Column: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies.
I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward.
When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder:
Can I believe what I just saw?
Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions.
In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't.
Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies.
The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see.
Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives?
'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.'
The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?'
Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.'
Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse.
'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.'
Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.'
And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.'
That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.'
Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun.
So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.'
Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.'
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