mickey, mickey, soderbergh, spy
elevated dorm-room existentialism in mickey 17 // soderbergh goes le carré in black bag
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, plus some seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. This week we’ve got Bong Joon-Ho’s long awaited Mickey 17 and Steven Soderbergh’s not-really-awaited-at-all Black Bag, two relatively normal movies that are probably showing right now at a theater near you. My greatest ambition is that I’ll get these newsletters out by Wednesday and hey look, I did it. Please enjoy.
What can we learn from Mickey 17 about life as it currently exists on planet Earth?
There are media-obsessed demagogues who put odd emphasises on certain consonants and overuse words like "magnificent."
There are men with unbound access to capital who would like to colonize outer space.
We tend to be unkind to and/or exploitative of people/things we do not understand.
Our comportment toward death generally defines our relationship with life.
The first three points are neither interesting nor interestingly presented in Mickey 17. What's left is the existential heart of Bong Joon-Ho’s long belated return, a premise that could have provided more than enough material for a feature-length film but instead gets overwhelmed - but not totally lost - in 137 minutes of sci-fi excess.
Mickey 17 is a space movie about a loser (Robert Pattinson) who joins a planetary colonization mission as an "expendable": a low-wage worker hired to complete unpleasant tasks that usually result in his death. Thanks to some gene-replication technology that the film mercifully doesn't explain, Mickey is reprinted after death to once again face the challenges of space travel. You can probably guess how many times this happens. Things go awry when Mickey 17, unbeknownst to his overlords, survives a mission and finds himself in bed with a fresh-off-the-presses Mickey 18.
Two Pattinsons should have been enough for one movie, but Bong Joon-Ho loads his film with all sorts of side plots that overwhelm his run time and force out some of the more interesting questions that he could have explored with this nutty scenario1. Instead of Pattinson/Pattinson antics we get giant roly polies, Mark Ruffalo doing Donald Trump, Toni Collette raving about sauce, and a lot of shots of Tim Key dressed up as a pigeon.
It’s all too much to chew on - but every once in awhile the nonsense cuts away and we get a chance to savor something meaningful. Take for instance the scene when the two Mickeys decide, for plot reasons, that they have to kill each other. Confronted with the possibility of yet another death, 17 tells 18:
"Till now, when I died, I was just, born again, you know? It felt like it was me, continuing on. But now, uh - once I die, it'll be over, for me. It'll be you, living on. You know what I mean?"
On a sci-fi level, this isn't interesting; there is a zero-percent chance that I will ever be replicated by a human printer. But existentially - I'm horrified by the negation of the present that my future self implies. I think about how many times I’ve betrayed the ideals I believed in when I was younger, how much my teenage self would hate the person I am now. I think of how much I hate the person I am when I'm tired, when I'm drunk, when I’m being too mean to people, when I’m being too nice to them. I think about how writing is the only way I can deal with the selves I don’t like, because writing lets me edit those selves out of existence. How many times will I run over these words so that I leave behind only the print-out that I want people to read? The draft you’re reading doesn’t care at all about all the pathetic previous drafts that it’s replaced.
Mickey 17 doesn't dwell in this space for very long; we move onto other queries, like, does loan debt still apply when you’re in space? or, what if you made sauce out of an alien? It's a shame - not because meeting your clone is an altogether original concept, but because it’s presented here in an accessible and nice-to-look-at movie, all the more compelling because we’ve got an actor as good as Pattinson to guide us through it.
If there's a beauty in Mickey 17, it's Bong’s celebration of survival amidst political insanity, grounded in a reminder that we can only be the version of ourselves that we currently are - and that all the variants, even the ones that prove the failures of the present, mean nothing. Survival is doing what we can with the crappy version of ourselves that exist. Maybe the sweetest thing about this movie is just how dumb Mickey is. Pattinson gives us a complete loser of a protagonist, and he puts every muscle of his beautiful face into celebrating the individuality of that loserdom. If we're going to save the world, we have to be ready to trust a bunch of losers to do it. Which means that we're going to have to trust the most loser versions of ourselves. Mickey 17 could have done a better job of getting there, but if that's where it ends up then it's pretty hard to hate.
My patience for Steven Soderbergh is extremely low, especially since he broke boundaries in 2017 by becoming the first man to come out of retirement in order to put out whatever crosses through his head. Like all sane people, I think Ocean’s Eleven is about as fun as humans ought to be allowed to have, but beyond that I think his stuff - especially the recent stuff - stinks. Regardless I found myself looking forward to Black Bag. Pulling off a spy thriller requires some work, so at the very least Steven’s going to have to do something other than play around with a stupid new camera for 90 minutes.
And it works! Black Bag is the exact sort of thriller we deserve but never get: smart, star-powered, pretty, short. The premise is simple: Fassbender plays a British intelligence agent, George Smiley, who needs to suss out a leak in the NCSC; the challenge is that the top suspect is his wife (Blanchett). If this sounds like a John Le Carré knock-off, you’d be right, and if that sounds like a great time then you’re in for one.
Soderbergh is still putzing around with his stupid lenses. He's still getting the same soundtrack out of David Holmes. He still dresses every room like it’s an Anthropologie catalog. But Black Bag adds a screenplay from veteran hack David Koepp to the mix, which shouldn’t be good news but somehow results in a taut 90-minute plot complete with reasonably clever double-entendre, believable techno-babble, and a lie detector sequence that I’d almost describe as masterful.
Contemporary spy movies seem to be about increasingly aged men jumping from one vehicle to the other. This is a shame, because the joy of a vintage espionage thriller is the rush of figuring out what the heck the plot is. Black Bag follows the old model by throwing out only the barest bones of exposition before offering, piece by piece, tiny glimpses into what’s going on and why. To describe the pieces in writing would be the equivalent of describing the physical mechanics of Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff. The whole point is to see it and to feel the rush of landing it.2
It’s romantic to think about a world when novels like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy were best sellers. Reading Le Carré books makes me feel about the average intelligence of the 1970s reader the way I feel whenever I think about how everyone in England knows how to do cryptic crossword puzzles. How did people read this stuff? You have to be a genius to get through it. Black Bag is a perfect route back into MENSA, just smart enough to make you work without having to pause and take notes. Imagine a world where the Broccolis had bought the rights to Le Carré’s literary output instead of Ian Fleming’s - what a refined and hyper-intelligent society we’d be if only we got something like this every couple years.3
What sort of propaganda are we watching here? The most curious things about Black Bag is that, despite it’s extremely contemporary vibe, it’s still set in a Britain-vs.-Russia international conflict. Part of that is the Le Carré talking, but part of it must stem from the difficulties of writing a spy vs. spy story in a time when geopolitics is so convolutely evil that all fiction can do is throw up its hands and declare that nothing makes sense. Does the spy thriller have an obligation to inform, an expectation that it’s going to provide some insight into the global situation? And does rooting for an NCSC agent ultimately mean that I’m cheering for the surveillance state?
I don’t think so, because I don't think spy movies are actually about politics. They're about gossip, the undercurrents of deceit and unkindness that spring up between people who know each other too well and are best hashed out over dinner parties. Black Bag's contribution to the rich legacy of English dinner party scenes is a psychotic parlor game, invented by Fassbender’s character, in which each guest makes a New Year’s resolution for the person to their right. It’s up there with the scene in The Idiot when they play the "confess the worst thing you've ever done" game. Is the game about weeding out the leak, or is it a host raising the stakes on what would otherwise be a boring dinner party? Maybe this is the question we should have been asking for the entire Cold War.
I wish I had the malice to invite people over to my house and make them do this sort of thing. Thank goodness we’ve created space for beautiful people to carry through with it on camera. Is Black Bag morally good? Probably not. Is it about as much fun as a person can have at the movies? I think so. Soderbergh has earned his pension.
Thanks for reading this week’s installment of life is disappointing. If you found this review slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, I guess pledging me money, or (probably most usefully to everyone involved) subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. You can even send it to your spam. But more importantly, go see these movies! I guarantee you will have a better time at the theater than staying at home and watching The Electric State. See you next week, probably with a review of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.
Really a lot of those questions are currently being answered by the Pattinson-focused fanfiction community. I won’t link - but the tag “mickey 17 bottom” is doing a lot of work on A03 right now.
As much as I’m praising Hoepp’s screenplay, you could easily make the case that it’s his fault for getting us here. His original Mission: Impossible is a completely stupid spy movie with a convoluted plot that only serves to bring about action scenes. No critic at the time of it’s release thought the plot made any sense (here’s a representative example). That didn’t stop it of course from setting the mold for the past 20 years of spy films. We seem to be happy now chowing down on nonsensical plots and recapping them verbatim, but I wonder if we took the time to think about how pointless they are that we’d realize how barren the thriller landscape has become - and maybe demand something better.
A couple days after Black Bag came out Matthew Macfadyen was announced as the next George Smiley in a new Carré-verse TV series. So maybe smarter days are ahead.