claims that this kind of “post‐human labor” offers the “illusion of immortality” that the medium of film has long promised (388). Whereas the version of immortality offered in Genisys was a circular one, with younger and older selves existing in the same image, the immortality offered in Furious 7 is more timeless in nature, visualizing a kind of perpetual present that could be recreated ad infinitum. With Furious 7, Walker attained a kind of digital immortality, his body translated into code, stored on a hard drive, and reanimated and reintegrated into the screen image. The code of Walker’s digital body has merged with the apparatus of digital cinema and digital visual effects, able to navigate the digital terrain with ease. The (re)animation of Walker’s body (see Figure 8.2) was achieved in a similar manner to the recreation of the 1984 Schwarzenegger, though the VFX artists didn’t Figure 8.2 Reanimating Paul Walker. Source: Furious 7 (2015). Directed by James Wan. Produced by Universal Pictures/Media Rights Capital/China Film Co., Ltd./Original Film/ One Race Films. Frame grab: author. 180 Drew Ayers have a previous body scan to work with, so they were forced to employ a suite of different techniques. Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital was responsible for completing Walker’s performance in the film, and their most difficult task was recreating close‐ ups and still frames of Walker. Since Weta did not have a scan of Walker to work from, they built a reference library of Walker‐as‐O’Connor’s facial expressions and movements from past films in the franchise. Weta also used performance‐capture data from Walker’s brothers, Caleb and Cody, as well as another actor, John Brotherton, to fill in the gaps in O’Conner’s movement (Gray, 2015). As this VFX process reveals, Weta’s goal was to create a photorealistic composite human, one combining profilmic and digital data, as well as contributions from (at least) three other people. The character of O’Conner originated by Walker has transformed into an amalgamation, what Bode (2010) terms a “disintegrated technologized performance” (48). While acting has long been created through a synthesis of different sources—stand‐ins, body doubles, shot selection from different takes, different labor streams, etc.—what we find with the incorporation of digital visual effects is an intensification of this practice—an attempt to present a unified subject and body where none exists. The danger with this kind of posthumous resurrection of actors is an uncanniness of performance. Especially with audiences who are aware of the digital trickery, a kind of macabre fascination with a “zombie performance” might accompany reception of the film.15 Using examples of digital resurrection, including Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos (1999–2007), Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), and Marlon Brando in Superman Returns (2006), Lisa Bode (2010) outlines this uncanniness, and she argues that posthumous performance calls into question cultural notions of personhood. Bode states that posthumous performance challenges or disorientates familiar, taken‐for‐granted ideas about screen acting as an effect produced by an intentional, present human being. Posthumous performances remind us of our uncertainty about the degree to which we are organic or artificial, and raise questions about the nature of personhood. (60) Popular understandings of acting—especially acting within the parameters of the Method—frequently rely on notions of the unified, emotive subject, one with clear intentionality and personal expression. Posthumous, composite performances, such as that of Walker in Furious 7, call into question this humanistic view of acting, revealing that screen acting has been formed from a composite not just in the digital age but throughout the history of analog film (through editing, shot selection, etc.). Bode also notes that audiences frequently view posthumous performances as exploitative and “creepy.” To counter this perspective, the producers and cast of Furious 7 rhetorically situated the completion of the film as honoring Walker’s legacy. In numerous interviews and articles, the digital resurrection of Walker is The Composite Body 181 shifted away from the rhetoric of exploitation surrounding the use of posthumous performances of Fred Astaire (in a Dirt Devil commercial), Orville Redenbacher (in his own popcorn advertisements, and Audrey Hepburn (in a Dove/Galaxy chocolate commercial) to sell commodities, toward a rhetoric of homage, respect, and honor. Universal’s Facebook post announcing the plans to continue with the production of Furious 7 noted that they had the blessing of Walker’s family to finish the film (Furious, 2014). Franchise star Vin Diesel stated that completing Furious 7 was about celebrating “the legacy that was Paul, the legacy of that angel” (Nessif, 2015). Cast member Christopher Bridges echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that they completed the film “in Paul Walker’s honor” (Malec, 2015). Before the premiere of the film at South by Southwest, producer Neal H. Moritz stated that everyone involved was “determined to honor his [Walker’s] legacy and our love for him forever,” and co‐star Tyrese Gibson chimed in as well, claiming that they finished the film “on behalf of our brother Paul Walker” (Rosen, 2015). At a preview screening, Diesel reiterated the common refrain that the cast and crew felt an obligation to complete the film for Walker’s fans, saying that it “is our gift to you [the fans], and more importantly, it’s for my brother there [pointing at a picture of Walker]” (Romano, 2015). Even the VFX crew at Weta Digital stated their pure intentions in digitally resurrecting Walker, with VFX supervisor Martin Hill saying, “We knew we were doing something special for the filmmakers, the fans, the family—and for Paul’s legacy. We wanted to give him the sendoff that he deserved” (Gray, 2015). What all of this rhetorical labor adds up to—aside from a genuine, deep mourning for a close friend and colleague—is an attempt to counter any claims that the digital posthumous performance of Walker was completed for purely commercial reasons. As Bode (2010) articulates in her essay, these kinds of performances are often greeted with skepticism and cynicism, viewed as an attempt by Hollywood to cash in on the image of a deceased star. The outpouring of sentiment from the cast, crew, and producers of Furious 7 allays these fears and instead situates the digital resurrection of Walker as honoring his final film in the franchise for which he was best known. Furious 7 thus serves both as Walker’s swan song and a clear example of the power and malleability of performance in the digital informational age. Conclusion As the examples of both Schwarzenegger and Walker demonstrate, the contemporary action body is defined as much by its ability to merge into simulated environments and VFX as by its material hardness. The body becomes just one more element in the swirling vortex of digital manipulation, and its materiality and phenomenology are as malleable as everything else on the screen. With the pervasive use of digital VFX in all aspects of moving image media, the body is forced to keep pace, lest it become a relic of the analog era—a T‐800 in a time of liquid metal. To push 182 Drew Ayers the Terminator analogy even further, we are now in a time of the T‐3000, the Terminator model introduced in Genisys that is created by a machine intelligence using nanotechnology to replace human DNA with “phase matter.” The result is a human–machine hybrid that uses the human form as the basis for a mechanical expression. The T‐3000 also functions as an exemplar of contemporary relationships between VFX and the human body, as well as a broader informational cultural logic. In terms of both narrative and form, the T‐3000 is constructed of human and machine parts. Narratively, the T‐3000 is the result of a machine infection of a human body. On a formal level, the T‐3000 is a combination of the profilmic body of actor Jason Clarke and digital visual effects technologies. As with many action bodies in the digital age, the T‐3000 is a composite body, a combination of practical effects/profilmic bodies and digital effects/digital bodies. The governing logic of these types of composite bodies is a negotiation between the two forces—analog and digital—the negotiation of which has been praised in a number of recent films, including Furious 7, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As discussed in the introductory section of this chapter, the hybrid nature of these films is particularly valued, and the rhetoric surrounding them praises their skillful combination of profilmic and digital effects. This kind of negotiation can be understood as countering anxieties of complete digital simulation through the recognition and incorporation of material profilmic bodies, and it resituates much of the discussion of fears of digital malleability recounted throughout this chapter. Hye Jean Chung (2015) acknowledges this shift, arguing that there has been a recalibration in the representation of bodily regeneration. Rather than being “framed in codes of horror or technophobic nightmare,” the reanimation of (digital) bodies “is indicative of the concepts and practices of renewal (e.g. rebooting, copying, pasting, converting, and downloading) in digital platforms and virtual gaming environments, as well as evolving practices of digital production in media industries” (55). In the context of Genisys and Furious 7, the de‐aging and digital resurrections are not fearful or anxious, but rather optimistic expressions of the logic of the digital age. Within this environment, the materiality and authenticity of the action body comes to be defined by its ability to reboot itself, to merge and interact with its digital surroundings. As opposed to the spectacular profilmic muscularity of the 1980s hardbody and the superficiality of the 1990s postmodern action body, the informational, composite body of the 2010s tries to have its cake and eat it, too. It negotiates between profilmic and digital materiality, incorporating each into its identity. Its phenomenology is one of a transition between states, and its authenticity is connected as much to its materiality as it is to its digital photorealism. What is valued here is not ontological purity but rather ontological negotiation: the ability to exist in multiple states at once. If the action body can be taken as a measure of a prevailing cultural logic, then the blockbuster action bodies of the twenty‐first century indicate a commitment to digital malleability, a remembrance of their profilmic heritage, and a nostalgia for an analog past. The Composite Body 183 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The term “profilmic” refers to objects and bodies placed in front of the camera. Profilmic events, therefore, are events captured by the camera in “reality,” as opposed to events constructed digitally in post‐production. As with most J.J. Abrams productions, The Force Awakens is saturated with nostalgia in terms of both narrative and aesthetics. The film echoes the original trilogy, providing fans with a modified version of what they know and love, while also incorporating just enough tweaks in story and style to make the film appreciably different from its predecessors. The organizational schema employed in this analysis of action bodies is admittedly broad in that it reduces dozens of films from three decades into overly neat categories. The reality is, undoubtedly, more complicated, and on a more micro level, a categorization could take any number of different forms. On a macro level, however, the framework utilized here highlights a particular perspective on the evolution of the action body, one that emphasizes the relationship between production of the image, broader cultural logics, and the representation and phenomenology of the body. What are lost in this broad view, however, are the nuances of this relationship as exhibited in individual films. The concise lines of demarcation between eras are perhaps overstated, for example, when discussing the shift from industrial and postmodern action bodies. The films from the 1980s until the present do not follow a precise chronology in their engagement with issues of industrial and post‐industrial cultural logics. As evidenced by Terminator 2 (T2), these films do not present a clean, precise attitude toward cultural and economic issues. Like all pieces of art, they are messy and complicated. T2, for example, exhibits a fear of mutability while incorporating a more sensitive masculinity into its narrative. At the conclusion of the film, industry triumphs over information, while in the world of 1992, American manufacturing was inexorably being replaced by an information economy. What is clear, however, is that these films display a working out of these cultural and economic shifts, however messy this process might be. And the body of the male hero is a site where we can see these issues play out. Gung Ho (1986), for example, uses the Japanese acquisition of American car manufactures as comic fodder. To complicate this schema, Jean Baudrillard (2005), for example, considers the hardbodies of 1980s American action cinema to be exemplary of a postmodern cultural logic. For Baudrillard, the body has become a consumer object that functions both as a representation of capital and as a consumer fetish (277). Baudrillard also views the body produced by body‐building as a form of simulation or cloning, a performance of a particular kind of identity. The built body is an Ego‐Ideal that individuals can put on and take off: “This is how it is with body‐building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle” (Baudrillard, 1996: 124). I have tried to account for this viewpoint by referring to the industrial hardbody as an imaginary reclamation of a lost American culture and economy. Each film in the franchise features a unique T‐800 cyborg, but they all share Schwarzenegger’s appearance. This line is from T2. The scene in which John and Sarah Connor remove the T‐800’s CPU to activate his learning and emotional capabilities was not included in the original theatrical cut of the 184 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Drew Ayers film. This scene was added to the “special edition” home video release. In the theatrical cut, the T‐800 simply states that he possesses the ability to learn: “My CPU is a neural‐net processor; a learning computer. The more contact I have with humans, the more I learn.” Though we can find a return to the materiality of the body and action in examples like The Raid: Redemption (2011), John Wick (2014) and the Netflix series Daredevil (2015–), all of which emphasize action choreography that avoids VFX supplementation, it is important to note that the action bodies in these films are the lean bodies of martial artists, not the bulky hardbodies of 1980s American action cinema. A similar anxiety also surrounds motion capture performances. Performance capture maestro Andy Serkis, for example, exerts much rhetorical effort to authenticate the presence of his body in the animated image, as well as to claim authorship over the performance, and he does so by tying his performance to discourses of Method acting (Ayers, 2014: 222). Ignoring the complex technological and artistic mediation that performance capture requires, this rhetoric situates digital performance as the unique expression of a singular, humanistic force. “Spotting the joins” is a concept borrowed from Dan North (2008). The facial de‐aging in X‐Men, Benjamin Button, and Ant‐Man was completed by the team at Lola VFX (Jones, 2015). The de‐aging VFX used in TRON: Legacy are a bit different from those used in the other films cited here. Instead of using Bridges’s profilmic face as the basis for digital manipulation, Digital Domain employed a process closer to performance capture. On set, Bridges acted the part of his younger digital self, Clu, and his facial performance was captured with a head‐mounted camera rig. Using reference images from Bridges’s long film career, VFX artists then created a digital version of Bridges’s face circa 1987. Thus, while Bridges’s performance capture forms the basis of the animation, Clu’s face is completely digital. This digital face was then grafted onto the body of a profilmic performer. This idea of a “composite body” is neither a new idea nor the product of digital technology. Acting, in general, is a composite process, with different takes from different times compiled into a cohesive whole. Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiment of compiling shots of different women to give the impression of a single woman is an early example of this process. 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