Armond White writes for National Review Online about a significant factor in a high-profile West Coast mayoral election.
It is the cheerfulness of the AI memes for the Spencer Pratt mayoral campaign that signifies a cultural and technological advance. These clips restore the satirical power that political cartoonists in newspapers and print magazines lost during the digital era. No matter one’s position on the Los Angeles mayoral race, the Pratt spots harness physical movement and mimesis for the liveliest examples of cinema so far this year.
Updating the history of satirical political graphics — William Hogarth’s 18th-century engravings on British moral topics, Honoré Daumier’s caricatures of 19th-century French decadence, and Thomas Nast’s critiques of Tammany Hall corruption during America’s Gilded Age — the Pratt graphics respond to current social circumstances using AI style that’s distinctly of its time.
The spots are shocking because they dare to use Pratt’s recognizable appearance alongside ultra-realistic likenesses of his opponents, primarily presiding Mayor Karen Bass, with her perpetual “what-me-worry?” grin. Humorous antagonism heightens the emotional impact of these imaginary confrontations. They would be cartoonish, but background images of Los Angeles burnt to cinders and crumbling social order trip an alarm. It captures the desperation of the moment. Pratt’s tech team accesses that gleefully morbid fascination of 1970s disaster movies — The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and the Airport franchise — in which the desire to see Los Angeles/Hollywood “get it” (as ’70s wags quipped) is now a reality.
AI algorithms contrast models of Pratt against Bass and the Democrat pols (Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi) who rule California as a one-party state, seen cavorting ghoulishly through their policy-created Garden of Earthly Delights.
The spectacle owes to Charles B. Curran, who founded Menace Studio in Los Angeles, focusing creativity on pioneering synthetic/AI imagery and video. Curran reportedly uses tools such as ByteDance’s Seedance to generate public domain images combined with short-form storytelling and structure. Some political sympathy is obvious (while Pratt’s “conservatism” is not), but it seems that Pratt frequently reposts the spots, as a savvy Madison Avenue client would.
