Mr. Robot

[RooksBailey]

Shadowrun Return's Harebrained Schemes shared this on their feed.  It does look good. 

Needs more shamans.   ;D

But still, this looks like it could be refreshingly different.

[RooksBailey]

But still, this looks like it could be refreshingly different.

Sadly, it is not.   

I had forgotten all about this show, and was only recently reminded of it when it came up in a neo-noir discussion.  Now, I am largely not a fan of neo-noir.  Sure, there are some good ones out there - Blade Runner comes to mind most prominently - but I find most of them to be what one film noir aficionado recently referred to as being "all style, no substance."  Sadly, I have found that to be true.  Modern directors seem as enamored with film noir as ever, but they really don't understand what made the genre so memorable.  So, they copy the obvious stuff: criminality, low-key lighting (sometimes), and so on, but completely miss the existential tone (neo-noirs largely prefer hopeless nihilism), sense of cosmic comeuppance,  and general classiness of the originals.  Neo-noirs are shabby noirs for a shabby age, and that just doesn't work for me. 

Mr. Robot, sadly, encapsulates all these flaws and more.

Initially, I thought I was going to like this series as the general tone was very cyberpunkish: We have a story of a white hat hacker who, like Neo in The Matrix, is given the opportunity to go down the rabbit hole and change the world for the better.  Of course, this involves taking down a powerful corporation, E Corp,  that seems to embody the worse aspects of modern trans-global corporate culture and power (amusingly, the logo for E Corp is the canted "E" that will be familiar to Dell owners everywhere  :) ).  Heck, I even give the story credit for starting out with a strong condemnation of the hypocrisy of certain tech giants such as Apple (words to the effect of "people cheered Steve Jobs for revolutionizing consumer technology, but paid no mind to his use of Chinese child labor in building his empire") and Facebook (a mention of how people are selling their privacy cheaply so Zuckerberg can get rich).   The show definitely came out swinging.

But then it bogged down with the usual faults of neo-noirs:

1)  The world is run by twenty-somethings.  This is something that is driving me away from the majority of television and cinema these days.  Don't get me wrong: there is a time and place for 20-somethings to do their stuff - movies like The Transformers and The Hunger Games come to mind, but when you are telling what is supposed to be a serious drama involving mega-corporations and criminal syndicates, it stretches things a bit to see a kid sitting in a CEO chair - surrounded by lawyers twice his age, no less (what, no kid lawyers available to the corp?)! - calling the shots.  The same goes for the rest of the cast of Mr. Robot.  With the exception of the middle aged Christian Slater, who plays the master revolutionary, the rest of the cast is far too young for the subject matters at hand. 

As an aside: One of the things that struck me about classical noirs was that the magical age of the protagonists and antagonists was "36."  Seriously.  Go watch some and see how often that precise age comes up.  I can believe a 36 year old would be the head of a criminal organization or a seasoned gumshoe, but not a 26 year old.  One is believable, the other seems more fit for an episode of Scooby Doo (I'm sure one of the episodes of Mr. Robot will end with a 'grup' exclaiming: "I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"). 

2) The dialogue in Mr. Robot is flat and uninteresting.  Again, might as well say that this is another general complaint I have for all of contemporary entertainment.  While classical noir went for what some call "poetic," "lyric," or "fantastical" dialogue, neo-noirs go for "realistic" dialogue - which is just a euphemism for "I based the dialogue in my script on my Facebook and Twitter conversations."  At best, it is uninteresting and brings nothing memorable to the table, at worst (American Sniper comes to mind, but that is a discussion for another time), it can be as bad as nails being scrapped across a chalkboard.   Mr. Robot suffers from the additional burden of being a story about hackers, and you know what that means: lots of dialogue that sounds like this:  "I'm re-routing the DNS server to communicate with the server farm to stop the DDOS attack!"  Ugh.  I can only take so much of that.  And then you have copious amounts of vulgarity (including two sexual remarks that were particularly memorable) that just drag what little writing there is further down into the gutter.

Honestly, though, I don't blame movies for completely giving up on dialogue.  Writing snappy dialogue like Chandler or Hammett is not easy; it takes skill and wit.  And we know those are rare commodities in Hollywood these days....

3) Drinking and smoking are not the same as popping pills and smoking pot/crack/what-have-you.  Film noir is known for its heavy drinking and smoking.  Neo-noir is known for its heavy drug use.  The two are not comparable.  Unfortunately, Mr. Robot, like many neo-noirs before it, doesn't seem to understand that.  While watching Nick and Nora Charles getting sloshed on Martinis can be funny, or Sam Spade chaining-smoking his way through a mystery can be amusing, watching a pothead get high...isn't.  Yeah, I know kids think it is, but it isn't.  Unfortunately, Mr. Robot is filled with casual hard drug usage that make all the characters seem pathetic rather than being the hard-edged bon vivants of decades past. 

4) Nihilism and purposeless rage is not cool.  Classical noirs are often mis-characterized as being immoral tales.  This is actually not true.  Classical noirs are actually existential tales that often contained a strong morale message.  This is one of the reasons why I so love them.  In a classical noir, the protagonist is usually a cynic, someone who recognizes that it is "a bright, guilty world," but fights the good fight nonetheless.  And even the bad guys aren't so bad! For example, take the film noir "Johnny Eager." Here we have a mob boss who goes from ruthlessly exterminating his rivals, to sacrificing everything to save a girl who loves him (and not necessarily vice versa!). And even when the bad guys are particularly loathsome, such as the husband-murdering couples found in Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, even they eventually have a moment of moral clarity.  God's inescapable justice (which is the aforementioned "postman" in The Postman Always Rings Twice) is always operative in a film noir despite the innate immorality of the setting. 

Not so in neo-noirs.  In neo-noirs such as Mr. Robot, any sense of overarching morality is either completely absent or, if present, it is the trendy politically correct "morality" of the tabloids.  I was struck by one scene in Mr. Robot where, after a successful hack of E Corp, Christian Slater exults that they got enough emails to bury the corporation is "racism, sexism, fascism, and other isms." Yeah, that sounds like a portion of the Decalogue according to The Village Voice.  Now, to be fair to Mr. Robot, nihilism is not as present here as it is in other neo-noirs (such as the recent and interesting Night Crawler with Jake Gyllenhaal) as the purpose of Mr. Robot is to take down the "1% of the 1%" who are exploiting the world, but as that quote and the previous one indicate, all we have operative here is some sort of Occupy Wall Street unfocused rage against an unfair world.  Worse, like a video game,  the moral choices confronted by the hackers aren't really choices at all as anyone with a working moral compass and a mature sense of right and wrong would instantly know what needs to be done - which is to run as far and fast as possible from both E Corp and the cadre of hackers known as FSociety.  But not here.  Instead, we get Elliot, the hacker protagonist of Mr. Robot, blindly feeling his way from one scummy situation to another all the while wondering, and sometimes literally begging the audience, "what would you do in my place?"  Anything but what you are doing, pal.  If you are over twelve, you should realize the ends never justify the means.  Ironic that contemporary social justice warriors never figure that out in their quest for utopia....

5) Enough with the psychiatry!  I used to like Monk (which was also a USA Network show), but I gave up after having to listen to Tony Shalhoub babble to his psychiatrist every episode.  Yeah, I know it is a rare person indeed in the modern entertainment industry who doesn't have his psychiatrist on speed dial (David Letterman used to brag that he couldn't begin his day without a quick psycho-therapy session - no, I didn't make that up), but enough is enough, USA!  Do I have you suffer through it with Mr. Robot, too?  Personally, I just find this to be a very cliched and lazy method of character development.  Once upon a time characters used to unveil themselves to the audience by their words and deeds.  Apparently that is too much trouble for screenwriters these days.  So, now they just plop the character down on a couch and have him tell you his deepest fears, desires, and motivations.  It saves a lot of time.   ::) 

Needless to say, despite being involved with murder, adultery, pornography, and all sorts of other immorality, Sam Spade or Phil Marlowe never felt the need to navel gaze.  Tough times call for tough men; modern times apparently call for very fragile men.

I will say, though, this obsession with psychiatry was actually present in classical noirs, too.   :)  Oh yes, it is true.  Freudian psychology apparently was fascinating to audiences back in the Golden Era of Hollywood, so you have quite a few films noir that uses this same technique (The Locket, Ministry of Fear, and Suddenly come to mind, amongst many others).  I was never a fan of this technique back then, either.   ;D  But back then it was fresh.  Today, it is the equivalent of "the butler did it."

So, those are just some initial thoughts on Mr. Robot.  I might have been unfair in my critique because I only watched one and a half episodes...but that was all I could take, frankly,  By the middle of the second episode, and the protagonist's fourth or fifth psych session, I had had enough.  Shame.  It had such a promising start. As it currently stands, it resembles little more than a juvenile look at serious contemporary issues of corps more powerful than governments and the power of technology in the modern world.  Unfortunately, it seems to me to be little more than a live action version of Watch_Dogs.

EDIT: I will say that Mr. Robot did a good job with the noir-ish lighting.  The story is very dark.  It appears to have been filmed in New York during the winter.  This was an excellent idea as the sun in rarely seen, something that makes the story very claustrophobic. 

[GDS_Starfury]

I really think that you haven't quite defined you position in an in depth manner.

please elaborate.

[DoctorQuest]

Oh, man.......

Is there going to be a quiz?  ;)

[Staggerwing]

No, but you do have to have your project in by second bell.

[RooksBailey]

Okay, in the fashion of Stonewall Jackson, let me repeat the lecture....word for word.     ;D

I admit to being on a late night tear.   ;D  I just am getting so tired of the same nonsense popping up in contemporary movies and television.  I could copy and paste that critique and apply it to about 75% of the movies and TV shows that are around these days.  Cliched doesn't even begin to describe it.