SCIENCE FICTION, through its dystopian tales, has often explored alienation at work. Recently, with The Substance, Mickey 17 and the second season of Severance, this theme is back in the spotlight, taking new paths to question the dispossession of self linked to work in productivist societies.

Science fiction has always had a close link with the theme of alienation at work. As far back as 1921, Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. featured artificial workers condemned to work on assembly lines in factories in the future (the distant year 2000). These synthetic slaves are referred to as “robots” (from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labour), a term that has entered the jargon of science fiction. 

In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis depicted workers transformed into cogs in the industrial machine of the future. Charlie Chaplin did the same in 1936 in Modern Times, which itself incorporated elements of science fiction and literally made the worker, as Marx and Engels had written as early as 1848, “a mere appendage of the machine.”

Today it is not so much the factory worker as the office worker who has become the typical figure of alienation at work. Alienation in a sense inspired by Marxism, as put forward by the philosophers Lucien Seve and Stephane Haber in their respective works on the concept. 

“Alienated labour,” writes Marx, “makes man a stranger to his own body, like nature outside him, like his spiritual essence, his human essence [...] When man faces himself, it is the other who faces him.”

What is employed as a metaphor for exploitation and self-emptying is made literal by science fiction, which has sometimes drawn on Marxism. Estranged from the outside world and from themselves, workers are reified and literally split into multiple copies that become increasingly hostile towards each other.

Severance is an excellent example of this, even to the extent that a British communist organisation uses the series as an illustration of Marx’s foresight.

Employees working for the mysterious Lumon Industries have agreed to undergo a surgical operation that literally separates them into two consciousnesses sharing the same body. The “exter” (“outie”), to which the private sphere belongs, and the “inter” (“innie”), condemned to spend all their time at work. Each time the employee enters the lift to the office, one personality takes precedence over the other. The moment is visualised by a compensated tracking shot, a technique that translates onto the screen the separation and unease between the character and the world around him.

“Inter” and “exter” have no memory of their alter egos’ lives. One is therefore condemned to perpetual work, a sacrifice freely consented to by the other, who is thus able to enjoy life. In the first episode, the series’ protagonist moves in sequence through the labyrinth of impersonal company corridors. 

The long tracking shot underlines the absence of decoration or any trace of humanity, while the soothing lift music further underlines the absurdity of the situation. Far from the infernal factories of Lang and Chaplin, the interminable windowless and doorless corridors, which can only ever lead to the office, are perfectly sanitised, but just as dehumanising.

One employee, Helly R, even goes so far as to clash with her other “self,” threatening to do violence to the body they share if Helly doesn’t free her from her wage slavery. To no avail.

Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance also proposes a literal alienation of its protagonist, doubling down on the representation of the female body. The star of an aerobics TV show, Elisabeth has become a slave to the idealised representation of her body. 

She can’t bear to be made redundant on her 50th birthday and freely chooses to inject herself with a substance that will enable her to become, as the advert puts it, “the best version of herself.” In practice, this means that her consciousness can inhabit another body, that of a “younger, more beautiful and more perfect” woman, but that she must alternate with her ageing body every seven days.

In the grip of a delusional narcissism, Elisabeth is reminiscent of psychoanalytic concepts of alienation, which can be likened to psychosis. But the character is also the victim of the camera as an alienating machine; in other words, of a system that constantly returns her to the idealised image of her female body, to the point where magnified “copies” of the character multiply on screen.

A scene at the beginning of the film sees her walking down a long corridor, while posters celebrating her past glory visually overwhelm her. The tracking shot, taken from three different angles, underlines the omnipresence of the posters and the domination of images over reality, while the character is constantly reminded that she has aged another year. Lift music heard in the background creates a false sense of harmlessness, while the scene (a visual reference to The Shining) is anything but innocuous.

Once again, it’s not against the system that the character rebels, but against her double, who literally steals the show. Increasingly confronted with the image of her withering body, Elisabeth gradually enters into conflict with her other self. The character’s two consciousnesses end up attacking their own bodies and engaging in a fight — to the death.

Bong Joon Ho, who is no stranger to films about class struggle, takes the logic of literal alienation one step further in Mickey 17. The film imagines no fewer than 18 successive copies of its protagonist, who is nothing more than an “expendable.” The term doesn’t quite convey the fact that he is indeed expendable. The character’s mission is to die as many times as necessary for the company that employs him in order to help colonise an exoplanet. His consciousness has been copied onto a hard disc and these duplicates, which are owned by the company, can be downloaded on demand into a new body. The production of these duplicates is visualised on screen as if it were a print-out or photocopy.

In this absurd, dystopian future, bodies have become literally consumable and disposable, at the mercy of their employers and their machines.

Visually, the film returns to the industrial context: the base in which the characters evolve is reminiscent of a huge factory. Here, it is the editing that underlines the absurdity of the character’s condition by multiplying the scenes in which he dies on screen and his corpse is ruthlessly thrown into an industrial incinerator. These scenes are shot from the same angles to accentuate the effect of repetition and push the protagonist’s condition to the point of absurdity.

Once again, his alienation is reflected in the hostility and conflict between two of his copies, Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, who are forced to live together after a manufacturing error. However, after trying to kill each other, they end up making common cause and turning against their employer, like Karel Capek’s robot workers.

Marx would be proud.

Mehdi Achouche is senior lecturer in English-language cinema and American studies at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence.