Poor Greta Garbo.
Perhaps, in life, she thought her final indignity would be the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore TV sketch from 1970, showing Pete as the legendary recluse standing on the back of a flatbed truck as it rumbles through the crowded city streets, shouting at everyone through a megaphone: “I vant to be alone!”
But now, 36 years after her death in 1990, there is something worse. As if to give us yet another reason to fear and resent AI, this technology has exhumed Garbo and brought her to a state of bland, mediocre undeadness for a bizarre 99-second TV ad from the Swedish ball-bearings company Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF), in which the screen legend, dressed in a silk blouse and stylish slacks, key-lit like a movie star, at first in dreamy profile-silhouette and then standing by a stool and prefacing her script by saying movie-type things like “Are we rolling?”, drones out her appreciation for this very boring industrial product. At the end, we get an odd, stilted sort of joke about her well-known yearning for solitude.
There is a reason for it. In 1921, the 15-year-old future screen icon, then known as Greta Gustafsson, really did briefly appear in a promotional film for SKF. (This appears to have been an offshoot for the women’s clothing commercials she was doing at the time for Stockholm’s PUB department store, which got her into the movies.)
The AI Greta Garbo is a bizarre soignée figure, a Stepford robo-star, a Hallmark-greeting-card parody of the icy hauteur, distraite sensuality and deadpan comedy that Garbo projected in life. The AI Garbo is like the classiest ever presenter of a TV shopping channel, purring her way through a dull and humourless script that seeks to create a brand synergy between the frictionless ball-bearings manufactured by SKF and what the company imagines to be Garbo’s own all-important smoothness. But Garbo’s impact rested on something other than smoothness. “One of my first films was for SKF and now I’m back for my last,” AI Greta remarks.
Her last? Well, this film is supposedly derived not from any of Garbo’s own movie appearances, but reportedly from images and pictures that exist elsewhere. This perhaps means that SKF need not negotiate with any of the corporate movie studios – who might be rather chary of people making free with Garbo’s image, which is part of their copyright-protected IP – but only with Garbo’s distant relatives, who might well be more amenable. And they say that they are not averse to the idea of licensing the AI Greta Garbo for other movies. We need Mrs Merton to ask what first attracted them to that idea. Perhaps Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth also have distant great-great-great nephews and nieces who can be induced to greenlight similar projects.
Let’s hope this dull AI Garbo is not the way of the future. Guardrails were never more badly needed.
