Mickey 17: A Class Focused Takedown of Authoritarianism
Mickey 17 – Video essayist Sage Hayden has argued that all of Bong Joon-Ho’s films, to some extent, tackle class conflict. There’s plenty of truth to this statement, as director Bong’s movies all address the hardships working people face under the strains of broken societal structures. In Memories of Murder a military dictatorship’s efforts to quell pro-democracy protests hinder the police’s ability to protect civilians from a serial killer. In Snowpiercer the remnants of humanity are confined to a hierarchical structure inside a train. In these cases and more, Bong uses class conflict as a springboard to exploring deeper sociopolitical topics. His filmography’s topics of scrutiny range from the wealth gap, to authoritarianism to the ridiculousness of capitalism.
Director Bong’s newest film, Mickey 17 (an adaptation of Robert Pattinson) is a down-on-his-luck amateur businessman whose latest venture has put him in the crosshairs of a lethal loan shark. Wanting to flee Earth and start anew, he s the crew of a spaceship leaving to colonise the distant planet of Niflheim, where he signs up to be an “Expendable”.
An Expendable is a crew member who takes on the most dangerous assignments of a given space mission, partially for research purposes. Through banned futuristic technology, their memories are saved and, if an Expendable dies during the assignment – and they often do – that individual is reprinted into a new, identical body, with their memories still intact. By the time the central conflict arises, Mickey is onto his 17th body, having been treated as completely disposable throughout the mission.
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While director Bong has claimed to prefer the cinema over politics, it’s easy to be skeptical of this given how politically-minded every one of his films have been. But that is hardly surprising – Bong is one of many filmmakers who grew up under the Fifth Republic, a South Korean military dictatorship with strict censorship laws that prohibited anything that seemed even vaguely anti-capitalist. Those laws eventually lifted in 1993 with the founding of a democratic government, and thus the door was opened for South Korean filmmakers to craft stylistic, vociferously left-leaning features. Whether it was Park Chan-Wook, Lee Chang-Dong or others, so many South Korean filmmakers made rambunctiously political films that scholars often refer to them as a collective auteur.
Even among his peers, Bong stands out for his unique blending of absurdist humour – based on the concept of social pujoris (irregularities in the everyday) – and deep-running societal issues that affect ordinary Koreans. His first film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, saw the pathetic dog killer Yoon-Ju bribe his way to promotion, while the hard-working, if self-centred, Hyun-Nam was punished for missing work to rescue a dog, showcasing the double standards inflicted on the lower classes. The Host was a monster movie that lambasted American neocolonialism, a deep-seeded issue in South Korea. Bong’s most popular film, the Best Picture winning Parasite, is a direct damnation on the wealth gap, something that’s become increasingly universal and not limited to South Koreans, which was possibly a factor in that film’s gargantuan success. All of Bong’s films hybridise various styles and genres, sometimes commodifying tropes and aesthetics associated with Hollywood, while possessing roots in the classic dramas of the 1960s Korean Golden Age – Kim Ki-Young’s The Housemaid was a key influence on Parasite. All of this is done to highlight the struggles that working people in South Korea, and increasingly around the world, are faced with.
In Mickey 17, Bong’s bizarre sense of humour and unique imagination is once again employed to highlight class conflict – specifically how mass labour living on the margins are exploited for the whims and riches of the elite. Putting aside the fact that Mickey is literally giving his life over and over to help the ship on its voyage, the general populace of the ship live in bleak, routine-dictated quarters, forced to dine on what looks like processed slop as grey and lifeless as their surroundings. Mickey dies so often in service to the societal whole of the ship that his fellow comrades have become apathetic towards him, giving each of his deaths – many of which are comical – a disturbing undercurrent. When Mickey’s 17th incarnation fails to die as predicted, he finds himself having to share duties, and dilemmas, with his next incarnation, Mickey 18. This new Mickey has a much more cynical personality than Mickey 17, whose timid awkwardness and Spongebob Squarepants-drawl makes him an easy target of victimisation. This follows a regular theme of Bong’s filmography in which class solidarity is difficult to find. The titular character of Mother resorts to throwing other proletariat under the bus to protect her son, while the two poor families in Parasite fight each other instead of their wealthy employers. In Mickey 17, the masses are downtrodden and exploited for their labour all throughout their voyage, made to live in squalor so that the higher ups can dine on all the luxury and fine sauces that they want.
Pioneering the ship is that of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Ylfa (Toni Colette). An ex-politician who sees this mission as a way to become a king on a new world, Marshall is a particularly grotesque character in Bong’s filmography. Bloated and narcissistic with infantile mannerisms, Marshall is a wannabe dictator who keeps the masses down to maintain wealth and power. A key scene sees Mickey being invited to Marshall’s home quarters as part of a sham display of generosity, where Marshall and his wife are seen dining on rare meats and bountiful fruits in contrast to the literal sludge everyone else is being fed. Marshall is a manbaby who needs constant validation, unable to separate the needs of the working classes from the needs of his ego, with both Ruffalo and Colette dialling up their scene-chewing performances to eleven.
It would be easy to write Marshall off as just a Trump parody – his ers are seen wearing reddish caps in one scene, and Ruffalo certainly portrays Marshall as a bumbling idiot with limited vocabulary. However, Bong has spent his career mocking would-be authoritarians, which is no shock to anyone aware of his background. From useless policemen and government officials in Memories of Murder and The Host, to avaricious CEOs in Snowpiercer, director Bong has never been subtle in his disdain for authoritarian types. The point he makes about all of them, whatever his film, is that they are dangerous yet incompetent nincompoops only interested in securing power rather than improving life for all. That Marshall happens to have obvious parallels to Trump is a non-criticism in this critic’s view, particularly in a world where Trump can win the presidency twice.
More importantly, Marshall’s existence in the story highlights the ways in which the proletariat can be manipulated by the upper classes to normalise the inequality of their conditions, as Mickey’s recycled bodies become a footnote to the ship’s hero worship of a blatant, conceited hoarder. The setting is not dissimilar to the one in Snowpiercer, only half the masses don’t realise they’re being exploited, as they are too caught up in the off-kilter charisma of Marshall. Even as the human race travels to live on another planet, the system of capitalism and the disparity between rich and poor survives.
Where Mickey 17 finds originality in its depiction of these career-long themes is in how it ties into environmentalism and solidarity between humanity and nature. Director Bong has shared pro-environmentalist views before in Okja, but with Mickey 17 Bong showcases how class exploitative authoritarianism will ultimately destroy not just our own world but others as well. When they arrive on Niflheim, Mickey quickly discovers hairy, mammoth-like creatures called Creepers – or “croissants dipped in shit” as Yfla eloquently describes. Despite being ignorant of their peaceful nature, and unmoved by the fact that these creatures saved Mickey from certain death, Marshall unilaterally declares them a threat. The crisis point sees the working masses, led by Mickey’s dual bodies, having to choose between their loyalty to a tyrannical, singular leader, or the collective whole of the planet they are on.
Ultimately, director Bong is showing that authoritarian elitism is a destructive ideology that won’t cease until everything has been consumed by it. When I wrote my Masters Thesis on Bong’s films in 2022, I described his filmography as a “Cinema of Disillusionment”. All of his films can be perceived as stories of disillusionment for his characters, all of whom are some form of proletariat. Whether they become disillusioned with their roles in society, as seen in Mother, or with their dreams of affluence like in Parasite, the characters endure mental – sometimes physical – suffering, wi to the inequalities that surround them.
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Mickey 17 also features a story of disillusionment through Mickey’s character arc, as he realises that, by becoming an Expendable, he has simply traded one form of oppression for another. Yet, like with Curtis in Snowpiercer or Gang-Du in The Host, his disillusionment paves the way for class-based enlightenment. This is one of Bong’s few films where class solidarity, and thus the answer to the sociopolitical issues of his movies, is embraced, as the once dispensable Mickey becomes a ringleader in ensuring the survival of all living things on Niflheim. It’s a story that condemns the inherent authoritarianism of class inequality and champions revolution in a bid to ensure everyone’s wellbeing.
All of this together makes Mickey 17 a very fun, biting satire, full of director Bong’s usual tropes and idiosyncrasies. However, despite its strengths in theme, production design and characterisation, it’s not one of Bong’s better films. This may be in part because of the film having huge Western funding and influence behind it, like Okja before it. However, his films have also traditionally had bleaker endings, or bittersweet at best. Even Okja saw its heroine, Mija, having to become a capitalist to beat the capitalist system. Mickey 17 does imply that the conflict isn’t over, that the possibility of class-based exploitation will always exist, represented by the printing machine that dishes out Mickey’s clone bodies. Nonetheless, its ending is by far the most hopeful of his films. Perhaps succumbing to the Hollywood-ised happy ending was a condition of being able to adapt this work.
Furthermore, something that has unified all of Bong’s previous works is how deeply rooted it is in the South Korean experience, with most of his leading characters being working class Koreans. His most transnational films, Snowpiercer and Okja, still had Korean characters as significant players – with Namgoong in the former being the anarchist among the capitalists, and Mija in the latter being the one source of purity. Mickey 17’s themes are certainly in keeping with Bong’s previous work, influenced by the various societal hardships that South Korea has gone through in the past century. But it’s arguably lacking that quintessential Koreanness that made the rest of Bong’s work so engrossing. The American-Korean actor Steve Park features as the head of Marshall’s security team, and thus becomes instrumental to pushing back against the authoritarianism, but it’s still a rather minor role compared to Pattinson or Naomi Ackie’s characters. It’s also the most aesthetically Western of Bong’s films so far, something that, given Bong’s film history, perhaps makes Mickey 17 seem more pedestrian by comparison, despite its rather radical themes.
With all of this said though, even the weakest Bong Joon-Ho film is still better than the best of many other filmmakers’ work, and there is more than enough to sink your teeth into here. The presentation is a bit messy in places – the class-based struggles aboard the spaceship and the environmentalist conflict of the Creepers doesn’t always harmonise, sometimes feeling like two separate stories until the climatic act. Nevertheless, the film is chock full of rich themes and stellar craftsmanship. That it is all anchored by a charismatic, and proudly strange, dual performance from the ever versatile Robert Pattinson makes it a constantly engaging experience. Pattinson’s willingness to experiment with his roles makes him an ideal fit for Bong’s absurdist humour and visuals; it’ll be interesting to see if he appears in more of his work.
Mickey 17 isn’t always airtight, but it confidently continues director Bong’s exploration of rich, socio-political themes. As idiosyncratic as ever, with a joyous leading performance, it’s a flashy, timely, reminder on the vitality of class solidarity. Without that solidarity between the working classes, and without addressing the key concerns that they are faced with, the issues of authoritarianism, wealth gaps and possibly planet-wide destruction are only going to grow. Director Bong has long advocated for that solidarity through his absurdist comedy and stories of disillusionment. Mickey 17 is proof that he is not yet done when it comes to ringing the alarm bell on these issues.
Mickey 17 is in cinemas now.
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