The Curious Case of De-Aging

With all this "de-aging" in Hollywood movies, it won't be long before they do away with the original actors all together and replace them with avatars, a la James Cameron's "blue world."  I see there are also anti-aging apps available for your cellphone and tutorials on YouTube so that you too can recapture your youthful glow, if looking back at old pictures isn't good enough.  I'd be lying if sometimes I wished I was 30 years younger when I saw a pretty young woman smile at me, but then it's an easily dismissed reverie.

Star Trek foreshadowed this with The Menagerie, two episodes that cleverly repackaged the pilot movie in which Spock hijacks the Enterprise to take the badly deteriorated figure of Captain Pike back to the notorious planet Talos IV.  Once there, Pike was restored to his youthful self and reunited with Vina to live the blissful life that had been denied him, albeit illusory.

For the most part this de-aging doesn't any serve any purpose other than filling gaps in times.  One of the more interesting examples was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, However, I don't think F. Scott Fitzgerald ever intended it as anything more than an amusing story, but in the hands of David Fincher it became a much-too-serious drama on recovering lost youth.

I found myself with an interesting dilemma when writing stories about my youth.  Do I become a pervert for looking back at my first romance when I was 14.  I found myself uncomfortable writing about the experience and decided to leave it alone.

Not Hollywood.  It is fertile ground for them.  If you can't go forward because you killed off a central character, well then go back and retrace his or her steps.  In the case of the TV series Lost you can even go sideways and imagine alternative realities, essentially rewriting the script as you go along.  

I was pleasantly surprised by how well a recent German TV Series Dark did this.  The creators imagined 33-year cycles in which a certain set of characters could teleport themselves back and forth.  They had moved around so many times that older versions got trapped in one time frame and younger versions in another, so that the German town had become an incestuous trap.  They even threw out an engaging book title, A Journey Through Time, which has since been printed even if no such book existed beforehand.

This made me curious in the notion of time travel, so I bought James Gleick's Time Travel: A History in which he explored the concept more as a historian than as a scientist, noting that scientifically it is not possible to do.  We can only move forward, and if we surpass the speed of light ahead in time, but to what is anyone's guess as the future really hasn't been formed yet. 

Of course, there are those who believe in predestination,  Not surprisingly there has even been a movie made about it, which is where I think the creators of Dark got their idea.  But, it is kind of sad to think that our lives are all laid out in front of us and we are but actors playing scripted parts.  I prefer to think we have free will.

Scientists recently did a study on the subject and found that those who believed in predestination took more candy from a jar than did those who believed in free will.  I guess those who didn't think they had free will, felt it didn't matter how much candy they took as it was predestined they would do so.  I think this goes a long way in explaining Republicans.  I wish I could find the link again but no such luck.

Getting back to this idea of de-aging.  If I was going to go back in time there are a lot of things I would do over.  It's not that I'm unhappy with where I am now.  I just feel like I really fucked up some things along the way and would like some do-overs as in Groundhog Day.  Mostly, I would like to pick up some additional skills like being able to play a bass guitar, not giving up on karate at purple belt, and pushing myself to write sooner so that I would have several books under my belt by now.  How much that would have affected what I am today, I don't know, but I was pleased to see that James Gleick had a soft spot for this movie as well.

Then the question becomes where do we go from here?  What do we do with all these memories, all these object lessons that we have stored in our brain?  The better ones among us write it down and pass it along to their children and grandchildren.  But, does the younger generation really want to read them?  

For years, I had my mother's journals locked away in storage in Seattle only to fall behind on payments and in the end just give them up.  I was really disappointed I did this but then a funny thing happened.  Some woman contacted me out of the blue on facebook messenger claiming she had some of my family records and even shared a picture of my young mother from the box she bought at Goodwill.  I wrote back and after some haggling I arranged to have the box mailed to me in Lithuania.  It almost made me believe in predestination, but I chalked it up to an incredible stroke of luck.

Alas, I haven't done much except go through the box.  It was mostly clippings from her early twenties before she met my father.  Not much in the way of personal photos or even her own written text, but still it helped me form a picture of my younger mother.  De-Aging if you will, although I didn't consider it at the time.  I still want to do something with these journals as it is too good a story not to tell.