Tag: Gaga & Reena Spaulings

In typical Richard Hawkins fashion, his videos “Blood Everywhere” feature unclad male celebrities (Timothée Chalamet and Bill Skarsgård) slowly starting to rot, eyes blackening and blood gushing. Chalamet undergoes a literal “twink death,” while skipping over the actual aging process, immortalized forever in youth. These haunted characters turn into doppelgängers of their former selves. This is mirrored by footage from the film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Chalamet and Skarsgård are in some regard already doppelgängers—Chalamet replicas appear at an unstoppable rate through look-alike contests, while Skarsgård and his siblings are nepo babies (a form of doppelgängerdom).

Despite a pastiche of uncanny signifiers creating a B-movie campy thrill, the true unease of these videos lies in their form rather than content. Much like a fancam, these videos feel deeply of the gay scopophilic celebrity worship internet. The videos are vertical, probably due to their production on an iPhone or iPad, and thus read as familiar, casual. Hawkins avoids the groan factor of AI. At its best, AI is a poetic collage medium creating the undead.