On Monday this week, I decided to go see Mickey 17. I saw the trailer for the movie when I went to the movie theater to see another movie called A Real Pain, and I absolutely loved the trailer for Mickey 17. I thought it was original and unique, and I remember seeing Bong Joon-Ho’s other movie, Parasite, a few years ago and it was really intriguing. I also really love Robert Pattinson, so I was pretty excited to see the film. I know that he has done so much more in his acting career since his days as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise, and for the past few years I have seen him in more intense, independent films. A few years ago, I saw a movie directed by Benny and Josh Safdie called Good Time, and it’s a crime thriller movie. It was pretty dark, but I watched it because I enjoy movies distributed by this movie company called A24. They have a lot of interesting cool films, and even though I won’t get to see all of them, like X and other horror movies that A24 has distributed (I don’t like scary movies), I have enjoyed many of their films since I saw Moonlight. In Good Time, Robert Pattinson plays Connie, a young man living in New York City who tries to rob a bank and also looks out for his brother, Nick, who has a developmental disability. It was a total contrast from the Robert Pattinson I saw in Twilight and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I think that Good Time catered to a different audience. When he was in these two movies, a lot of the audience members were teen girls, like me, who really loved the Twilight book series by Stephenie Meyer and a lot of people in my peer group loved Cedric Diggory. I’m sure there are still young women who love his current movies, and I am glad he got to star in those movies, but I’m also glad that he gets to find other projects that he wants to explore and roles that different from what he has played in the past. The last movie I saw him in was The Lighthouse, which is another film from A24, and in the movie Robert Pattinson and a legendary actor named Willem Dafoe play two lighthouse keepers who are stranded on a remote island off the coast in New England. The film takes place in the 19th century, and to give it its olden ancient feel, they shot the film in black and white. Honestly, I don’t remember any specific details that stuck out to me about the movie. All I remember is that it gave me chills, and I probably should have watched it with subtitles because the dialogue is old New England dialect, and I had a hard time understanding what the characters were saying. I don’t know if I can watch it again, though. It’s pretty unsettling and left me with goosebumps.
I think what got me more interested in learning about Robert Pattinson’s acting is an interview that he did with the incredibly talented actress, musician and producer Jennifer Lopez (she will always be “Jenny on the Block” for me. I love ya, girl). The interview is so authentic and so lovely to watch. Just seeing two people talk passionately about film and praising each other’s movies was so heartwarming and so delightful. I have always seen Robert Pattinson as this dark, serious person when he was playing Edward Cullen, or being a heartthrob as Cedric Diggory, but honestly, I loved watching him just nerd out with Jennifer Lopez about the work they do as actors. Actually, the entire Actors on Actors series is very wholesome to watch. I haven’t seen all of the interviews, but I have seen a few of them. There is one with Emma Stone and Timothee Chalamet, another with Kristen Stewart and Shia LaBeouf, and another with Daniel Kaluuya and Timothee Chalamet. I want to see the rest of the series on YouTube because I don’t know much about the business of being an actor in Hollywood, so it was really cool to hear the different acting methods and processes that these famous actors go through to prepare for their roles.
But I want to segue into my experience going to the theater to see Mickey 17. I got off work at 4 pm, and there was a showing at my local movie theater at 5 pm. Perfect timing! I asked my mom if I could borrow her car, and she was fine with it. I drove up to the movie theater, excited to see another movie. I felt once again like I was that 8-year-old kid getting excited to go to the movies. I pulled up, and I got there at 5:05 because I was running late. I rushed over to the ticket counter and purchased a ticket for the 5:00 pm showing of Mickey 17. I paid my $11.10 in cash (it was a matinee showing), got my ticket and walked into the theater. I felt like I was in paradise. I went to the person at the front desk near the concessions and showed him my ticket. I needed help finding House 11 on my ticket. The person told me where House 11 was. I thanked him and fast-walked towards House 11. I was worried I was going to miss the beginning. I walked past a large ominous poster for The Monkey, a horror film directed by Oz Perkins. It freaked me out, but I kept walking.
When I reached House 11, I opened the door. It turns out that I wasn’t late after all, and they still had ten more minutes of graphic violent bloody red-band previews to go. I told myself to not turn around as I heard squelching noises from the large movie theater screen. It was the red-band trailer for Novocaine, an action film. I thought about going back outside because I am sensitive to movies with violence and gore, and the sound was pretty loud. But I didn’t know if, when I waited outside, the movie was going to start without me, so I closed my eyes during the previews. There were only a few people in the movie theater seeing Mickey 17, which was kind of nice because I am still trying to be cautious about COVID-19 since I live with my parents and don’t want to get them (or myself) sick (although I haven’t been very good at masking all the time, to be honest.) So, I had the entire row G to myself. I put in my foam earplugs because the noise from the previews was pretty loud, and I have sensitive ears. They played another trailer for The Woman in the Yard, which is a horror film. After that preview, my heart kept racing, and I thought I was going to get a panic attack. I violated a huge movie theater rule, which is to not use my phone during the movie. Because I didn’t have the common sense to just walk out during the ten minutes of violent scary previews and just stay there until it was safe to walk back in, I opened my World Tribune app and read some faith experiences about members who used Nichiren Buddhism to overcome various challenges. But I couldn’t focus because my anxiety was at such a high level, and it was screaming at me to get my butt out of my recliner chair and go into the bathroom to recollect myself instead of thinking I just had to sit and close my eyes through the trailers and that would be enough. Even though I had my earplugs in, just hearing the screaming and the jump scares from these trailers set me on edge and almost made me cry and freak out right there in Row G. After quivering and closing my eyes through a trailer for a scary movie based on a Play Station horror video game, I opened my eyes when the trailer ended. The movie had started at last, and so I finally got out my skein of acrylic yellow yarn and size 8 needles and started knitting in the comfort of my recliner chair.
The movie opens with a young man named Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) lying down in an icy cavern. His friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), finds him down there and asks him what it’s like to die, and after he disappears, a bunch of aliens (called “creepers”) surround Mickey’s body and try to get him out of the ice. Mickey begins to narrate how he and Timo left Earth and ended up on the planet Niflheim. The movie takes place in the distant future, and Timo and Mickey are unable to repay a loan they owe to someone and as punishment they have to watch a man get his legs amputated with a chainsaw (I don’t remember if they showed it or not because I was closing my eyes during this scene). Mickey and Timo sign up to be crew members on a spaceship that takes them to a planet called Niflheim, which they seek to colonize. Even though Mickey tells the person at the desk that he read through the paperwork before knowing what he was getting himself into by signing up as an “Expendable,” it turns out that he lied and didn’t read the paperwork before signing up. He ends up taking a job where he becomes literally disposable and dies multiple times and is cloned over and over again for research purposes, so there are multiple clones of Mickey throughout the film. Even though Mickey’s job is thankless and bleak, he falls in love with Nasha, a beautiful crew member on the ship, and they have sex frequently and become a couple. Everyone else on the ship makes fun of Mickey for being an “Expendable,” but Nasha always sticks with Mickey and provides him a source of love and companionship that is missing from his daily job. Mickey 17 and 18 are the clones who end up surviving, and they have to find a way to stop Kenneth Marshall, who is a corrupt politician, from killing Mickey. Kenneth and his wife, Ylfa, aren’t only plotting against Mickey, but they also want to kill off the original inhabitants of the planet Niflheim, the “creepers,” and Nasha and Mickey have to find a way to stop Ylfa and Kenneth from forcing Mickey to carry out the plan to annihilate the creepers with poisonous gas.
I am still processing the movie, so I can’t give an explicit synopsis, but I will say that this film is pretty brilliant, even though it is goofy and outlandish at times. I tend to gravitate towards black comedies for some reason. I don’t know why, but one of the reasons that I saw Mickey 17 is because it is a black comedy. I had to look up more about the elements of black comedy to understand it more, and according to Brittanica, black humor “juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones that underscore the senselessness or futility of life. Black humour often uses farce and low comedy to make clear that individuals are helpless victims of fate and character.” I think my earliest memory of reading something that had dark humor in it was when I checked out a book at the library called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, which is a poetry collection by Tim Burton. In the book, the young characters in the book go through horrible ordeals, such as Oyster Boy, whose dad eats him so that he can boost his sex drive, or a kid named James who gets mauled by a bear. Don’t forget the Mummy Boy who kids mistake for being a pinata and bust open. As a ten-year-old, the adult themes of these poems went completely over my head, but somehow the characters resonated with me, probably because they, like me, were outcasts. I also think I just liked the book for the illustrations because I found them to be unique and interesting. I’m pretty sure I checked out The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy several times because to this day, I still have those grim illustrations stuck in my psyche. I reflected on it as an adult, and I thought, Wait….why are these poems so depressing? Also, I read some of those poems on PDF as a 30-year-old and realized, Oh, wow….wow, that was an adult joke or wow, wait, they were talking about sex in that poem?!? How did I not realize this when checking this out from the library?!? And then I looked online for more background about the book, and it said the poems are full of black humor, and it made sense why they kept this book in the adult section of the library rather than the children’s or young adult section of the library. It’s not every day you see an eight-year-old kid reading a poetry book about a bivalve whose dad eats him to increase his sex drive. But honestly, I have no regrets because I really loved reading those poems, even if they were bleak and sad. Maybe the loneliness of the characters spoke to me somehow. I was a pretty introspective quiet kid back in the day (I still am, even though I have discovered that I can also be outgoing at times) and was often lonely and didn’t have lots of friends to play with on the playground because I was weird and picked my nose and cried a lot. Books were great friends to me during that time, and so I guess I felt some sort of empathy for the characters in The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy that made me want to read the poems over and over again. As I got older, I started to watch more movies in the dark comedy genre, such as Birdman and The Lobster. I really loved The Lobster. It was one of my favorites, but it is a really sad movie. It’s about a dystopian society where people have to find a romantic partner in 45 days or else they will be turned into an animal of their choice. The characters have to deal with these harsh restrictions, but they show little to no emotion, which I guess is why this movie is a black comedy. It’s pretty wild to think that we could live in a society where singles face such absurd discrimination and turn into non-human animals if they don’t find a companion. But the film does present a social commentary about the stigma that still surrounds being single. Even though more people are open to saying they are single or want to take care of themselves after a breakup or wait until dating again, there is still that pressure sometimes to find a romantic partner to spend your life with. I am inundated with Bumble ads, images of happy friends at their weddings and engagement parties on social media, and sure, I want to be happy for those people, but sometimes advertising has a way of making you feel that you’re missing out if you’re not doing a certain thing just because everyone else is. It’s why I had to delete my Facebook after a while, because I found myself comparing my life with my peers who were engaged, married and had kids and not being happy for them. I have thought at times about getting married one day or having kids, and obviously there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I am still unsure at this point in my life if that is what I truly want, and even just having the chance to think about it is something I need to appreciate. I might change my mind one day and want to have kids and get married, but right now, I’m still figuring my life out and trying to take care of myself, so I appreciate that I have the space to do that. Watching The Lobster was uncomfortable at times, because the society had very little regard for the single people and expressed a cold unfeeling attitude towards them. The humor is really offbeat and deadpan, not normally the kind of humor I watch on a regular basis. But as I watched more of Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies, I came to understand he uses a very offbeat style of humor in his movies, like in The Favourite and Poor Things. I haven’t seen his recent movie Kinds of Kindness yet, but I’m pretty sure that is a pretty dark film, too.
I guess the movie Mickey 17 is a dark comedy because it grapples with the uncomfortable topic of death and dying. In real life, once someone dies, you can’t clone them. Their physical form is no longer there. But because the movie is science fiction, Mickey gets a new chance to die, not a chance to live, every time scientists on the ship clone him for research. It’s pretty bleak and messed up if you think about it. He has to die multiple times so that these researchers can do experiments on him. He can’t live a normal life. He has to live a meaningless existence where his entire purpose in life is to die and be cloned, die and be cloned and repeat. Honestly, I found it hard to watch the scene where they kill that one baby creeper. I know they are weird-looking creatures, but for some reason, I think after realizing that the creepers were trying to help Mickey, not kill him, I started to have more empathy for the creepers, especially the baby creepers. They were big and scary to watch, but I didn’t get any horrible nightmares or wake up screaming in the middle of the night after watching the movie. I did have to close my eyes during the scene where Kenneth Marshall and his wife, Ylfa, invite Mickey to dinner and serve him this unpasteurized meat, which he devours. I closed my eyes because I have an irrational fear of vomit scenes in movies, and Mickey vomits after eating the unpasteurized meat. It is a pretty long scene, and I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo under my breath to calm myself down because vomit scenes actually make me have panic attack symptoms. Thankfully, I didn’t miss anything super huge by closing my eyes during the scene. I am glad I read Does the Dog Die before watching the movie to see if there were any vomit scenes in it.
I think my favorite scenes where when Nasha and Mickey were making love. For some reason, I found these two characters making love with each other to be incredibly hot and sexy. I haven’t seen the actress Naomi Ackie in a ton of stuff, but I saw Steven Yeun, who plays Timo, in a few movies like Sorry to Bother You, Minari and The Humans. I really love Mark Ruffalo, and he played a very convincing Kenneth Marshall. Even though Bong Joon-Ho, the director, said that Kenneth Marshall wasn’t based specifically on Trump, but on authoritarian leaders throughout history in general, Kenneth’s way of talking and mannerisms were very similar to Donald Trump’s, and at the rally on the planet Niflheim, there are pro-Kenneth Marshall supporters who wear red baseball hats similar to the MAGA hats that pro-Trump supporters were. I found it hard to watch the scene where Nasha has to save the baby creeper, which is hung on a hook and about to be killed.
The Arts Are Life 