Ethical, theological, and political issues are salient in the film, Mickey 17 (2025), which is about Mickey Barnes, a character who is repeatedly cloned on a space-ship and on a distant planet. The one-way trip alone takes over four years, during which time Mickey is tasked with dangerous tasks because when he dies, another clone is simply made. A mistake is made when the 18th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17th is still alive; they are “multiples,” which is a crime for a theological reason. I contend that reason is erroneous, as is the political, ethical, and theological regime that undergirds clones being expendable.
In a flashback to back on Earth,
a man who represents an evangelical Christian perspective urges lawmakers to
criminalize multiples even on other planets because a soul cannot have two
bodies. Such a claim turns the soul into something imaginary—an abstraction
only. In the movie, that no two clones of a person have the same personality suggests
that they do not have the same soul. They make different choices and can even
have different values, as when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are at odds on whether
to kill Timo, a pilot who had been in business with the original Mickey. Both
clones have the memories of the original Mickey, yet the two clones have very
different attitudes towards Timo. Mickey 18 is more aggressive than Mickey 17,
and yet the former decides in the end to sacrifice his life to kill Kenneth Marshall,
an autocrat who fixes elections by the Assembly in order to stay in power on
the mission. Furthermore, that Kai Katz prefers Mickey 17 romantically while
Nasha is really turned on sexually by Mickey 18, and even that Nasha wants both
clones for herself as a three-some sexually implies that the two clones are
different people. In effect, they are identical twins, and even such twins do
not share the same soul. Although not clones by any means, my brothers and I
could not be more different from each other. That the clones of Mickey differ
suggests that the cloning “printing” doesn’t replicate the DNA exactly.
That Mickey 18 is so different than Mickey 17 immediately after being “printed”
means that the differences cannot be due to environmental factors. Therefore,
the theological argument that two clones should not be alive simultaneously
because they share the same soul fails.
The argument that multiples is
against the “natural order” also fails because cloning itself is not natural.
So if multiples are objectionable theologically for this reason, then cloning should
be illegal not only on Earth, but also on colonies on other planets. Furthermore,
the argument used that human cloning is a sin, but it can be sued by humans on
spacecrafts and on other planets is a non-starter, for a sin is a sin, no
matter where it is being committed. The
argument seems to be that if the sin takes place far away from the rest of us, and
if the sin has unintentional beneficial consequences, which Augustine claimed
of sin in general (for otherwise, our species would have self-destructed), then
consequentialism trumps the duty not to sin. In the utilitarian ethical
principle of the greatest pleasure to the most people, the suffering of the
clones of Mickey can be said to be ethical because the clones’ dangerous tasks
make it possible for everyone on the ship to survive. That the same rationale
could ethically justify the Nazi’s concentration camps and eastward expansion strongly
suggests that utilitarianism fails if the distribution of suffering is
concentrated within a collective.
Just as the ethics of cloning
for use in dangerous tasks is ultimately answered by blowing up the cloning
machine at the end of the film, so too is organized religion eschewed. It is
very significant that Kenneth Marshall accidently lets out the secret that the
company behind the mission is in fact a church, and that the point of the
colony is to create “the one and only pure colony planet,” meaning that the human
inhabitants are genetically pure.
The religious auspices make
use of political autocracy disguised as democracy. It is no accident that at
one point, Kenneth and the audience of his show give each other the Nazi raised-arm
salute. Kenneth’s religious hypocrisy extends to his willingness to have the
clones suffer even apart from in performing dangerous tasks, such as breathing
in a virus in the planet’s air so a vaccine could be made so everyone could venture
outside without dying. The callousness of the “church, I mean company,” towards
suffering is matched by Kenneth’s willingness to subvert elections to keep
himself in power on the planet. That political resistance develops suggests
that it is a natural consequence of unchecked power being exercised on a
captive population that cannot leave. In the end, Mickey 18 blows himself up because
Kenneth would also die. Kenneth had strapped bombs to Mickey 18 with impunity,
even though the Assembly was in theory democratic rather than autocratic. It is
significant that after Kenneth, legitimate trials began and even Nasha, whom
Kenneth unilaterally declared to be a criminal, is elected to the Assembly.
The republic wins in the end, whereas
the church and its prelate/dictator are discredited. Although in this respect the
film has a happy ending, for the good guys win in the climax, what the film
says about the hostility and even aggression that is in human nature even under
the auspices of religion is a severe indictment of the species. This indictment
is perhaps most revealed in the severe suffering that many of the Mikey clones
must endure on the orders of other humans.
Empirically, the Milgrim experiment at Yale in 1968 found that 40 percent of the people in the study thought they were giving severe electric shocks on other people even though those people had been screaming at the previous level of shock, and just for being wrong in answering questions! Ironically, at the same university nearly 60 years later, and fifteen years after I had finished my studies there, two police departments, one under a city government and the other under the non-profit Yale Corporation, plus Yale’s proto-police security guards, kept up constant and overlapping “presence” on and around campus; in fact, by 2025, Yale’s police unit had accepted the FBI’s invitation to Yale to participate in counter-terrorism tactics used on students. The risk of autocratic passive-aggression even just to intimidate by an overwhelming “presence” as a deterrent was real where the film was screened (and where the director, Bong Joon Ho, would speak on May 5, 2025). The tactic itself evinces not only a very negative assumption about the human nature of Yalies (and local residents), but also reveals the sordid nature of those people using the tactics. In fact, the “overkill” in “presence,” which compromised the otherwise relaxed atmosphere on a college campus, can itself be viewed as hostile and autocratic, not to mention disrespectful of students and academia more generally. Turning around, and, as I had to do quite unexpectedly, having to walk off a sidewalk on campus while talking with students and faculty because a Yale police car was driving on the sidewalk on a weekday morning with red and blue lights on, and even headlights blaring, even though the car was only on a patrol, is at the very least uncomfortable and definitely antithetical to an academic atmosphere, where shows of the threat of might does not make right.
It is interesting, in terms of
the theological-political nexus in the film, that Yale was founded by Christian
Calvinist ministers who had been at Harvard but would not tolerate the
Unitarians having any influence. The dichotomy of the elect (saved) and
the rest of humanity in Calvinism can easily result in repression of the latter,
as if the rest of us were sub-human and thus needing to be constantly watched (which is a form of passive aggression). In the film, clones are viewed as such by the elite of
the “church,” who are not bothered by their respective consciences for
inflicting much suffering on the Mickeys even beyond that which results from
the dangerous tasks for the good of the whole. Whether in the fictional film or
on the ground at Yale, where the movie was screened and the director would soon
thereafter give a talk, power without being checked can easily be used by human
nature in very unethical and anti-spiritual ways.
The question from the movie is not whether each clone has his own soul, for in choosing to sacrifice his life, even Mickey 18 has a good soul, but, rather, whether Kenneth and his wife have souls, and even whether their “church” is at all religious or spiritual rather than a basis for autocracy being used to conduct medical experiments on clones and construct a genetically pure colony, although presumably with an underclass of servants who obviously would not be treated well, as they would not be among a Calvinist elect.
