Throughout the history of cinema, the male body has always been linked to the relentless grind of capitalism and the cruel whims of its enactors. Think of the toiling workers and their menial tasks in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), or Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936). Since the advent of science fiction, movies have found even more imaginative ways to explore and dissect the idea that the performative, exploited, and spectacularised male body is an essential cog in the economic machine. Mickey 17, the latest entry from Bong Joon-ho, continues this tradition. 

In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson plays a down-on-his-luck nobody who volunteers as an ‘Expendable' for a research and colonisation vessel setting course for a distant planet. This means that he is given one lethal assignment after another – taking off a spacesuit outside the spaceship, deliberately poisoning himself with radiation, and coming down with a deadly virus to name just a few – and dies every time. He is then restored as a clone, with all of his memories and personality intact, so that he can do it all over again. ‘Bad day at the office' doesn't quite cut it, particularly after he unexpectedly returns alive from one mission only to find that a new clone has already been produced.

Mickey's body (or later bodies) is the source of scientific, political, and sexual fascination throughout the film. Like Chaplin on the assembly line, Mickey is put to work under the most grotesque of conditions and specific of instructions, constantly forced to replay and relay the pain he inflicts on his body. In the eyes of most scientists and the expedition leaders, he is little better than a lab rat. He is given no control over his body, with no say in what happens to it, where it goes, or who gets to see it. All in the name of some supposedly glorious future.

Bong instils a great irony throughout Mickey 17 in that the women on board appear to have their bodily autonomy respected more readily than expendable men. Over dinner, security agent Kai Katz (Anamaria Vartolomei) puts a very blunt question to Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), asking him “Am I just a uterus to you?” Marshall guffaws and dismisses the suggestion, claiming to have nothing but the utmost respect for women's rights. And yet he dismissively refers to Mickey as a “meat sack” at every opportunity and values him only for the scientific strides forward that his repeated sacrifices enable. Marshall may as well be screaming “Your body, my choice” at him while Mickey writhes on the floor in pain. 

Since the repealing of Roe vs. Wade, the rights of women to control their own bodies have come under the spotlight with renewed passion and urgency. Underpinning either the anger or apathy that some men feel when it comes to women's bodies could be the lack of understanding about them, and the inability to step outside of one's shoes (or skin) into the perspective of somebody else. Mickey 17 addresses this ignorance with a startling immediacy, flipping the script so that it is a man – a white, cisgender, conventionally handsome man at that – who forfeits control of his bodily rights. Suddenly, the male viewer has no choice but to at least try to understand what it could feel like to lose bodily autonomy, a consequence of the mission's industrious drive and a reality too often lived by those who don't experience male privilege. 

So prodigious and repetitive is the dismissal of Mickey's bodily autonomy that he begins to internalise it, valuing himself only in terms of his physical being. After being surprisingly spared by the creepers (“croissants dipped in shit,” as they are eloquently described), Mickey is in disbelief. “I'm still good meat! I'm perfectly good meat! I taste fine!” he screams back at the nonchalant alien critters. This has become all he knows; his self-worth is tied to the consumption, exploitation, and parading of his body. Its functionality and use to anyone other than himself is what grants him value. The person inside is of little to no significance as far as the cause is concerned. The comically suggestive nature of Mickey's outburst further highlights the parallel to women's reproductive rights; people being unjustly defined and governed purely down lines of biological use.

Compared to the earliest days of the movies, genre cinema like Mickey 17 has allowed explorations of male autonomy to become even more explicit. In the post-apocalyptic black comedy A Boy and His Dog (1975), Don Johnson thinks he is going to be allowed to have sex with an underground colony's entire female population – only to find that he is actually going to be milked like a cow, with electro-ejaculation and artificial insemination used to impregnate women while he misses out on the pleasure and thrills he craves. His sexual authority and control are revoked. The idea that a man is suddenly the one who loses out on bodily autonomy is supposed to be even more horrifying given that it goes against the norm of an aggressively patriarchal, heteronormative society. 

This is far from the only example. Jordan Peele, David Cronenberg, and John Carpenter have all explored what happens when masculinity is divorced from bodily autonomy (and in Peele's case especially this intersects with how race has historically tied into autonomy as well). What Bong does so incisively with Mickey 17 is combine a tale of how pressing the issue of bodily autonomy is with a warning about how little consideration corporations and leaders are prepared to give it. He does, however, manage to slide in subtle nods to the hypocrisy of it all. Marshall is himself at times unable to string a sentence together without his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) whispering in his ear. He may have the power and influence, his body can sometimes barely even function without someone else behind the wheel. Despite his wealth, power, and egomaniacal insistence on his own importance, even he does not exercise autonomy as much as he thinks. 

Mickey 17 is far from the first film to explore the male body's exploitation at the hands of political, capitalist expansionism. It won't be the last either. Instead, it continues a fine tradition of reversing the typical power dynamics of gender, a narrative trope with extra shock value for an audience too familiar with patriarchy's vice grip on bodily autonomy. The film does end on an optimistic note, with Mickey finally accepting his whole self and his full name, rather than number, appearing on the screen. Perhaps Mickey 17 tells us that there is hope for those wanting to reclaim their autonomy, even if they need the help of some dung-tinted sentient pastries to achieve it. 

Watch the trailer for Mickey 17 below.

Podcast