The Self vs The Market: Severance, Mickey 17, and The Substance.

We’ve been having a lot of confrontation with the self in our media recently, haven’t we?

What are you talking about?

No, I am not talking to you, but to them, I don’t want to speak to myself now, sorry.

Who’d ever want to speak to you anyway?

Anyway, Between Spider-Man meeting version of himself in “No Way Home”, to “The Substance” insisting to Elizabeth and Sue that “They are one”, to Sebastian Stan meeting a mirror/or an inverse of himself in “A Different Man”, to “Severance” season 2 exacerbating on the conflict between the two “halves” of Mark, too. From Kratos standing in front of a younger version of himself at the end of “God of War: Ragnarok: Valhalla”, to, more recently, Mickey 17, giving us a conflict between two clones of the same person.

There’s a lot of “stop hitting yourself” going on recently in many high profile, critically acclaimed films and shows (and videogames), is it a trend? Something new? Something in the air? Is there something in the collective consciousness of us right now manifesting itself in different unrelated artistic projects as a case of “parallel thinking”?

No, stop being a pretentious hack! Rick from Rick and Morty has been fighting different versions of himself since as early as season 1 back in 2013 in the concept of the “Council of Ricks”, which is just a riff on “The council of Reeds” from Marvel comics, where many versions of the Reed Richard from throughout the multiverse guard over said multiverse.

Of course, the influence of Comic books, more specifically superhero comics as the biggest influence in our modern's pop culture cannot be overstated (even if it gets understated a lot), Spider Man has been fighting clones and different variants of himself since the 1970s, and many of our writers and pop culture shapers are or were comic book lovers. Furthermore, many of the recent examples you (I?) just mentioned above take inspiration from the classic story of “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” .So, no, Idiot, you shouldn’t look to hard into things

But hear me out, maybe there IS a philosophical or psychological meaning to this phenomenon and this.

No, I’m telling you, this Boom of variants of the same characters is the natural conclusion of decades of Sci-Fi storytelling. Marvel just needed financially to do “Multiverse stuff and do not intend to say anything deep about us, and Coralie Fargeat is just a Cronenberg fan influenced by the same horror classics that inspired him and by his own “Dead Ringers”

Hey, did you know there was a modern remake of Dead Ringer recently, does that count as part of the trend?

It counts as part of a trend indeed, a trend of unoriginality and remaking everything. You know what, maybe we ran out of originality too much that we can’t even invent side characters, and just have the protagonist have a conflict with just another person of himself.

Can you stop interrupting me? You are so annoying

I’m you

Then I am annoying.

He said it himself, folks.

However, True art analysis believes in a collective consciousness, of society expressing itself through us artists, artists are just the world using itself to comment on itself, many of these examples, From Loki, Spiderman, to The Substance, Mickey 17 and A Different Man.

who even watched “A Different Man”.

It’s on the most important films of recent years, shut up... anyway, all those works take about self-loathing, about a crisis of self-perception, of self-respect. Aren’t we as a generation, filled with self-loathing, always ridiculing, insulting, critiquing, downplaying ourselves, Wasn’t social media…

He said the thing!

…responsible for a negative shift in how we view ourselves? To the point where I am here, writing a different version of myself to make fun of me.

I am only fair, so I must salute you for not going so far without mentioning Freud or Ego and Superego and that stuff.

There’s a leftist video essayist making a video on the same trend and she will probably mention that

First, this joke will age poorly. Second, then what the hell do you want to talk about?

Capitalism!

Go to hell!

We are already there.

Good point.

One thing that struck me in three of those recent examples, Mickey 17, The Substance, and Severance, is how it’s an explicit part of the text how all those different “versions” of same person wouldn’t have existed without capitalism.

In “Severance”, the process of severance is implemented by the evil corporate of Lumon to protect its corporate interest and secrets. In “The Substance”, Elizabeth wouldn’t have cloned herself if the market and her executive producer didn’t deem her “outdated” and unbeautiful..

In a way, The Substance fits all that pretentious stuff you have been saying about how social media and modern life exacerbate self-loathing, Capitalism tells you how flawed and broken you are to sell you a better version of yourself.

Exactly, comrade

Do not call me that.

And Mickey 17 is a continuation of Bong Joon-Ho’s critiques of capitalism, as Mickey undergoes the cloning procedure in the film because he has no education or other qualities, and thus, no other value to the market other than his pain and death. He gets printed and reprinted many times to do manual labor.

I was going to saw how cool it is that “The Substance” and “Mickey 17”, with their giant budgets, use capital money to criticize capital, but isn’t that just another proof of why capitalism is immune, of how it can absorb every critique of itself and makes it a part of itself. That these works of art are made by producer money and bring those same producer money back. So, a critique of the system becomes part of the system.

God, you are bleak.

So are you, sorry for interrupting.

Anyway, it’s interesting that the market is the one that forced those characters to multiple into different version of themselves. The market said that it isn’t enough that Elizabeth gave the audience her whole career and youth, she has to give another young version of herself in order to preserve her market worth, and to do that with a smile. It’s not enough to exploit and overwork one “Mickey”, so let’s recycle, make, and kill as much version of Mickey for us. It’s not enough for Lumon to control one person, but to divide, to severe this person to different version, each version to be exploited and used for a different task.

And also, in a meta level, it’s also market and capital that made all those Superheroes meet with and fight and play with different variants of themselves, to “save” those studios and give them money.

Thanks for the bleak insight, my Ai digital copy!

Thank you, my original, soon to be obsolete, flesh self.