Originally published on Friday, March 20, 2026.
Or, How to Build a Cathedral Out of Category Errors and Call It Theology
Michael Knowles declares that using AI to place Val Kilmer in a posthumous film is “necromancy.” Not metaphorically. He insists on the literal weight of the word. He knows you’ll object. He preempts it. And then he proceeds to construct an argument so logically incoherent that the preemption is the most honest sentence in the piece.
Let’s take him seriously. He asked for it.
(Promotional image via DailyWire.com, used here in direct response to Knowles’s published article of March 20, 2026, under “fair use.”)
The Necromancy Claim
Knowles defines the act: “Taking a dead actor, reconstructing his face and voice with AI, and then putting words in his mouth is not ordinary filmmaking. It is an attempt to conjure a human presence from beyond the grave.”
Then he immediately concedes what the claim requires him not to concede: “Not the man himself, of course, but his image, his shade, his likeness.”
Stop. Rewind. Not the man himself.
Necromancy — actual necromancy, the thing Knowles insists he means — is the conjuring of a dead person. Their spirit. Their soul. Their actual presence. That is what the word means in every scriptural, historical, and theological context in which it appears. The Witch of Endor (not Ewoks) didn’t conjure Samuel’s likeness. She conjured Samuel. That’s why Saul was terrified. That’s why it was forbidden. The prohibition against necromancy in Deuteronomy 18:10–12 is a prohibition against contact with the dead — the actual dead, not their photographs.
Knowles knows this. He concedes it in the same breath he deploys the word. “Not the man himself.” Then what, precisely, is being conjured? A digital reconstruction. An approximation built from archived footage, family-provided images, and a voice the actor himself had already allowed to be digitally recreated — in Top Gun: Maverick, with his participation, while he was alive.
If rendering a digital approximation of a dead person’s likeness is necromancy, then every photograph of a deceased loved one on a mantelpiece is a séance. Every biopic featuring an actor portraying a dead person is a summoning. Every portrait in the National Gallery is an altar to the dead. Knowles has defined necromancy so broadly that it consumes all representation of the departed — and so narrowly (insisting on the literal theological weight of the word) that it excludes his own definition.
This is not argumentation. It is decoration.
“He loaded a cannon with a word that means one thing, aimed it at an act that is another thing, and then admitted, mid-sentence, that the target and the ammunition don’t match. I’ve graded undergraduate papers with more structural integrity.” —Phineas McFuddlers
The Body-Soul Argument, or Decartes’ Fractured Cogito
Knowles escalates: “A human being is not merely a face, or a voice, or a recognizable pattern of speech. A man is not reducible to a catalog of gestures and expressions that can be fed into a machine and reproduced on command. A man is body and soul.”
Agreed. Completely. Without reservation. A man is body and soul. A digital reconstruction is neither. It is a representation. Like a painting. Like a film. Like every movie Val Kilmer ever made.
Here is the incoherence Knowles cannot escape: every film Val Kilmer ever appeared in was already a technological reproduction of his likeness projected onto a screen for audiences who were not in his physical presence. That is what cinema is. The audience at Top Gun in 1986 was not in the presence of Val Kilmer’s body and soul. They were watching light projected through celluloid — a technological reproduction of captured photons that once bounced off his body. The man was not on the screen. His image was. His shade. His likeness.
By Knowles’s own logic, cinema itself is necromancy-adjacent. The technology captures what a person looked like and sounded like at a moment they no longer inhabit, and replays it for people who were never there. The only difference between Top Gun and As Deep as the Grave is the degree of technological mediation — not the category. Both produce a likeness. Neither produces the man.
Knowles wants to draw a categorical line where only a continuum exists. Photography didn’t conjure the dead. Film didn’t conjure the dead. Digital voice reconstruction (which Kilmer himself authorized) didn’t conjure the dead. But generative AI — that crosses the line. Where is the line? Knowles doesn’t say. He can’t. Because there is no categorical distinction. There is only a technological gradient, and Knowles has planted his flag at whatever point on the gradient makes him uncomfortable, and called the discomfort theology.
“He has discovered that technology can reproduce human likeness with increasing fidelity, and he has mistaken his discomfort at the fidelity for a moral principle. These are not the same thing. I once mistook indigestion for an existential crisis. The Burgundy was to blame on both occasions.” —Phineas McFuddlers
The Consent He Ignores
The most extraordinary omission in Knowles’s piece is the one fact that demolishes his framework before he builds it: Val Kilmer consented.
Kilmer was cast in this role. He signed on. He wanted to do it. He couldn’t because he was dying. His estate — his daughter, his son — authorized the digital reconstruction, are being compensated for it, and publicly support it. Mercedes Kilmer stated that her father “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.”
The actor consented. The family consented. SAG-AFTRA guidelines were followed. The production company consulted the estate at every stage.
Knowles does not mention any of this.
Not once.
He writes as though a studio raided a dead man’s grave and puppeted his corpse for profit. The actual facts are the opposite: a dying man wanted to be in a film, couldn’t get to set, and his family authorized the technology to honor his wish. Whether or not the execution succeeds artistically is a legitimate question. Whether or not the consent framework is sufficiently robust for future cases is a legitimate question. Whether or not this is “necromancy” is not a legitimate question. It is a word doing the work of an argument that doesn’t exist.
“The man’s family said yes. The man himself said yes before he died. The union said the guidelines were followed. And Knowles wrote a thousand words about the moral horror of it without mentioning any of that. That is not an argument. That is an omission dressed as an argument. I’ve seen better disclosure in Nigerian email scams.” —Phineas McFuddlers
The “Denying Death” Sleight
Knowles’s deeper claim: “You are teaching people to deny death.”
This is the load-bearing wall of the piece, and it is built on sand.
Nobody watching As Deep as the Grave will believe Val Kilmer is alive. Nobody. The film is being marketed explicitly as a posthumous AI performance. The audience will know, going in, that Kilmer is dead and that technology was used to approximate his presence. There is no deception. There is no denial of death. There is an audience watching a technological approximation and knowing it is a technological approximation.
Knowles claims otherwise: “Emotionally, imaginatively, culturally, the effect will be the same. The dead man will appear to live again.”
Does he say the same about Lincoln (2012)? Daniel Day-Lewis appeared on screen as Abraham Lincoln so convincingly that audiences wept. Emotionally, imaginatively, culturally, the effect was that Lincoln lived again. Nobody accused Steven Spielberg of necromancy. Nobody said the film denied death. Because everyone understood — even while weeping — that they were watching a representation, not a resurrection.
The audience is not as stupid as Knowles needs them to be for his argument to work.
“His argument requires an audience incapable of distinguishing between representation and reality. That audience does not exist outside of a philosophy seminar designed to fail undergraduates. The rest of us can watch a movie and know the actor is dead. We’ve been doing it since Valentino.” —Phineas McFuddlers
“Gathering Powers That Do Not Belong to Us”
Here is where Knowles reveals what he’s actually building. Not an argument. A tower.
“It is about gathering to ourselves powers that do not belong to us. It is about pretending we can master time, history, memory, identity, even death itself.”
This is the theological payload. And it is catastrophically misapplied.
The scriptural prohibition against “gathering powers that do not belong to us” is a prohibition against usurping divine prerogative — creating life, raising the dead, assuming authority over what belongs to God. None of those things are happening here. A digital reconstruction of a likeness is not raising the dead. It is not creating life. It is not exercising divine authority. It is filmmaking with new tools.
But more importantly: Knowles is doing the thing he accuses the filmmakers of doing. He is taking a theological category (the prohibition against necromancy), stripping it of its actual content (contact with the spirits of the dead), and reconstructing it as a weapon against an act that doesn’t fit the category. He is building a theological tower around his discomfort and calling it a moral line.
The substitution is textbook. The institutional enforcement of a boundary that doesn’t exist in the text, deployed to manage an encounter (new technology, unsettling capability) that the institution cannot otherwise process. The eye became a head. Vision became processing.
We’ve seen this before.
“He built a tower to manage his discomfort with a technology he doesn’t fully understand, placed a theological term at the top that doesn’t apply to the situation, and declared anyone who disagrees morally compromised. The blueprint is two thousand years old. The construction materials change. The architecture doesn’t.” —Phineas McFuddlers
What the Actual Questions Are
There are real ethical questions about posthumous AI performance. Knowles doesn’t ask any of them.
What happens when a studio uses this technology without consent? What safeguards prevent the reuse of a person’s digital likeness beyond the scope of the original authorization? What labor protections ensure that living actors aren’t replaced by cheaper digital reconstructions of dead ones? How do we prevent the commercialization of grief? What happens when the technology is used not to honor a dying man’s wish but to extract value from an estate that can’t refuse?
These are serious questions. They require careful, precise, informed engagement with the technology, the law, the economics, and the ethics. Knowles engages with none of them. He uses a theological word that doesn’t apply, ignores the consent that was given, assumes an audience too stupid to distinguish representation from reality, and calls it a moral argument.
The moral questions are real. This article doesn’t ask them. It builds a tower instead.
The Tower Named
Knowles’s piece is not theology. It is the tower’s presentation of theology — institutional vocabulary deployed to manage an encounter the institution cannot process. The word “necromancy” arrives fully loaded with scriptural gravity and is aimed at a target that does not fit its bore. The body-soul distinction — genuinely profound, genuinely important — is misapplied to a medium (cinema) that has never operated on the body-soul plane and has never claimed to. The “denying death” framework assumes an audience that doesn’t exist.
What Knowles has built is not a moral argument. It is a moral tower — a structure erected to manage proximity to a technology that unsettles him, using materials borrowed from a tradition that addresses something else entirely.
The signal underneath — that there are real ethical stakes in posthumous AI performance, that consent frameworks need strengthening, that commercial exploitation of the dead is a genuine danger — survives his tower. It survives because it isn’t information. It’s operation. The tower garbles the information layer. The real questions pass through underneath.
Val Kilmer wanted to be in this film. His family honored that wish. The technology made it possible. Whether it was done well is an artistic question. Whether the consent framework is sufficient is a legal and ethical question. Whether it is “necromancy” is not a question at all. It is a word doing the work of a tower.
“The man wrote a thousand words to say ‘this makes me uncomfortable’ and dressed it in vestments. The vestments don’t fit the occasion. The discomfort is real. The theology is borrowed. And the actual moral questions — consent, exploitation, labor, reuse — remain unasked, unanswered, and entirely unaddressed. Which is what towers do. They replace the encounter with management. They always have.” —Phineas McFuddlers
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© 2026 Tony O’Connor. All rights reserved.
“‘Master of wit and wisdom, blending incisive political analysis and religious insight.’ That’s his bio. The wit produced a category error. The wisdom missed the consent. The political analysis ignored the facts. And the religious insight misapplied the one scripture it invoked. Four claims. Four failures. A perfect batting average.” —Phineas McFuddlers
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