Reviews

This review of Mr. Robot is best understood in the context of my thoughts on the upcoming Whitey Bulger movie, although they apply equally to Nightcrawler.

"Our society idolizes psychopaths. The onslaught of programs that feature and pretend to condemn them are actually training manuals for the burgeoning psychopathic administrative class."

That obviously applies to Tyrell, but also Elliot. The telltale quote below is from Mr. Robot writer Sam Esmail.

"These are young people who are tech-savvy, who use technology to their advantage to channel the anger against the status quo and try and make a change to better their lives. It's set in the world of technology, because I think that is a tool that young people can use to bring about change."

And who could argue against that vaguest of ideals, "change"?? Technology decreases freedom, increases pollution and state control. Slaves to mine the minerals, assemble the components, having already been dispossessed of their ancestral lands, these people are deliberately dumbed down through education and malnutrition, controlled economically and culturally to serve as workers. The slaves, and the money and guns to control and direct their energies, are all prerequisites of an Elliot.

And he is completely controlled , a drug dependent, Aspergian transhuman techno-whiz who could no more survive in nature than a computer virus. Simply pull the plug, remove his Matrix link, and Elliot ceases to exist.

Sadly (for all of us I suppose), the soul-crushing system Elliot protests is the thing he cannot survive without, because free people would not choose to spend their lives producing the instantly- disposable machines that he centers his life around, and vainly seeks to free them with. In reality Elliot is just another helping of social engineering: make whatever "change" you want the youth to adopt seem dangerously rebellious, put it on TV and you've molded a generation. Just as vigilante Bruce Willis in Die Hard is the Military Industrial Complex, Elliot is the Surveillance State, neurotically watching your every move in the name of saving the world. Wiping debt would not save the world, and everyone would be back in debt in no time anyway. It's not truly money but WMDs that equal power in this world, thus it is technology and the Elliots who create it that ultimately enslave, not free us as the show's writer purports.

It doesn't matter what radical causes Elliot supports. Form is function, the words don't matter as long as you become as he is. And you will become as he is, or be a lowly, mistreated servant to the psychopathic technocrats, selling them shoes or wiping their tables as the show points out repeatedly. Elliot, far at the top of the mountain, feels free while his every thought is recorded on tape, but understand this: his creation is the purpose of all of it, including this show.

Lights Out a fine portrait of the working class American male. The lead actor is well cast, reprising his role from Fight Club and others. We come to sympathize with Lights because he is fair, means well and is generous with his family. He is doomed, however, by his greed and stupidity. In the end he is a doberman who fights for food, and will always be played by the manipulators who use him until they throw away and replace him. Lights is aware of this, but he doesn't mind and soldiers on because his goal is to elevate his family into the intellectual elite, so that they can become manipulators themselves. The family situation is fully explored, and it is made clear that Lights is the leader, financially and morally, of a misfit crew that would be completely lost without him, save for his brilliant daughter. This is the story of evolution, in the context of pure Americana, as Joe Palooka takes the punches to deliver his possibly-unworthy and definitely-ungrateful family to the promised land.