Mickey 17 – A Potentially Very Good Movie, Derailed by Anti-Trump Seethe

Mickey 17 is a movie that started off well but was derailed from being something truly great by its second half. The first half promised a nuanced, complicated interpersonal drama that explored alienated late-capitalist life in a way that was intelligently buried and stylistically hidden, but this was taken over in the second half, resulting in a Trump Derangement Syndrome-inspired allegory for the presidency of said man, ending in a fantasy of good sensible neoliberalism saving the day. Bleh.

The story concerns Mickey Barnes played by Robert Pattinson (in my mind he’s permanently shiny Edward from Twilight despite his graduation to acting in serious movies; sorry man), who gets away from earth by signing onto a colony ship to the ice planet of Niflheim, as him and his hustler friend, Timo (played by Steven Yeun of the Walking Dead), are fleeing from a blood-thirsty debt shark after their dumb gimmick business fails,. Mickey gets a place on ship despite the demand by accepting the most horrific role on it, becoming an expendable. Being an expendable means that Mickey essentially agrees to a contract where when he gets killed he will be cloned and have his memories re-uploaded. In other words, in the race to the bottom Mickey jumps right to the lowest depth to survive.

So the Mickey we’re introduced to at the beginning of the movie is the 17th Mickey, hence the title. As he gives us his backstory it’s shown that Mickey isn’t just dying and being re-cloned because he gets killed doing dangerous jobs, most of his deaths are intentionally done by the small clique of the ship’s scientists. What’s brilliant in this segment is the black comedic contrast between the horrific ways he’s killed and the mundane way the scientists kill him. They speak to him in HR talk while he’s poisoned in a gas chamber, or is roasted to death by space radiation. Despite the facade of professionalism the scientists keep, who all appear together in white uniforms like a Greek tragedy choir, you see them get bored or light up with perverse, morbid curiosity at his pain and death. The workmen who have to dispose of his body are miffed and tired, in one scene they realise Mickey’s still alive but shrug and say “aw fuck it” before throwing him into the furnace anyway.

This well-done but unsurprising. The director Bong Joon Ho, who achieved a breakout for non-Kpop Korean culture onto the global stage with his movie Parasite, is mainly concerned with life under Late Capitalism™.

Now this is a term that’s bandied about a lot, but as far as I see it, it basically means this: that as we run out of opportunities for growth, corporations still looking to make not just profits, but to show that they are growing, are increasingly forced to out-compete each other in finding ways to cut costs by outsourcing those costs into people’s private lives. For example, the Deliveroo driver: the company doesn’t give him the tools he needs for the job besides the food pack and the app, he brings his own car or bike and his own phone, hell he’s not even employed, he’s a “freelancer” so he doesn’t earn a set wage, doesn’t have legal employment protections, has to do his own tax, and his pay is near-totally performance-based.

Late-capitalism also means a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the rich are rich not even because they do something cool such as making giant planes like Hugh Heffner, or going gallavanting off into the desert to find oil like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Nah, they’re extremely rich, richer than either of those guys, because they sit at computers and jam out code like nerds, then they claim the IP rights on some vital piece of code, like a bunch of nerds. Microsoft Office used to come with the computer, then you could buy it but you’d own it for life, now you have to pay a subscription service for it. You gotta shell out your wages to make sure the nerds can keep buying tasteless crap in Dubai. Doesn’t it make your stomach turn that you have to scrape and bow to such nerds? Doesn’t it make you mad that they tell you you have problems because you’re not grind-setting hard enough, unlike them? Doesn’t it make you want to burn shit? It should.

But Joon Ha deserves credit for not totally harping on this one topic. He adds a wealth of personal dimensions and drama to the film which do three things: it adds personal interest, it reinforces his criticism of Late Capitalism by contrasting its clinical-managerial dehumanisation with the warmth of human relations, and it prevents the movie from becoming one-dimensional and preachy.

There’s Mickey’s relationship with Nasha, both of whom are sceptical of the cultish adoration most of the passengers have for the expedition’s leader, a Pseudo-Trump played by Mark Ruffalo. Their relationship is one in defiance of the ship’s sex-ban, done in order to “save calories” (curtailing natural human pleasure and intimacy for austerity purposes, another Late-Capitalism critique). There’s the fact Mickey also has his eye caught by Kai, a kind of bisexual “tough-girl” archetype. Then there’s his one-way “friendship” with Timo, who is continuing his huckstering ways in outer space, dealing drugs as we learn later, and really looks down on Mickey as a useful stooge. The dehumanisation is also contrasted with momentary glances into Mickey’s childhood memories.

All this picks up a notch when Mickey survives an accident, Niflheim’s aliens helping to save him, and finds that he’s already been cloned. The catch being that two simultaneous clones, called “multiples”, are illegal and they both risk being “liquidated” (again, it’s Late Capitalism, so we use genteel passive language for “executed”.) From here the movie dives headfirst into all the personal problems that arise from cloning, while still dealing with the more philosophical ones.

Like Time-Travel, cloning has rules even though it doesn’t exist (yet). There’s the classic identity question, which is “if you died and someone made a perfect clone of you with all your memories, would that clone’s consciousness be you, as in the you that’s inside your head right now looking out of your eyes at this article? Or would it be someone else who just happens to be the exact same as you, and you’d just be dead?”. The film takes a centrist position: if you die and then you’re cloned you’re the same person, but if two clones are made at the same time, you’re different people.

There’s also a Jungian dimension. We learn all the different iterations of Mickey had different personalities. Mickey 18 is aggressive, assertive, and does what he wants, even being willing to kill without qualms. He even speaks in a lower tone (which I assume is Pattinson taking the piss out of his own Batman performance). Mickey 17 is wimpy, he’s such a pushover that he seems mentally slow, and he’s also a moralist. 18 and 17 are each others’ shadows.

A comedy of errors ensues with multiple disastrously overlapping storylines. Kai attempts to seduce Mickey 17, Mickey 18 attempts to kill Timo but 17 saves him while Timo assumes there is still only one Mickey who has gone schizophrenic, Nasha attempts to have a three-way with both 17 and 18, Kai discovers this and threatens to report them.

The zenith of the movie begins with Kai bartering with Nasha for one of Mickeys (she’s lonely because her girlfriend died), while 18 is rushing off in a rage to assassinate Ruffalo’s Pseudo-Trump who is in the middle of hosting a useless, chaotic ceremony, while 17 is trying to stop him. And then it comes to its end when the assassination attempt fails, and both Mickeys are caught.

Here is where the movie begins to go downhill.

The failure of the assassination of the pseudo-Trump, called Marshall in the movie, is a clear metaphor for the failed assassination of the actual Trump in Pennsylvania.

Before this scene, pseudo-Trump feels like a funny addition onto a broader and deeper analysis of our current condition. I thought it was an expression of a broader historical phenomena, that when old systems break down part-cultish, part-grifter leaders emerge leading confused social movements with mixed-up ideas. This is akin to what Marx called “false consciousness” in the case of capitalism’s breakdown, but is something that can seen be the world over throughout human existence, the partying cults when Shogun Japan started coming to an end, the purification movement and warrior-cult revivals of the native americans as they began to lose ground to the Americans, etc.

Instead, it becomes clear that this is a specific metaphor for the Trump administration. You almost feel the failed assassination scene is a cathartic expression of regret by the writers that the actual assassination attempt failed.

From this point, it is no longer a deep artistic exploration of our day and age, it is just a self-congratulatory middle-class neoliberal fable.

Like most middle-class neoliberal portrayals of populism, it’s marked by its absence of a serious analysis of its causes, or any analysis really. Why do the people on the ship so fanatically support the pseudo-Trump ex-congressman? Did he address the concerns of his supporters that had been totally ignored by the powers-that-be (themselves virtually unexplained or unexplored, beyond some momentary portrayals of being a futuristic technocratic elite, who hold meetings in minimalist-futuristic congress halls which aesthetically mirror Villeneuves’ “apple-store-wallpaper” look)?

“Nah, he was just super-charismatic and the masses were dumb,” comes the response, “just like that one-time in Germany when the crazy magic moustache man took over the country by standing up on a podium, waggling his moustache, and hypnotising the dumb, rube masses.”

There are some throwaways which hint at the motivating ideology of the expedition. Pseudo-Trump wishes to create some “pure all-human” planet. There are moments of vague ritualistic-charismatic cultural Christianity. There is Pseudo-Trump’s wife’s obsession with fresh meat, blood, and “sauces”. The details felt specific enough to hint that the authors had a deeper understanding of the modern post-alt-right ideology and could mount a brilliant and brutal lampoon of it, but this was so drowned out by the ham-fisted analogy which followed, that I’m left to guess they must have just managed to pick up a few details and not the underlying currents.

From this point on the movie is one deus ex machina after another. The humans killed one baby alien and captured another, the aliens that saved Mickey 17 earlier. Thousands of these aliens then appear and surround the ship (deus ex machina count: 1). Meanhwhile, our heroes are held hostage by Pseudo-Trump and his cronies, who are stupidly planning to kill the baby alien, and want to pretend that the thousands of aliens outside just aren’t a problem (at this point in the theatre I swear I could hear some midwit nearby in the audience thinking, wow, this is just like how Trump is just pretending that Climate Change™ isn’t an issue but it’s actually going to kill us all, just like the aliens are going to kill everyone on the ship if they don’t change their ways! So deep!) .

In a good ol’ just-in-time, against-the-clock cliffhanger scene, the two Mickeys are sent out to communicate with the aliens using a translator the scientists just threw together (deus ex machina count: 2). It turns out the aliens, who appear to have no technology whatsoever, are actually sentient (deus ex machina count: 3) and better yet, they’re actually quite sensible and magnanimous negotiators (deus ex machina count: 4), who ask only for the return of the hostage of the baby alien, and one human death to replace the baby alien the humans killed.

This latter part is a real libtard mental archetype, the noble savage: “of course, you’d think us humans are the goodies and the aliens are the baddies, BUT AKSHUALLY it’s the aliens, who are the goodies, and let’s take a moment to acknowledge they are the NATIVES of this here planet and live in harmony with their environment. The aliens are AKSHUALLY real mature and sensible and magnanimous, and REALLY it’s us humans who are AKSHUALLY the nasty, disgusting, mean ones. I mean let’s just think about what we did to our planet with all the yucky factories and pollooshin!” Of course, in the real world, the Other is often not so magnanimous, often cares far less about the environment than you do, and in fact they often just want to kill you and take your shit like everyone else.

As Mickey 17 and 18 are working things out with the angry but reasonable aliens, their friends and the baby alien are freed by a group of officers on the ship who were secretely working to overthrow Pseudo-Trump (deus ex machina count: 5). Meanwhile, Pseudo-Trump sallies forth to take out the chief alien, and Mickey 18 sacrifices himself by killing Pseudo-Trump with the bomb that’s been strapped to him (I don’t think I’ll count this last one as a deus ex machina, it cleverly highlights the differences between 17 and 18, and highlights what the goodness is in 18s otherwise violent and aggressive character).

And so the movie finishes with the classic neoliberal happy ending, which is more gratuitous than a happy ending in an open-till-2am Thai massage parlour. With Pseudo-Trump gone everything goes back to the good old Western Middle-Class sensibilities, the colony becomes managed by a nice elected council — genteel technocrats. Mickey 17’s girlfriend, Nasha, is elected and she becomes some kind of stand-in for Kamala or maybe Michelle Obama.

It’s another classic libtard, and specifically neo-libtard trope: “Badman is in charge for no reason at all. We only need a good PLOT where all us good sensible people get together to overthrow him, then we’ll just go back to just the way things were before Badman arrived and no one else matters! The END!” It’s a kind of fairytale view that eerily mimics that of the French aristocrats who fled the Revolution and thought they could just overthrow Robespierre or Napoleon, and everything would just go back to the way it was before.

It’s the same ending as last year’s movie Civil War, or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. It’s a vision where no chaos or no question emerges when you overthrow an authoritarian order. When the Berlin Wall falls there’s only the big grinning faces of Ursula von der Leyen and Angela Merkel for all eternity, and Francis Fukuyama sheds a single of joy. There’s no new authoritarian figures who fill the vacuum, there’s no anarchy, no oligarchs, no warlords; the Libyas and Putins of the world are just aberrations.

The main point of comparison that comes to my mind for Mickey 17 is Joshua Cohen’s book, The Netanyahus. In under 250 pages Cohen brilliantly explores a story which is a novel of ideas (should Jewish people defend their cultural identity and embrace Zionism, or should they assimilate?) that is inextricably interwoven and intertangled with an hilarious and poignant interpersonal drama (dealing with parents-in-law, hosting rude guests, class differences, teenage daughters, and condescending bosses). For its first half, Mickey 17 promised the same.

Where I believe Joshua Cohen diverged from Mickey 17 is that he was content to let the questions his book raised to go unanswered. In newer editions he even includes an epilogue touching on the increasing complexities raised by the war in Gaza. Leaving a novel of ideas unresolved isn’t a cheap cliché (“what’s the right answer kids? Guess we’ll never know!”), in fact it’s better than fine, it’s honest. It gives us a chance to have a truthful look at where we stand today in the wake of the collapse of the Big Unified Theories™, and how we continue to make life as we still exist in this shitty situation.

My most generous interpretation of Mickey 17 is that the creators reverted to tropes when they realised the questions they’d raised didn’t have any easy answers. But more likely, I think they genuinely believe they resolved the problems they raised. In either case the result is the same. A faction of Left-Liberals in our societies is able to diagnose many problems well, but then looks to resolve them by doubling down for more of the same. This faction signals that they do this with an eager appetite for self-righteous violence, and a form of magic thinking that some number of deus ex machinas will come in to their aid in their righteous struggle to create a rules-based order, complete with independent judiciaries, and extortionate unaccountable NGO sectors.

In the worst case it signals a serious of people in the Western world live in a dangerous spiralling cult. In the best case it makes for disappointing movies.