Before entering the theatre, one remembers Bong Joon Ho바카라s Snowpiercer, his only English-language film prior to Mickey 17. Regarded by many as the least impressive of his oeuvre, Snowpiercer garners little following compared to his other works. It prompts this spectator to ponder whether the foreignness of the English language is the source of alienation for Bong. When it comes to the evocation of feeling, he seems to be adept at translating it on screen in Korean.
In Mickey 17, Bong adopts a clinical approach as he tells the tale of a body sacrificed to science. It could be Korean, English, or any other language here, and the effect would arguably remain the same. Bong is interested in cultivating a specific mood and style 바카라 a cinematic tone oscillating between sardonic and dry, eccentric and whimsical. Although the film could easily fit within the body horror genre alongside Crimes of the Future, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, The Substance, Titane, Malignant, Tusk and others, Robert Pattinson바카라s treatment of Mickey Barnes quickly introduces the character as a nobody while infusing a uniquely zany touch to his voice.
By the time the film begins, in 2054, Mickey has already died 16 times. We meet his seventeenth version, labouring as a guinea pig on the frozen planet Niflheim, wondering how he survived a great fall and is still not dead. We learn that every time Mickey dies바카라of an unknown virus or severing his hand while floating in space or being exposed to lethal environments like extreme radiation바카라a machine reprints him. After his right-hand blows up in space, the new body that materialises studies the contours of its new hand. In that fleeting moment, an insurmountable burden is placed upon Mickey to not only repeatedly die but also grieve his destruction over and over again.
In a certain sense, he does not die but is constantly murdered like a forgotten victim of Alan, one of the scientists who technologised this process of human cloning. Alan utilised the human printer to produce copies of himself in an attempt to outmanoeuvre the legal repercussions of killing people. Thematically, there is little difference between him and the sadistic, psychopathic loan shark, Darius Blank, from whom Mickey escapes to volunteer as an 바카라expendable바카라 in outer space. The tragedy is that the world is full of loan sharks. It is impossible to avoid them, as Bong chucklingly said in an interview: 바카라Humans will always be evil, as well in the future, even when we make our way to space.바카라
Mickey바카라s position as an expendable requires complete submission to scientific experimentation. He essentially reports on what occurs to a body when it dies under different circumstances and how long it takes for the symptoms to manifest as death. In a hilarious moment during his internal monologue, Mickey says he would have been filthy rich if he had insurance, but of course, an expendable cannot be insured. Furthermore, there is no worker compensation, union, or pension benefits. We do not need 2054 to realise that such is the economic organisation of workers, particularly gig workers.
In Parasite, the young Ki Woo tries his hand at a pizza delivery gig but fails to secure it. Bong, in an interview, envisaged a potential storyline where Ki Woo obtains such a job but suffers a bike accident while making a delivery, and 바카라immediately Delivery Boy 2 [takes] his place. There바카라s this endless train of delivery boys that can take his place. Three, four, five, six바카라 His job바카라s not as extreme as dying, but he is just as replaceable, and I thought that really connected to Mickey바카라s situation.바카라
Just as there are several iterations of Mickey, there are also multiple iterations of Darius Blank 바카라 the buffoonish political leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), whose inflated sense of self is rivalled only by his equally cruel, sauce-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) and his assistant, Preston (Daniel Henshall), who encourages every imperialist, albeit foolish, thought that crosses Marshall바카라s mind바카라 each a different model of the same self without the need for a human printer.
The presence of an expendable, however, obscures the distinctions between concepts such as death, murder, and suicide. Since Mickey willingly signs up to be an expendable, does he commit himself to suicide? Remember, the ultimate test to become an expendable is to shoot oneself. Whether Mickey does this or not remains open to spectators바카라 interpretation; however, it triggers a cinematic flashback that delves into the recesses of his childhood memory, where his mother was killed in a car accident. Is it then the survivor바카라s guilt that subtextually places him at the site of recurring suicide? Or is it the case that Mickey Barnes is never truly presented with a choice?
He is one among the plenty who are in line to leave Earth; as a sandstorm billows outside, Barnes utters, 바카라Everybody바카라s got money problems.바카라 Real choices can only be made if an individual is free to determine their preferences, values, and interests and is not coerced into action due to structural limitations. The artistry of capitalism lies in its perpetual creation of a constellation of false choices, wherein it appears to provide us with innumerable options that are actually restricted by socioeconomic conditions, preventing us from ever fully exercising our autonomy.
So, death is predominantly forced upon Mickey. Curiously, we do not view him as immortal but as someone fated to die repeatedly. There is nothing grand about his predicament, nothing messianic. If immortality were a job and not a condition of self, this is what it would be 바카라 a torment so terribly ordinary. Death is stripped of meaning under capitalism. There is little possibility of mourning when a system efficiently replaces one body with another, and none whatsoever when the other body looks identical and possesses the same memories. For the spectator, Mickey바카라s death generates neither pity nor grief. In any case, feeling sorry for another white guy 바카라 even if he is represented as an innocent nobody 바카라 would have undermined the radical potential of the film. Sorrow, then, is evoked only in relation to the native 바카라creepers,바카라 the arthropod-like alien species on Niflheim.
Ultimately, when Mickey 18 sacrifices himself for Mickey 17, this act fractures the ever-receding sense of agency. He is not rescuing the native inhabitants of Niflheim; instead, he is saving himself and, by extension, his species. While offering a critique of capitalism and severe economic inequality, Right-wing celebration of power, control of bodies in the governance of a polity, eugenics, settler colonialism and its making of an imagined enemy, Bong Joon Ho바카라s Mickey 17 dreams of a world where grieving is possible only through another iteration of oneself.
Srishti Walia is a doctoral student of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
