De-Aging the Star, Re-Aging the Industry: Real-Time Generative AI and the Politics of Aging in Robert Zemeckis’s Here (2024)
De-Aging the Star, Re-Aging the Industry: Real-Time Generative AI and the Politics of Aging in Robert Zemeckis’s Here (2024)

Summary/Abstract: Robert Zemeckis’s Here (2024) was a critical and commercial failure—yet its failure is precisely what makes it valuable to film and media studies. By making real-time generative AI de-aging the structural principle of an entire feature rather than a localized flashback effect, Here pushes a now-pervasive Hollywood technique to its limit and exposes the assumptions buried within it. Drawing on age studies (Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Kathleen Woodward) and scholarship on digital de-aging and stardom (Kathleen Loock, Christopher Holliday, Timothy Shary, Dan Golding), this article reads the film as a case study in a broader contradiction: a contemporary American cinema that has begun to represent aging even as it intensifies its technical means of denying it. The industry’s rhetoric of “human-centric” AI, I argue, in fact moves cinema toward a “ghost-centric” regime, in which living performance is displaced by the algorithmic recombination of stored images. In foregrounding the very illusion it should conceal, Here inadvertently dramatizes Hollywood’s deep-seated unease with growing old—a logic the film’s final scene, read against the ending of Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020), makes unmistakable.

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