‘Good Meat’: Mickey 17’s Little Deaths
But sex—specifically recreational, playful, non-essential and maybe even politically ill-advised or frowned upon sex—is spoken of, thought of, cherished, and communicated through in Mickey 17 in a way that touts it as not just important, but a key aspect of existing.
In Mickey 17, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is the living embodiment of la petite mort — the little death. As an Expendable, Mickey’s job is, essentially, to constantly die. Mickey is hired for a colonizing trip to the fictional planet of Niflheim; he’s so desperate to escape being pursued by a murderous loan shark on Earth that he doesn’t even bother reading about what he’s signing up for. After being hired, Mickey’s selfhood, memories and all, are transferred to a brick-looking harddrive. Each time Mickey dies—either after a painful experiment or due the dangerous work he is asked to do—his body is “reprinted” and his selfhood is reuploaded into a fresh brain.
The non-Expendable members of the colonizing mission to Niflhelm frequently ask Mickey how it feels to die: sometimes in mockery and sometimes sheepishly. Mickey either doesn’t answer or says the obvious - that he doesn’t like it. Mickey is well-acquainted with the literal petite mort — he experiences many little deaths.
After a freefall into an icy crevasse, the seventeenth iteration of Mickey prepares to die as dinner for a pack of Creepers, the rollie pollie shaped aliens that populate Niflheim. Instead of eating him, the Creepers mysteriously carry him out of their den and back into the cold. Frustrated by their unwillingness to kill him (because for Mickey, the easiest way for him to return back to the ship and his girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), is to die), Mickey pleads with the Creepers as they retreat. His final attempt to coax them back is a shout of, “I’m good meat!”
Mickey is, indeed, good meat. To his employers, Mickey is put through the metaphorical—yet always fatal, and frequently painful—grinder unceasingly; part-lab rat and part-gruntwork extraordinaire, exposed to deadly radiation, viruses, human growth hormones, and untenable working conditions.
Mickey 17 doesn’t just implicitly understand, but states bluntly that to work to survive under late-stage capitalism is to die a thousand little deaths, to sit in endless spiritual and emotional petite morts. Your waking hours are spent feeling your precious time on Earth whittle away into the corporate-owned void while you conceal any political beliefs, personality traits, and emotions that are not aligned with keeping your job. And if your job also requires regular and/or intense manual labor, your time off could very well be filled with the painful reverberations of injuries or exhaustion acquired on the clock. In Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he asserts:
“The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
In the case of Mickey 17, one could say that the dead flesh (or the reborn, artificial flesh—Mickey’s body is printed out in full through a technological canal) is being converted into living labor. When at work — whether this work be manual labor or playing lab rat for a brutal, fatal virus — Mickey is usually apathetic and incurious about his various occupational tortures, sometimes to the point of appearing dopey. It’s hard to say if that’s just how he is, or if Mickey 17 is suggesting that to check out entirely is the only way to accept and maintain such a horrific job— a purposeful muting and shuffling away of any feelings at all about the immensely cruel, painful, and unfair nature of Mickey’s employment. Fisher would perhaps describe this as “reflexive impotence”, as he describes the state of modern youth in Capitalist Realism. Reflexive impotence is a state of being where one “[knows] things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it.”
Mickey, though, is not ambivalent about everything. He is also familiar with the figurative petite mort: the orgasm, and is driven greatly by his sexual desire for his girlfriend, Nasha. To Nasha, Mickey is “good meat” in the carnal sense. Mickey and Nasha love to have sex. Shortly after Nasha and Mickey first meet, a sex scene plays out that is intercut with Nifhelm’s expedition leader, the veneered and gelled Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and his acrylic-taloned, dye-blonde wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), making a speech to the troops in the cafeteria. As Kenneth and Ylfa espouse the importance of the troops saving their precious limited calories by refraining from sex, we see flashes of Nasha and Mickey having sex that is clearly not of the sort the Marshalls will ever approve of. This is sweaty, calorically-deteriorating, non-procreational sex: deep kissing, the implication of cunnilingus as Mickey kisses down Nasha’s parted thighs, a collection of sweaty embraces.
Crucially, though, Nasha and Mickey don’t just relish having sex, but it’s very concept: they love to think and talk about sex. At one point, the two laugh over one of their tablets — on screen is a collection of crude stick-figure drawings detailing their various attempted sexual positions. The first thing Nasha says to a reprinted Mickey is that she wants to perform a sex act they call “flying Nasha”. In their book Revolutionary Desires, Xuanlin Tham points to theorist Linda Williams’ assertion that we don’t just speak about sex, but “speak sex” itself. This is to say, Tham expands, that “our idea of sex and sexuality, what it can and cannot be, is structured by a vast array of interconnected, material and ideological factors” and thus goes beyond simply the physical act itself. Nasha and Mickey’s cherishing of sex, even in the face of political disapproval and limited essential resources like food and space, is striking. Gayle Rubin writes in her seminal essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” that “sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.” Mickey and Nasha embody this work.
I am not going to posit that Mickey 17 is a messianic rebirth of sex on screen, nor is this essay going to be touting the power of the actual content and form of Mickey 17’s sex scenes.
The scene I just described is brief — three or so quick flashes of Nasha and Mickey going at it. It’s sexy, but it’s not sustained enough to strike me meaningfully, bodily—much like the shots themselves, the sensation elicited is that of a firecracker snap. Minus a brief almost threesome between Nasha and two Mickeys later in the film, there is no more of the physical act of sex itself. To qualify a few flashes of skin and sex — sex that is also heterosexual and within the confines of a stable monogamous relationship — as a liberatory and radical return to erotic cinematic form feels overly-enthusiastic. This is instead a consideration of what it names to uphold a love of sex as something good, even fruitful.
But sex—specifically recreational, playful, non-essential and maybe even politically ill-advised or frowned upon sex—is spoken of, thought of, cherished, and communicated through in Mickey 17 in a way that touts it as not just important, but a key aspect of existing. What excites me about Mickey 17 is that it holds pleasurable sex as something that can be one of the most essential aspects of life, something that can be prioritized and cherished and something that can lead to political solutions, particularly as we lose more and more avenues for free pleasure.
After Mickey 17 survives the Creepers, he returns to the ship to discover that the crew has already printed a fresh Mickey—his eighteenth iteration. Nasha can instantly tell the difference between the two of them, just as she has been able to tell the difference between all previous Mickeys who vary in certain personality traits. Despite the fact that the existence of “multiples” (more than one of the same Expendable) is a violation which leads to an execution of the Expendable and a permanent deletion of their memory bank — the big death, as it were — Nasha is unconcerned, actually excited. Nasha is giddy with the sexual possibilities unfolding before her, shrugging off the Mickeys’ potential permanent obliteration, marking their respective numbers in lipstick on their bare chests, and immediately attempting to embark upon a threesome. More is better. An excess of Mickey, in all of his “good meat”, as it were, is good news.
The two Mickeys are opposites in some obvious senses — where Mickey 17 tends to be impassive about the hideous nature of his job and the manner in which it serves only to benefit a cartoonishly evil ruling class, Mickey 18 seems to have been infused with some of the spirit of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle—Mickey 18 is cold, calculated, and anti-establishment to the point of violence. When Nasha sizes up her new potential sexual bounty, Mickey 17 shyly blanches at the suggestion of a threesome while Mickey 18 bares his teeth like an eager dog. They are doubles with minor divides, but there is also an inherent divide inside each singular Mickey, as well. In each singular body, there is a Mickey that is a guaranteed disposable cog in the vast and cruel machine that is the Niflheim colonizing expedition, and there is a Mickey who is filled with endless and consistent sexual desire and true affection for his partner, even when it is against rationale and in spite of his grueling work.
Mickey 17 suggests through Mickey and Nasha’s sexual appetites that desire has not (perhaps cannot) be squeezed out of people in full — even Expendables, those toiling the most and the hardest. Despite the Marshalls warnings, Nasha and Mickey decide that sex is worth the hunger. They refuse to give it up even when Mickey’s rations are halved and his work is doubled. Even though Mickey often toils out in the snow to the point of exhaustion, he cheerfully drops onto his knees each morning to assist Nasha with the straps and buttons of her uniform. She, in turn, scrunches his hair. There is the slightest tint of power play in these interchanges, a reference to a gentle submission and assertion. As an Expendable—an on-the-nose term that certainly represents all of those in our reality working under the vampiric and zombifying forces of capitalist work—Mickey is treated as a complete subordinate; something he grits (or, more realistically, dissociates) through. In these two brief moments where Mickey dresses Nasha, paired with Nasha’s frequent bulldog protection of Mickey amongst the troops, we see a recreational submission where Nasha is in charge and Mickey derives pleasure from such being the case—a pleasurable reimagining of the sensation of subordination in his working life. As an Expendable, no one watches out for Mickey, but as an attentive, deferential, and horny boyfriend, Mickey is cared for intensely.
Mickey is born again and again and again. He’s immortal in a twisted sense, likely incidentally evoking Pattinson’s breakout role as the undead vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise. The Twilight series represents, at the very least to my own teen experience with it, the peak of Pattinson’s specific brand of sex symboldom; someone lithe, slim, low on fat but not necessarily heavy on muscle. Pattinson is, I would argue, objectively and notably attractive, but not in the ‘roided out, macronutrient-oriented manner of modern superheroes. RS Benedict’s iconic 2021 piece “Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny” ends by posturing Pattinson as a beacon of hope in a landscape of sexless beefcakes — Benedict lauds him for “his refusal to bulk up” to play Batman, as well as applauding his own proud touting of his many masturbation scenes. “Perhaps he will be the hero we need,” Benedict muses in the final line of the essay.
Mickey is no good as a superhero in our modern understanding of the word. Mickey is designed to be obliterated — to puke, to bleed, to hurt, to look weak and desperate and foolish and in pain. He’s a little pathetic. He’s got a high, nasally voice and a meekness (with some margin of error depending on the Mickey). He does not fight bad guys, he works for them.
Benedict writes of the uber-strong Marvel bodies that are now so en vogue,
“Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win…”
Mickey, on the other hand, is not a killing machine. He is a machine made to be killed. I think here of a moment in Paul Verhoven’s Starship Troopers (which Mickey 17 owes much to), where the military official accepting applications from a crowd of naive and eager youth jokes, “Fresh meat for the grinder, eh?” No matter what fantasies the Marvel industrial complex tries to shill us about the importance of becoming optimized and hard-bodied superheroes, in reality, under current conditions, those working to survive are almost guaranteed to be seen as nothing more than fresh meat for the grinder, machines to be worked to death.
All of the time Mickey spends puking, screaming, writhing, and dying from the various fatal experiments and missions he is put through do not make him appear impossibly strong. This, paired with the fact that Mickey is frequently driven by sexual desire, make him supremely useless when placed against the criteria that cultural critics like Benedict and Tham argue has been declared the norm by the cinematic universes and franchise films that dominate our screen. But in Mickey 17, Mickey’s sexual drive is what makes him a hero.
Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are eventually sent out to draw the Creepers to one location so they can be lethally gassed. Using a gadget for translation and shirking orders, Mickey 17 and the Creepers reach an understanding — for the humans to be forgiven, they must return the infant Creeper currently within their ship, and sacrifice a human life.
With no way to access Nasha except for the live feed camera on the side of the ship, Mickey 17 desperately signs “3-C” with his fingers — the label for a sex position on their chart called “Bring The Baby”. Nasha, very familiar with their sexual charting, is able to interpret Mickey’s plea immediately, and return the young Creeper safely. Nasha and Mickey speak sex so passionately and so fluently that it provides multi-species salvation, and serves as the plot resolution of Mickey 17 itself.
In Revolutionary Desires, Tham writes, “This idea that the sex scene should be instrumental, productive somehow, is internalised capitalism par excellence.” I completely agree with Tham’s position, and am well aware that Mickey 17’s sex scenes are, in fact, instrumental and productive to the plot. The sex that Nasha and Mickey have is entirely plot-oriented — it is the plot device that causes the film’s resolution. I will be the first to say much about Mickey 17 is not inherently a radically political film. Tham writes, “We need to revolutionise desire: to use it as a way to look ecstatically beyond the choices prescribed to us.” Mickey 17’s saving of the Creeper colony, killing of the one “bad guy” by exploding Kenneth Marshall (as if that addresses the systemically-imposed insanity that allows for Expendables, planetary colonization missions, and endless space troops), and decision to remain on Niflheim as colonizers, is all within a classically neoliberal framework. Desire has not, necessarily, been revolutionized.
But what matters to me about the space that sex takes up in Mickey 17 is that the love of sex for the sake of it — letting being someone who loves sex be a key part of your existence — can hold power, solutions, and freedoms. Mickey 17 is, likely adventitiously, a response to our current queasiness around sex in film. And there isn’t even much sex. But sex is positioned as a crucial aspect of Mickey and Nasha’s relationship, and a crucial aspect of what drives and fulfills them as individuals. As Benedict says at one point in “Everyone Is Beautiful”, some characters just “[radiate] overwhelming sex-haver energy”. Nasha and Mickey simply love to be sex-havers.
If we don’t allow the experience of sex—which includes not just having it, but looking at, thinking about, and speaking sex—to be seen as inherently important even if it is sex that is “only” playful and recreational, what forms of sex become appropriate? Only the kinds of sexual experiences that are heteronormative, procreative, and state-sanctioned? What are we primed to lose by not treating sexual pleasure as a priority in our understanding of ourselves? What are we primed to gain when we learn to fluently speak sex and desire, when we prioritize pleasure even when the powers that be wish to give us the exact amount of time, space, and energy to do work and only work?
Let us not be good meat for the grinder. Let us instead be good meat for those who are hungry with desire, who want to tear into and be torn into, to feel fed and fulfilled by the pursuit of that which truly feels good. Mickey 17 posits that choosing sexual pleasure could very well save the day.
You're a revelation, v
I love this analysis!