Digital manipulation has been a wonderful advancement for people

Digital manipulation has been a wonderful advancement for people who make films. The latest hit “Moulin Rouge” took 3 years to produce, owing to the digital graphics which saw the recreation of last century’s red light district of Paris. To get the ‘fill’ for the buildings the filmmakers had to travel to Paris and hunt down old buildings and photograph the actual brickwork. Such detail has enabled we, the consumer, to be able to experience the era in a way that could not have been imagined even 5 years ago.
Even wondrous advances like this have a real ‘downside’. I believe that the use of digital manipulation has become quite dangerous. We have unprecedented amounts of young women and young men who are literally starving themselves to death in order to maintain or gain a body image that they see as desirable because of the press. We have mature people spending fortunes on plastic surgery in order to try to stave off the ravages of time.
It is one thing to simply remove the wrinkles off of Madonna’s or Andy McDowell’s face for cosmetic advertisements – we all know that these photos have been ‘retouched’ since the invention of advertising. It becomes another thing altogether when the person who you are looking at does not exist, except in the computer of some highly paid digital manipulation expert.
It is the continual bombardment, day after day, that makes us all start to believe that what we are seeing is ‘reality’. Once upon a time the really greats of the film industry reflected what the general population looked like (only better). It is said time and time again that Marilyn Monroe would not get a job in Hollywood today, as she would have been considered far too fat. She was a gorgeous size 16!!! Now we have people who are size 6 told to lose a couple of kilos!!! The mu