Double Take

If there is one thing with which I am familiar, it is the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards performance of “Like a Virgin” and “Hollywood.”

I was at a random bar with a group of friends to watch the show live. Rings of excitement pulsed through my body when Britney Spears appeared atop a white staircase, her face hidden behind a veil. She sang the first few notes of “Like a Virgin” with her unmistakable style and the crowd erupted in ecstatic recognition. I recall the way my brain short-circuited when Christina Aguilera emerged from the side of the stage and joined in on the next verse with her high-powered vocals. Then Madonna herself emerged and sang her song, “Hollywood.” Then the kiss: Britney leaned toward Madonna, who caressed Britney’s chin and brought their lips together, followed by a lingering cut to a dumbfounded Justin Timberlake—his eyebrow raised in skepticism. 

The Britney and Madonna kiss became legend. In the 20+ years since that night, the smooch seen round the world has been shared across media channels, posted to thousands of internet sites and memed millions of times. It is a pop-culture touchstone of the early aughts. Which is why I was so unsettled when I came across what I thought was a digital alteration of that event. It actually made my stomach do a somersault.

I was scrolling Instagram and paused the moment on my screen, “wait a second. Huh?” I did a double take. Something was off. The music was the same, the sequence correct, but in this edit Britney was wearing a red jersey and Christina a pink T-shirt. I checked the image and the caption to make sure this was the right event. It was exactly how I remembered but eerily off. 

I rewatched the Instagram video. I did a Google search and found evidence that my recollection of that event was indeed correct. Britney and Christina were wearing white for the big show. I watched the clip again. 

“Why would someone do that?”

I spiraled. I brought it up at a dinner party and it was a hot topic for me for a few days. It seemed to point to something much larger happening in society. I was so ready to believe the nefarious that it wasn’t until days later, while writing this essay, I discovered the footage was real. It just happened to be from the dress rehearsal and not a digital ruse designed to destabilize me. I was embarrassed and almost more uneasy. Why had that line of thinking come so forcefully to the forefront? Why did the thought of that memory being altered shock my core?

I’ve encountered a number of moments recently that have quietly unsettled me. A face a little too smooth. A voice not quite attached to a body. A video of something that happened, but maybe not exactly like that. My feeds have become so overrun with AI-generated everything that my internet time is increasingly consumed by double takes and Google searches. Add to that a decade of warnings about political disinformation—images manipulated, clips stripped of context, a deepfake lurking around every corner—and apparently I now approach a Britney Spears video like the Zapruder film, evidence of a larger conspiracy. Is this person real? Did this actually happen? Is that how I remember it? It feels like the internet is orchestrating a subtle gaslighting campaign targeted directly at me. But that’s crazy, right? A little more paranoid than I’d like to consider. 

No one had changed Britney’s top. There was no nefarious plot to tamper with my formative pop-cultural memories. Still, I had become so accustomed to artifice, to things being changed for “funsies,” to get around copyright, to generate your run-of-the-mill clickbait, that real footage seemed less trustworthy than my own recollection. The video hadn’t been altered. But my ability to look at it without immediately suspecting the worst apparently had.

My paranoia didn’t materialize from nowhere. For years, I’d watched as digital surfaces drifted away from the people behind them. A chasm between human subject and avatar. Tools like Photoshop have warped the body image of generations. Video filters made it easy to smooth out our appearances or present as something else altogether. I have employed a puppy dog filter with gusto. Harmless. Fun, even. Face filters did not lead in a straight line to people generated entirely by AI, but they did help make the growing distance between a face and the person behind it feel normal. We conditioned ourselves to artifice. A little smoothing here, a pair of puppy ears there.

Now it is easy to scroll past a face and not immediately recognize that it isn’t a filter placed over a real human, but a 100% digitally generated being. Their speech, their faces, their insane abs—designed, targeted, and delivered just for me (and the millions of profiles the algorithm says look just like me). Yesterday, I found myself trying to determine whether someone I was watching was an actual person, the mimicry so impeccable. Were they on LinkedIn? How old was their profile? Did we have friends in common? These are epic exercises in catfishing, but instead of hiding behind a little text and a stolen profile picture, these folks move around our screens giving us workout advice or making us lust after exotic vacations. They promise to be our perfect significant other. At some point, I stopped asking whether the person on my screen was being authentic and started asking whether there was a person there at all.

At a quick glance, and maybe even with sustained viewing, these digital people pass as human. But look at them long enough and the artificiality begins to show. Human faces have a unique way of responding in the moment. Our eyes dilate. Our mouths quiver. Tears well up spontaneously. Our bodies betray what’s underneath; our smiles conceal and contradict extreme tension. We avert our glances to buy time in difficult conversations. AI can mimic those responses: a quiver, a tear, an averted glance, but the response isn’t tethered to anything. No surprise produced it. No difficult conversation made it look away. It can reproduce the evidence of a response without actually responding. There is no real listening.

When actors talk about a good scene partner, it almost always boils down to listening and responding. A generous actor remains open, in the moment, responding not just to the rehearsed lines but to the physical delivery of them. A pause held a little too long. A slight tremor in the voice. The unexpected thing the other person does. That back and forth between two people can read from the stage of a Broadway theater, on film, or on television because the connection between them is palpable. One person has been changed, however slightly, by the presence of another.

I think back to a course I took in college, Theater of Communion. How humanity has gathered to share stories for thousands of years. We are a social species and need that community. We build our cultural identities around shared stories, but also around the fact of having witnessed them together. There is something about the corroboration of a shared moment. Not that everyone remembers every detail in exactly the same way. Clearly. But someone else was there. Someone else saw it, felt it, responded to it.

Live theater is remarkable that way. Sitting in an audience with other people, watching the highs and lows of human emotion onstage while also sharing them with others in the crowd. A laugh moves through the room. The silence shifts. Concerts, sporting events, even a day at the movies—they all allow us to participate in a shared reality. Watching a ballgame at a sports bar with a hundred other fans can create something meaningful. Alone, my screen may deliver some of the same content, but not necessarily the same version or at the same time. No one is responding alongside me. What makes the moment feel real is not only what I see. It is the presence of other people seeing it with me. A knowing look, a nod, an eruption of excitement.

Shared moments are not perfect records. Details drift. Sometimes we get the shirt wrong. Sometimes the shirt was right and we get everything around it wrong. But a shared experience does not live in one person alone. Our recollections can be compared, challenged, corrected. Handed back to us by someone else who was there.

I once performed in a comedy show. I wore black leather pants and a red-and-black bowling shirt. A white tank top underneath. At least, that’s how I remember it. I’d written a bit about where four people were when Britney gave her “Oops!… I Did It Again” VMA performance. It culminated in my doing a partial recreation of the iconic choreography. The sketch was well received, and afterward people regaled me with their own recollections of that performance. Their memories weren’t identical to mine, and I can’t say whether any of us had every detail right. But each memory met mine somewhere, and for a few minutes the performance existed again between us. Perfectly reconstructed. Absolutely not. But joyous. 100%.

I keep circling back to what is shared and how much I need those mutual recollections. The screen itself is not the problem. I watched the 2003 VMAs on a television in a random bar with a group of friends. The performance reached us through a screen, but the room made it an event. Other people were there, responding alongside me. Their presence became part of what I remember.

The feed is something else. It removes a thing from its time, its source, the people around it, then drops it into an endless procession of other things. A performance. A rehearsal. An edit. A person who may not be a person at all. I am left to sort it out alone, armed with Google and a memory I now know better than to treat as infallible.

I was right about what Britney wore during the broadcast. I was wrong about what the jersey meant. The footage needed context. My memory, apparently, needed company. I had wanted the feeling in my body to be proof—some master recording no one else could alter. It isn’t proof. Not exactly. It cannot tell me what happened at the dress rehearsal. But it can return me to that random bar, the people beside me, the thrill that moved through my body when Britney appeared at the top of the staircase. That’s the footage I want to remember.