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Mistaken
Identity
by Mad Dog
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| Jesse Ventura says he used the body double because he didn’t
have time to spend 10 hours at the photo shoot. You have to give him credit, it’s a
better excuse than "The dog ate my feather boa." |
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Appearances can
be deceiving. You know this is true because we’ve developed so many platitudes about
it, like "Don’t judge a book by its cover", "You never get a second
chance to make a first impression", and "What do you mean, did I see the Crying
Game?". Take Jesse "The
Body" Ventura. Go ahead, the people of Minnesota did, and they took him seriously.
Well, sort of. At first glance he appears to be a wrestler who made a wrong turn, entering
politics instead of the ring. But he pulled off the upset of the election, beating a tag
team of well known career politicians to become governor of the only state which thinks
ice fishing should be an Olympic sport. And why shouldn’t Ventura be governor? After
all, wrestling’s always been about yelling, screaming, posturing, beating up on your
opponents and, if you’re a bad guy like he was, fighting dirty, so it’s not like
he doesn’t have the necessary experience.
Now it turns out that Ventura may not be
what he appears to be. At least not physically. He admitted that during his campaign he
used a body double in a TV commercial that some say helped clinch the election while
cinching his waist, something he may have deemed necessary after his sportscasting cronies
started calling him Jesse "The Stomach" Ventura on the air. He says he used the
body double because he didn’t have time to spend 10 hours at the photo shoot. You
have to give him credit, it’s a better excuse than "The dog ate my feather
boa."
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All you need is a computer, a program like Photoshop, and time, which shouldn’t be a
problem since the presidential election’s not for two years so you don’t need to
be watching WWF wrestling like it’s a presidential debate. Yet. |
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We shouldn’t
be surprised that he did this. After all, Hollywood has been using body doubles for years
and no one objects. Of course that might be because it’s generally done for a nude
scene and the body double has a nicer body than the star. Face it, this would be like
arguing against someone trading you an original Picasso for that starving artist
Any-Painting-For-Ten-Bucks special on the living room wall.
But what’s good for the movies isn’t good for the
Internet. On film they happily let someone else be nude instead of them, but the minute
they find their heads pasted on a naked body online they get their Victoria’s Secret
panties in a knot.
This is going to be difficult to stop,
since thanks to technology almost anyone can make these modifications at home. All you
need is a computer, a program like Photoshop, and time, which shouldn’t be a problem
since the presidential election’s not for two years so you don’t need to be
watching WWF wrestling like it’s a presidential debate. Yet.
One person is so outraged by this
unauthorized use of an actor’s nude and fake nude photos that she started a group
called Cybertrackers to hunt them down and behead them. Well, virtually speaking, anyway.
This person is Alyssa Milano’s mother. Alyssa, in case you’re still publicly
denying having been to an adult web site, is the hottest thing on the Internet this side
of Dawson Creek screen savers. Of course, instead of griping they should just be happy the
culprits didn’t use the same body double Jesse Ventura did.
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The difference here is that it turns out the cop who arrested him wasn’t even a cop
but rather Steven Nemec, who pretended to be a cop and then arrested the wrong man! |
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This certainly
isn’t the first time body doubles have been used in politics. A few years back in
Virginia a political commercial for Senator John Warner showed opponent Mark
"I’m not John" Warner shaking hands with former Governor Douglas Wilder and
President Bill Clinton. The only problem was Mark Warner wasn’t in the original
photograph. It seems someone removed Warner’s head and placed it on the body of Chuck
Robb, which not only caused a political stink but aroused Robb’s wife, Lynda Byrd,
for the first time since she discovered Robb wasn’t, in fact, Al Gore. This in itself might not have been so bad except
that several months previous a state agency published a photograph of then Governor George
Allen rafting down the James River sitting next to big political contributor Jimmy
"Wanna see my sausage?" Dean. While Dean actually had been in the raft, he
didn’t sit next to the governor. Someone thought the photo op could be improved upon
so they grafted Dean’s head onto someone else’s body. Probably Lynda
Byrd’s. (But at least it wasn’t Jesse Ventura’s.)
You don’t need to manipulate photos to
make appearances deceiving. Recently, in Fresno, California, 22-year-old Chanel Chandler
was found dead, dressed for a night on the town in a black minidress with silver and gold
stripes. A week later the police revealed that Chanel was actually Charles, something not
even his/her friends were aware of, least of all the man Chandler supposedly married in
Sacramento.
But at least the police in Fresno who
investigated this are who they say they are. Hopefully. This wasn’t the case in Santa
Clara, California last summer when the police released a man who had been jailed for six
weeks on sexual assault charges because they discovered he’d been arrested by
mistake.
Okay, these things happen. The difference
here is that it turns out the cop who arrested him wasn’t even a cop but rather
Steven Nemec, who pretended to be a cop and then arrested the wrong man! There was no word
as to whose body was attached to the mug shot.
Remember all this the next time someone
tells you that a picture is worth a thousand words. Some of those words might just be
borrowed.
©1998 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Think
about this when you look at the photographs.
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