The micromanaged ingénue works a “Natalie Portman in Vox Lux” vibe with an added dash of teenybopper appeal lavender wig, rapidly deteriorating mental state, pseudo-inspirational messaging about being able to do anything if you just believe in yourself. “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” concerns itself with the splintering and displacement of consciousness, specifically that of pop star Ashley O (Miley Cyrus, vivisecting her erstwhile Hannah Montana persona). Even with all the everyday surreality that sounds like a prepackaged Black Mirror episode, I’m still surprised it’s taken Charlie Brooker five seasons to get around to this one. These hinted at a slippery-slope future that has now come to pass in our real world, as the likes of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher get digitally exhumed from their graves, propped up and marched around to give the latest Star Wars a little extra something-something. Whether it was ’Pac rising from the dead to sell tickets or Robin Wright fictitiously selling her image to the studios, new advances accelerated the erosion of the self for the sake of dark financial imperatives.
In the early 2010s, personhood itself seemed to be coming to an end as fanciful new equipment enabled the complete capturing, digitization, and control of a real figure’s digital likeness. One year later, when Ari Folman unveiled his live-action–animation hybrid The Congress, a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s cult sci-fi novel that imagined an actress signing over her physical form to the industry, the film heralded the vanguard of an existential apocalypse.
When the Tupac Shakur hologram graced the 2012 Coachella music festival with its glowing, eerie presence for a couple of numbers with a flesh-and-blood Snoop Dogg, it was unsettling enough.
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