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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Michael Phillips: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies. I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward. When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder: Can I believe what I just saw? Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions. In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't. Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies. The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see. Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives? 'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.' The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?' Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.' Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse. 'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.' Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.' And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.' That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.' Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun. So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.' Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.' ——— (Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.) ———
Chicago Tribune
3 days ago
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Peter H. Schwartz: Why nostalgia for the 1950s of ‘Leave it to Beaver' persists in America's religious right
Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching 'Leave It to Beaver' stoned. Which is what I did with an old friend in the 1980s while attending graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley. Nostalgia for the '50s — that land beyond time where Catholic traditionalists such as Notre Dame political theorist and post-liberal prophet Patrick Deneen dwell — idealizes imaginary communities of yore such as Mayfield, the setting for 'Leave it to Beaver,' where the values of faith, family, friends and flag all flourished. According to this narrative, late-stage liberalism and the globalization of markets, with their characteristic rootlessness, dissolve this communal existence. When I was at Berkeley in the 1980s, a large number of my childhood friends from Princeton, New Jersey, somehow found their way to the Bay Area. One afternoon, one of my Princeton buddies was house-sitting for an uncle in a Bay Area suburb. The uncle, whom I'll call Uncle Jim, had been my Cub Scout pack leader in Princeton when I was in elementary school. One sun-drenched afternoon, my friend and I settled into a couch, he rolled some joints and we flipped the TV to 'Leave It to Beaver' reruns. The series, on the air from 1957 and 1963, is a resonant symbol of '50s nostalgia, one to which conservative Catholics have returned as a template for modeling natural law. To Catholics who moved to the suburbs in the '50s and '60s, 'Leave It to Beaver' was a 'medieval morality play,' as Jerry Mathers, the Catholic actor who played young protagonist Theodore 'Beaver' Cleaver, put it. The show was a guide for young souls more tethered to television than to the suburban church. Michael De Sapio, writing in the online journal The Imaginative Conservative in 2017, states that, according to Mather, Beaver Cleaver 'repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue.' In other words, these archetypal storylines and characters represent a moral imagination that 'elevates us to first principles as it guides us upwards towards virtue and wisdom and redemption,' in the words of American philosopher Russell Kirk. De Sapio continues: 'The emphasis on decorum and good manners in the Cleaver family conveyed a vision of the good, true and beautiful.' Mathers shared that the casting directors for the show selected him to play Beaver when they asked where he would prefer to be after they noticed he was uneasy at the audition. His guileless reply: his Cub Scouts den meeting. Notably, the mission of the Scouts is to 'prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.' Which returns us to Uncle Jim, my former Cub Scouts leader. He was an electrical engineer who ended his first marriage and moved to California in the 1970s, where he married a woman several decades younger and shed the trappings of his formerly decorous identity. 'Leave It to Beaver' mirrored and shaped the aspirations of millions of Catholics moving to the suburbs after World War II, and it has lingered as an idealized — and exclusive — depiction of the American Dream. The only nonwhite characters to appear in the show's 234 episodes were a Black man exiting a dairy truck in the episode 'Eddie, the Businessman' (1962) and a Black actress who plays a maid in the 1963 episode 'The Parking Attendants.' Within months of its final episode in June 1963 — following the March on Washington, D.C., in August led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the November assassination of President John F. Kennedy — 'Leave It to Beaver' had become a charming artifact of midcentury optimism, more a product of nostalgia and romantic imagination than a realistic model for America's future.
Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies. I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward. When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder: Can I believe what I just saw? Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions. In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't. Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies. The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see. Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives? 'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.' The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?' Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.' Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse. 'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.' Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.' And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.' That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.' Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun. So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.' Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.'
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Study finds key to why obese people lose pleasure in eating rich foods
ST. PAUL, Minn., March 26 (UPI) -- While it seems like a contradiction, many obese people do not enjoy eating rich, calorie-laden foods. A study published Wednesday indicates that low levels of a key brain chemical among overweight patients with high-fat diets is responsible for a loss of pleasure from food. Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley say they may have found why people with obesity have been shown to take less pleasure in eating fatty foods than those of normal weight. The culprit, they say, is a deficit of the neuropeptide neurotensin which is linked to the pleasure activator dopamine. Neuropeptides act as a signaling molecule in the nervous system, and can affect appetite. These molecules are made up of short chains of amino acids, like other peptides, and they play a crucial role in communication between neurons and other cells. The findings are significant because diminishing pleasure response from eating high-fat foods can lead obese patients to continue or even increase their unhealthy eating patterns "out of habit or boredom, rather than genuine enjoyment," according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature. As counterintuitive as it may initially sound, the authors say that restoring the pleasure in eating high-fat foods via the replenishment of neurotensin actually could help reduce the progression of obesity and provide a valuable new tool in fight against the global obesity epidemic. The need for new strategies is a stark one. More than half of adults and one-third of children and teens worldwide will be overweight or obese by 2050, according to a comprehensive study released earlier this year. Overweight and obesity rates in adults, children and teens more than doubled over the past three decades, afflicting 2.1 billion adults and 493 million young people with excess weight. A link between neurotensin, or NT, and eating disorders has been established in previous studies, which found that changes in NT levels are associated with obesity or eating disorders, leading doctors to believe that disrupted NT signaling may contribute to body weight disturbance. Specifically, research has centered around the NT receptors located in a specific brain region that connect to the dopamine "reward" and "pleasure" network. However, a key question remained: Does a high-fat diet somehow influence the release of NT in the brain? The new study, led by Stephan Lammel, an associate professor of neurobiology at UC Berkeley's Department of Neuroscience, presents evidence that the answer to this question is yes, leading to hopes that by "upregulating" NT -- perhaps through dietary changes or genetic manipulation -- the pleasure of eating can be restored. Lammel said the study, which was supported the National Institutes of Health, the McKnight Foundation, the One Mind Foundation and others, has "uncovered a concrete mechanism that may link chronic high-fat diet exposure to a loss of pleasure in eating -- a phenomenon that's been observed for years but lacked a clear explanation." Specifically, the researchers found that NT becomes significantly reduced in a key brain circuit in obese mice. This reduction essentially blunts the motivational value of enjoyable foods like sugar and fat. "What's especially compelling is that restoring neurotensin levels -- either by switching back to a regular diet or through targeted genetic approaches -- can bring back that sense of reward," Lammel told UPI in a statement. "This not only increased feeding motivation in specific contexts, but also normalized weight gain, improved mobility and reduced anxiety." Clinically, "that's really important," he added, saying it suggests that part of the challenge in obesity may not just be overeating due to pleasure, but also continuing to eat without pleasure -- out of habit or diminished reward. "If we can find ways to restore or rebalance neurotensin signaling in the brain selectively, we may be able to help people regain healthier eating behaviors without broadly suppressing appetite or affecting other systems," he said. The idea that making eating more pleasurable for obese patients as a way to help them manage their weight may seem paradoxical at first, Lammel admitted. "After all, we often assume that the more we enjoy food, the more likely we are to overeat," he said. "But our study shows that the reality is more nuanced. What we found is that in mice exposed to a chronic high-fat diet, the brain's reward response -- particularly in circuits involving dopamine and neurotensin -- becomes blunted," but even so, they kept on eating the unhealthy food. This uncoupling of reward from consumption is important "because it suggests that overeating in obesity isn't always driven by pleasure -- it can become automatic or habitual, which makes it harder to regulate." So, the paradox is that bringing back the "right" kind of pleasure -- this is, pleasure that's appropriately tied to the reward value of food -- may actually help break the cycle of mindless or habitual overeating, the study team found. "It's not about encouraging indulgence, but about restoring balance," Lammel said. "If food becomes pleasurable again in a meaningful and regulated way, the body may naturally recalibrate toward healthier patterns of intake." Another prominent researcher of the connection between NT, dopamine and obesity said the UC Berkeley study represents a significant advancement in the understanding of the role brain chemistry plays in determining our eating habits. Gina Leinninger, a professor of physiology and leader of the Leinninger Laboratory at Michigan State University's Neuroscience Program, is an expert on how neurons in the brain's hypothalamus regulate energy balance, and how disruption of these neurons contributes to the development of obesity and metabolic disease. Leinninger, who was not connected to the study, told UPI the work sheds a new light on what had been known previously. "Neurotensin has long been connected to modulating feeding, but how and where has remained a mystery," she said. "This work makes important strides in connecting neurotensin to the dopamine system that shape show much we want to eat, and therefore how much we do it."
