Multiple Choice: Mickey 17 and the Disposable Self

The first time Mickey Barnes cracks open his eyes after being liquefied by alien hail, he mutters: “Every time I died… they just printed me out again.” 

Mickey 17 (2025) adapts Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7 into a dark workplace parable. Robert Pattinson’s Mickey is an Expendable—a colonist whose consciousness uploads into a fresh body every time he’s fatally mauled, frozen, or otherwise inconvenienced. The seventeenth copy returns from a supposedly lethal mission to find an aggressive replacement (Mickey 18) already in his bunk. Hijinks, horror, and identity crises ensue.

The film works because it never treats cloning as sterile sci‑fi tech. Instead, Bong turns it into an anthropology experiment on meaning, hierarchy, and the stubborn animal called “self.”

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Body Double, Mind Puzzle

When Mickey 18 snarls at his predecessor—“You’re an Expendable. You’re here to be expended.” —he isn’t just parroting corporate jargon; he’s voicing a brutal evolutionary logic. From a colony’s viewpoint, redundancy equals resilience. In nature, ants sacrifice hundreds of workers to defend a queen because the gene pool, not the individual, is what must endure.

Yet humans aren’t ants. Our sense of self rides on three fragile threads: continuity (I remember yesterday), agency (I act, therefore I am), and social recognition (others call me by my name). Cloning slices all three threads thin. Behavioral biologists would call Mickey a “biological cul‑de‑sac”: he can’t pass genes, history, or even legal identity onward. Psychiatric fallout follows—think depression on an existential overdose.

Bong stages that fallout in a throwaway gag that lingers: a medical console shows Mickey’s cumulative “Death Count,” like a loyalty program nobody wants to top. The laugh curdles because we intuit what neuroscientists confirm—re‑encoding traumatic memory en masse hammers the amygdala, leaving each new Mickey jumpier and more dissociated than the last.

Hierarchy on Ice

Class is the film’s hidden ice shelf. Regular crew call Mickey “Print‑Out,” echoing Wilkerson’s idea of caste as an invisible scaffolding that tells people where to stand. The colony stratifies:

• Leadership caste: governors who never leave the heated dome.
  

• Skilled caste: engineers who risk frostbite but not death.
  

• Disposable caste: Mickey and the janitorial androids, dying so the others don’t.
  

Anthropologists would note how the colony uses ritual to keep that hierarchy humming. Mickey’s “Reinstatement Ceremony” involves a perfunctory hand stamp and a pep talk—corporate liturgy that grants him just enough dignity to keep volunteering. Sapolsky reminds us that stress hormones spike hardest in low‑status primates who almost have agency but not quite; no wonder Mickey’s cortisol graph looks like seismic activity.

When Copies Collide

The plot’s powder keg is two clones alive at once. Evolutionarily, duplicates are bad news; identical niche, limited resources. Mickey 18’s instinct to eradicate Mickey 17 mirrors the way identical male lions fight littermates for pride dominance. One Mickey even jokes, “Natural selection’s got an asterisk now, huh?” Mild humor, meet lethal stakes.

Psychiatry adds another layer: folie à deux becomes folie à deux bodies, one mind. Each clone claims to be the real “I”—a tug‑of‑war over autobiographical memory. Cognitive scientists call memory a “self‑simulation engine.” If two engines run the same program on different hardware, which earns the titleholder? Bong doesn’t answer; he lets the absurdity bloom until even the audience feels ontologically seasick.

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Touch, Taste, Matter

Bong grounds all the metaphysics in sensory slapstick. A standout scene shows Mickey 17 devouring a jelly‑bean colored protein bar, realizing—mid‑chew—that it’s recycled human biomass. He gags while muttering, “Our entire life is a punishment.” 
Gross‑out humor aside, the moment rewires our empathy circuits: taste and disgust sit in the insula, the same brain region that lights up for moral disgust. By making Mickey ingest the colony’s literal body count, Bong forces his conscience—and ours—to surface.

The Colony as Cortex

Zoom out and the ice base itself functions like a cortical map. Command tower → prefrontal control. Hydroponics → limbic nourishment. Expendable Bay → the amygdala’s fear circuit, firing every time a clone awakens screaming. Bong uses tight corridors and blinking LEDs as neural metaphors: information travels down myelinated hallways, synapses spark, but the system only “thinks” because expendables keep dying to gather data outside. If the colony were a brain, Mickey would be nociception—the pain receptor hitting the ice so the cortex can learn without risking vital tissue. Pain, in this setup, is literally outsourced.

Humor as Homeostasis

Bong spices dread with gallows humor: Mickey quips about “punch‑card immortality” while stapling his own death report. Laughter releases endorphins, blunting stress. Watching clones joke about their demise feels wrong and right—much like ER nurses trading macabre jokes to stay sane. Humor here isn’t decoration; it’s an evolved coping tool keeping Mickey’s psyche from thermal runaway.

Relationships in the Reprint Age

The film’s unexpected warmth comes from Mickey’s budding romance with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a hydro‑engineer who’s tired of “new car smell” clones. Their first kiss is awkward; Mickey worries he’s version 17.5 after a mid‑date update. Yet the relationship underscores an evolutionary truth: bonds anchor identity. The more Nasha sees Mickey as irreplaceable, the more he feels like a singular being again. Love turns fungible flesh into someone specific.

When Mickey 18 threatens that bond, jealousy surges. That emotion, wired for mate‑guarding in primates, becomes a literal fight with oneself. Mickey battling his clone in an ice tunnel is part mating ritual, part autoimmune disorder—the self attacking duplicated self.

Can a Printed Man Matter?

By the finale, Mickey 17 confronts the governor with a simple plea: “Let me choose when I’m done.” Autonomy, not immortality, is the prize. Behavioral biology backs him up: organisms thrive when they retain some control over stressors. Rats with a working escape lever show less ulceration than those without, even if neither lever nor no‑lever rats can stop the shocks. Mickey wants a lever.

The colony reluctantly retires the Expendable program, proving that a disposable man can still bend the arc of policy. Meaning, in the end, comes not from lasting forever but from making a dent once—even if a dozen copies stand behind you in line.