Stunt double take

Hollywood gets away with a lot. History has suffered royally over the years in the hands of Hollywood directors as the viewing public have accepted historical distortions aplenty including everything from a Welsh accented Marc Antony to a Genghis Khan with a Texan drawl. Along the way Hollywood storytellers have also managed to perpetuate the myth that all love is the same thing as early phase infatuation. Over the decades the publicity machines of Hollywood have been allowed to play with our sensibilities via everything from changed names to deliberately falsified stories to add lustre to stars that are actually quite dull. Yet while all of these things have gone on, perhaps one of the great chicaneries of Hollywood remains the stunt double. Since the 1920s stunt women and men who don’t really look like Hollywood stars have leapt from burning buildings and onto sprinting horses yet we have accepted that it was the star who did it without disengaging from the narrative of the film and now we know how they get away with it…it is because your brain wants them to.

Janene Carleton has stunt doubled for Angelina Jolie in Salt, Jessica Biel in Total Recall, and Paula Patton in Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol. How can one person look exactly like three very different movie stars? The answer of course is the she can’t and she doesn’t have to because when you watch a movie a brain mechanism clicks into gear that allows you to believe that a stunt person is a very unique-looking Hollywood star.

This mechanism was examined in a new study that asked people view dozens of faces that varied in similarity. Every six seconds a “target face” flashed on a computer screen for less than a second and was followed by a series of faces that morphed with each click of an arrow. The subjects were asked to click through until they found a face that most closely matched the target face.

What emerged was that regardless of whether subjects cycled through many faces before they found a match or quickly named which face they saw, perception of a similar face was always pulled towards a face they saw within ten seconds of the target face provided the faces were reasonably similar.

This “perceptual pull” phenomenon results from what is known as the “continuity field” which operates in our perception. Essentially the continuity field allows us to maintain the knowledge that a face belongs to the same person even if light, shade, or perspective changes. If you had to constantly reassess what you were seeing all the time then you would live in perpetual chaos. The continuity field of perception allows you to sensibly view reality as a continuous stream even though aspects of it may change.

In Hollywood, albeit that “continuity” people are meant to stop it happening, it means we can ignore a character changing shirt buttoning or hairstyle from one moment to the next. It also means we will accept that it is the same person we see in gorgeous close-up who in the next moment leaps from one mid-air plane wing to the next and then is seen again next instant with flawless hair again.

Hollywood, either consciously or unconsciously, has made heavy use of the continuity field in its filmmaking…now if we could just convince Hollywood that the brain had a “quality field” as well…what a wonderful world that would be.