In Defense of the Robot: A review of Companion and Mickey 17

Companion poster from IMDb 

Mickey 17 poster from IMDb

Image description: A movie poster for Companion shows a woman dressed in pink and smiling, with only the whites of her eyes showing as a man says something in her ear. A movie poster for Mickey 17 shows several people staring directly at the camera in uniform, with orange X’s on the eyes of several faces.

The first time I meaningfully engaged with the idea of artificial intelligence was three summers ago. I was taking a philosophical ethics class about technology and had started the first season of “Westworld” at the same time. In the class, we talked about a wide range of technological ethics issues, but what struck me the most was our discussions about AI sentience. Most of the convos surrounding AI center around its negative environmental impacts, the potential impact on labor and wages, and, reminiscent of the most boyish sci-fi movies, how AI will rise up against humanity and kill us all.” But when I think about AI, I can’t help but consider what sentience, or consciousness, or being alive really means. I think about the alleged lack of interiority of artificial beings and what their existences are like. What does it really mean to be “human,” or “alive”? What really differentiates “human” and “machine”? 

Ontological categories of being result in racial, gendered, and classed hierarchies. The ontological separation between “humans”, “animals”, and “machines”. Any ontological status that is not human, allows the subject to be rightfully discriminated against. Enlightenment philosophers theorized about the “human” and what its inalienable rights were in the 18th century. The human had a right to life, to property, to happiness. To the ability to move freely, to have control over one’s own body and to own one’s labor. However, the qualifications for humanity have been elusive and exclusive. At the time of writing, these thinkers considered the human to be a white man. Their definition of the human did not include enslaved people, indigenous peoples, and colonized peoples. These people were often considered “animals” and this classification allowed oppressors to subjugate them to labor exploitation and colonial occupation. Over time, more beings have been granted the status of human, but ontological hierarchies still plague our society, and these hierarchies facilitate ongoing oppression.  

While contemporary beings are still subjected to classifications as “animalistic”, ontological equivocations to the “machine” also render beings disposable and exploitable. Associating a being with machinery implies a lack of human feeling, and the ability to have human feeling is often the basis for moral sensitivity. If a being allegedly does not feel, then it does not matter if they are worked to the brink of exhaustion or denied rights. The creation of artificially intelligent beings brings the issues of ontological hierarchies into the future. 

Two feature films have recently brought these themes to the forefront of my mind: “Mickey 17”, dir. Bong Joon-ho and “Companion”, dir. Drew Hancock.

“Companion” stars Sophie Thatcher as Iris and Jack Quiad as her “love interest”, Josh. Iris is a robot purchased by Josh in order to fulfill his sexual and romantic needs. The film follows Iris as she realizes that she is a robot and frees herself from Josh’s control. “Mickey 17” is about a space-colonization mission led by a politician / businessman. The mission utilizes a technology called “reprinting,” which allows a person’s memories to be restored to a clone of their body once they have died. The mission hires “expendendables” to complete dangerous tasks during the mission and reprints their bodies when they have died. Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, signs up to be an expendable in order to escape predatory loan sharks on Earth. The film follows Mickey as he disrupts the mission’s imperialist effort to colonize Niflheim and ultimately bans the reprinting technology. 

Mickey 17 and Companion both explore the supposed dichotomy of the human and the machine, but from opposite binaries. Mickey 17 posits a human with machine-like attributes and Companion, a machine that is undeniable human. The common denominator between the two characters is that their proximity to “the machine” results in the ability for other characters in the film to exploit their labor. For Mickey, his machine-like qualities come from the way his body is printed continuously throughout the film, so he can complete dangerous tasks and be the subject of medical experiments for the colonizers. His body is mass produced, so that his life and his labor can be exploited over and over and over again. On the other hand, Iris from companion is a robot that is given human characteristics, so that she can perform sexual and emotional labor for her human boyfriend, Josh, without any agency over the way that she conducts herself in their relationship. 

Despite the fact that the films approach the human-machine binary from opposite ends, both films illuminate the relationship between labor exploitation and proximity to the machine. 

I grew to love Iris, but she unsettled me in the first parts of the film. Her dollish costumes, the way she lovingly fawns over Josh, the way Josh utters, “go to sleep Iris,” and she immediately loses consciousness. My horror at this prospect, of a man being able to immediately render a woman unconscious by a simple phrase, was heightened by the fact that this element of Iris’s programming is first put on display after Iris and Josh have “sex” and he wants her to stop talking. This aspect of Iris’ technological make up will become essential to the plot later on when Iris attempts to thwart Josh’s control over her, but it is first put on display in an intimate setting. This illustrates the way that the dynamics of heterosexual intimacy reflect and mirror the gendered inequality women face in the public sphere. 

I was really bothered by how much Iris loved Josh, or how much she thinks she loves Josh. But I think she does. I don’t think her condition as a robot makes her love less real, because it is her reality. The film opens with Iris’ recollection of their first meeting. The scene is dream-like and whimsical. The coloring is warm and romantic, Iris seems to float through a grocery store as she picks her items off the shelf with delicacy and care, as if each item is special and important to the moments that follow. She moves as if she is dancing, light and bouncy, and her features are softened by the warm lighting of the scene and her girlish outfit. She is not robotic in the slightest, but there is a falseness to the scene, an inauthenticity constituted by the perfection and romance of the moment. But as anyone who has been in love knows, this is the way the memories of early love appear upon recollection. The falseness comes from the perfection of the memory, but also her perfection. Her uncanniness does not come from stiff robotic movements or a stilted monotone meant to mimic humanness, but the fact that she performs a version of humanness, more importantly femininity, that is near perfect. Perfect to the point of coming out of a porno. She is perfect for the kind of man who desires a partner that he can completely control. But she does not know this, she does not know that her “purpose” is to perform sexual and emotional labor for Josh, and she does not know that it is the only thing she can do. She could not say no if she wanted to because her existence is tied to his desire, and there is no way for her to give consent. Or at least this is how she is supposed to function. She is able to overcome her programming through a series of mishaps. She realizes that she is a robot, and the film ends with the image of her “skin” falling off her hand to reveal cold metal. She looks at the hand that is now her own and comes to identify with it; she stretches out her fingers and gazes lovingly. There is no horror, no shock, only appreciation for herself: for her body and for her being. Despite the fact that Iris is a “robot,” the film wholeheartedly champions her humanity and her right to agency. 

Mickey is far from the perfection that Iris embodies. He is undeniably human. He bumbles over his words and his own feet throughout the film.  He is loveable and relatable and endearing. Mickey 17 is a story of an ordinary man rising to the occasion and fighting on the side of good. The film begins with Mickey 17 groaning as he lies face down in an icy cave. His friend, Timo, dangles above him and asks if it is okay if he leaves Mickey to die but takes his gun back to the spaceship. It would be too much of a hassle to drag him out of the cave when they can just reprint him anyway, his friends reasons. Mickey seems slightly hurt but understanding — this is just the way things are for him, and the audience internalizes this worldview as well. After these moments, Mickey begins to narrate in a classic “you’re probably wondering how I got here”-type sequence. The film takes place in a dystopian future society where a failed politician, Kenneth Marshall (played by Mark Ruffalo) and his wife, Ylfa, lead an expedition to colonize a planet in the distant cosmos and quickly begin a genocidal campaign against the planet’s native inhabitants, which Marshall calls “creepers.” Even if its parallels to the characters that make up America’s current political landscape don’t resonate based on theme alone, Ruffalo makes the comparison crystal clear from his performance of Trumplike physical mannerisms and speech. Mickey joins the mission as an Expendable in order to escape debt. An Expendable undergoes a procedure where their memory is backed up regularly, and their body can be reprinted after they die. The action begins when Mickey 17 is not actually killed by the creepers in the snow but instead, saved. However, a new version of him, Mickey 18, has already been printed. There are now two Mickey’s, when there should only be one. 

The expendable technology is employed by the mission in order to have people conduct dangerous missions, and for medical experimentation on the ship. Mickey repeatedly undergoes horrors with little concern from others for his pain and suffering because he can simply be reprinted. The fact that he is technically still able to “live” limits the empathy that other characters show for him, except for his girlfriend Nasha and the “creepers.” But the film conceals their empathy and Mickey’s pain, or the meaning of it, until the very end of the film. Mickey’s narration of his past lives that have been killed either from dangerous labor conditions or medical experimentation are comedic at first, and we get the sense that Mickey himself is also numb to the pain. It is only after the “creepers” in the snow cave save him that Mickey, and the audience, begins to realize that he should be treated better. The audience is not shown Mickey’s suffering or Nasha’s insistence of being there with him through the pain until the very end. In spite of the fact that I knew from the beginning of the film that Mickey’s exploitation was wrong, it felt abstract to me. I did not feel the pain of his mistreatment until the filmmakers showed it to me in the final moments. I was left with a feeling of disappointment and shame that I didn’t emotionally empathize with Mickey sooner. The film seemed to prove to me my own complicity in the apathy for exploited laborers that permeates the global North. The film highlights the “creepers’” humanity juxtaposed with the humans’ cruelty, despite the overwhelming narrative from the colonizers that the “creepers” are dangerous, inhuman creatures that they must eliminate in order to inhabit the planet. 

While the film presents an obvious, though failing, critique of colonialism and the treatments of Indigenous peoples by colonizers, Mickey 17 also illuminates how proximity to the machine, and therefore distance from the human, relegates one to the status of laborer. While Mickey is a human, whatever that means, the ability for his body to be mechanically reproduced after death, aligns him with the machine. His body is a mass produced commodity. Iris represents the same thing. Her body and consciousness are mass produced up until the end of the film. Mickey’s body is exploited in order to generate new knowledge for the company that will be used to colonize Niflheim. Iris’s body is exploited for the sexual and emotional labor required of women in heterosexual relationships.  Both films fail to actualize this critique of capitalism and its need to exploit the non-human though. Mickey 17 ends in the continued occupancy of Niflheim but under a “better” regime and a supposed cohabitation with the Indigenous creatures / people / entities.  The cloning machine is destroyed and the expendable program is suspended. Mickey is granted his freedom on an individual level, yet the humans continue to occupy a land that is not their own. Iris is also liberated from the tyranny of her programming, but the film makes no acknowledgement to the corporation that continues to create robot girlfriends or advocates for making this technology illegal. Neither film recognizes that Iris and Mickey’s labor exploitation is a factor of systemic capitalist oppression; they only function as critiques on the individual level. The relationship between oppression and the question of who is considered human is a fundamental element in the history of imperialism and the genocide and exploitation of Indigenous peoples. I can’t write about this topic and not consider how the films address this history. While both want to trouble the idea that “machines” should be subjected to labor and states of consciousness that are beyond their own control, they fail to acknowledge that the supposed ontological separation between humans and machines is actually a refashioning of the human and animal ontological binary that allowed colonizers to oppress people throughout history. The classification of artificially intelligent beings as distinct from humans is just another iteration of historic oppression.