Mickey 17

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 18^th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17^th 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.

Yale security and police stationed outside of the classroom building where the film was screened.

With lights glaring, a Yale police presence "screens" outside after the screening of the film.

More yellow, blue, and red lit-up stationary "patrols" nearby after the film on April 19, 2025

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.

The Conversation

Winner of the Palme d’Or (golden palm) prize in the Cannes Film Festival for 1974, The Conversation (1974) was written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola; it was a film that he really wanted to make, whereas he had made The Godfather (1972) to make money. In both films, business comes to be something more than business. In The Godfather, Sonny tells Michael not to take being hit in the jaw by the corrupt police captain McCluskey personally. That Sollozzo expects Tom Hagen to objectively present a business proposal to Sonny after Sollozzo has had the Godfather gunned down with five shots and still he survived just shows how ludicrous it is to suppose that the consequences of the murderous tactics of that business would not be taken personally. Even so, the moral dimension does not enter into the considerations. In contrast, Harry, who runs a small business recording third-party conversations for clients in The Conversation, gradually comes to take his work personally in a moral sense. Whereas the murders in The Godfather are personal in the sense vengeance being part of the motivations, those in The Conversation are personal in the sense of moral responsibility being increasingly felt by Harry. Accompanying this realization of guilt, however, is a recognition of the extent of surveillance on him, and this too changes him. If the problem were just being morally responsible for what clients do with his tapes, then he could solve the problem by doing something else for a living. Being a target of surveillance himself, however, is something that he cannot change. Even in tearing his apartment apart, he does not find the “bug,” or listening device that his client’s assistant is using. By implication, we can reflect on just how much we are watched in the modern world—that is to say, how much the world in which we live has come to be characterized by surveillance. I contend that we are largely oblivious to it because it has encroached so gradually that its incrementalism is difficult to detect.

Harry repeatedly finds his privacy invaded throughout the film. He arrives at his apartment and finds that his landlady has left a birthday gift for him just inside the apartment. Concerned, he picks up the phone. “I thought I had the only key,” he tells her. “Well, what emergency could possibly . . . alright.” She has undoubtedly said, in case there is a fire, but would she really enter an apartment on fire? “I’d be perfectly happy to have all my personal things burned up in a fire because I don’t have anything personal, noting of value . . . no, nothing personal except my keys, which I would really like to have the only copy of.” The notion that she would enter his apartment during a fire to save his belongings is of course ludicrous. She would be on firmer ground citing a plumbing (water) emergency because of possible damage to the apartment below. Then he notices that she has written his age on the card accompanying the gift. “How did you know its my birthday?” he asks. She undoubtedly tells him that she had seen his birth date in his mail. Another invasion! “As of today my mail will go to a post office box, with a combination [lock] and no keys.” He is reacting to this extreme because her excuses don’t hold water, and thus support his view that she is abusing her authority as a property-owner. Anyone who has rented a room in a house being lived in by its owner knows that without any moral reservations, the roommate can change into the boss.

Of course, Harry exempts himself from the immorality of invading other people’s privacy. Asked by his assistant Stan, who is played by the actor who had played Fredo in The Godfather, about what the man and woman on the tape are saying, Harry dismisses Stan’s claim that curiosity is simply part of human nature. “I don’t know anything about human nature. I don’t know anything about curiosity. That’s not part of what I do,” Harry insists. Furthermore, what his client does with that tape is none of Harry’s business—it is literally not part of his business. In the confessional at his church, however, Harry admits to having some moral misgivings. “I’ve been involved in some work that can be used to hurt these two young people. This happened to me before; people were hurt because of my work. I’m afraid it could happen again.” But then his denial quickly returns for its last stand. “I was in no way responsible. I’m not responsible,” he tells the priest. Well, people were indeed hurt. The president of a labor union had thought that his accountant had talked, so the accountant, his wife, and kid were found naked, tied up in their house, with the hair on their bodies gone and the heads found in different areas of the house. Bernie, one of Harry’s competitors, reminds Harry of this during a post-convention party at Harry’s business. Harry blurts out, “Had nothing to do with me; I just turned on the tapes.” He insists that what his clients do with the tapes in their own business, but we know from Harry’s confession that the line of ethical responsibility is not so clear to Harry himself.

At the convention, Bernie had placed a microphoned pen in Harry’s suit pocket. Bernie records a conversation that Harry has with Stan, who is now working for Bernie, and a conversation that Harry has at the party with a woman who works for Bernie. At the party, with everyone listening, Bernie plays the emotionally intimate, and thus private, conversation that Harry has just had with the woman—the same woman who would steal the tape of the current project from Harry after sleeping with him that night. Bernie does not understand why Harry is so angry at him, and Harry does not indicate any awareness of this extent of his competitor’s invasiveness. These suggest that the extent of invasiveness in the society is more serious than even the practitioners realize. At the party, Bernie tells Harry, “There’s no moment between human beings that I cannot record.” This statement should be chilling for all of us.

After Harry realizes that Bernie’s employee has taken the tapes that Harry has been holding back from his current client, presumably out of fear that the client would kill his cheating wife, Harry calls Martin, his client’s assistant. “You don’t have my telephone number,” Harry says when leaving a message for Martin. When Martin calls back anyway, he tells Harry, “We prepare a full dossier of everyone who comes in contact with the director. You know that means we’ve been watching you.” Well, it doesn’t follow that having a dossier on someone also entails constant surveillance.

Fearing that the director will kill his wife and her lover, who works for the director, Harry gets a hotel room next to the one where the wife and her lover were scheduled to meet. He witnesses a murder there, and goes back to his apartment in fear, where Martin calls. “We know that you now. For your own sake, don’t get involved any further.” Harry then hears his own music playing on the phone, which suggests that Martin has a listening device planted in the apartment. Harry tears it apart looking for the bug, but he can’t find it.

The message of the film goes beyond the moral lesson that Harry is indeed morally responsible for what his clients do with his tapes, for without them the harm would not take place. Interwoven with this realization in Harry is also his gradual realization that his own privacy has been so utterly violated. Both realizations characterize his character-arc.

I submit that we, like Harry, are not aware of the extent to which we are subject to surveillance when we are in public. Indeed, the trend, at least in the U.S. since 2001, has been almost certainly been in the direction of increasing surveillance rather than more liberty from it. Just as Harry comes to realize that his own business activity has an ethical dimension, so too we may come to realize that being watched involves a harm, and so the perpetrators can be culpable ethically.

One example of unethical surveillance is the flawed theory that by intimidating people by maintaining a nearly constant visible stationary presence, whether on a street or in the produce section of a grocery store, police can use deter people from committing crimes. At what cost though? The increasing trend points to the absence of a check on the municipal employees with guns. Freedom from intimidation, and, moreover, from fear, especially in a society replete with instances of police brutality, is arguably an important part of political freedom in a democracy. The gradual depletion of that part of liberty can easily go unnoticed because the change is so gradual.

Receptionists in business offices are gradually replaced by security guards, who not only must check us into a corporate or bank building, but also check us out! In some cases, we can’t leave the building unless we stop by security. This becomes even more questionable legally where the security guards are replaced by police, who by law cannot stop anyone without probable cause, at least in the United States. It is in that country that I think the trajectory is perhaps especially evident. Security guards at the main doors of a grocery store get replaced by police, and they start wearing bullet-proof vests, and then they stand in the produce section as if customers should be shot if they put a cucumber in a pocket.

Security guards at (even small) colleges and universities have been replaced by, or, even worse, supplemented by private police departments, and those police employees can patrol off-campus to enforce the regulations of academic administrators, who don’t have democratic legitimacy. Yale is a case in point. The implication is that private organizations, in the case of private colleges and universities, have municipal police power. The sad thing is that students and faculty get used to being constantly observed, and even come to be oblivious to it. Yet the gradual psychological effects from the passive aggression, culture of paranoid distrust, and routinization of emergency lights on security and police cars that are stationary on a campus even on class days take their toll. In the film, Harry is surprised at the extent to which he has been under surveillance by non-state actors. Faculty, students, and alumni on campus may similarly be so oriented to their tasks, teaching and learning ideas, that the innocents are oblivious to the extent that they are being recorded by cameras and (yet, as if the cameras were not sufficient) watched by security and private police employees. Perhaps university stakeholders should have a conversation with university administrators about the extent of surveillance as being antipodal to academic culture and atmosphere, and thus with the free exchange of novel ideas. 

Surveillance at Yale

Students in Yale's film classes think they are the voyeurs without realizing that there are cameras pointed at the seats! Even so, some egg thought having a security guard in the lobby was essential. Essentially paranoid.

 

As a student, I had taken the documentary seminar. As an alum, I put what I had learned to use, unobtrusively holding my phone-camera once I realized that a virulent security employee was continuously eyeing me as I was innocently leaving a film screening in December, 2023. 

Students being watched as they enter a classroom building

Excessive presence? What would a young student feel?

In September, 2023, that security guard followed me inside. Profiling alumni. Not a good fund-raising strategy for Yale!

The security employee who had followed me inside the building continued to follow me around, even eves-dropping when I was in an office! 

Students being watched on Old Campus; A manned Yale police car on a walkway; An undercover, hostile Yale policeman at a reception. Chill, Yale. 

Police-state 101. New course! Surveillance by Yale's private police employees (and security guards!) takes place even off-campus, in spite of an obvious lack of democratic legitimacy.

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed, namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is problematic.

The craft of acting lies precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character. Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary. That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion: qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

An ideology, such as one stemming from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1] In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.

I contend that delusion pertains to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2] The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and, relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.

I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.

Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g., being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types. One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different: race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with primarily.

Because each of us has several group identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.

In fact, the film shows actual television footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity as a woman and a mother.

Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly, as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification is not the only one in play.

To be sure, Mirren does a great job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity.  In a scene in which Golda is talking with Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup.  As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement, and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.

So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.

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1. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 22.