The Plot Doesn't Matter Why You Should Watch MR. ROBOT (No Spoilers!!)

I mean, I think I said this to you guys last year on the podcast, where I don't care about plot. Point of view is everything. When I say tone, that's where I think that comes from. The world and everything around them are the details that enriches that. That was Mr. Robot writer, director, and creator Sam Esmail talking about Blade Runner 2049 and also his masterpiece show. I remember listening to that quote and being completely taken aback. His show has a lot of plot. If you haven't seen Mr. Robot, it follows hacker Elliot Alderson on his quest to upset the status quo. What I'm about to tell you is top secret. A conspiracy bigger than all of us. There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. The top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission. Mr. Robot has so much plot and story going on that you could easily make a show out of just the forgotten bits. But those details aren't the point on Mr. Robot, especially since the show uses the storytelling device known as an unreliable narrator. Where Elliot speaks directly to us, his imaginary friend, but we can't completely trust what he's telling us or what he sees. The plot doesn't matter. Or rather, it's just a tool to explore the tone Esmail wants to show us. And it's in that tone, not the plot, that you find what Mr. Robot is truly about. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. Tone in Mr. Robot and how the plot is there to serve it. We're going to keep this really light on spoilers, but I also kind of just said that that doesn't matter as much on Mr. Robot, so you know, make your own decisions. I'm Jackson, and this is Ideas at Play. Even though the details of the plot aren't the point of the show, it's important to acknowledge how intricate they are. Mr. Robot goes out of its way to make its lines of code completely accurate, weave in complicated geopolitics, and hinges on an unreliable narrator, which is a plot device designed to control how much of the world we, and Elliot, are exposed to. And a lot of that ground overlaps with our world. Elliot's hacker group F-Society looks a lot like Anonymous. The Chinese interest in the Congo is based on the real world. E-Corp is some kind of combination of every multinational corporation that has immense power. At times, the plot's been weirdly prescient. A DDoS attack like the one in the pilot actually took out Ukraine's power grid six months after it aired. While all of those details have a commentary on world issues, it's not what the show is about. It's about what it's like for us to live in our modern world. It's about immersion in that world and examining what it does to its characters. It's about how we feel in our world by seeing a dark but parallel universe. Ultimately, I think you can break that tone into three feelings. The first is cynicism. Mr. Robot sees a lot of problems with the system. In Elliot's mind, E-Corp is just about the worst thing there is. He only ever shows it to us as Evil Corp. But it's not the only thing he has problems with. The whole system feels corrupted. Oh, I don't know. Is it that we think he's a great man, even? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. **** society. Sound familiar? It taps into the same feeling of frustration that led so many people to vote for both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, politicians who offered an alternative to the status quo. Our trust in institutions is crumbling, and honestly, for good reason. We know that we don't know the whole picture, but we can sense that it's bad. We don't know the whole picture. Elliot's best friend Angela is struggling to pay her student loans, which are owed to E-Corp, while she works for the company responsible for E-Corp's cybersecurity. And this cynicism is what draws Elliot to Mr. Robot. Everyone steals. That's how it works. You think people out there are getting exactly what they deserve? No. They're getting paid over or under, but someone in the chain always gets bamboozled. The plan they come up with is to destroy the whole thing, equalize everyone, and start over. A revolution. But the deeper they get, the more they realize that their enemy is a puppet of a puppet of a puppet. They keep finding out that the choices they made were not their own, but orchestrated and planned for. That the revolution is part of the system. While the details of how these plots play out offer commentary on our world's problems, that's not the base purpose. The most visceral effect is that we recognize the same patterns from our world, and the show captures the cynicism that many of us feel. And that leads us to the second feeling that makes up the tone in Mr. Robot. Anxiety. With the internet, we are capable of doing so much more than ever before in human history. And with that ability, an expectation. The constant plugged-in nature of our modern world can feel like a race against the clock. And that idea is present in the details of Mr. Robot's plot. White Rose, the hacker at the head of the Chinese Dark Army, is obsessed with time. Every hacker has her fixation. You hack people, I hack time. She's consumed with controlling it. Chasing it literally to the ends of the earth to try and gain some advantage. She has total control over everything, but time. Tyrell Wellick is anxiously climbing the corporate and social ladder, striving to make CTO at Ecorp. It is his first true driving motivation. At both times a carrot and a stick. Elliot has extreme social anxiety problems, and he deals with it by hacking people. In the same way that we all use social media to compare each other, Elliot goes a step deeper. I witnessed his first I love you with Angela over Gchat. Then I witnessed the first of many infidelities with Stella B. He understands the tremendous power that is at his fingertips. But being aware of that power is a double-edged sword. He feels like he's being followed the same way he's following others. He knows that he's a target because he knows better than anyone that everyone is the target. In our world, even if we don't understand the dark web or what a DDoS attack is, we do understand the creeping feeling that people are looking where they shouldn't be, and that we're always under attack. Unseen vulnerabilities could be our demise, so we have to keep our guard up constantly, trying to expect the unexpected. And that brings us to the biggest feeling you get from watching Mr. Robot. Isolation. It seeps out of every frame. The show has a unique and unconventional visual style, with its characters in the bottom corners of the frame, so that when characters have a conversation, we rarely see an over-the-shoulder shot. They're all on their own little islands, and although they may interact with each other, there's always some level of disconnection. When we do see characters outside of this viewpoint, they're often framed together within another frame, placing them together but still on an island, separate from the world. This triggers a lot of the same feelings we have about our world. Social media and technology have us at both times as connected and isolated as we've ever been, and every character's story expresses this isolation in some way. Elliot joins F-Society because he's lonely. He wants to be a part of something bigger, to actually have agency in his world. But at the same time, we can't get that close to Elliot. As I mentioned before, Elliot is our unreliable narrator. We are literally characters in his head that he talks to. Now, this is a powerful plot device, but it's even more powerful as a tool to serve the feeling of isolation. Elliot is alienated from the entire world, struggling to make a connection, even with himself. It's hard for him to know what's real and what isn't. Without giving too much away, the unfolding plot of the show has left each character more isolated than ever before. Mr. Robot and Elliot spend long swaths of time not talking to each other, even though they're theoretically working together. Instead, acting as opposite sides of the same coin. Angela has made her own decisions, separating her more and more from the rest of the cast. Jarlene, having grown up without a father, has lost friends and family to the hack. Tyrell, having dedicated himself to creating a legacy, is on his own, without anyone to pass it on to. But these are all just devices to get us to experience the isolation we all feel in different contexts. In this genre of dramatic serialization, it's so easy to get caught up in plot details, predicting the story and crafting theories. And that's all part of a good show, but that's not what makes a show great. That comes from feeling part of a world and caring about deep and complicated characters. The plot is just another tool to show off that real story and to connect with the audience. In many ways, Mr. Robot is voicing the most vocal sentiment of the 2010s. This isn't working. It's why there are movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. It's the idea of the 1% of the 1%. It's fake news. It's why Donald Trump is president. And it's in that tone, not the plot, that captures those feelings and personifies what it's like to live in our world today. Thank you so much for watching. Please like and subscribe and goodbye to 2017. I can still say that, right? Right. Yeah, this is my channel. This video took a little while to make because I had a lot of stuff up in the air, but I'm back and better than ever. So thank you so much for watching, liking, subscribing, and sharing my videos over the past year. It's really meant the world to me. I'm looking to add more to the channel and the Facebook page and the blog that I just launched, so please let me know below in the comments what you'd like to see in the new year. You guys are the best. See you next time.