Your Forever Person

N ARI FOLMAN’S ENDEARINGLY BONKERS 2013 CURIO THE CONGRESS, ROBIN WRIGHT (playing herself) signs over her publicity rights to an unscrupulous studio boss—and becomes legally obligated to languish in obscurity as her digital avatar achieves monumental fame. The full extent of that film’s dystopia is yet to materialize, but the technology that allows the studio to simulate Wright’s presence is more or less already here, and only getting more powerful. Even before the advent of CGI, studios have taken measures to construct performances in the absence of performers: there’s the considerable history of studios faking their way to a usable turn from an actor who had the temerity to die before wrapping, running from Robert Walker in (1952), to Brandon Lee in (1994), to 2016’s installment , which reanimated long-gone genre stalwart Peter Cushing using English actor Guy Henry and some no longer seem inconceivable. Already, studios and actors alike are preparing for the potential economic and artistic disruptions of and implications for the right of publicity (i.e., to the use of one’s likeness, name, and persona).