Mr. Robot: The show that hacked the news

The Binge
By Jessica Zafra

THE REVOLUTION is being televised, in the form of a cyber-thriller on the previously unheralded USA Network. Written and produced by Sam Esmail, Mr. Robot is so plugged into the zeitgeist that you could watch it instead of the nightly news. In the series premiere, an anarchist group called fsociety hacks into a conglomerate’s systems and makes confidential information available to the public. In the real world, a Web site for cheaters was hacked and sensitive personal information made available to the public.

The airing of Mr. Robot’s season one finale was postponed because of its distressing similarity to an actual event: the on-air murder of two journalists in Virginia. This is not the first time that the real world has borrowed its script from television. Sixteen years ago, an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer was pulled from the air because it featured a student who was apparently planning mass murder. The episode had been shot before the Columbine massacre, but was delayed due to concerns about school violence.

Much as I love Joss Whedon’s oeuvre, demons and vampires are not usually in the news headlines unless they are metaphors for politicians and public figures. Cyber-attacks, massive data dumps and financial meltdowns are. The power of Mr. Robot is that it has tapped into the dread and paranoia lurking beneath the “likes” and “hearts” of the digital age. We’re being watched. Our identities can be deleted in a few keystrokes. The myth of the digital age is that we are all connected; the truth is that we’ve never been more alone.

The cyber-thriller has been a problematic genre because watching people watching screens is not sexy. Filmmakers have tried to deal with this by casting someone like Chris Hemsworth as a genius hacker (Michael Mann’s Blackhat), as if over-caffeinated, malnourished people whose only exposure to light is the reflection from their computer screens can look like Chris Hemsworth. Or by showing us cascading green numbers a la Matrix.

Mr. Robot immediately got the approval of the programming community with its authenticity. Episode titles are file names like “eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg” and “eps1.2_d3bug.mkv”. It uses terms like “rootkit” and “DDoS” without bothering to explain them (Use your head, figure them out from context). The characters say “AFK” (away from keyboard) and the fish is called Qwerty. And the protagonist looks like he hasn’t slept since grade school and still has eyes as big as screens.

Rami Malek plays Elliot Alderson, a systems engineer at a cyber-security company called Allsafe. Elliot is depressed, has limited social skills, and is addicted to morphine. He has delusions, and questions the reality of things. Having seen so many TV shows with disturbed characters, I have diagnosed him as aspergetic and schizophrenic. Elliot doesn’t talk much, but he addresses the viewer constantly in voice-over. We, the audience, are his imaginary friends. My friend pointed out that Rami Malek is the male version of Emma Stone — we are programmed to like him instantly because of his facial geometry.

Elliot can’t interact with people, so he gets to know them by hacking their social media accounts and online records. He fancies himself a vigilante, turning over pedophiles to the police and blackmailing his psychiatrist’s lying boyfriend into leaving her alone. Think of him as Robin Hoodie. He foils the fsociety’s cyber-attack on Allsafe’s biggest client, the huge conglomerate E Corp. (which everyone refers to as “Evil Corp.”), but for some reason he leaves the hackers’ rootkit in the server. Shortly afterwards, he is recruited by the leader of fsociety, the mysterious Mr. Robot, whose headquarters are in Coney Island.

Mr. Robot is played by Christian Slater, whose raspy Jack Nicholson delivery is used to great effect. Mr. Robot could be the older version of Slater’s rebel DJ in Pump Up The Volume. We learn that the fsociety’s grand plan is to hack E Corp. and erase its debt records. The result is a true revolution: Everyone is liberated from crushing debt.

Wait. You’ve heard this before. Where? Slap yourself, it’s Fight Club. To its credit, Mr. Robot does not hide that it is the Son of Fincher. The visual style, the voice-over, the unreliable narrator — welcome back to 1999. In a nice loop, the pilot which sets the tone for the series was directed by Niels Arden Oplev, the Swedish director of the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which was remade by David Fincher.

Of course revolutions are never simple. People know what they’re against, but not what they will replace it with. On Mr. Robot, good deeds are swiftly punished and euphoria is immediately followed by anxiety. Elliot’s childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) picks up a wallet and returns it to the man who dropped it, only to learn that he had stolen it from someone. Elliot turns over his drug dealer’s source to the police, only to deal with the horrible consequences. Our suspicions about Mr. Robot are confirmed, but what about Tyler Wellick (Martin Wallstrom), the very ambitious VP for Technology at E Corp.?

Elliot thinks he’s free of fsociety so he decides to try and be like everyone else. “I’m gonna be more normal now. Maybe Shayla could even be my girlfriend. I’ll go see those stupid Marvel movies with her. I’ll join a gym. I’ll heart things on Instagram. I’ll drink vanilla lattes. I’m gonna lead a bug-free life from now on.” The very people he mocks will probably love Mr. Robot because it’s “edgy” (Let’s consign that word to the fire along with “hacktivist,” “netizen,” and “netrepreneur”).

Showrunner Sam Esmail’s previous project was the indie feature Comet, in which two on-and-off lovers talk and talk and talk. There’s plenty of talk in Mr. Robot, but it’s all misdirection. Like Comet it makes time-jumps, taking us back to Elliot’s childhood and the family drama at the heart of this story, and then plonking us down three days after the big fsociety attack. Mr. Robot declares war on capitalist society, a society we pay for, whose corporations bring us this insurrectionist show and enable us to go online and comment on it. Who’s Occupying Whom?

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