Reality Is The Sum Of Your Collective Delusions — MR. ROBOT
[MAJOR SPOILERS] Why The Elliot/Tyrell Duality Is Probably True And Is Artistically Brilliant
In this post, I want to argue that not only is the Elliot/Tyrell duality hypothesis very possible, but if true, would be one of the most beautiful artistic choices in television I have encountered. Far, far from being a cheap and cliché attempt at a plot twist or a cop-out ending to a complicated storyline, it was masterfully executed and made a mind-numbingly astonishing statement.
Eps1.9 — Unexplained Events
The season finale of Mr. Robot left us with some serious questions:
Why did Joanna, Tyrell’s wife, talk to Elliot in Danish? How did Elliot end up in Tyrell’s car? Why did Tyrell not do anything with the information Elliot gave him to get his old job back? Who hid the USB drive in the sunroof?
During a discussion with a friend about these question, she told me about a seemingly impossible Internet speculation: that Tyrell, like Mr. Robot, was a figment of Elliot’s imagination.
Denial
That was my initial reaction upon first hearing the Elliot/Tyrell duality hypothesis.
If it was true, more questions would actually be raised than answered, the opposite of what a plot resolution is supposed to accomplish. How can we explain the scenes with Tyrell and Elliot in the same room, talking to the same people? How did Elliot climb up the corporate ladder at E-Corp while maintaining another full-time job at Allsafe? How did he have time to find, marry, and impregnate Joanna, Tyrell’s wife (or learn to speak Swedish and understand Danish!!). How did Elliot maintain this intricate double life without any major screw-ups, especially considering his frequent psychotic breaks where he can barely keep it together as one person??
By contrast, the Mr. Robot twist felt much more legitimate. The mechanics of this plot twist didn’t feel like an impossible stretch. Out in pubic, most people around Mr. Robot do not acknowledge his existence. They don’t even flinch when he shouts. During scenes where both Elliot and Mr. Robot speak, only one of them is the center of attention. Mr. Robot seems to be Elliot’s alter-ego, brash and risk tolerant, with much less self doubt than Elliot himself. This twist seemed well planned and executed. It wasn’t a twist for the sake of a twist. It served to highlight many of Elliot’s inner demons and daemons, while giving the show one of its awesome climaxes.
But Tyrell also being a manifestation of Elliot?? That seemed like a huge stretch.
Upon first dismissal of the Elliot/Tyrell hypothesis though, I was still left with the unexplainable events from the season finale. The realization that this hypothesis was seemed like the only plausible explanation for the events in eps1.9 came down quickly. It made too much sense.
Anger
That’s the next feeling I experienced. This additional plot twist felt like too much. I remember expressing my frustration to my friend during our discussion. It felt like a cheap cop-out by writers trying to dig their way out of an overly complicated script. It also felt cliché, especially for such a well crafted show with brilliant acting, beautiful writing, stunning cinematography, and harsh critiques of the current world order usually not seriously explored in American television.
In architecting the Mr. Robot twist, the show treats his scenes very delicately, such that in hindsight, it becomes obvious that Mr. Robot is a manifestation. By doing so, the writers implicitly agree that a huge twist in a plot requires careful artistic planning, yet they then proceed to take huge liberties with another character seemingly without doing much of that planning, turning the show from one where scenes are distortions of reality to ones where anything goes!
If this hypothesis was true, then it would call into question the reality of way more than simply the scenes with Mr. Robot. What else wasn’t real?? Just about everything could be tossed into the bin of Elliot’s imagination. This ending felt like the equivalent to the “it was all a dream” ending of so many other stories: cheap, overdone, and lazy!
Bargaining
After the initial wave of frustration passed, I allowed part of my brain to began to entertaining the validity that Tyrell was in fact another manifestation of Elliot and my friend and I began the predictable analysis of the mechanics of how Elliot’s and Tyrell’s lives could have co-existed with each other throughout the first season, bargaining with the gods of fiction. But by the end of it, I still hadn’t bought into this crazy speculation. Either the mechanics of the plot seemed way too convoluted to be plausible/elegant or much of the show would have to have occurred in Elliot’s head, which, again, for such a well crafted show, seemed like stooping too low.
Depression
Then came the inevitable feelings of depression upon realizing that there seemed like no satisfying resolution to what had quickly become one of my favorite shows of all-time.
And so this feeling remained, until a few months later, when I rewatched Mr. Robot joining some friends who were watching it for the first time. After we finished the first season, I told them about the Elliot/Tyrell rumors to get their take and see their reactions. After their initial bewilderment, I pointed out those weird clues: the sunglass USB stick, the Joanna interaction, and Tyrell’s SUV. Predictably, I got the same reactions I myself had previously. Initial dismissal, then anger for what it would mean to the plot if such a hypothesis was true.
Acceptance
But a very curious thing happened. As I saw my friends’ reactions, something clicked in my head making me realize that not only was the Elliot/Tyrell hypothesis was very possible, but if it were true, would be an absolute stroke of genius!
Let’s begin:
Our Point Of View
“You’re only in my head, we’ll have to remember that.” These are the first words that Elliot utters in the very first episode. Not only are they the first words, but Elliot stresses that we need to remember them. As if that weren’t enough, the screen is still dark, with no imagery distracting us. So let’s remember it. We’re in Elliot’s head.
And just to make sure there is no ambiguity about this deliberate choice by the writers, Elliot tells us about how his brain interprets the name of E-Corp as Evil Corp when he hears or sees it. From then on, (almost) all mentions of E-Corp are seen and heard as Evil Corp. It’s a constant reminder to us, the audience, about our unique point of view.
Elliot’s Condition
What makes this perspective interesting? Well, what’s the first thing we’re told about Elliot’s psychological state? He’s schizophrenic: “I’m a schizo.” How exactly does schizophrenia work? Or at least how is it interpreted in this show? This we learn from Mr. Robot and his interactions with Elliot and the real world. He interacts chiefly with Elliot. The rest of the world doesn’t seem to pay him much attention: on the subway, in the cafe, even at Allsafe, no one seems to notice him.
A few times though, Mr. Robot does interact with “real” people, as seen in the Internet cafe where Mr. Robot draws a punch from a stranger.
So Mr. Robot teaches us that reality is very fluid for Elliot. His reality is actually a very liberal blend of his inner world and his physical world. But it also teaches us that events can occur mostly in Elliot’s mind, without much interaction with the real world.
As crazy as Elliot seems though, his mental state is not that of insanity. It’s not a complete break from reality. It’s not a state devoid of meaning, logic, or ability to rationalize. Elliot is still able to rationalize, plan, think, and hack. Even during his most vivid of hallucinations in the Internet cafe, when he is now fully aware that Mr. Robot is not real, he can appreciate the bewildered reaction of other people seeing someone choke themselves. In fact, he uses a brilliant strategy to bring Mr. Robot out of “hiding” from his own subconscious, by threatening to turn himself in. He is by no means crazy even if his mind’s eye is quite “buggy.”
I believe this is the key to understanding the show. Elliot’s brain transforms his subconscious experiences, thoughts, and emotions into physical manifestations and weaves them seamlessly with reality. The show is the blend of the messiness of his inner world with the information received from his eyes and ears from the outside world.
If this sounds too strange to relate to and difficult to empathize with, it shouldn’t. We all actually know what this is like when we retire for the night, check our waking consciousness out the door, and fall into the world of dreams.
Dreams and Blended Reality
Let’s think about dream states. In dreams, almost everything makes perfect sense, so much so that in the moment, we usually don’t realize we’re dreaming. We get dropped into random scenes like a character in a surreal movie without asking ourselves how we got there or what exactly we were doing just a few moments ago. We move from one scene to another rather arbitrarily, without too feeling too bewildered. Characters and situations in our dreams seem to magically have identities and back stories. How? Our brains seem to be generating these explanations on the fly, seamlessly filling in the gaping plot lines, exactly like Elliot’s reality.
In dreams, our emotional desires, our life events, and the people we know all seem to commingle. Again, exactly like Elliot’s reality.
And very interestingly, if any substantial external stimuli from the real world occurs during our dreams that is too significant to ignore completely, such as a loud noise or significant amount of motion, our brains merrily marry those stimuli with our dream, creating a blended consciousness, a dream reality hybrid.
Similar observations can be made for states of consciousness under the influence of drugs or in conditions of deteriorating health.
Our Dreamy Reality
However, such melding of inner and outer worlds does not just stop with dreams, drugs, dementia, and near death. It’s not as though in our most lucid states of awake, we’re perfect interpreters of reality. Quite the contrary.
We all live in a purgatory of blended realities. We all have inner worlds that map themselves onto reality, morphing and distorting reality: the culture we grew up in, the parents we had, the people we befriended, the schools we attended, the era in which we lived, our hopes for the future, our moment to moment worries and thoughts, the values we hold. These all color our realities, and not just a little bit. A piece of art will invoke very different reactions and interpretations from different people. A certain way of life can be seen either as living a life true to oneself or as living in sin. We see a political party as good or bad. The same major life event can effect us all in very different ways, destroying some, motivating others. War can seem just to some and inexcusable to others.
Actually, our inner world and our past experiences are what gives any of our experiences meaning at all. Being social, cultural creatures, most of our experiences are tied not simply to “actual reality,” the world of atoms and laws of physics, but to cultural realities. This is especially true in the modern world, with so many of us living in cities and immersed in technology, where almost our entire existence resides in the world of human fictions: norms, interpretations, values, and ideas. So, like Eliot, we all live in a “fake” reality. Mr. Robot hammers in the point in eps1.9, in Times Square, as Elliot attempts to mentally resist his existence telling him repeatedly that he isn’t real:
And what? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this! Look at it!
A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of food. Brain-washing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks…
As far as you’re concerned, Elliot, I am very real.
The Sum Of Your Collective Delusions
Reality, as it turns out, is merely the sum of your collective delusions. It’s the story you brain tells itself, weaving together pieces of information from the real world with bits of information from your inner world to produce a storyline that appears coherent and has meaning. Yet, when viewed from someone else’s perspective or closely scrutinized, your neat, consistent reality can look, well, downright schizophrenic! Your reality is not unlike a dream, where as soon as you wake up, the suspended disbelief that seemed so compelling in the moment, just drops like a rock. Now awake, you recall the dream and realize how strange and nonsensical things were.
Hence the repeated calls throughout the show telling the audience to wake up:
Elliot to Shayla in the tub: “Wake up.”
Krista to Elliot lying in a hospital bed: “Are you awake?” Elliot “I don’t know.”
Darlene in the arcade, at the end of the world party “We are finally awake!”
The call to wake up isn’t just in service of the story though. It’s fair warning to the audience about what is required to understand this show. We can’t just lean back and let the show happen to us. It’s not a show that we can watch at the end of a long, tiring day to get our mind off of things. Every minute is a missed clue, often conveniently ignored by our brains.
Elliot and E Corp
Back to the plot of the show: let’s think about Elliot’s relationship with E Corp. E Corp is a company that ripped Elliot apart his father/best friend, the only person who he could connect to, and subjected him to a childhood of emotional abuse by his mother and a lifetime of extreme loneliness. It left him severely broken and severely powerless, feeling unable to control his own destiny, a fact that Krista reminds Elliot of: “You’ve brought up this issue before, this issue of not feeling like you’re in control.”
This is how Mr. Robot is manifested. He is created as a result of the trauma E Corp has caused Elliot. Mr. Robot looks like Elliot’s father, is at times a loving father figure to Elliot, but is imbued partly with self confidence and partly with craziness (“and not the cute kind”) stemming from Elliot’s past. We know Mr. Robot is not quite the character of his father, when comparing him to Elliot’s much more likable real father in the flashback to his computer store.
Elliot and Tyrell
Now let’s think about Tyrell’s relationship with Elliot.
It’s a little odd. Upon his first visit to Allsafe, Tyrell specifically begins chatting up Elliot even though there are dozens of other employees to talk to. When Tyrell brings Elliot to that surreal office surrounded by lawyers with blurred faces to offer Elliot a job, it’s the men in the black suits that brings Elliot to him. The men in the black suits, let’s remember, are most certainly not real, given that Krista had asked Elliot if he is still seeing them after starting (she thinks) the medication she prescribed him. In eps1.0, Mr. Robot can even be seen asking men in suits for change and they don’t ignore him, unlike most people in the real world! For some unexplained reason, Elliot reveals his entire plan, the plan he’s worked so hard and so long for, to Tyrell without so much as a struggle.
Tyrell also has a tendency to simply pops up at unexpected moments. He appears near a random stairwell in Steel Mountain the same exact day and moment as Elliot. He appears at Elliot’s apartment in the last episode when Darlene leaves him by himself, almost filling the void left by Darlene, although we have no reason to believe Tyrell knows where he lives.
Finally, almost as if the writers know just how vested we the audience are in the fiction they have created to notice anything strange, they decide to have the popcorn machine magically begin popping in the final scene of eps1.9, when Elliot tells Tyrell about the plan!
Now let’s recall Elliot’s psychological condition. He is constantly in a dreamlike state. Reality is a spectrum for our main character. His imaginative manifestations are so powerful that he is even able to “summon” Mr. Robot, who he now knows isn’t real, into existence, appearing as real as everyone else in the cafe.
What about the questions about how Elliot could have maintained such an intricate double life, leaving us with more questions than answers? Maybe Elliot didn’t have a double life at all.
Let’s think about Elliot’s delusions. They can be acted out in the real world and involve other people, like the Internet cafe scene getting punched in the face, or they can occur primarily inside his head as we see in the footage of him on the railings, throwing himself off. Before falling, he doesn’t appear to be having a conversation with an imaginary Mr. Robot sitting next to him, or even smoking a cigarette. He’s pretty much in a daze. Daydreaming might be a close analogy.
Additionally, let’s consider Elliot’s very loose relationship with time, in addition to his ethereal relationship to people and objects. Elliot is constantly disappearing, sometimes for days at a time, much to the worry and annoyance of all those closest to him: Darlene, Angela, and Shayla.
A good example of this time deficiency is during the Steel Mountain heist. Tyrell would appear to have stalled Elliot for quite a while, yet no one waiting for him in the van seems to ask Elliot what took him so long. In dreams, time goes by much faster than reality.
There seems to be a subtle hint at this idea that of Tyrell is living in Elliot’s imagination with time being a key component, after Elliot’s visit with White Rose:
Damn. She infected me with her time paranoia. We’re all living in each other’s paranoia. You definitely can’t argue that.
Therefore, maybe Elliot didn’t really need years of time to create Tyrell. Some of Tyrell’s storyline could have been built up while Elliot was “daydreaming” like on the railing, and some of it could have been built up quite quickly, almost instantaneously, in his interactions with E Corp at Allsafe or with Angela.
Finally, let’s think about Tyrell himself as a character. Unlike an actual E Corp executive such as Colby, who, as despicable as he is, does show signs of remorse when confronted with the consequences of his past actions, Tyrell seems to be more of an abstraction, a one-dimensional caricature, a distillation of the evil and control that E Corp represents in Elliot’s psyche. His plans for becoming CTO are borderline crazy. He lashes out when things don’t go according to plan. He is willing to sleep with a random co-workers just for a few seconds of access to their phone. He is married to someone who seems very puppet-like as well, defined only by a simplistic relationship with power and control, maniacally focused only on attaining more of it, except in the bedroom, where she enjoys giving it up completely.
Here are two very telling quotes from Tyrell:
“We’re all human, except for me of course.” He’s a fictional character.
Talking to Joanna: “Us is me.” She’s fictional as well.
Finally, let’s again remember the strange clues in the last episode with Tyrell’s wife, the USB stick, and Tyrell’s SUV. Let me add two small, but crucial details to these clues. First, we find Elliot sleeping not in the passenger seat of Tyrell’s SUV, but in the driver’s seat. Second, when Elliot gets out of the car, the first thing he asks the parking attendant is “Who am I?” before correcting himself and asking the more seemingly logical “Where am I?”
Considering all these points, Elliot’s relationship with Tyrell, his loose relationship with time as well as the physical world, and Tyrell being a cartoonish character, it’s beginning to look like, far from being real, Tyrell is another one of Elliot’s imaginary characters. He seems to be Elliot’s manifestation of E Corp’s evil essence while at the same time serving to fulfill Elliot’s deep Freudian desire for power and control. And far from this duality being a sloppy, last minute fix to a complicated plot, it seems to have been even more carefully and subtly crafted than Mr. Robot!
Too Much Creative License?
Ok, even if it was well done, why should we not be back in the stage of anger? This Elliott/Tyrell duality IS basically an “it was all a dream” device. How is this not cliché, using the same type of plot twist in the same show?? How is this not lazily writing, easily resolving many of the plot’s contradictions with the a deus ex machina type resolution??
Well, if this hypothesis proves true and the “reality” of large portions of the show prove to be “fake”, such a move would elevate the show from simply a merely a modern day, hi-tech David vs Goliath narrative, to one that explores the nature of reality and deeply questions our assumptions about the authenticity and coherence of our own reality, asking us what that phrase even means given the abilities of the human mind to fool itself and the necessity of believing in cultural fictions in a social context. Dreams become a great metaphor for this mental footwork that the brain does to craft a seemingly coherent reality from mutually exclusive beliefs and contradictory actions even in its most awake state.
But didn’t the show already teach us this with the Mr. Robot twist? Why hammer it in with Tyrell?? That’s not good art! Have some respect for your audience!
The answers to these questions are where I believe the show’s genius and beauty lies.
Mr. Robot Was Just The Tip Of The Iceberg
First, Mr. Robot was just the tip of the iceberg. Even after the show “teaches us” to be more awake, to not take things at face value, to not let our brains lazily fill in contradictory information, we still seem to be asleep, even after repeated reminders throughout the show telling the audience to wake up.
Besides the Mr. Robot scenes, so much of the show seems to also be a dreamlike reality. Even after we think we’re awake and aware, knowing Mr. Robot is not real, realizing that we should have realized it form the get-go, we continue to ignore so much more of the show’s inconsistencies and unexplainable occurrences! Here’s a list of just some of these oddities:
- We fail to see so many of the fSociety stickers placed all around the city, in the background of so many scenes (fSociety having almost no notoriety in the beginning of the show, yet their stickers seem to be everywhere in the city).
- We fail to ask who all those other CDs refer to in Elliot’s digital graveyard, especially considering that he’s quite an introvert, rarely meeting new people (his mind might be much more prolific in character creation than we thought, his biggest desire after all being fixing his own loneliness).
- We fail to realize the lack of explanation given to how all the other fSociety hackers met Elliot since Mr. Robot brought them all together to begin with, and given that Mr. Robot is Elliot.
- We forget that, after Elliot is waiting for fallout from the Terry Colby IP address incident with the FBI, when Elliot goes back to the arcade, there is no one there and there is no computer equipment there either. How is that possible?
- When Darlene and crew are destroying the physical hardware in the pound’s incinerator, even though we see many hard drives being destroyed, we see only one tower being burned, only one computer.
- Also, why did they choose to go to an incinerator anyway? Wasn’t burning hardware Elliot’s ultra-paranoid method of deleting data after a wipe? Going to an animal pound seems like the result of a one of Elliot’s unconscious daemons, compelling him to a pound to save locked up dogs, just as he saved the other dog.
- The very last scene in eps1.9, the popcorn begins to magically start popping without anyone having turned it on.
- “Elliot” and “Tyrell” are almost perfect anagrams of each other, only the vowels being different (and I don’t know if this is a stretch but “i” and “y” are the same sound and “o” and “e” are similar shapes).
- Finally, the cinematography: it’s beautiful, yes. But it’s also very strange with lots of unconventional framing choices and heavy use of blurring.
In fact, we fail to notice so many of these dreamlike inconsistencies that one could argue that Mr. Robot isn’t even there to teach us anything. He might simply be a distraction, distraction being a theme brought up over and over again in the show. He might simply serve the show as the misdirection of a good magician to get us all to look away from the sleight of hand being perpetrated. A distraction from the truth, that Tyrell is also Elliot. A distraction representing the distractions of modern society, the social media, the political theater, the pharmaceutical drugs, the luxury cars, the television shows. Maybe Mr. Robot is also a commentary on the show’s irony, both the show and Mr. Robot railing against the ills of modern society, yet at the end of the day, being inevitably just another distraction from these ills.
The show is an exaggerated versions of the human condition, but the exaggeration is not as large as one might hope. None of us actually perceive reality. The only perception, the only reality we have is the sum of our collective delusions. Or to put another way, believing is seeing.
This Is What Delusion Feels Like
Second, having much more of the show arising from Elliot’s mind than just the Mr. Robot plot, allows the writers to create a firsthand experience about what it feels like to have your brain rectify so many contradictions and fill in so many gaps: namely, it feels just fine. In the moment, nothing feels out of place, even when you think you’ve finally woken up (knowing about Mr. Robot) and have put all pieces together. True freedom of the mind, being truly awakened is not simply a matter of being informed, following the news, knowing about specific cases of political corruption or knowing about certain deceptive marketing tactics used by giant conglomerates. It’s recognizing that we are all part of a system of control, manipulation, and distraction who’s sole purpose is the continual growth of capitalism, money and power, and then taking at least some form of action.
In Times Square, Mr. Robot derides Elliot himself for being part of the system, for being asleep: “We live in a kingdom of bullshit! A kingdom you’ve lived in for far too long.” This line is probably directed at us, the viewers, who exist in Elliot’s mind.
Don’t Be Mad, You Chose To Go Back To Sleep
Here’s the third reason why the Elliot/Tyrell duality is, I think, so brilliant and beautiful. The show over and over tells us how we all live in a false reality:
Krista — What is it about society that disappoints you so much?
Elliot — Oh, I don’t know.
Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit.
The world itself’s just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking as intimacy.
Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things. Our property. Our money.
I’m not saying anything new. We all know why we do this.
Not because Hunger Games books makes us happy. But because we wanna be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend. Because we’re cowards.
Fuck society.
For a moment, we all nod in agreement at the deep truth of that monologue. We are being told about the chains around our wrists. We are being shown these chains. They are being dangled in front of our eyes, clanking in our ears. Yet the show ends, we close the TV or computer, and we go right back to that very same reality, completely ignoring these chains. We go back to checking our work emails, checking our Instagram, dutifully paying our bills, doing some frivolous online shopping, etc.
If reality is the sum of a person’s collective delusions, capitalism is the sum of society’s collective delusions. But there is one huge difference between the two.
The delusions of our minds are extremely hard, if not impossible to control. The blending of your inner world with reality is automatic and hard wired. It would take months of deliberate self education for a person to change their underlying assumptions about how the world works, to get rid of prejudices for instance or to learn about state propaganda. And it would take years of meditation training to even begin to be able to effect the actual mechanics of brain blending. Thus, the show does not criticize Elliot for not being able to control the perceptions of his own reality.
However the negative societal delusions that we subscribe to and propagate, voting for it as Elliot points out with “our property, our money,” are much, much easier to control and change. From not accepting jobs that we all know cause direct harm just because they pay for our evening cocktails, to being satisfied with having a slightly old cellphone or car, to the absolutely easiest actions like simply switching off propaganda laden cable news shows, not voting for this capitalist system with our every action is relatively much easier.
As Darlene puts it: “Sorry, dude, I got no sympathy. You don’t want to put cute puppies out of their misery, you don’t have to.” Our response shouldn’t be “That ain’t on me. I gotta pay the bills.”
We can be forgiven for being misdirected by the system for a time. But when we have just seen the chains that bind us, having experienced the trauma these chains induce, the loneliness they cause, the lives they ruin, we cannot be easily forgiven. We shouldn’t allow our brains to simply wipe these feelings and memories away like they never existed, just to maintain the continuity of the tidy, neat story we tell ourselves about the American Dream, our individual success, material goods, money, etc.
We live in a fictional world and our reaction to a show critiquing that fictional world using a liberal dose of “fake” plot is anger?
“How ordinary,” as Tyrell puts it.
So ordinary in fact, that the writers seemed to have foreseen it. Let’s recall the very first full scene of the show: Elliot confronting Rohit, the cafe owner with hosting child porn on his servers. This scene seems to be a simple establishing scene, introducing Elliot, his abilities as a computer programmer, and revealing a bit of his inner world. But by now we should know not to take anything in this show at face value. As Elliot confronts Rohit with his findings, watch Rohit’s face, note his reactions. Notice anything interesting? He goes through the 5 stages of grief. Denial at first, then anger, sadness (depression), followed by bargaining. Acceptance will come soon enough in prison. These are the same reactions we (or at least I) had when we first heard about the Elliot/Tyrell hypothesis!
Just to make sure we don’t write this off as mere coincidence, in the last episode is hidden this gem, as Elliot muses to himself about the chaos that is unfolding:
I wonder what stage they’re at.
Denial, muttering to themselves, “No, this can be fixed.”
Maybe bargaining, forcing their techs to work overtime to try to decrypt our data.
Or have they come to the realization yet that Darlene encrypted everything with 256-bit AES and it would take an incomprehensible amount of time to crack. That all of their data is actually gone, for good.
Ultimately the writers of Mr. Robot almost seem to be whispering into our ears: You’re upset that most of the show is a delusion, that it was all a dream? But we just revealed to you your own delusions, exposed the forces that control you, you agreed with us, cheering on Elliot in his quest to bring down this system of control, then you went right back to that comatose state, not only passively accepting all the bullshit of capitalism, money, debt, virtualization, individualization, and ultimate loneliness, but actively propagating this virtual reality via your actions, your consumerist behaviors, your social media posts, your dreams of money and individual success. We woke you up, we showed you the fire, we showed you that the figures on the wall were just shadows, fragments of a deeper reality, and you chose to go right back to sleep and you’re angry at us that the show wasn’t real enough for you? Your anger was predictable, yes. But no, you have no business being angry. No, YOU are the dreamer.
In fact, this last accusation seems to be the premise of the entire show.
Elliot is himself a slave to his own mind. He himself is a corporate shill, working to protect the company that killed his father. Beyond that though, he’s a morphine addict. He is a slave to a substance which melts the pains of reality away. Yet he is not just a character on a show. He is us. And in the chilly voice of Vera, we can almost hear the writers laughing at us “…probably even convinced yourself you ain’t an addict.”
For all his insane, inhumane ideas, [Vera] does understand the world, the wild savagery of the world.
Now, let’s do what Vera does for a moment. Let’s look up the origins of the word “robot.”
1923, from English translation of 1920 play “R.U.R.” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”), by Karel Capek (1890–1938), from Czech robotnik “forced worker,” from robota “forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,” from robotiti “to work, drudge,” from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota “servitude,” from rabu “slave.”
You’re going to make me say it aren’t you? I am Mr. Robot.
We are the slave.
Epilogue
I had written a few paragraphs arguing that at least the core plot line in the story was real, but decided to take it out. Here’s what I had written:
Yet still, part of me still wants at least something in the show to be real. Ok, my brain understands the deep metaphor and the ironies of the show, but my heart wants something in this show to have been real, damn-it!! If anything, we want the show to at least have been about Elliot achieving the goal of taking down an evil corporation, if not for our own vicarious satisfaction, then at least for his own sake. Even after writing this long ass essay, I think I’d still feels cheated, if by the series finale, Elliot ends of waking up in a hospital room, all his emotional turmoil, trauma, and perspiration having been for nothing!
I don’t think that’s the case. There is Angela’s storyline, much of which at least seems to happen outside of Elliot’s consciousness. The clue which solidifies Angela’s existence, as well as the reality of the massive hack of a giant evil corporation is the crescendo of her storyline: the TV interview where Mr. Plouffe shoots himself. It’s a small clue, but it’s significant: the crawl at the bottom of the screen reads “James Plouffe: E Corp EVP of Technology.” E Corp, not Evil corp. We’re not experience this scene through Elliot’s point of view.
Here’s why I decided to take it out.
First, as I was writing this piece and rewatching the show in an attempt to try to pick up on all of its deliberate inconsistencies, I began to suspect that, other than Darlene, all of fSociety was imagined:
- Elliot visits the arcade after the Colby framing incident finding no one and no computer equipment there.
- The incinerator only has one computer tower being destroyed.
- And we are never told how Elliot brought this group together, since he was Mr. Robot.
Then, after watching the promo for season two where Elliot reaches for the gun inside the popcorn machine, I’m beginning to wonder if Darlene herself was imaginary. We never see her in Elliot’s flashbacks to his childhood. More tellingly though, it was Darlene who put the gun in the popcorn machine after Elliot leaves the arcade. Elliot doesn’t know there’s a gun hidden in the popcorn machine. How is he reaching for it?
So then if Darlene isn’t real, then is Angela? They have spent quite a few scenes together throughout the show.
These small clues seems to be slowly leading us to believe that the entire show is ultimately a modern (and awesome) interpretation of Plato’s Cave, where it was in fact, all the dream. All of it.
And if this is true, would I still stand by my assertion that the writers still haven’t overstepped their artistic license?
Yep. Here’s why.
We have enjoyed watching Elliot taking down E Corp, vicariously living the dream of having accomplished something huge, just like when we watch The Daily Show, or retweet inspirational stories about hope and change, or go voting every 4 years. This feeling of vicarious living is poisonous. It makes us feel like we’ve done something. It makes us feel like we’ve taken action via our digital activism, yet at the end of the day, almost all of us are at home, sitting on front of our digital devices (like Elliot in the last few minutes of eps1.9), letting the world be run the way the powerful have intended it and mindlessly helping them do so with our time and money. We are emperor Nero, playing the lyre, as we watch Rome burn.
So at this point, I actually do hope the entire show is happening inside Elliot’s skull just so we (myself included, sitting in front of a computer, typing up this absurdly long post) are robbed of the vicarious satisfaction of Elliot’s victory, thus perhaps, maybe, causing us to feel slightly more compelled to take REAL action.
More Thoughts
Thinking about these themes has sparked two more posts!
My apologies…
Why Do Dreams Makes Sense?
(still working on it)
