Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/08/arnold-schwarzenegger-as-anton.html
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I wonder if we could salvage any of Batman Forever by deepfaking Javier Bardem into the role of Mr. Freeze.
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He really is so great in that role.
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I don’t have some way to put it. That’s the way it is.
One of the best movie scenes ever.
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Oddly enough, Schwarzenegger is pretty funny in the new Terminator flick.
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Easily the best acting i’ve seen from arnie.
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You can’t fool me, that’s Fred Armisen in a wig!
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What do you mean oddly? Half is movie career is comedy.
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Ugh, this deep fake shit is getting really hard to detect.
Ok, I’ll bite. What do you think’s going on here?
Okay, I’m kind of bad at recognising faces - I might have a little bit of face blindness - and these videos just don’t work on me.
Like this one, doesn’t look like Arnie. At all. It looks like Javier Bardem. The posture is Bardem’s. The profile and shape of the head is Bardem’s. The character of the movement is Bardem’s. At best, there’s occasionally something vaguely Arnie-ish in the brows and cheekbones when he looks directly at the camera, but I wouldn’t have seen it if I wasn’t specifically looking for it.
If you’d presented this to me with no sound, and I not seen the original, I still would not believe it was a genuine Schwarzenegger performance.
So, for the first time in my life, it seems I’m better than the general population at recognising people. What should I do with this superpower?
Nothing’s going on, he’s just a weirdo driven by a sense of himself as a justiciar of blind fate. So you end up with a lot of deeply menacing scenes where there is a hidden layer of motivation that complicates things the more you think about it. One of these motivations is that Chigurh ( though happy to kill people fated to be in his way, such as innocent hotel staff) prefers not to kill people who willingly or accidentally engage with his way of seeing things.
So a couple of scenes which appear to be sadistic cat-pawing are, as he sees it, genuine negotiations for their lives. He’s trying to badger people into saying something that, according to his warped ethics, lets them off the hook. But they typically bore or aggravate him by wheedling, so he has to resort to the coin.
The four that spring to mind are Moss’s wife, the gas station attendant, the accountant, and the other hit man. The gas station attendant wins his toss. I assume that the accountant was smart and sharp enough to just say “no” and live, but again, the more you think about it, the less is clear.
And my feeling is that the other hit man already won a toss on a previous encounter, the hidden layer of their conversation, and the reason why Chigurh is happy to negotiate until circumstances force a decision.
I also think that Moss’s wife’s refusal to call the toss led him to kill her out of spite, and thinking about the ramifications of that are why he crashed his car. In the movie’s magic-realist dimension, she’d proved his “fate” thing was bullshit, so now he wasn’t an agent of fate anymore. Just a normal coin.
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I think that’s right but I would add that his way of seeing things include considerations of power and domination. Chigurh seeks total control of situations, as you would expect of a hitman, but he also despises those he can easily dominate. The man in the gas station? Not only does he tolerate Chigurh’s open rudeness, but he also submits to all of his threatening questions. Chigurh has no respect for him. The turning point is when Chigurh realizes that the guy only has the gas station because he married the right person - he didn’t even have to do any work to get the place! His life isn’t worth more than a coin toss to Chigurh. The man he kills with the bolt pistol also submitted to doing whatever he was asked of and went to his grave without a whimper.
Compare that with the woman in the office who refuses to give Chigurh the information he wants, even though he asks for it three times. He sees he can’t dominate her without resorting to violence, and because of this he respects her toughness and commitment to principles and so doesn’t harm her.
Chigurh’s view of power and domination might seem quite warped but I think it’s just “If you don’t fight back you deserve whatever you get” and I bet a lot of people would agree with that.
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