After Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020, becoming the first non-English-language film to do so, then-President Donald Trump declared himself displeased. At a campaign rally right after that win, Trump said, “What the hell was that all about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of that, they give them best movie of the year. Was it good? I don’t know.” To the audience’s cheers, he declared that he missed the days when Hollywood made movies like Gone With the Wind and Sunset Boulevard.
Now Bong Joon Ho is back, with Mickey 17, a story about a worker (Robert Pattinson) who, in debt to some bad people, signs on to a colony expedition, desperate to leave Earth. Because he has no particular skills that would qualify him for a berth, he agrees to be an “expendable.” Mickey gets all the worst, most dangerous jobs—external spaceship repairs that expose him to dangerous levels of radiation, inhaling the air of a new planet to test whether there’s a human-killing virus—because he’s agreed for his personhood to be uploaded and his body to be printed out again and again. At the time the story begins, he’s on his 17th body, when, mistakenly, the expedition prints out his 18th, creating a dreaded situation: the existence of “multiples.”
The antagonist in the story, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), is the leader of this expedition, a smarmy, evil ex-politician with veneers, a TV show, and a hovering wife (Toni Collette) who’s the true brains of the Marshall operation. At a recruitment event, we see that the other prospective colonists are all Marshall freaks and several of them are wearing red baseball hats; one of them tries to speak to Marshall through a news broadcast. Marshall, an empty suit with preposterous hair, is obsessed with his image and being on television, isn’t religious but uses religion to manipulate people, does a dorky little dance to pump people up, hoards all the wealth on the ship while his loyal followers eat glops of gray paste, gets excited at the idea of colonizing a “pure, white planet,” and, at one point, barely escapes a bullet aimed at his head.
This is Donald Trump, right? Kenneth Marshall is Bong’s revenge? But hold on a minute. Not only was this movie shot long before Trump escaped a bullet in Pennsylvania this past summer, but in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bong says that although he is aware that people consider Ruffalo’s Marshall to be a Trump analog, he swears he isn’t. Marshall, he says, is “a mix of many different politicians” and “dictators that we have seen throughout history.” Bong points to the audience reaction as proof that Marshall is an archetype, not a caricature: “When we showed the film in Berlin and talked to people from many different countries, it seemed like people were projecting the most stressful political leader onto the character of Marshall.” The omnipresence of Marshall’s wife, he said, tied the character closer to other historical figures than to Trump. “They move as a couple,” Bong explained. “To me, that was quite important. So think about the Ceaușescu couple from Romania and the Marcos couple from the Philippines. It’s always very uncanny when dictators move as couples. It makes them even more ridiculous and more terrifying.” (Bong also says to this interviewer, who asked about Trump’s public Parasite commentary: “I don’t hold it against him. He can have his own opinion. He mentioned Gone With the Wind and Sunset Boulevard. I like Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder is amazing.”)
But Mark Ruffalo, appearing on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show to promote the movie, didn’t seem to have gotten the message that the movie wasn’t supposed to be “about Trump.” “I play a petty dictator,” he said, slyly employing the art of the strategic pause to add irony, as the audience laughed. “We shot it three years ago, and I thought, This is over the top, at the time. And now I realize it’s totally underplayed. I made a documentary.” Ruffalo, a longtime member of the #Resistance, looked as if he were in his element.
Whom to trust, Bong or Ruffalo? It helps to look at the book. In adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, Bong, who also wrote the screenplay, made a number of changes, including adding a full 10 deaths to the character’s history. But he also significantly expanded the character of Commander Marshall, adding many of the Trumplike characteristics that people have been noticing, enjoying, hating, or just trying to ignore while watching the movie.
Ashton’s main character, Mickey7, is much less of a hapless fool than Pattinson’s Mickey 17. He’s just a man who never really found his calling. He describes himself as “a historian”—an occupation that doesn’t pay him and that gets met with scorn when he mentions it to the ship recruiter when he goes to sign up to be an Expendable. (In this future world, much like our own, there’s not much of a job market for professional historians.) This conceit of having a narrator who’s also a historian lets Ashton do a lot more world-building, explaining the inner workings of the colony ship, the character of Commander Marshall, and the actions of the colonists—all of which, in the movie adaptation, gets swept up instead in Bong’s story of a man with a very dangerous cult of personality.
In the novel, the civilization Mickey is trying to escape is not Earth but Midgard, a third-generation colony, which was itself part of what everyone calls the “diaspora” away from Old Earth. The impetus for the diaspora is not, as in the movie, generalized collapse and possibly climate change but, rather, a technological shift—the invention of antimatter and its use as a weapon. Mickey, who has a lot of time on his hands during the interstellar journey, reads up on the failures of previous colonies and tells us about them: Roanoke, the victims of local microorganisms; Asher’s World, which thought its target planet had a better atmosphere than it did; New Hope, felled by civil war. This is a universe where traveling on a colony ship is common, and there are rules to it.
Another bit of history, narrated by Mickey7, explains the strong taboo against “multiples” that drives the plot of both the novel and the movie. A colony called Gault, made up of wealthy people mad about being taxed on their home planet (get it??), died off after Alan Manikova, a sociopathic scientist with a large amount of family wealth, invented the process for replication of human brains that later makes the Expendables program possible. Manikova, armed with this new technology, flew to Gault, infiltrated its fragmented society, captured colonists, and used their bodies to replicate himself again and again. It’s Manikova, rather than Marshall, who’s probably the biggest traditional villain in Mickey 17. Not only did he kill thousands of wealthy libertarians and make them into copies of himself, but he also caused the death of the colony planet, one of the few Goldilocks planets in the universe, by forcing a neighbor to do a kamikaze mission that renders it completely uninhabitable. This is the situation that creates the taboo against multiples—a much more drastic one than what happens in Mickey 17.
The novel’s Marshall is a natalist, a fundamentalist who doesn’t believe in the printing of humans. This—a belief well explained by the history of Gault—is what makes him into Mickey’s opposition. He doesn’t seem to be a racist; he’s more of a Puritan. He’s got “brush-cut salt-and-pepper hair,” a military bearing, and a first name from ancient Earth: Hieronymus. Marshall, Mickey explains while describing their first meeting, was “someone who thought of himself as In Charge of Things.” The guy “looks like he has a metal rod for a spine even in free fall.” Mickey eventually figures out that Marshall is made up of “ten percent priggishness, ten percent insecurity, and eighty percent overcompensation.” Although this might sound Trumpish on its face, the book’s Marshall is less of an emperor with no clothes, and more of a soldier trained to exert control, who’s reacting poorly to the circumstances of his post. Due to the rules of the ship, since Marshall’s only a ground commander, he “might as well have been cargo for the entirety of the transit.”
This is the thing about this particular leader: Ashton’s Marshall is far from all-powerful or, really, evil. During the voyage, when he finds out that Mickey was in debt to a loan shark, he wants to kill him, but he’s stopped by the captain of the ship, who has command of the mission until it reaches the target planet. Even after landfall, when Marshall is in command, the Mickey multiples are discovered with their lover Nasha, and Marshall threatens to throw them down the cycler, Nasha points out: “This colony wasn’t chartered as a theocracy. You can’t just burn us at the stake.” He doesn’t do it—for plot reasons, but also because he isn’t, at his heart, an irrational man. As Eight says to Marshall, trying to talk him out of killing both Seven and Eight and wiping their template: “You’ve got a stick up your ass most of the time, but you’re not some kind of villain from a vid drama, and I don’t know why you’re trying to act like one now.”
The ship on Mickey 17, on the other hand, is a little world unto itself, ruled only by two psychopaths—Kenneth Marshall and his wife. They can change the rules as they like, and only assassination and overthrow will stop them. In adapting Mickey 17, Bong has made it into a real Bong movie. He’s taken a colony-ship story that takes place in a universe of history, precedent, and law, and a supporting character of an upright, religious military leader, and made each of them into something that is much more cinematic: a hermetic, oppressive dystopia, and a vid-drama villain.
I believe the director that the Trump parallels we see in Bong’s Marshall were meant to be seasoning rather than the main dish. If Kamala Harris had won in November, we’d be reading this movie a lot differently. (Although, even then, there would have been parallels: Marshall begins the movies as a politician who’s been cast aside following his defeat.) But we are stuck in this timeline, where every dystopia feels like our own. We can only hope we land on a better planet soon.
