the hatred of creepy crawlies (I watched Mickey 17)
the following contains some spoilers for Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025)
...
Mickey 17 takes place in a future in which Earth is messed up. We don't see much of it, but we do see people barely-reacting to a sandstorm swallowing airport-like infrastructure (must be a common thing to happen?), and we do know that people are queuing up to go into space to try and find another habitable planet (they'd rather gamble on maybe finding another planet to live on, than stay on Earth). The social systems in place seem pretty similar to what we have nowadays — there are congresspeople and elections, there are religious organizations and companies that buy out politicians, and Mark Ruffalo's right-wing-figurehead Kenneth Marshall is very unsubtly Donald Trump.
Marshall has rallied his obsessive fanbase to get them to sign up & join him on his journey to colonize a new planet. The protagonist, Mickey, is an "expendable": a person who has been scanned and uploaded as data, allowing him to be rebuilt by a human printer when he dies. His job is to do everything super dangerous, being a guinea pig for novel situations. When the ship arrives on a snowy planet, Mickey is the one who first sets foot on it (he dies from a virus, and then dies a few more times as they test a vaccine on him).
Mickey is therefore one of the first people to encounter the resident alien life on the planet, which are later named creepers. I love the creepers. They're like huge tardigrade/isopod things:
( above: a bunch of creepers standing on their back limbs )
there is even a licensed plushie of a creeper. They're pretty great.
Mickey isn't alone when he first encounters a creeper. He's with a few elite agent types as they explore a cave. The creeper crawls out of a cranny and runs towards the group, and the humans utterly fail to shoot the thing, repeatedly missing it. They run out of the cave, but as they do so, one agent looks up and sees the creeper above her. She shoots at it, collapsing the cave and dying from being crushed. When the survivors head back to the ship, the news of the creepers causes a mix of anger and nervousness, and Mickey is then repeatedly sent out to try and capture a creeper to study.
...much later,
a big rock is brought into the ship to be carved into a monument. There are multiple creepers inside the rock, and they start running around inside the room, causing panic. One is captured in a bag, and the other jumps on Marshall before being shot to death (shot until nothing but bloody chunks remain). The room is cleaned with sterilizing mist and the living creeper is taken by the scientists to study.
The surviving creeper manages to distress call in a way that attracts a kind of herd of hundreds that surrounds the ship. Marshall starts strategizing a way to kill the creepers with toxic gas (of course, tested on Mickey), but his wife Ylfa Marshall wants to harvest creeper tails to make sauce & so delays the gas deployment. They learn that the creepers can make a painful and overwhelming noise, a kind of sonic attack.
...
this summary of creeper-stuff has focused on one side of the story. I have left out, until now, that the creepers are sophonts, with a culture and language. And, very importantly, the creepers do not ever really attack a person. Every death and injury involving creepers is caused by a human — cave collapse, bullets, explosives.
The creepers are assumed to be aggressive for reasons obvious in the words used to talk about them: "insects", "vermin", "cockroaches", "ugly"...
the justification needed to annihilate a living being (which may very well be the first alien contact ever made!) is simply: they're bugs, and they're in our way (aesthetically incompatible with the white-supremacist vision of Kenneth Marshall and his followers). They're pests.
every day, thousands of people demand spiders and centipedes get crushed for the crime of existing as an invertebrate, and see no issue with this. Thousands more delight in the concept of total extinction of mosquitoes and cockroaches. Ants are fried with magnifying glasses, gnats suffering in sticky traps.
the human-culture of Mickey 17 really isn't very different from our own, not in the slightest. And as in the movie, so in real life: the creepers are devalued and in the same way so are classes of humans (the poor, the expendables...). Only a narrow definition of Life is allowed to live.
tell me: If a spider scuttled past you, would you swat it? Would you collapse that ice-cave in on yourself over a presumption of aggression?
We're doing that as we speak. The mass-death of creepy-crawlies is threatening to collapse our life support, while a gardener sprays his roses down with pesticide.
blessed be the invertebrates, the small, the vermin. blessed be the arthropods, the gastropods, the ugly and the creepy. blessed be those that are squashed underfoot.
may we all live in each others' presence, in peace and in gratitude.
...
thanks for reading!🪱🦀
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