The Flash Cameos Give In to Superhero Culture’s Most Crass Impulses

Last week, in-theater photos and videos from the climax of The Flash, one of the last vestiges of the DCEU, leaked. The plot of the film is mostly convoluted superhero nonsense but, in essence, the scene in question involves multiple versions of the speedy hero watching awestruck as their actions start causing the different worlds of the DC multiverse to clash and collapse into each other.
We are treated to displays of the recognizable faces that inhabit these worlds—specifically, digital recreations of classic portrayals of Superman, Supergirl and Batman designed to get a pop from the audience, featuring the visages of both living and deceased actors. You’ve got Christopher Reeve, Helen Slater, George Reeves, Adam West and even a Nicolas Cage Superman who has only ever existed as a hypothetical version of the character in a never-made Tim Burton movie. All are rendered as uncanny, dead-staring, artificial voids of humanity, existing only as crushing reminders of the hold that the intersection of capitalism, technology and fanboy pandering has on us as a culture.
Of course, everyone online got mad…that the new superhero movie was being spoiled. To be fair, through gritted teeth, I avoided any quote-tweet bashing of the leaks because I empathize with the modern dilemma of not being able to log onto social media without having a movie you want to see being ruined. I know that there are people (many, in fact) out there who enjoy these movies more than me; I’m not here to wrestle with the social politics of spoiler culture. That said, the reaction to these particular leaks made me question where we draw the line between being rightfully peeved about a callous disregard for other people’s experience and righteously exposing yet another craven instance of virtual grave-robbing for the sake of catering to a vacuous culture of multiverses, used only to further monetize a cultural familiarity with existing IP. That’s what this scene represents, and it’s extraordinarily grotesque and depressing.
This practice of digitally recreating actors is not a newfound phenomenon of course. We saw it in 1978, when Bruce Lee was inserted into Game of Death after he died during the early stages of production. Similar incidents have been seen numerous times since then: Paul Walker was famously, posthumously inserted into scenes in Furious 7 to finish the picture, including a closing epilogue created to give him a cinematic goodbye. These examples, of actors’ likenesses being used after passing away mid-production, are generally a less grievous example of the topic at hand. These performers were already involved with a production that, in a lot of cases, was very close to being finished—but they still implicitly perpetuate the normalization of digital actors within the larger cultural zeitgeist.
Then, of course, there are the digital replications of living actors who agreed to participate. Star Wars is the most obvious culprit of this, with Mark Hamill agreeing to have the likeness of his young self appear in The Mandalorian. Carrie Fisher was still alive to give her consent in making an appearance in Rogue One, though she apparently did not realize it was going to be computer generated. Both appear as their younger selves in Rise of Skywalker, with Fisher’s appearance being approved and played by her daughter Billie Lourd. As for the third in the main trio, Harrison Ford, he’ll be de-aged in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Though portrayals that have the personal blessing or full-blown participation of the subject attached to them may free the filmmakers of ethical wrongdoing when it comes to the act of digital impersonation, it does not let them off the hook from the ways these creations still reinforce this practice as something routine.
Besides that, these recreations exist only as exceedingly weird, eerie imitations of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. One of the few instances of de-aging that worked was in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, where the unnatural look that the tech produces adds a spectral layer to the story structure of an old man looking back on a regretful life. In nearly every other case, its use adds nothing to the texture of the story, which accentuates its bizarreness. You cannot tell me that this thing actually passes as a real person: