Warning: this article contains spoilers of The substance And Mickey 17.
Science fiction has always maintained a close link with the theme of alienation to work. From 1921, RurKarel Capek's play, features artificial workers condemned to work on the chain in the factories of the future (the distant year 2000). These synthetic slaves are described as “robots” (from the Czech ” robota “, Saying forced work), a term which thus enters the jargon of science fiction. In 1927, Fritz Lang featured in Metropolis Workers transformed into simple cogs of the industrial machine of the future. Charlie Chaplin did the same in 1936 in his Modern timewho himself incorporates elements of science fiction and literally made the worker, as Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, “a simple appendage of the machine”.
Today it is no longer both the worker and the office worker who has become the typical figure of alienation at work. Alienation in a sense that is inspired by that of Marxism, as could highlight it the philosophers Lucien Sève or Stéphane Haber in their respective work on the notion. “Liéné work”, writes Marx, “makes man his own body foreign, like nature outside of him, like his spiritual essence, his human essence […] When man is in front of himself, the other face him. What is a metaphor for exploitation and self-disposable is made literal by science fiction, which has sometimes been able to rely on Marxism. Foreign to the outside world and to themselves, workers are reified and literally split into several copies which become more and more hostile to each other.
Severance inters against exters
Severance This is a very good example, to the point that a British communist organization uses the series as an illustration of Marx's clairvoyance.
Employees working for the mysterious Lumon Industries have agreed to undergo surgery that literally separates them into two consciences that share the same body. The “exter” (” outrage ), To which the private sphere belongs, and the “inter” (” innie ), Condemned to spend all his time at work. Whenever the employee enters the elevator leading him to the office, one personality takes precedence over the other. The moment is visualized by a compensated, technical tracking that translates to the screen the separation and discomfort between the character and the world around him.
“Inter” and “exter” have no memory of the life of their alter ego. One is therefore condemned to perpetual work, a sacrifice freely consented by the other, which can thus benefit from life. In the first episode, the protagonist of the series advances in the sequence plan in the labyrinth of the impersonal corridors of the company. The long traveling underlines the absence of decoration or any trace of humanity, while a soothing elevator music a little more underlines the absurdity of the situation. Far from the infernal Lang and Chaplin factories, the endless corridors without windows and without door, which can never lead only to the office, are perfectly sanitized, but just as dehumanizing.
An employee, Helly R., will even go so far as to find herself in conflict with her other “me”, threatening to make violence to the body they share if the second does not deliver her from her wage slavery. Without success.
The substanceor the alienation of the female body
The film by Coralie Fargeat also offers a literal alienation of its protagonist, by doubling the purpose of a commentary on the representation of the female body. Star of an aerobic TV show, Élisabeth has become the slave of the idealized representation of her body. She cannot bear to be dismissed on the day of her 50th anniversary and freely chooses to inject a substance that will allow her to become, as advertising wants, “the best version of herself”. In practice, this means that her conscience can live in another body, that of a woman “younger, more beautiful and more perfect”, but that she must alternate with her aging body every seven days.
In the grip of delusional narcissism, Elisabeth is reminiscent of the psychoanalytic conceptions of alienation, which can be akin to a psychosis. But the character is also the victim of the camera as an alienating machine; In other words, from a system that constantly refers it to the idealized image of her woman's body, to the point where the “copies” magnified of the character multiply on the screen.
A scene at the start of the film sees her advance in a long corridor, while posters celebrating her past glory crushed him visually. Traveling, taken from three different angles, underlines the omnipresence of posters and the domination of images over reality, while the character is constantly recalling that she has still aged a year. An elevator music heard in the background creates a false impression of safety, while the scene (visual reference to Shining) is anything but trivial.
Here again, it is not against this system that the character rebels but against his double, which literally steals the show. Increasingly confronted with the image of her wasting body, Élisabeth gradually conflict with her other “me”. The two consciences of the character end up attacking their own body and engaging in a struggle – to death.
Mickey 17the cog in the photocopier
Bong Joon-Ho, accustomed to films featuring the class struggle, pushes the logic of literal alienation even further in Mickey 17. The film imagines no less than 18 successive copies of its protagonist, which is nothing other than a “replaceable” (” expendable »). The term does not translate the fact that it is indeed a “disposable”. The character's mission is to die as many times as necessary for the society which employs it to help the colonization of an exoplanet. His conscience was copied on hard drive and these duplicate, whose company is owner, can be downloaded on demand in a new body. The manufacture of these is visualized on the screen as recalling an impression or a photocopy.
In this absurd and dystopian future, the bodies ended up becoming literally consumable and disposable, at the mercy of their employer and their machines.
Visually, the film returns to the industrial context: the base in which the characters evoke a huge factory. Here, it is the assembly that underlines the absurdity of the character's condition by multiplying the scenes where he dies on the screen and where his corpse is thrown without care in an industrial incinerator. These scenes are shot from the same angles to accentuate the repetition effect and push, to the absurd, the condition of the protagonist.
Once again, the latter's alienation results in hostility and the conflict between two of his copies, Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, led to cohabit following a manufacturing error. However, after trying to kill each other, they will end up making common cause and will turn against their employer, like the Karel Capek robot workers. Marx would be proud.
