Mickey 17: Unrestrained optimism, real problems
Dragonsphere Report
Bong Hoon Jo is a great film maker, but he is not cynical enough. In Mickey 17, a great problem is articulated: the apex of new human technological capacity is consistently used by the most willful, and hence the most vicious human beings. This has the potential to overwhelm the normal sphere of human life. At the end of the movie, the problem is made clear by a dream in which a dictator is resurrected using the cloning and mind synchronization technology established throughout the course of the film. Bong Hoon Jo’s feeble answer to this is that the technology should be banned and destroyed.
Genies do not go back in bottles, therefore this is a non-solution. It is pure wishful thinking.
The film correctly identifies a problem but it’s proposed solution is a human myth, something that fits the context of a story but not reality. In modernity, every few generations have yielded a crisis, and that crisis has mostly resolved itself over the course of subsequent generations by introducing costs and dysfunctions into the problem society that ultimately destroy it’s ability to remain dysfunctional. This seems to me a suboptimal solution, but it is a solution. In fact, we see a much faster version of this play out in the course of the film, which is all that ultimately enables the dysfunctional society to be cured by means of the technological ban.
However, when technology has the ability to make a problem permanent, even this natural remedy ceases to exist.
The movie was cute. The “creeper” aliens were a nice twist on monster tropes, and provided a foil to the provincially human dysfunction the settlers demonstrate. The utter incapacity of the human race to internalize the stakes of the clone printing technology were to the point (even to the point of playing video games while a newly printed clone falls out of the machine). Some gestures were made towards inherited systems of meaning-making being wholly insufficient to handle the crisis. Ultimately the movie found it’s “solution” within these systems though, making it’s analysis of them vapid.
If humans lack the capacity to make moral decisions past a certain threshold, then they should not make decisions past that threshold. That does not mean everything past that threshold should be or can be destroyed. It means human judgement has to be supplemented by capacity which is robust even in the face of the worst excesses of human judgement. If humans can’t care about unfamiliar things, something else needs to.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report