Extra in the Flashlight: Jesse "The Body" Heiman

What do you see when you look at this still from Spider Man?

To you is this a poster of Kirsten Dunst? Or is it on your wall because of the figure behind her: Jesse Heiman?
Your next question should be....which background figure is Jesse Heiman? Will the real Jesse Heiman step forward?
The truth is extras never step forward. Like soldiers dying in the battlefield, they only fade away into the backdrop.If film is indeed a battleground (as Sam Fuller immortally proclaimed when he himself played an extra in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou) then the extra serves in the infantry of the image field, and every film retains the tombs of countless unknown extras.

Jesse Heiman looks a tiny bit like Jonah Hill:

It's hard to say what separates these two actors other than the gaping abyss of celebrity. In addition to identical initials, they clearly share a similar body type. Yet their faces seem at different stages of differentiation: Heiman's is, as it were, still downloading, looking somewhat blockier, pixellated, compared to his more celebrated counterpart. Having never been invited to stand apart from the crowd or smile at the camera, Heiman's features have not been chiselled by the spotlight and retain a generic and indistinct quality, laying claim only to an idiosyncratic blot of color on each cheek.

Some adoring fan of Jesse Heiman has compiled his greatest "work" in both television and film:

This brief film gives us a sense, no doubt, of how Mr. Heiman's parents watch his movies. The order of shots is completely indifferent to content, plot, and drama and radically decenters our attention. Notice, for example, how even the corpse in one of the clips is given more focus (a staggered zoom) than Heiman.

This "video c.v." of Mr. Heiman's work is itself a study in the peculiar way in which we speak of and designate extras. What is the funny white circle that helps us identify the Heiman? How is this different from the spotlight of celebrity? In some measure it seems closer to a digital flashlight directed rudely at the extra's face, marking him the way police might specially shade someone of interest but otherwise overlooked in a surveillance video. Yet the wholly unexpected and supernatural quality of this white light also gives Mr. Heiman a strange and temporary aura, one that extends no further than the width of his shoulders. In fact, this method of singling out Mr. Heiman echoes the halo by which medieval and early Renaissance painting distinguishes Christ from the crowds through which he frequently moved, as in this painting by El Duccio depicting the kiss of Judas:

The halo effect is no different in the video of Heiman. Both he and Jesus have been called forth by the voice and the light. Or, perhaps, kissed by the Judas of celebrity.