I didn’t used to be afraid of dying.
Most kids don’t think about dying growing up. It’s a very morbid thing to think about, and it doesn’t suit one’s complexion well. I had my happy-go-lucky phase, obsessed with not much else than the odd puzzle, a silly book, and rereading my favorite Geronimo Stilton, because what could that cheese-eating little genius think of this time?
I did my time pretending death was a strange tale told by people trying to scare me, exclusive to the awful TV shows my dad tried to get me to watch and the YA section of the library. Until, one day, I could no longer pretend.
For a few years, the thought of death stuck in my brain. It’s hard to imagine yourself existing and enjoying existence and being a full, real, live person for so long and then for it all to stop one day.
It frightened me that everything I was and could be and thought of could disappear.
It frightened me that there was just an abrupt stop.
Of course, I was 13, and 13-year-olds have
easily-frightened imaginations. I was a scaredy-cat, and the biggest offender was death.
I eventually got over it — helpfully,13-year-olds do not have a habit of dying unless they do very stupid things like eating glue.
I then got gripped by science fiction, and, if you know anything about science fiction, you know that it often wrestles with one question: What if we could
conquer death?
This brings me to “Mickey 17,” the newest, weirdest movie made by Bong Joon Ho, the director of “Parasite,” and starring ex-vampire/wizard Robert Pattinson. “Mickey 17” is a story about death, loss, cloning, bugs, and capitalism. It’s a story about conquering what it means to die.
When death is just one more frontier to conquer, what does that mean for those of us who cross it?
Fair warning — I am going to spoil “Mickey 17.”
“Mickey 17” is a story about a man named Mickey who has died 16 times. The version of him that has made it to the beginning of the film, when we’re introduced to him, is the 17th one.
The movie opens by telling us what Mickey has been dying for: experimentation, over and over again, in every horrific way, shape, and form until he’s been exposed to so many atrocities it’s a wonder the man can bear
to exist.
Mickey is a clone of a clone, built with recycled DNA from a bunch of colonists trying to make it big on a snowy tundra planet (take that, global warming) who have memories of everything.
Mickey has beaten death itself. It was not a fair fight.
After all that prodding and poking and killing and hurting, Mickey number 17 is left to die in the middle of the tundra, laid under the body of a large creature intended to chew him up and spit him out so another version of him can reappear back at home base.
Unfortunately, the creature does not oblige, and, with that, the entire movie spirals into insanity.
After the incredible premise, the rest of “Mickey 17” is a bit odd — the realization that Mark Ruffalo is doing a Donald Trump thing, the general plot and setting. It’s a fun time, but it’s just got so many flaws.
The core, though, stands strong. On one hand, Mickey 17, who has tussled with monsters and lived, who has learned to stay alive, to stay out of the way, refuses to become the menace to the rest of the world you’d expect from a guy who can’t die. On the other hand, Mickey 18 just printed out, while number 17 remained missing-presumed-dead on the ice plains.
And boy, do they hate each other.
Mickey 18 considers 17 an existential threat and tries to kill him. Mickey 17, who at this point has died so often that dying feels like a fun little thing you do in the evenings if you’re bored and have time to kill between rounds of bridge, refuses to go gently into that good night.
Suddenly, the man who conquered death itself can
die again.
Mickey 19 won’t pick up where Mickey 17 left off — Mickey 19 is a Mickey 18 clone. Mickey 17 is the last of his line, the only one who has felt the genuine, terrifying, crushing fear of death since the entire process started.
He saves himself, over and over again. He suffers, but he survives, using every trick and trap and oddity to his advantage because he cannot die this time, not anymore. He must live, because if he does not, there is no
more Mickey.
Mickey 17 is a man granted immortality. It’s a man making the decisions necessary to survive in a universe that has assumed that him with a bullet in his head, and him sans a bullet, are just differing opinions of presentation and style. It’s a man fighting not only the Spectre that has raised its ugly hand over him one more time, but also the endless hordes who seem to be sent to execute that specter’s bidding.
All the while, Mickey 18 seems to be totally different, violent, angry, and most importantly — ready to kill.
The movie loses a bit of its focus at that point. “Mickey 17” is a weirdly-paced film and, after all this amazing exposition, the second half feels lackluster. The memories used by the cloning device to make more Mickeys are destroyed by the Donald Trump caricature I don’t care enough to learn the name of. Mickey 18 sacrifices his life to complete the redemption journey. The bugs can talk somehow and have senses of humor. Or telepathy. Or both.
Mickey 17 takes the idea of death, removes it, and then brings it back to remind us that it’s real and visceral and horrifying. A character dies early on. A real one, one of the sorts that don’t have this magical cloning technology, and the movie just lets her. Her friend grieves for a few minutes and then life has to go on because life always goes on because it needs to.
Death is real again, and somehow, that’s so much less jarring than the man who is pumped full of disease to make sure everyone else is going to be okay.
Mickey 17 sees us triumph over death itself only to remind us that there is nothing wrong with it. That Spectre haunts us for so long that it’s almost comforting. A world without it is no less dark and dreary than one with it.
Mickey 17 made me stop being scared of death.
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