what is your take on joanna? she’s always been such an interesting character to me, but tbh i don’t think i fully understand her motives lol
adding to this another ask i got about the same thing:
Speaking of the women in Mr Robot, any thoughts on Tyrell's wife? (No, I did not forget her name...)
an interesting fact about joanna is that she is the character who underwent the biggest change from the original pilot script to the final product. i would recommend reading the original pilot script if you want a laugh because some of the choices are genuinely horrible (such as flashing the definitions of "hacker" words like AFK over the screen when theyre mentioned in dialogue??? lol???) but in some ways elliots character is a little more kooky and charming. also, qwerty was a cat, not a fish!
the intention for tyrells original characterization was obviously a lot more overtly aggressive, alpha male esque, patrick bateman expy deal. to the point where its actually comical lol. this is best shown by his interactions with joanna:
lots of changes to unpack here. first, joanna is filipino, so they dont have that mutually-intelligible-but-not-totally-aligned native language. this is important because joanna and tyrell speaking to each other in danish and swedish respectively shows they are close enough that it WORKS, but they are not "speaking the same language"—and i mean that both literally and in colloquial terms. we see in the final product that their marriage works largely as a business agreement: joanna gets to mould tyrell into her perfect husband, completing her vision of a perfect life, and also gets to enact her ambitions through him, while tyrell gets some semblance of love. do they want the same thing? sure. they both want tyrell to become cto, eventually ceo. but they dont want it for the same reasons.
another big change from the original script thats very important is the balance of power between the wellicks. their sex life provides the best metaphorical example: joanna puts on the APPEARANCE of being the submissive, the led party, but she controls tyrell through her desire. the one time we see them have sex, tyrell tries to get out of it ("im too tired," he says, like the stereotypical prudish wife in r/deadbedrooms) but joanna wont take no for an answer. both in his work life and in his sexual life at home, tyrell plays at being dominant, but its just that—an act. he is in fact entirely at the whims of others.
joanna serves as a lady macbeth type in the narrative, shaping tyrells goals and how he goes about achieving them. whats interesting is that the plots she directs tyrell through are... very feminine lol. like sleeping your way up to the top is something you would expect a woman to have to do, not a man. there is such a weird gender role fuckery happening here where joanna, wanting to be in the role of the traditional stay at home wife, is directing her husband, the supposedly dominant party, to debase himself by sleeping with other people for power.
its telling that the two memories she reminisces on when tyrell is gone are times where she had total control over him.
one is when she comes home from shopping (spending tyrells money) and finds tyrell has left her a gift (giving her an offering) and then comes down the stairs wearing a goofy matching outfit (which im sure she picked out in order to use him as a walking accessory)
the other is, of course, the cubic zirconia earring story. "tyrell fucked another woman just to give me some cheap thing i wanted thats an imitation of the real thing." and make no mistake, those cubic zirconia earrings are also tyrell, symbolically. he is told by everyone in these actually rich circles—price, scott knowles, joannas father—that he doesnt really belong. he can fake the aesthetic and mannerisms of an influential, successful man, but hes a fake. a copy. like those cubic zirconia earrings. humble, cheap origins trying to imitate the real, expensive, exclusive thing.
what joanna obviously WANTS is the tradwife fantasy. she wants to stay at home, shopping and eating and trying on clothes and plotting her husbands rise to power, while appearing as the pretty, harmless, well-mannered trophy wife. as for why she wants this, i have two guesses that go together. the first is that, as we see from the deleted scene where tyrell meets with joannas father, joanna obviously grew up spoiled and doted on. yet she leaves home, marries down, and tries to create a version of this same dynamic with tyrell—a sort of self-made trophy wife situation—rather than just living on the coattails of her father her whole life. i also think she was chasing a do-over of the child she abandoned in her teens. one of the few times we see her look truly emotional is when she brings up that abandoned baby, and she is clearly very attached to her and tyrells child in her own possessive way.
joanna does seem genuinely enamoured by the nuclear family model, but she pursues it with all the methods, zeal, and control of a sociopathic ceo, lol. its a far more interesting take than what the original script was going for.
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