South Korean filmmakers are having a big moment right now. The first season of Squid Game was the most-watched Netflix show of all time, and the second season of Squid Game broke multiple viewership records for the platform. South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made Oscar history by directing the first foreign language film to win Best Picture, Parasite, and he won many film fans years earlier with his 2013 English-language sci-fi Snowpiercer. Meanwhile, other South Korean films have become cult classics on streaming, from Train to Busan to Burning.
It’s not surprising that these movies and shows have so much cross-cultural appeal. Most of them are thrillers or sci-fi films that deal with anti-establishment and “eat the rich” themes, which have become very popular in Hollywood—including Get Out, Glass Onion, White Lotus, The Menu, Joker, and Severance. On a cultural level, South Korea shares many of the same trends as America—including growing income inequality, falling fertility rates, and growing political gender divides—and therefore many of the same cultural anxieties.
Bong’s latest English-language film, Mickey 17, is a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of films. Mickey 17 takes place on a future Earth where the unlucky Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) escapes his debt collectors by signing up to be an “expendable” on a ship leaving Earth to start a new colony. This means he will get sent on suicide missions and then be “reprinted” (i.e. cloned) to do so again and again. But things go sideways when Mickey 17, who was supposed to die, survives and must contend with Mickey 18. To stay alive, both Mickeys have to team up with their girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) to take down the would-be dictator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife Gwen (Toni Collette).
The big strength of genre satire—whether that’s horror like Get Out or The Substance, or sci-fi like Mickey 17—is its ability to take something seemingly normal in our society and blow it up to such ridiculous proportions that it’s easy to see its absurdity. Bong uses Mickey 17 to explore how the modern world devalues human life by reducing it to mere utility. People are clamoring to leave Earth for a better life free of economic exploitation, but the people running the interplanetary expedition also see people as mere means to wealth or power for the elite. Mickey can only get a place on the vessel if he agrees to be an “expendable.” And even the non-expendables—particularly women—are constantly told by their leaders they are valuable primarily for their fertility potential on a new planet.
Bong describes the message of his film this way: “They’re printing Mickey out so that he can die, and in that concept is all the comedy and tragedy of the film. In real life, you see a lot of jobs that end in fatal accidents. When that happens, the worker leaves, another worker comes. The job remains the same—it’s just the people who get replaced. You can call it the capitalist tragedy of our times, and in this film it’s even more extreme.”
Sci-fi is particularly useful for exploring the value of human life because new technology is often one of the biggest threats to how we perceive ourselves. The Industrial Revolution jump-started modern debates around people’s—and especially at first, men’s—roles because the advent of mechanized tools and energy sources made it possible for machines to do the labor that only men could do before. Likewise, AI has created massive anxiety around people being replaced, particularly since it doesn’t just make rote work more efficient but is now capable of mimicking art as well.
Mickey 17 uses cloning to wrestle with that same existential anxiety. Because a new Mickey can just be printed out every time he dies, each individual Mickey’s life is not considered valuable. Supposed friends won’t risk saving his life when he’s trapped in an icy cavern but they do take a risk to grab a flame thrower. Gwen Marshall objects to shooting Mickey in the head because it might stain the carpet.
But this changes when Mickey becomes “multiples.” When Mickey 17 meets Mickey 18, he explains that he wasn’t afraid to die before because he felt like it was always the same person coming back. But now that he’s met Mickey 18, he realizes he would die while someone else lives on. It’s this ability to value your own life that keeps coming up as distinctive of humanity.
But the movie also implies that, even if you were not to intrinsically value your own life, you would still be distinct from other people. Mickey 17 notes in voiceover after he’s met Mickey 18 that Nasha always noted differences in personalities among the different Mickeys. And events in the story play up how different Mickey 17 and 18 are. Mickey 17 is portrayed as mousy and meek whereas 18 is portrayed as psychopathically willing to kill.
Yet Mickey 17 doesn’t think deeply about how to make its views logically consistent. Both Mickeys fight over Nasha during the movie, and the characters argue about whether she can share them or if one of the Mickeys will have to have a different girlfriend. But the filmmakers sweep that subplot under the rug with the cop-out of killing one of the Mickeys at the end.
Further, at the end of the film, the reformed government run by the heroes bans the cloning technology in a triumphant ceremony. But it’s not clear why. If clones are real and distinct people who are just as valuable as anyone else, what’s wrong with making them? Earlier in the film the filmmakers mock religious individuals who say that God and the natural order intend “one soul and one body.” And yet, they never explain their justification for banning it.
Thinking through the implications of these ideas is important because putting limits on economic freedom and technological achievement has the potential to harm human life even as it protects it. This is a problem with the “eat the rich” Hollywood genre that popular South Korean cinema falls into: It tends to criticize capitalism as being solely about exploitation. But childhood mortality is going down around the world because of the technological achievements and wealth creation enabled by the Industrial Revolution and globalized capitalism. Both the rich and poor around the world are getting richer (the rich are simply getting richer faster). The economic and technological factors accused of devaluing human life are the very things that are improving human life today.
When we don’t think things through and just go with our gut, we’re more open to tribal thinking. Movies like Mickey 17 encourage making all the people who dehumanize others “right-wing coded”; the film’s villains are basically a collection of Saturday Night Live parodies of conservatives, from Mark Ruffalo’s uninspired Donald Trump knockoff; Toni Collette’s surface-level but entertaining Melania; the culty, red hat-wearing Kenneth Marshall supporters; the cringy religious people, etc. In many ways, it’s not much different from the oft-criticized (including by me) God’s Not Dead franchise, which casually makes all its unsympathetic villains liberals and atheists.
And yet even a cursory look at the left and right wings in America can show that both treat human life as sacred in their own ways. Conservatives condemn abortion and euthanasia as violations of the sacredness of human life. Liberals condemn capital punishment and support welfare programs. Both routinely mock the opposing side as not valuing human life. But this is really a difference between how someone conceives of this value, not whether one has it in the first place.
Ironically, otherizing half the country to be “the bad guys” encourages a devaluing of lives in general. It’s no coincidence that movies like Mickey 17, Triangle of Sadness, Parasite, Snowpiercer, Blink Twice, The Menu, and Ready or Not all end with the brutal deaths of the bad guys. These movies set up a world where all the bad guys are unsympathetic, evil rich people, their greed is responsible for all the hero’s troubles, and the only way to stop them is through violence because the system won’t stop them. It’s also no surprise that a world that consumes these movies would valorize people who do this in real life—like the man who allegedly killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
Films like Mickey 17 remind us of the power of satire to explore and validate the anxieties of the present moment. But it will take more than exploring and validating to actually soothe those anxieties.
