A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.
Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw men arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundreds (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.
Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who with much needed voiceover explanation, describes what gruesome fate befell versions 1-16.
For various reasons that need a lot of voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help, indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives, and indeed it is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think that people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of people who are total shitheads. They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.
Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome. There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? It would be odd if our culture in the 20th Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future. And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one today with antipathy against clones, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?
The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism (say by the industrial revolution) is the steady democratisation of society, an unbroken rise in the standard of living, and the ever-prevailing acceptance of human rights, at least in society’s with capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about humans, can’t find a way to express sympathy with the people of North Korea. One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of elite conspirators (gay texans and at least one Chinese man), that pitted debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. This too pointed the finger at capitalism. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there. The only difference would be a lack of prize money.
Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use his clones on a remote lunar base. That is, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a normal amount of respect. Noone goes out of their way to insult them. Now that could be plausible and is a much more interesting topic since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that could someday occur.
Moon came out in 2009. It is amazing what about it is no longer all that impressive now. I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, but I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and had more importance to the story line. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this is the future where everything is possible.
Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that great movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day, and so there couldn’t be any futuristic cheating. To make the movie believable, Joon-Ho had to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and more often.