Marx and The Final Cut

For this week I watched The Final Cut. I had never seen this movie before, but the story’s premise rally drew me in. It seems to take place in either the present or the near future. In the movie parents can purchase a Zoe implant for their child, which develops with their brain and stores all visual memories. These memories are storied on a hard drive, and after death they are used by cutters to craft a rememory. Rememories serve as a sort of literal memorial to the deceased. The footage of their life is cut down from years to create a short film immortalizing the deceased’s most formative and poignant memories.

I thought our reading from Marx’s Alienated Labor was most relevant to the themes of this film. In the reading from Marx, he argues that in a political economy (meaning the kind of society that forms the basis of our system and that of the movie) “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity” (XXII). In The Final Cut the very lives of those possessing a Zoe implant have become a sort of commodity. After death, so once the individual can no longer make use of his memories or trove of personal experience, these memories are rehashed for the consumption of those he left behind. These private experiences are put on display for public viewing. The rememories are catered to the desires of friends and family the dead have left behind.  That the rememories are put on for the benefit of those surviving and not actually for the memory of the dead is almost literally clear in viewing the rememories. Because all the footage is from a first-person perspective, the stars of each rememory are those that surround them. Even within one’s own rememory they appear only as a sort of voyeur because they are never pictured. The thoughts, emotions, and importance the Zoe user had attached to their memories was never apparent. And as the truth of the central character, Alan’s inner turmoil is revealed, the true memories rarely correspond perfectly to factual experience. So the memories of the Zoe are memories without meaning.

In the film the Zoe is incredibly popular. It is mentioned that one in every twenty people has a Zoe implant and their popularity continues to increase. In this world memory is a commodity and every experience, no matter how trivial, is bound to be on record. In this sense, The Final Cut expresses our current cultural dilemma between our growing ability and desire to record our experience and a growing paranoia that in light of technology, genuine experience is fading. Marx articulates this idea in economic terms: “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects” (XXII). Those with Zoe implants quite literally put their life into their final product, which is their life’s footage. The more focus there is put on the importance of recording experience, the less each individual remembers for themself and less they experience for themself. Thus, the Zoe will lead of to what Marx would consider ultimate servitude: “…the worker becomes a servant of his object…The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.” (XXIII). In a way, Alan, at least before the revelation of his own Zoe, is a literal example of this living for others that Marx sees as the only possible product of this kind of culture. Alan is a cutter, and his life is his work. But his work is the lives of others. He has spent his adult life troweling through the experience of others. There is no room in this life for his own experience.

The Zoe’s success rides on the human desire to live on through our actions in the memory of others. The Zoe spokesperson even spells it out for us in explaining the benefits of the product: “What does that mean? Immoratlity.” He lingers on the word immortality, playing on our natural desire to dodge death’s oblivion, our fear that we lived and died for nothing. Oddly, but fittingly, Alan, who spent his life cutting, dies for the cause that will end the intellectual dark age of Zoe’s wake, and as Fletcher flips through the footage of Alan’s life and the movie fades out he says, “Your life will mean something I promise.” These closing words promise a future of genuine experience and genuine remembrance.