A fleet of Marilyn Monroe impersonators descended upon London this week, their platinum waves and crimson smiles a ghostly echo of the star who would have turned 100. But beyond the pageantry, a quieter revolution is unfolding within the British Film Institute’s vaults, where lost prints of Monroe’s early work have been meticulously restored using machine learning algorithms. The restored films, including a previously unseen screen test for a 1952 comedy, will be screened before King Charles III at a private Buckingham Palace reception next month.
This is not merely nostalgia. The BFI’s collaboration with DeepMind represents a tectonic shift in how we preserve cultural memory. Traditional photochemical restoration is labour-intensive and often destructive. But by training neural networks on thousands of frames of degraded nitrate film, the team has taught an AI to ‘imagine’ missing frames, reconstructing lost details with startling fidelity. The algorithm, optimised for the emulsion’s unique grain structure, can even separate overlapping soundtracks: think of it as digital panacea for the 20th century’s most fragile medium.
Yet the ethical dimension is thorny. Should we use AI to resurrect the dead, even if it is only their celluloid ghosts? Monroe’s estate has granted permission, but the precedent feels unnerving. One can imagine a future where every deceased celebrity is digitally reanimated for commercial gain, their faces and voices synthesised without consent. The BFI insists the project is purely archival, but the line between preservation and exploitation is dangerously thin.
For the lookalikes themselves, the centenary is a celebration of Monroe’s enduring iconography. “She represents freedom, sexuality, vulnerability,” says one contender, adjusting her white dress. “But we must remember the person behind the image.” Indeed, Monroe’s life was a cautionary tale of stardom’s cruelty: her image consumed by a hungry public while her humanity eroded. In the age of deepfakes and parasocial relationships, her story feels more relevant than ever.
The royal reception promises to be a surreal collision of past and future. As the King views the restored footage on a state-of-the-art OLED screen, he will witness a Monroe more real than she ever was in life: every pore perfect, every whisper clear. But will this digital resurrection honour her legacy or commodify it further? The answer lies in how we choose to remember, not just what we restore.
