Article“I’m still good meat!”
In Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson’s Mickey is almost indignant that the bug-like aliens on the icy planet Niflheim aren’t devouring him with relish. He fears his “meat” isn’t any good.
The scene sums up the existential angst at the heart of Boon Jong Ho’s sci-fi satire: are humans more than just meat?
Mickey has more reason than most to be worried. As the film begins, he’s an “Expendable” who, desperate to flee loan sharks on earth, agreed to become a Kwik Kopy human who can be reprinted, on demand, from reconstituted organic matter and viscera. More Spam than man, Mickey, who is onto his 17th reprinting, knows first-hand that his lives will be nasty, brutish, and short.
Especially since he’s part of an interstellar expedition to settle a far-flung world. The film’s resident billionaire-megalomaniac-attention-seeking-politician – yes, you’re meant to think of a real-life equivalent – aspires to make Niflheim “a pure white planet full of superior people”. Both progress and these imperial ambitions, however, require a ready-made sacrifice for the greater good.
Enter Mickey. Need to test the devastating effects of cosmic radiation, or the efficacy of vaccines combatting viruses on Niflheim? Mickey’s your human lab rat. If he dies, another copy of him can be run off, no problem.
In a poignant moment, a reprinted Mickey looks unnerved as he stares at his hand that in the last scene got severed and then floated off into space before he died. You might think that knowing he’ll live again might eliminate his fear of dying, that losing a limb is no great loss since it’ll be restored upon reprinting. That’s not the case for Mickey.
Even if “progress” makes mincemeat of him, he feels he’s more than just meat.
Mickey 17 briefly references the ethical and legal obstacles challenging the expendability of people. But one character soon pipes up: “the abomination” – i.e. Expendables like Mickey – might, they point out, be used for “common economic benefit”.
With that, Mickey 17’s not so far-off future – the film is set in 2054 – merges with our own times. Sure, no outright class of Expendables exists today, but the film takes to extremes the logic of increasingly common business practices today that instrumentalise human life or treat it as a means to some other end. Usually profit.
Recall that it was in the industrial era of old that factory workers first became referred to as “factory hands” – a job description still used today. When operating machinery, workers were required to perform often repetitive movements – pulling a lever at regular intervals, say. It’s no surprise, then, that eventually, the job title emphasised the limb that was instrumental to the job and that became the stand-in for the entire worker. Not the human in their fullness, now subsumed into the alienating logic of the machine.
Along with that reductive picture of the person goes a non-commitment and non-obligation to their full humanity and dignity. Mickey’s hand is cut loose, a factory hand might be let go. No big loss.
Abandoned is the notion that the human might be far more than the sum of its parts.
Contemporary work practices in multi-national corporations seem to double down on the instrumentalization of human life. It’s not that long ago that Foxconn, the Chinese mega factory that for many years exclusively manufactured Apple products, installed nets around the base of its buildings to foil suicide attempts from workers in despair at exploitative, inhumane working conditions.
And, in recent years, Amazon and Woolworths have been criticised for practicing “digital Taylorism”, where surveillance technology tracks and rationalises workers’ physical movements to make them work harder and faster, treating them like machines whose operations are standardised, predictable, replicable, and – here’s some cold business logic for you – infinitely replaceable. In this schema, the human is a copy of a copy of a copy of a bundle of capacities and resources that can be put to work for profits.
These workplace practices aren’t the stuff of futuristic dystopias, but business as usual for the corporations that are trying their hardest to become indispensable – read, the opposite of expendable – to us in our everyday lives.
When profit runs the show, the human is not a someone who is an end in and of themselves, but an expendable, useful something – in which case, it really matters if we’re good meat.
It’s unfortunate that Mickey 17 has no time for transcendent claims about human life, dismissed as “religious blah blah blah” in Pattinson’s mumbly voiceover. Instead, religion is dismissed as mere manipulation, with the billionaire-politician making empty references to God’s blessing on his life, or his desire that people “go forth and multiply” in the “promised land” of the new colony. The film’s critique of religion is blunt but fair, given how baldly Christianity has been politicised in recent times.
But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sure, religion, thinned out, is ripe for manipulation. But “thick” religion, full of moral force, is no one’s mug. It’s also the source of a compelling answer to the film’s fear, evident under all the jokey fun: that the human is ultimately expendable, there to be used and discarded at will.
For there is no stranger idea in the world than the Christian claim that all human beings are made in the image of God, regardless of wealth, ability, status – or whether or not they’re useful or profitable. This bestows an unimaginable, irreplaceable worth on all. In the Christian world of meaning, there is no such thing as an expendable someone.
Actually, scratch that: the only expendable someone happens to be God himself. This is an even more counterintuitive Christian tenet: that God cast his lot with the dead meat of the world, to identify with humanity at its lowest, to demonstrate that no despised or rejected class of person was beneath his loving concern.
What you do to the least of them, you do to me.
These words of Jesus often seem sentimental – “oh bless, he cares for the little ones”. But they’re better read as a safety warning that cautions against the human-as-meat mindset: treat people with care, because God identifies with their plight and cares for them. Divine concern scoops up everyone, even the ones no one remembers and who are regarded as expendable.
To the cynic, this seems lame, a sentimental tale of human value, and completely irrelevant to us today. But even in our apparently disenchanted times, from which all trace of the sacred has been scrubbed, Eugene McCarraher argues that the “death of God” simply hands us over to another. The only “god” left is Mammon, he says, the almighty dollar before which all kneel, and which becomes the arbiter of the real and the good.
Absent Christian claims about the gobsmacking value of all people, we’re left casting about for measures with which to judge the worth, value, and expendability – or not – of human life. The scales of the market are within easy reach.
Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and the author of Achievement Addiction.