Imagine that you've died and your family wants to celebrate you; remember you; honor you. To do this, they provide your entire life—as recorded by an implant in your brain—to someone who will create a feature-length film of life through your eyes. Your family will get to see and hear what you did at family vacations, the sweet memory-building moments of you and a close sibling, mundane moments that were previously forgotten, and the highlights of your life.
At first this sounds incredible, but enticing, to think that your life, and specifically your perspective could be preserved. The memories most valuable to you are captured. Sure all of the bad things you did or the questionable actions you took would also be recorded, but they've already got a code of ethics in place, plus the social pressure of portraying you in a good light, just like any other funeral service.
Why not let your legacy remain intact from your very own point of view?
That's the kind of technology available in the world that Robin Williams's character, Alan Hakman, inhabits in the 2004 film, The Final Cut. Hakman is a "Cutter" which means he is in charge of taking a person's entire life-footage and producing a film for Rememory services (a funeral-style service in which loved ones gather at a private theater to watch the production).
Hakman uses a computer system called "The Guillotine," complete with the software and custom integrated desk to do the job. With custom keyboard and wheel input devices specially designed for rapid editing, he can make a story out of a lifetime of footage.
It's only when we see him start a new project for a deceased shady lawyer that we can glimpse AI. When Hakman inserts the lawyer's memory chip into the Guillotine, the computer begins to whir, sorting through 500,000+ hours of life and calling out types of memories: Childhood. Sleep. Eating. Awkward Phase.
They don't mention artificial intelligence at all in the film—they reference the "program" of the Guillotine once, but a classic program would never be able to process and categorize video and audio like they show, and certainly not at the speed that it happens. I think in a way, that makes a powerful statement about this world's AI use: it's a background element. It's very much in line with AI in the real world before LLMs and Generative AI, i.e. an obscure set of tools for only specific fields of expertise.
However, we still see a lot of the concerns that we have today, stemming from invasive technology: privacy, corporate cover-ups, the uncanny. We even see some "religious" themes throughout the story. Most important, this AI-powered story asks us questions that remove technology from the conversation.
Symmetry
There is a tension between symmetry and asymmetry in this film, whether in dialogue, character actions, or composition of the shots. Alan Hakman states it himself. He put together a short "story" where you see an old man brushing his teeth and looking at himself in a mirror. After a few seconds, the video cuts to the same man years before, so that you watch him get younger and younger incrementally, his face changing from man to boy.
Wow. What about all the bits in between?
Delilah (someone Alan is dating) responds after watching the short video.
It's a miniature—concise, symmetrical. That's the way the world looks to me, the way I see it,
he explains.
You can see symmetry follow Hakman in his process at work. He and his Guillotine desk have a montage of power-poses with symmetrical background elements. It feels ominous and powerful—in fact, it reminds me a lot of Christian art history, with the gridded floor bleeding off the edge of the screen as if it could continue on as your own floor. Alan appears three times in this one shot (two mirrors on either side showing his back and Hakman himself in the middle), almost as if he's able to view past, present, and future.
The three monitors of the desk act like a triptych, another art history callback. The three screens are able to display multiple scenes as Hakman creates the narrative of the story he's telling. Effectively, these symbols are lending omniscient, god-like power to Hakman as he allows the AI to sort out a half-million hours of footage.
Then asymmetry starts to get introduced as Alan takes a seat and starts to deep-dive into the life of the lawyer, Mr. Bannister. These shots still feel powerful to me, but adding a solemn benevolence to Hakman, as though he were carefully considering the man's life.
Ultimately, I think Hakman is portrayed as a Christ-figure, and his relationship with sin gets even more apparent. First of all, we know from the very beginning of the movie that Alan has a very traumatic and dark memory from childhood. His parents took him to an unfamiliar town for the day and Alan ends up meeting another boy his age. They run around and end up in an abandoned building where an accident occurs and Alan sees his new friend fall several stories to his death—at least, that's what he assumes.
One memory. One single incident has made me who I am.
Later while working on this lawyer's life, Alan notices a man who seems to fit the description of the boy he saw fall. An unexpected resurrection, if you will, that simultaneously helps Alan find redemptive peace as he discovers that his friend did not actually die that day in the abandoned building.
The Sin-Eater
Hakman is confronted by an ex-Cutter, Fletcher, who has now turned to protesting and opposing the technology that makes the implant and Cutting possible.
Tell me something. Why is your name the first on the list for cuttIng scumbags and lowlifes?
Fletcher asks scathingly.
Because I forgive people long before they could be punished for their sins.
Hakman replies.
He then continues to explain how he really sees his role: as a sin-eater.
Do you know what a sin eater is? It's part of an ancient tradition. When someone would die, they would call for a sin eater. Sin eaters were social outcasts, marginals. They would lay out the body, put bread and salt on the chest, coins upon the eyes. The sin eater would eat the bread and the salt, take the coins as payment. By doing this the eater absorbed the sins of the deceased, cleansing their soul and allowing them safe passage into the afterlife. That was their job.
Fueled by the tragedy that Hakman had experienced, it seems like he considers this job of Cutting to be a way to redeem others—perhaps hoping he could be redeemed of his own dark memory for taking on the burden of knowing these darkest secrets that he inevitably uncovers and cutting away the bad parts, the sinful parts.
But there's also the important critique here. Yes, we're supposed to feel sorry for Hakman, for his burdens and trauma, but what about the victims? What about justice? What about the truth?
Fletcher makes this clear: Alan, you take murderers and make them saints.
In the case of the deceased lawyer, Mr. Bannister, we know of at least one direct victim: his own daughter whom he molested. Alan cuts those pieces away, turning Bannister's words like, You know daddy loves you so much,
into false proclamations of love, rather than the manipulative directives they really are.
Is redemption really about erasing? Or is deletion further harm? Does technology become a lever we can use to more easily escape reality, cover up truth, or make that which is evil seem good? Fletcher is convinced of his answer:
These implants distort personal history and therefore all history, and I will not stand by while the past is rewritten for the sake of pleasant memories.
Commodification of Human Experience
It is a good exercise to expand the landscape when trying to understand the impact of certain technologies. Focusing too directly on the tech itself can distort its scope of influence, and that's what I think this movie offers us: a look at the incentives and the other systems that also usually blend in with the background.
EYE Tech is the company that built this entire economic ecosystem: implants, the Guillotine, and even the cultural practice of Rememories. In one scene, Alan is hurrying past a wall of EYE Tech posters, which reveal that "EYE" is actually an acronym for "Everything You Experience." This sums up what the company is all about: commodifying and monetizing everything you experience.
When confronted with the problematic motives and the argument of privacy and rights violations, Alan deflects, saying, I didn't invent the technology. If people didn't want it, they wouldn't buy it...It fulfills a human need.
It reminds me of the marketing we're already seeing in the real world for AI-powered products to solve human problems like loneliness and validation. These hollow promises are nothing more than a deeply concerning grift to profit off of what are likely invented problems (e.g. technology creates isolation, so is the solution really going to be more tech?) or to monetize real pain without offering lasting balm.
AI might not have direct access to the people in The Final Cut, but its ecosystem does. Toward the end of the movie, we see a masoleum with a TV screen mounted on its wall, playing one of the implant videos. It almost seems like the Rememory service and its feature-film, are all competing with funeral services themselves. A corporate-sponsored cultural ritual slowly edging out the previous rituals, like a parasite presenting as the same creature, while actually infiltrating and destroying what was once there.
CYBORG
You can't have a discussion about AI too long before you run into the "uncanny." Like creepy dolls or ventriloquist puppets, manikins, and humanoid faces on robots, we can often detect when something is trying really hard to imitate humanity, but is still a little off. Delilah makes an important observation when asked about the only Rememory service she ever experienced:
I couldn't take it. I didn't stay....It wasn't him. And I wanted to remember him my way.
Similar to a previous newsletter, the right to be forgotten, where we examined a real-life use of AI to allow a deceased victim to deliver "his own" impact statement, the entire premise of Cutting a person's life into a story taps into the uncanny, as well as causing concerns about truth and manipulation. Sure, a professional story-teller might be able to create a beautiful piece from your brain's memories, but if the story is constructed by others without your input, is it really your story?
A funeral service almost always paints people in the best light—that's the expectation. Given that standard, however, does having an uninvolved, unrelated third party construct that white-washed story make it seem like all of the wrongs that are cut out really are redeemable? It's almost like social proof if the movie at the end shows an abuser as a perfect, sweet, gentle person, because another person has seen the horrifying moments and still chose to strip them away. Eating the sin, indeed.
Stories can be dangerous—they've always had the kind of power to redeem, condemn, justify, or destroy. Stories made possible at scale via AI and other technologies increase the risks. Technically, Alan Hakman loses his life because of the story he uncovers from Mr. Bannister's footage. His life was sacrificed (a decision he did not participate in) for "the greater good," so that Fletcher could get his hands on the evidence he needed to convict Mr. Bannister for his pedophilia and attack the company behind the brain implants.
"So you want to destroy EYE Tech with a scandal?" Alan asks Fletcher.
"Absolutely."