Some of you may have caught British comedian and actor Russell Brand’s cameo on The Simpsons on February 20. What you may not have known is that the yellow “Simpsonized” cartoon image of Brand is, in fact, his original form. The truth is that Russell Brand has no more reality than does Bart Simpson.
My friends, we have been victims of a hoax of mammoth proportions—Russell Brand does not exist. The planes of his face, too smooth to be human, and the raster graphics of his tangled hair, unmistakably identify him as a simulacrum, an image conjured up by a computer. In the following photographs, I will take you step by step through the irrefutable evidence that shows that Russell Brand is an animated computer-generated construct, like Schrek. However, unlike Schrek, Russell Brand is infecting everything around him with his essential unreality.
Russell Brand originated in 2003 as a rough sketch on a cocktail napkin, recovered from the trash at London’s chic restaurant Nobu. A source in the wait-staff indicated that Simon Cowell had just eaten there, fueling speculation he played a part in the conspiracy. Brand was soon developed into a more realistic pen-and-ink portrait and eventually given a body, but for some years he remained incapable of fooling anybody.
His name is thought to have emerged as an inside joke among his creators—”Brand” being a reference to the identity of their creation: as hollow and meaningless as the Nike Swoosh. Just as every criminal—Jack the Ripper, the Joker—leaves a calling card, so Russell Brand’s creators could not resist the temptation to “sign” their crime.
These creators (the plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity) grew emboldened after James Cameron’s Avatar showed that CGI characters could be convincingly lifelike. They developed Russell Brand into a fully fleshed out facsimile and began inserting him into likely settings. At first he only appeared in magazines, because still photography allowed more leeway in the illustration, but soon they felt confident enough to release video footage. Next came appearances in feature films, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek.
The Photographic Evidence:
This creature is being presented to us as a human being? This isn’t, like, a proof-of-concept from some Hollywood special effects laboratory, meant to demonstrate the realism of its CGI animation? Nice try, unknown conspirators. It may appear human-like at a glance, but detailed analysis shows its flaws. For example, in these two photos, notice the teeth, which experts believe have been photoshopped from a horse.
In this next photo, notice the way the hair in front lies in smooth locks against the skull, whereas the hair in back stands up in an immense, tangled bouffant; the disjunction provides textbook evidence that two pictures have been combined. Also notice the perfect V formed by the upper lip stubble.
This next provides especially strong evidence of Russell Brand’s ersatz condition. Whoever was responsible for this one was clearly not on their “A game” that day. We know that the people behind Brand use a variety of methods to convince us of Brand’s reality; in this case, what I think we’re looking at is a wax sculpture, flanked by two paid actresses who may have been killed afterward, used to allow Brand to appear to interact with physical objects when time does not permit extensive postproduction studio work. This may account for the blank eyes, the unnaturally featureless skin, and the obviously fake hair. Notice too how the first three pictures showed Brand against blurred or nonexistent background, helping to disguise the wholly CGI images), whereas the fourth shows a background in focus; this is no doubt because it is an actual photograph of an actual object, the wax sculpture.
No one should be surprised by this revelation. In a world were dinosaurs and Transformers flourish onscreen, the only surprise is that CGI personages have not emerged sooner. (Perhaps they have; who can say whether Russell Brand is truly the first simulacrum to masquerade as a human being, or only the first to be exposed?) This raises the question: who else is a graphical representation? A prime suspect is Brand’s own “wife,” singer Katy Perry. A cursory analysis of her face would indicate, as a first approximation, an origin as a digital polygonal bitmap. She also recently appeared on The Simpsons, albeit with much more convincing animation than her “husband.” Is The Simpsons a vector of unreality, a “Patient Zero” of trompe l’oeil? Other suspects include Miley Cyrus, Mark Zuckerberg (if you look closely, his appearance changes from image to image, sometimes quite drastically), Sarah Palin (fact: there is no record of her existence prior to 2008—anywhere), Kim Kardashian, Veronica Mars, and Justin Timberlake.
Is it a coincidence that, in the two years immediately prior to the first appearance of Russell Brand on that cocktail napkin, two movies involving CGI actors were released? In 2001, Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, a Japanese-American science fiction production, starred what was touted as the world’s first photorealistic CGI actor. In 2002, there was S1m0ne, in which a Hollywood producer played by Al Pacino creates a digital actress who subsequently acquires a spurious reality in the minds of the public. One of my informants speculated that this movie could have been used by the conspiracy to prepare mass opinion for the coming of Russell Brand and others of his ilk, similar to the way in which The Boys from Brazil was used to prepare the populace to accept the rule of an oligarchy of Hitler clones. “I strongly feel someone is pulling a “S1m0ne” on us, if anyone has seen that movie,” he opined.
Who created Russell Brand, and for what purpose? Does he represent merely the first stage in an invasion of simulacra that will eventually replace every human in the world with lifelike replicas capable of appearing in Us Weekly magazine? Is there a connection with what is known in Tibetan mythology as a tulpa (“thoughtform”), a physical manifestation of mental energy? We may never know the whole truth.