Earlier this month, Bong-Joon Ho released his follow-up to the Best Picture-winning Parasite (2019). Mickey 17, based on a book of a similar name, centres around Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a man who finds himself in debt to loan sharks who’ll stop at nothing to get their repayment, including travelling to the ends of the Earth. Mickey does what anyone else would do in his predicament—he decides to get off Earth by any means necessary. In his haste (and without reading the guidelines), he opts to become an ‘expendable’ on a space expedition to repopulate what’s believed to be a barren planet. In return for avoiding bludgeoning by loan sharks, Mickey becomes a lab rat for the expedition, doing everything others can’t because of their mortality: being exposed to poison, ungodly amounts of radiation, getting body parts severed off and eating fake meat that may or may not be riddled with bacteria. After his death, Mickey is continuously reanimated via a human cloning machine that prints him out with the same memories as the previous iteration. 

Much like most of Bong-Joon Ho’s films, Mickey 17 is rife with allegory and reflections on modern society. It satirises the influence of oligarchs on our political landscapes, growing class inequalities, our cultural obsession with space exploration (whilst allowing the earth to be destroyed) and perhaps most obviously, the cult of personality following politicians like Trump. Bong-Joon Ho has insisted that the character of Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) isn’t based on anybody in particular but instead a hodgepodge of conservative political figures. Marshall is almost a walking-talking Rorschach test where you may see Trump, someone else may see Elon Musk and I personally saw Geert Wilders from Holland’s Party for Freedom. Marshall is overly tanned, has gaudy veneers and has virtually no political ideas beyond wanting attention. It’s not a bad portrayal by any means, but it’s an obvious one. For writer and film marketer Elif Erisik, it can feel like parodies of men like Trump have nothing left to say: “In today’s context with a second Trump term, we’re almost exhausted from the media depiction of people like him,” she explains.“In 2015-16, we kept witnessing people parodying him, and it seemed like there was no actual criticism except around how ridiculous he was instead of how dangerous that actually is.”

Elif is correct; so much time was spent mocking Trump instead of figuring out why a man like him would be taken seriously in the first place. In the case of Bong-Joon Ho’s Kenneth Marshall, he’s a failed politician-turned-businessman leading a space exploration to repopulate what they believe to be a barren planet. He does this by taking on board his loyal followers, people needing work and those desperate to leave Earth for good (such as Mickey). However, the over-the-topness of Ruffalo’s performance left me feeling exhausted more than anything else. A similar sentiment has been expressed for Black Mirror, which spent most of the 2010s satirising our growing dependence on technology to great success, only to now feel more like reality than some faraway future. Perhaps the same can be said for characters like Marshall. No longer do we feel as if this is an impossible turning point for modern democracies; instead, we’ve been slowly accepting a new reality wherein liberalism was never really able to protect us from fascism. How does one effectively satirise the everyday when the most ludicrous headlines are thrown in our faces 24/7 directly through our phones? 

I’d argue that it’s the subtlety of fascism that needs to be explored more than anything else, and in the case of Mickey 17, Kenneth Marshall’s wife, Ylfa Marshall (Toni Collette), nails the landing. Ylfa’s control of her husband, in tangent with her obvious domesticity, is a scary sight. As film critic and programmer Jannat Suleman points out, men like Trump and Marshall can make fascism feel like a far-away concept that’s large and idiotic, but women like Ylfa bring it back into our homes. “It’s subtly with her portrayal, even when she’s doing something as small as giving Marshall validation or making sauces. She’s in such a strange position of hierarchy where she’s aligned with the regime and everyday activities. It’s very normative.” 

Part of this portrayal includes Ylfa’s costume, which includes her flamboyant-coloured blouses and long painted nails. She, like her husband, has a fake tan, along with a tinge of what’s now deemed ‘Republican makeup’, and a blonde bob, which somehow must be getting regular bleach touch-ups in the middle of space. It would be easy to argue that her dedication to keeping up appearances is tied to her husband’s desire for her always to look presentable. If Marshall is Trump, then surely Ylfa is Melania, a doting, desirable, yet often quiet figure supporting from the sidelines. However, that’s far from the case in Mickey 17, where Bong–Joon Ho instead chooses to empower Ylfa. After a disastrous attempt to test fake meat on an unsuspecting Mickey, Kenneth makes a brash decision to execute him on the floor of his living quarters. Ylfa momentarily stops her husband, not because she sympathises with Mickey or views her husband’s choice as cruel—but because blood stains on her Persian rug would be a pain to wash out. Moments such as these, along with her character’s costuming and makeup, point to distinct social signifiers that place Ylfa directly at odds with her husband’s pseudo-citizens, particularly the women fated to become nothing but future incubators for ‘superior people’ once the ship finds a planet to colonise. When told by a security guard that he views her as nothing but a uterus, Ylfa immediately defends her husband and rephrases his proposal of forced birth as a perfectly rational, even feminist, choice to make.

If Ylfa’s characterisation sounds familiar, you may have encountered the online surge of conservative influencers who espouse the same ideals via the ‘trad wife’. These influencers have rules for thee and not for me, which has become the tentpole of their political ideology. Through wealth and access, women like Ylfa present their aesthetic choice (often resembling a pre-women’s rights America) as the most natural thing a woman could do. Utilising their lifestyle blogs and social media accounts, they subtly promote their white nationalistic views whilst ultimately never having to face the same burden of their political choices as poor women and women of colour. While they aren’t entirely free from patriarchy, their cage is brandished in gold instead of rusted metal. Unlike Ylfa, the rest of the women aboard the spaceship wear identical grey shirts or stretchy grey long-sleeved tops. There’s minimal hair styling and makeup. It should be noted that although Marshall’s philosophy touts a “new pure legacy” for humanity, women are ethnically diverse—such as in the case of the female lead of the film and Mickey’s love interest Nasha (Naomi Ackie)—they still have similar body types so as not to stray too far from the ideal figure of womanhood. Obviously, not all on board align themselves with Marshall’s vision of pureness; for Mickey, it was an opportunity to escape a worse fate on Earth. For others, such as Nasha, it’s a job like any other, and for the scientists experimenting on Mickey, it’s a way to further their research to save humanity. Regardless of why one may be on board, the fact remains that by opting in, they’re aiding what ultimately is meant to become a nationalistic fantasy. Perhaps there lies the crux of the film: what choices are available when everything around you crumbles? 

Perhaps my feelings about Mickey 17’s use of allegory would be different if it had been released when it was initially due in 2024, a year before Trump’s second term. Maybe Marshall would seem less of a tiring figure and more of a lesson from the past. Maybe Toni Collette’s character would become a more significant talking point, but we’ll never know because that’s showbiz. Regardless, the fact that Bong Joon Ho was able to release his final cut without studio interference for a film explicitly about defeating a fascist entity that so closely resembles our current political landscape is a small win. Especially when we think of the current rightward shift within film studios, not to mention the lack of greenlighting impacting Hollywood giants such as  Michael Bay and James Cameron, let alone indie filmmakers and filmmakers from non-English speaking countries. 

As Sociology PhD student Christiana Ajai-Thomas tells me, the most crucial part of Mickey 17 is its ability to examine how trapped we all feel within our societal roles and ourselves. “In Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he argues that we live in a solipsist society, and this film takes that concept to the extreme. What if those feelings inside of you were externalised? What would then happen?”  Would we ignore it like Mickey until it’s too late, aid and abet like Ylfa or instead, realise early on where we’re heading and choose not to let history repeat itself? I’ll leave that decision up to you.