Today, on a whim, I asked my fiancée to join me for a matinee of “Mickey 17,” the new film by Bong Joon Ho. Like “Parasite” and “Snowpiercer” and so much else of Ho’s work, “Mickey 17” turns out to be both a socially concerned dark comedy that portrays the awfulness of some human traits, and a highly entertaining movie. If you can imagine a future Donald Trump (played by Mark Ruffalo) asserting himself as the leader of the first colony we send to a distant planet, you can extrapolate much of what’s made manifest by this plot. 

Afterward, we walked to a nearby ramen house for a leisurely dinner and to talk about the movie. We stopped in later at Republic of Pie, site of our probably third date, almost two years ago, and ate apple pie and played Uno and I had a latte.

After all this time, over four hours total, K. began to wonder if her car might have gotten ticketed. She’d parked in a free parking spot, but was now over the hourly limit. As we approached her car in the dim light, I saw a scrap of paper tucked under her windshield wiper, and K. moaned. But it wasn’t a ticket. Instead, it said this:

We looked the car over, but there was no damage. Not even the slightest.

The biggest impression made was, instead, the one made by the note. How refreshing and unexpected in 2025.

In the movie, Ruffalo’s character, a failed celebrity Congressman who somehow becomes a bigger celebrity in his electoral failure and soon finds a larger way to be the grasping tyrant he’s so suited for, utterly lacks any civility or decency. And meanwhile giving lip service to the members of a religion that worships him. Were we not already all too familiar with a real-world example of this, I’d say the character is more caricature than person. But we sadly know better, don’t we?

It was a small relief to see that it wasn’t a ticket K. had gotten, but more of a joy:  an honest, thoughtful note, a note from a kind stranger who, like most people, wants to do the right thing, and who on some level knows that we’re all connected and we’re all in this together and he’s better if we’re civil and decent.

I don’t want to tell you the ending of “Mickey 17.” I want you to see it. Its message will remind you that we only lose all if we give up, if we surrender to our base instincts, to the terrible examples set by the worst among us. Eventually, the film seems to say, no matter how impossible it seems or how far away to consider, self-serving sociopaths lose and the considerate people prevail.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2025 at 9:56 pm and is filed under On seeing, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.