Mickey 17: The Whimpering Laborer in Late-Stage Capitalism

Bong Joon-Ho tackles economic inequality not just on a tangible level, but an ideological one in his follow-up to the masterful “Parasite.”

Robert Pattinson stars in “Mickey 17”

Mickey 17, not unlike Parasite, is hardly subtle in what it is hoping to communicate. The Park family is depicted as living literally above the Woo’s lowly subterranean apartment - consistently, a visual hierarchy that couldn’t be more clear and effective in communicating the drastic class disparity between the film’s characters is reinforced through easy to understand imagery. The director behind both films, Bong Joon-Ho, is masterful in this technique: the ability to create thematically evocative visuals and situations based on clever use and evolution of a strong premise. The visual of Ki Woo looking upward at a lavish home that casts a shadow upon his family is the definition of visual storytelling for thematic communication, and while Bong manages to effectively dissect the Capitalist system and its inherent inequality in practically all of his work, never has it been done so effectively as in Parasite because of the ease in which one can understand the powerful message behind its affective imagery.

Parasite’s depiction of inequality is powerfully effortless to grasp. One family makes more than another, and thus, the Parks enjoy the rain that acts as a calamitous flood for the Woo family. There is a direct cause and effect, a simple mirror image of victims of Capitalism, and while it would be inaccurate to call Parasite a “simple” film, I find that Mickey 17 is attacking Capitalism from a slightly more nuanced lens. Or, rather, in Mickey 17, Bong chooses a more amorphous subject of critique. While in Parasite the Parks and Woo families are established as opposites with their morals becoming increasingly gray, Mickey 17 doesn’t attack the broad theme of “economic inequality,” but instead cleverly depicts a Capitalist system stuck in the late-stages of monotonous grinding. If Parasite is attempting to showcase the inequality inherent in Capitalist economic systems, Mickey 17 demonstrates what happens when that system is allowed to continue into it’s depressing late-stages, where Capitalism serves as a pervasive atmosphere instead of a physical form like an antagonistic family.

Capitalism existing on an ideological level is best explained in Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism,” where Fisher dissects the ways in which late-stage Capitalism is able to situate a society into a state of languid acceptance, passively listening to the governing forces around them, regardless of the suffering they may feel at the hands of their oppressors. I liken this state of late-stage Capitalism to the “whimper” stated by T.S. Eliot in “The Hallow Men.” The world doesn’t end with a bang, but instead, a whimper, one that depressingly carries on its own existence for seemingly no reason but to have lower classes suffer for the benefit of the higher order. Fisher uses the dystopia present in Children of Men as a visualization of late-stage Capitalism, and the way Capitalism can work as a construction by governing bodies to manipulate workers into their own subjectivity. Notice how in Children of Men there is no apocalyptic nuke that ends us all, there is no natural disaster that destroys the world as we know it. Instead, terrorist bombings are normalized in a society that hates itself, resources are scarce but just plentiful enough to tease every worker with the opportunity for more, and the lead character himself goes through an arc of having to regain his passion for humanity - to transform from passive complacency to active hopefulness. In Children of Men, we see a world whimpering, where no one is living the prosperous life that Capitalism promises, save for those at the top of the ladder, in part because of the population’s complacency. It is a system defined by passivity, exhaustion, routine, and the voluntary acceptance of suffering; individuals living within the accepted pain of a crumbling society, all seemingly working and waiting until it ends. Thus, late-stage Capitalism is involved with questions of meaning, passion, and how the system works as a constructed ideology to trick individuals into their own harmful working routines that benefit only the employer.

The specific attack on late-stage Capitalism as opposed to general “economic inequality” is evoked in the consistent depiction of “work as death,” and the strange acceptance of this murderous exploitation. The film opens with the titular worker, Mickey, last name 17, awakening in a snowy ditch, wondering how he hasn’t passed. Through voice-over and an overextended intro, audiences learn that Mickey Barnes is an “expendable,” or an employee who is treated as an object for the sake of forward progress. Mickey is a test dummy for viruses, vaccines, growth hormones, and the first one sent on the most precarious, and at times, life threatening missions. As a result, at multiple points in the story, the screenplay parallels work with death through dialogue, a metaphor that is literalized through Mickey as a representation of the late-stage Capitalist laborer trapped in his fatal working routine. At the bottom of this cavern, wondering how he isn’t dead, Mickey is visited by his coworker and “friend,” Timo. Mickey begs for help…but Timo says his climbing line only goes so far. This isn’t a problem though, as Mickey can just die and reset the next day. All is well for the suffering laborer dying from his own working conditions, because never fear, rest assured they will awaken the next day, ready to “die” all over again. The metaphor for “work as death” is manifested in Mickey as a character, but reinforced through a strong script that never lets audiences forget that while Mickey may be literally dying, all laborers are suffering in some capacity, and thus, Timo’s final line to Mickey before the title drop is horribly ironic: “Hey Mickey, what’s it like to die?” As a worker in late-stage Capitalism, he already knows the answer.

This read of Mickey 17 attacking late-stage Capitalism is given validity in a few specific instances, all of which are categorized under the umbrella trait of one’s passive acceptance of their own suffering. In fact, this passivity is Mickey’s primary flaw, and demonstrated as early as the opening scene. As Timo weakly explains why he has to leave Mickey for death, Mickey puts no effort into fighting for his own life. Mickey reluctantly agrees with Timo, that he should die, and as Mickey’s only friend leaves him, monsters begin sprouting from the walls. In voice-over Mickey continues to beg for death, tragically a relatable experience for every laborer who works until exhaustion and is forced to get up the next day. Wanting to “sleep forever” sounds delightful to an employee who never, ever is off the clock, and whose life is quite literally their work. On another level, Mickey consistently performs this “begging for suffering” when he repeats the mantra in voice over and spoken word that his work is a form of deserved punishment. Because, as explained by Mickey himself, he was the one who caused his mother’s death when he was child by unknowingly pressing a button that caused their car to crash. Because of this, Mickey 17 feels as though he is deserving of his own oppression, as if the system is rightfully punishing him for immoral actions that he is undoubtedly guilty of. Except…Mickey isn’t guilty. In the film’s climax, Mickey 18 reveals that he does remember his mother’s death, and the reason 17 can’t is because of the reprinting process allowing for the manipulation of one’s memory in their reprinted form. Meaning, it was Mickey’s own employers who limited his memory in order to make him believe he was guilty for his mom’s death, and thus, would be willing to work in a system that frames his job as punishment. For Mickey 17, he deserves the crimes committed against him for the one’s that he himself committed. But, in reality, it was the working order that made Mickey believe he was deserving of punishment, and in this depiction of a occupational force literally altering the memory of its employees for more accepting workers, we see a clever metaphor for how Capitalism motivates employees to accept their own suffering. It is the system that makes Mickey feel low enough to work, because what Mickey does for the governing body, Marshall Kenneth, and co is by no means normal “work,” but a form of labor so punishing, that the only way the subject can justify performing it is if they are deserving. The horrific potential of late-stage Capitalism is its ability to construct this reasoning for the subject, and thus, make every employee feel like a guilty party.

This is a specific construction of late-stage Capitalism. As Fisher explains, in a post-Fordist production model that late-stage Capitalism works within, labor is alienating, impersonal, and decentralized in a way that tricks workers into never stopping, despite how little connection they feel to the labor they perform, or the direct suffering they face. While in previous decades, where Capitalism actually worked as an economic system, the average American legitimately could live a comfortable life, providing for their family, all because of a specific skillset that was acquired over time and positions the individual employee as an expert in their given talent. The worker is an individual with special skills that makes them perfect for an occupation that, ideally, the employee enjoys performing. After all, if one’s work is related to their greatest talent, would it not provide some satisfaction to the employee to perform work they enjoy and succeed at? Further, in a Fordist working environment, that “work” was guaranteed. In a more tangible job market, employees were necessary to be on site with specialized skills. But, now that labor has become omnipresent with the pervasiveness of technology and now normalized working routines where employees have to be available 24/7 through indirect communication, the individual worker can be seemingly replaced at any moment by someone with a greater, more diverse set of skills. Thus, out of a fear of the deprivation Capitalism inherently provokes, the worker would feel pressured to work constantly, or to meet any demand in order to maintain their working position, such as developing a new skill. However, as Fisher notes, this consistent re-illustration of one’s skills as an employee causes crises of identity within the individual. When one’s work is so associated with a defining trait or talent, their occupation becomes an extension of the self, even more than a set of skills or personality traits. Meaning, for Fisher, the late-stage Capitalist subject is stuck in working routines that feel as though they are killing the employee because of how impersonal and decentralized their work is, which instigates conflicts of identity that can lead to depression, or the exhausted passivity seen in Mickey 17’s incompetent workers and Children of Men’s languid population. Furthermore, because decentralized work is more difficult to organize, the very performance of these employees suffer not just from a missing passion, but a genuine carelessness or lack of organizational forces to accurately and fairly manage employees. For example, at around forty minutes, a manager attempts to block a vehicle entering the ship carrying a boulder that would destroy the loading bay’s infrastructure. After much debate, another truck simply ignores the manager and destroys critical portions of the loading bay when forcing his machine through the doors, comically showcasing the breakdown of communication in decentralized labor, and the disastrous effects it has on the quality of work being performed.

The simultaneous existence of Mickey 17 and 18 is itself another metaphor for a painful result of late-stage Capitalism on the individual: a split personality and the resultant mental crises this entails. Fisher explains in Capitalist Realism, mental health has been improperly depoliticized for the benefit of the working order. Fisher wonders, is it a coincidence that mental health has been rapidly declining as workers are increasingly isolated from one another in positions that have them alienated from the end results of their already meaningless occupations? Further, is it a coincidence that mental health is oppositional to traditional notions of “productivity?” Think back to the last time you asked for a mental health day, your job advocated for self-care, your University preached the significance of taking care of one’s mind…and remember how you were still unable to legitimately rest when it came down to it. Mental health is important until it rubs against productive labor, in which case, the worker’s well-being is always sacrificed. Fisher says to truly achieve fair working conditions, we must re-politicize mental-illnesses, and interrogate the causes behind the chemical imbalances resulting in one’s declining mental health. Mickey is simply a perfect metaphor for how the aforementioned enforced fragmentation of one’s identity can lead the employee towards self-imposed suffering, or feeling as if they cannot recognize themselves/establish a concrete identity in late-stage Capitalism. Not only is one forced to change their identity to maintain secure employment, they must battle through the mental challenges that come with this. I read Mickey’s clones as representative of the laborer so dissociated from the self from a fractured identity leading to changing mental patterns, behaviors, and security, that they are unrecognizable even to themselves. Mickey 18 is aggressive, so much so that him and 17 try to fight to the death on multiple occasions. Mickey 17 passively accepts his punishment, whereas Mickey 18 despises this level of inequality, and is willing to go as far as murder to achieve what he sees as fair living conditions. One can imagine this same conflict happening 24/7 within the average worker, who has to work for survival, but utterly despises the ways in which they must perform. The result? A self that is exhausted not just from physical working conditions, but mentally in a way that keeps one stagnant, stuck between acting against the system and adhering to it. One can only imagine the mental turmoil a single laborer with, say, 18 conflicting personalities and identities must be experiencing.

Dynamic traits associated with identity, the new insecurity of intangible jobs, working for overextended hours, and the impersonal connection between one’s skills and labor causes a crisis of occupational security for the individual laborer, who as a result, has no choice but to work for survival, and even worse, in increasingly dehumanizing roles that exhaust workers instead of filling them with the passion required to make truly great work. This is why, in both Children of Men and Mickey 17, we see background characters acting as if they are in a daze, or completely incompetent employees failing at their most basic tasks. For example, one of the scientists monitoring Mickey’s reprinting procedure trips over a cable when trying to make it to his local gambling table, which unplugs Mickey’s brain in a surgery that one can only assume requires maximum caution and attention to detail. Further, scientists quite literally forget about Mickey in comical montage, when the naked, slippery Robert Pattinson slaps onto the cold laboratory floor. Funny, yes, but also painfully telling of how workers are stripped of their humanity, and how one can become so separated from their labor that the employees themselves become ineffective, or seen as mere extensions of their pointless jobs. Ironically, in forcing employees to work to live, the work itself becomes of lesser quality as the individual loses their investment into increasingly depersonalized labor. This notion perfectly applies to Mickey, who at multiple points in the story speaks to how much he hates his work. No matter how many times it happens, Mickey says dying never gets easier. And yet, every day Mickey still clocks in, ready for his execution. In Mickey 17, labor is presented as both literally killing its subjects, and submitting them into a passivity that equivocates death. For Mickey Barnes, not even the inevitable end is an escape…but strangely, Mickey still, for whatever reason, works whenever reprinted, and in his constant suffering, viewers naturally have to start wondering “why?” Why does Mickey do these jobs that he’s told? Why does Mickey believe that, when told he is meant to die, that this is sound advice? Why does Mickey concede to every demand, regardless of how little sense it makes, or detrimental to his own well being fulfilling this order would entail? Mickey’s life, like every worker in late-stage Capitalism, is out of their own control because of the ways in which they are mediated through work, and employees are massaged into accepting the horrific conditions they occupy.

The dynamic constructed here is thus the employer controlling the ideological realm employees operate in order to convince them of their own punishment. This is best displayed at the film’s mid-point, where Mickey 17 returns from his expedition and is invited to dinner with Kenneth Marshall after having been discovered and tried as an illegal duplicate (with human reprinting legal, the existence of two beings at once was outlawed back on Earth). At this point in the story, Mickey 17 has become at least somewhat more aware of his own subjugation at the hands of Marshall and the rest of the governing body ordering his respective ship. In fact, Mickey has become so aware at the arbitrary nature of his oppression that he even starts to have thoughts of resistance. Mickey’s voice over builds as he approaches Marshall’s office, with the monologue climaxing in an emphatic “this is not fair!”…which hard-cuts to Mickey 17 at Marshall’s dinner, forcing the food down his throat. It’s a complete 180, Mickey just recognized how he is being oppressed, and yet, he immediately eats from the hand that slaps him. This cut is one of the most crucial elements in understanding Mickey 17, as it shows the film’s focus is not merely on the idea of class inequality, but how this inequality is a manifested, arbitrary construction by governing forces, and that to maintain this economic system requires a similar manipulation of the individual laborer. This cut redirects the film’s focus and tells audiences what Mickey 17 is truly interested in: not just economic inequality, but the population’s acceptance of it.

At this dinner, we see even more instances of how rebellion is thwarted through ideological adherence to the normative economic structure, and other tricks of late-stage Capitalism that Fisher marks as key elements of a successful indoctrination. First, there is Mickey’s role in the scene. As it turns out, the raw liver so graciously provided by Marshall was poisoned with another growth hormone, which sends Mickey into a spiraling fit of excruciating pain. Satirical dialogue underscores that ideological terror of the scene, such as Marshall only refusing to shoot Mickey in the head because it would stain his wife’s lavish carpet. As Mickey gurgles up blood and spazzes, Kenneth and his scientists see this as a perfect opportunity to test the vaccine they have prepared for the potentially harmful hormone - after all, Mickey is in immense pain, it would be a shame to waste this prime chance at testing a vaccination. However, at this insistence, Kai, another employee on the ship and one of Mickey’s crew mates, begins to falter in her ideological adherence. She asks Marshall, is more testing really necessary? Mickey is clearly in abject pain, maybe, just this once, they can show him some mercy? While Kai’s recognition of Mickey’s pain is already inhuman in its relative casualness compared to Mickey’s terrifying screams, which itself shows just how normalized Mickey’s suffering has become in this pseudo-society, what comes next is a perfect illustration of Capitalism as an ideology. In response to Kai’s cry for sympathy, Kenneth screams that “he signed up for this,” which is just convincing enough for Kai to believe that Mickey’s suffering is deserved, and not nearly as bad as it clearly is. However, Fisher notes how this is an example of corporations reorienting guilt onto the individual as a means of implicating them to their own suffering. Fisher states how in late-stage Capitalism, one has to constantly be “walking backward” in order to understand the lengths of which Capitalism has engrained itself into the minds of its population. Yes, Mickey did sign up to be an expendable, but for what reasons? Because he was in a financially precarious spot on earth due to exploitative insurance practices. Because he was already in such a low economic position on a crumbling earth, he felt no choice but to turn to crime, which then forced him off of the planet purely for his own survival. But, to get accepted onto the ship, to live, Mickey had to sign up as an employee, which led him to becoming an expendable. Because, not everyone is granted access - viewers are specifically treated to a view of Kenneth Marshall supporters speaking to him through the POV of a news camera, begging him to accept them onto his ship for the new planet, Niflheim. Essentially, while Mickey did sign up to be an expendable, it was only because of how poorly Marshall and other powerful parties have destroyed the Earth to the point of commonplace crime ruining lives in a dying society that Mickey had to attempt leaving earth. In other words, Mickey’s suffering is a result of a system designed to deprive its population to the point of having them accept any and all alternative options. Mickey only scarfs raw liver after recognizing how unfair his position is because Marshall has limited his caloric intake for weeks. The thankful, suffering laborer is manifested in Mickey at the end of the scene, where after having thrown up blood, injected with multiple experimental pathogens, withering in pain, being threatened with execution, and insulted by the other members of his dinner, Mickey smiles at Marshall, and thanks him for the delicious meal. The tragedy is that this line isn’t ironic, Mickey, the completely subjected laborer, is truly thankful for his own mistreatment. The read of Mickey as the late-stage Capitalist victim is solidified when 17 relays this story to Mickey 18, the more aggressive version of the original Mickey Barnes, who after initially calling 17 pathetic for his passive acceptance, looks to the tv dominating their room with a larger than life Kenneth Marshall taking up the entire screen and comes to a realization: “it’s not your fault.”

Mickey 18’s lines were silencing for this viewer. It was the moment where the film “clicked,” where Mickey 17 solidified itself as an attack not just against economic inequality, but the normalized, horrific treatment of the individual employee. By showcasing the inherent inequality necessary for late-stage Capitalism to function through the lens of a single oppressed worker, Mickey 17 is able to provide an insightful and powerful depiction of how Capitalism works not just on the tangible hierarchy of upper and lower classes, but on the ideological level of convincing laborers to passively accept their own punishing working conditions.