Where are our minds? The triumph of Mr. Robot
Mr. Robot's addictive & ambitious first season has the world paying attention to our TV screens and the world we live in.
Mad Men is gone, Breaking Bad is gone, The Wire and Sopranos have long since passed and we are left to ask ourselves, as television lovers, what’s next? What television giant will be next for us to obsess over, talk about with colleagues and fall madly in love with fictional characters? The answer to that might well be Mr. Robot.
Mr Robot is a series which has just finished airing its first season on the USA network. Created by showrunner Sam Esmail, Mr. Robot revolves around Eliot Alderson, played by the magnetic Rami Malek , who lives in New York and works at a cybersecurity company by day, while working within a clandestine hacker group called Fsociety at night. Fsociety plans to overthrow the structures of capitalism, media and consumerism in modern society. Think of them as a not-so tongue in cheek parallel to the Anonymous movement.
The series follows Eliot balancing his office job and his dangerous night-life, endeavouring to take down the global system of capitalism through cybercrime. Similar to Breaking Bad, Mr. Robot illuminates this balance by showing Eliot struggle to protect the people he loves and cares about from being hurt through his actions as a hacker.
Cinematically, this show provides an absorbing and unique vision of New York rarely seen in television. Often New York is painted as an overcrowded metropolis, but Mr. Robot revels in the portrayal of its isolation and loneliness, meant as a parallel to the mental health of our hero Eliot. Much to its credit, this show is an exercise in looking at mental health which does more than break the fourth wall. You are watching it from the perspective of Eliot and how he views and interprets the world. For example, his company is referred to as Evil Corp because that is what Eliot cynically refers to this multinational as, as does everyone around him in the world of Mr. Robot because at you are meant to feel as if you are living inside his head.
Mr. Robot is a thrilling, paranoid and emotional commentary on the state of the world we live in, commenting on the themes of surveillance, privacy, technology, mass media and capitalism. This show is so current that it has seemingly preceded real world events of the year with commentary on the Ashley Madison Hack and the Chinese Stock Market Crash. Disturbingly close to reality, this series chose to postpone its finale after it was revealed that there were similarities in it to the tragic shooting of two reporters in Virginia late last August.
But the real thrill ride is in the narrative and the characters. Eliot has a puzzling relationship with a mysterious character named Mr. Robot, played by the evergreen Christian Slater. With hints to Fight Club, there is a sense of mystery about the character Mr. Robot, who he is, is he even real, and what role does he play in Eliot’s life. You will find yourself going back and watching previous episodes to try and figure out the puzzle.
Mr. Robot is a dread-filled, paranoid emotional odyssey gravitating around the trauma of a family history set in the backdrop of our troubled and anxiety-filled modern society. Before you pick apart the nods to Fight Club or American Psycho in the not-so-subtle subtext as tacky, understand that it comes from a place of adolescent nostalgia within the characters. This is reflective of a much deeper, darker yearning for understanding your personal arc when it is filled with nothing but pain and confusion. It is more a meditative comment on dealing with the trauma of the past being draped in darkness, rather than answering the question of who is Tyler Durden.
In these technocratic times we have to question whether our technology, our media, our institutions are our gods or our demons, and who will be the prophets to expose them. Mr. Robot believes that the bigger question lies in whether these mere mortals-turned-prophets should expose them, and as they make these choices do they metamorphosis into god, the devil or the better of our angels? A re-occurring question Mr. Robot asks is who really has the moral authority to take justice in his or her own hands in the world and does such a person even exist?
It can be considered extremely close to a perfect first season, in what was one of the bravest, most ambitious and soaring first seasons of television in the last decade. Every now and then shows come along that remind you why we obsess over television on an intellectual, existential and emotional level, why we read the television blog recaps, why we listen to the podcasts about television, why we have these water cooler conversations. Its life affirming.
As we check Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, hope that our Ashley Madison account didn’t get hacked and book our next Uber, we are left to ask in this blurred, dizzying world on the Information Superhighway, are we even real ourselves? It’s not that Mr. Robot has been meditating on our collective angst and ire to the state of modernity, it’s literally breathing it in and bleeding it out, holding up the mirror to ourselves as we ache and aggravate within. Mr. Robot comments on this in the most dazzling and surreal of ways. This is the show that we want right now, but before that, it’s the show we deserve right now when we look outwardly at our obsession and paranoia with technology, surveillance and privacy.
