Sarah Palin Forever (2023)
Fake Deepfakes and No-Camera Cinema
I wrote Sarah Palin Forever as a result of a real experience: being a college press photographer at a Sarah Palin rally in an airport hangar in Bangor, Maine during the 2008 election campaigns — McCain/Palin vs Obama/Biden. Most of what I describe in the piece is accurate: Miss Teen Maine, Lee Greenwood in a black cowboy outfit.
While I wrote the script myself, all of the images were generated by AI. The narrator speaks through a deepfake vocal synthesizer, trained on thousands of hours of Sarah Palin audio.
Most notably — and something that shaped my memory of that event, and what would eventually become this story — was a moment when Sarah Palin gestured at me, in the bleachers with the press, extending a finger and instructing the crowd to turn around and see who “the real know-nothings are.” A bunch of otherwise friendly folks turned around then and started to boo, jeering at us.
Party politics are a wrestling match, a series of performances complete with cheers and boos. It was my first major political rally as a college photographer and the moment stuck with me. I saw a sign being waved — “Sarah Palin Forever” — and I started to joke about what might happen if we took it literally. What if I was in that place, surrounded by hostile people, extended into some weird form of eternity?
Sarah Palin Forever imagined that world in a short story, published in Bangor, Maine’s own Detritus Magazine in, I think, 2016. The story is about how political environments — including media ecosystems — shape our enemies and how enemies shape our identities, even when we think we are resisting them.
It’s a horror story not because of Sarah Palin, but because of what it says about internalizing political ideologies even when try to resist them - or think we are resisting them.
A Generated Film Still from Sarah Palin Forever.
While Sarah Palin is the brunt of this joke that goes on too long, it’s not about party politics per se — though Donald Trump’s tenure certainly suggests that this Palin rally has indeed continued far longer than anyone expected. This story could be set in any party-politics space, or anywhere that pageantry and ideology replaces the value of people’s real experiences.
To be clear, this is a “fake deepfake.” There’s nothing about it that aims to convince you that Sarah Palin is present for the story, its actual narrator, or, thank God, that any of this actually happened. It’s an exercise in the tools and language of deep fakes — but ultimately, it’s just dark satire.
The girl in the story sounds like Sarah Palin because she grew up in a world where the third hour of a three-hour rally that perpetually loops — 30% of her life — was spent listening to the same Palin speech. That is what makes this a kind of existential, political horror film: the tension between a mother, desperate to save her daughter from becoming forever molded by a life in this hangar-shaped prison of ideology. This is the only world her daughter will know — can know — and watching her find beauty in it is almost as terrifying as watching her daughter abandon hope.
When initially sharing the piece I was asked if I had intended to humanize Sarah Palin. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I’ll be thinking about it. In a way, I hope it does, if only to play with the trope of deepfakes and dehumanization. We typically take away and use the voice of others to assert or to resist power. In some way, maybe this is me speaking back to the threat of an airport hangar of angry suburbanites who would otherwise be smiling at me in a grocery store.
The piece is meant to address the all-encompassing narratives of our media ecosystems. The worlds we see, and the lenses we see them through, the ways we internalize them, and the people considered expendable to all of it. Media shapes our imagination. Ideology and imagination are often mutually reinforcing. Deepfakes are part of that media ecosystem today, as much as 2008-era photojournalism slideshows were a part of 2008’s.
It both cases, the power of the images or words isn’t built on their reflection of what actually happened. Their power is built on the stories we tell with them.
In this film’s language, that lens is the lens of her mother’s camera. It’s a reminder of the danger of a life defined by political slogans. The danger is that you find yourself forgetting what goes on beyond the walls of infinite fervor.