𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

I haven’t read Mickey7, the novel by Edward Ashton that inspired Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, mostly because I haven’t purchased a new work of fiction since last year, and most of the ones I do buy are gifts for my husband. But I don’t feel starved of material. The film, on its own, is dense enough to serve as both science fiction narrative and social treatise. It is a story about replication and survival, about consciousness as both commodity and curse, and about the afterlife of capitalism in outer space.

The protagonist, Mickey Barnes, is an “Expendable,” a euphemistic term for a laborer whose job is to die in service of the colony, only to be brought back to life again and again through cloning technology. A failed small business owner turned eternal temp worker, Mickey embodies the anxieties of late capitalism projected into the stars. His body is repeatedly destroyed and replaced; his memories are backed up, downloaded, and selectively restored. He is a man turned resource.

The most compelling thing about Mickey is not that he is heroic or particularly intelligent. He isn’t. It’s that he is us. He is the everyman, but more than that, he is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak might call a subaltern with speech that doesn’t register. In her landmark essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak argues that the subaltern, the colonized, the exploited, the disappeared, can only speak within frameworks that already exclude or distort their voice. Mickey does speak. He is funny, curious, and even a bit romantic. But his voice is circumscribed by design. He’s allowed to joke, but not to dissent. To die, but not to revolt.

In this way, Mickey is more of a product than a protagonist. His replication is not a miracle but a mechanism of control, a corporate insurance policy. The film presents us with eighteen versions of Mickey. All are technically “him,” all equally disposable. There is something chilling in this multiplication. Identity is reduced to a code. Subjectivity is managed through biopolitics. Discipline is enforced through digital continuity. The body is no longer sacred. It’s a factory setting.

The colony where Mickey is stationed is governed by two men. One is a military brute, the other a religious bureaucrat. Both are narcissists convinced of their own moral authority. They are the kind of megalomaniacs who believe they aren’t being watched because they mistake their power for privacy. Their colonial project is built on extraction, domination, and spiritualized propaganda. It begins to collapse not under the weight of armed rebellion, but under exposure. Once their surveillance state is mirrored back at them, once they are made aware that they are no longer invisible, their authority fractures.

Enter Nasha, Mickey’s girlfriend and the film’s quiet revolutionary. Her anger is not abstract. It is domestic, intimate, and visceral. She doesn’t want to burn the system down for ideology’s sake. She wants it gone because it keeps killing the person she loves. If Mickey is the exploited subject, Nasha is the political actor who makes rebellion possible. Her uprising is aided by a mysterious group of watchers. These observers are not quite divine, but they occupy a position of elevated awareness. This alliance reinforces one of the film’s quieter points: power is maintained by secrecy and undone by exposure.

And then there is the alien creature. Small, delicate, and wide-eyed, it functions as a kind of moral accelerant. It is, by design, cute. Bong Joon-ho understands the human need for sentimental proxies. He uses this being to redirect the colony’s gaze away from militarism and toward empathy. Only when confronted with something they can’t exploit, something too gentle to deserve harm, do the colonists begin to question their methods. It is a sad truth. We often feel more protective toward animals and aliens than we do toward fellow humans. And Mickey 17 doesn’t let us forget that.

While Parasite sliced through class dynamics with surgical precision, Mickey 17 is more diffuse, more speculative, and frankly more absurd. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions. Instead, it presents the nightmare of infinite labor in a world where nothing has changed except the setting. Even in a universe of artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and consciousness transfer, the exploitation of flesh continues. Why build machines to suffer when people still will?

This is where Marxist critique hits hardest. Mickey is the ultimate commodity. He is self-replicating labor, alienated not just from his product but from his own continuity. His death is not a tragedy. It is a reset button. And it is cheaper than building robots. Bong suggests that the problem is not technology. It is capitalism’s insistence on scarcity, even when abundance is technologically possible. The film understands what Silicon Valley often refuses to admit. Exploitation isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system’s foundation.

There is also a post-humanist dimension to consider. If the cyborg is, in Donna Haraway’s terms, a transgressive figure who blurs the boundaries between human and machine, then Mickey is the anti-cyborg. He is a fully human subject who is still treated as property. His replication doesn’t free him from mortality. It industrializes it. If Haraway once imagined the cyborg as a feminist, liberatory figure, Mickey 17 imagines the clone as a cautionary one. The fantasy of bodily transcendence is turned back into labor.

In the end, the film offers neither utopia nor apocalypse. The colony does not dissolve. The system does not collapse. But something shifts. A new consciousness emerges, not just in Mickey, but in the people around him. Perhaps, Mickey 17 suggests, that is all revolution really is: a refusal to be reused.

Sources

• Ashton, Edward. Mickey7. St. Martin’s Press, 2022.
• Bong, Joon-ho, director. Mickey 17. Performances by Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2025. [Forthcoming film]
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
• Haraway, Donna J. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Originally published in Socialist Review, vol. 80, 1985, pp. 65–108. Reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–181.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics, 1990.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.