The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility
I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.
In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.
This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.
Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.
Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.
(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)
When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.
So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.
That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.
At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
