When the erstwhile reality TV star Spencer Pratt reposted a video on X recently, it went viral so quickly that it seemed few people stopped to really ask themselves what, exactly, they were looking at. Jeb Bush called it “maybe the best political ad of the year.” The former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz called it “basically a maximalist expression of what a political ad can do.”
It’s understandable that they thought it was a campaign ad. Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican, is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and the video echoed the themes of his dark-horse campaign: Los Angeles has gone to seed thanks to its inept and venal leadership, and he’s the man to fix it. But by any normal definition, it wasn’t an ad at all. It was something altogether stranger: an A.I.-generated fan video by a Los Angeles-based filmmaker named Charlie Curran, whose other recent works include a video of the pope dancing to the drill rapper Chief Keef and one of the Rizzler flying a sortie over Iran.
The video Pratt posted depicted Los Angeles as Batman’s Gotham. Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent mayor and one of Pratt’s opponents in the upcoming nonpartisan primary, is the villainous Joker. As things unfold, a man who looks a lot like Joe Rogan, if Joe Rogan dressed like Commissioner Gordon, fires up a searchlight that hits the overcast sky with an insignia that reads “SP.” At this signal, Pratt dons black armor, cape and gloves — a lot like Batman’s — and descends to rescue a postapocalyptic Los Angeles from its Democratic captors.
To make such a video in the past would have required actors who look like the politicians in question, sets, soundstages, costumes, Joe Rogan, extras, makeup artists, cameras and people to operate them, permits, writers, editors, security and, you would have to imagine, permission to use the intellectual property in question. This would have cost a bunch of money, which would also mean creating a political action committee and issuing all related disclaimers about who made this video and why. But now there’s generative A.I. — and, for better or worse, people can sort of do whatever they want.
Batman offers some obviously flattering comparison points for Pratt — who, in positioning himself as a populist candidate, has tapped into his fellow Angelenos’ rage at the handling of homeless encampments and the 2025 wildfires. Bruce Wayne is, famously, a wealthy and traumatized guy who (like Pratt) lives on the outskirts of the city. In the Christopher Nolan films, Wayne Manor is canonically in “the Palisades,” a suburban enclave inside city limits — not dissimilar to Pacific Palisades, where Pratt grew up and where he lived with his wife and children until his house burned down last year. This wound is a cornerstone of Pratt’s campaign. He believes that Bass, and a sclerotic city government, completely mishandled the response to the fire — before, during and after.
Nolan’s Batman movies aren’t terribly subtle about their themes, but even so, the “Prattman” video scrambles the films’ ideas in a way that’s revealing of the outsider candidate’s self-image and appeal. Pratt as Batman finds Bass, alongside a cake-eating Gov. Gavin Newsom and a vodka-chugging Kamala Harris, presiding over a kangaroo court where jackbooted Democratic Socialists of America agents bring forth ordinary Angelenos for judgment. This is also recognizably a reference to Batman, specifically “The Dark Knight Rises,” the third and final installment in the Nolan trilogy, in which the villain Bane turns Gotham into a nightmarish people’s republic.
In that movie, the meaning of the kangaroo court is entirely reversed from what’s shown in Curran’s video: It is the rabble and criminals who have taken control of Gotham, and they are dispensing retributive justice to the elite that used to rule over them. It is a Reign of Terror brought on by a popular revolt — and perhaps a warning against the cheap thrills of populism.
Pratt’s campaign has also focused on urban disorder, primarily homelessness and drug use. This is where the Batman comparison becomes truly uncomfortable, because Bruce Wayne occasionally flies into town and brutalizes the criminal underclass. And the Nolan trilogy strains to demonstrate that it is uneasy with this, portraying it as the behavior of a damaged man. A product of the “global war on terrorism” years, the films engage openly with the question of the trade-offs between order and chaos. Here, Bruce Wayne has more in common with Travis Bickle than Clark Kent, and the moral ambiguity of his vigilantism is explored at great (and sometimes excruciating) length in the movies. Pratt, instead, is an unreconstructed hero in the A.I. version. He liberates the city as a bouncy Calvin Harris track plays. The message, if there is one, is that fixing all the problems in Los Angeles wouldn’t be terribly complicated.
The fear with so-called deep fakes was that they could be used to make it seem as if a public figure had done something unsavory that they had not: a romantic tryst, a racist remark, the sort of scandal that might — in another era — end a career. What we didn’t expect was the dumber future that seems to have arrived: Now anyone can produce slick fan fiction about public figures, paper over reality with pop culture ephemera and convince themselves and others that they’ve arrived at some hidden truth.
And yet the paradox of generative A.I. is that because these models have been fed practically the entire corpus of human culture — a remarkable feat — they are doomed to tell us what we already know. Or perhaps we’re doomed to use them to tell us only what we want to hear. This quality is what makes it an ideal handmaiden to populist politics, which draws great power from the confidence of outsiders — candidates’ and voters’ alike. They already know that everyone in City Hall or Congress or the White House or at the newspaper or in Hollywood or academia is full of it. Corrupt. Phony. Probably lying right now. Probably laughing at you. Check out this video. They’re doing it right now.
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