Between Habit and Thought in New TV Serial Drama

Serial Connections

John Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429588723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Between Habit and Thought in New TV Serial Drama: Serial Connections is a consideration of some of the key examples of serial television drama available via transnational streaming platforms in recent times. Through the individual works examined, the book exemplifies the ways in which aesthetics, technology, and capitalism weave a complex social fabric around the production of the respective television series, thus presenting this type of serial drama as a finely engineered cultural production. Taking Bernard Stiegler's notion of an "image warfare" as its starting point, the author critically investigates the strategies deployed by the shows' producers to navigate this dynamic, shaped by the "new spirit of capitalism". With creativity intrinsic to the process, on the one hand, and a highly efficient drive for capturing and fixing attention driven by algorithm and economic logic, on the other, the author maps the processes at work in the production of high-value serial drama and considers how, despite this tension, they manage to present meaningful insights into the experience of being in this world: A world shaped by trauma, a desire for justice, and a search for systems of belief that can offer a way through the vicissitudes of contemporary life. Framed by a detailed analysis of the multiple processes that shape these works is a sustained analysis of the serials Mr Robot, Billions, The Leftovers, Rectify, and Westworld, and the dynamics of despair and hope that ripple through them. As such, it will appeal to readers of film and television studies, cultural theory, and those interested in furthering a critical aesthetics for our time.

1

Mr Robot

Eyeing the apocalypse

DOI: 10.4324/9780429197659-2

4 seasons

Episodes: 45

Dates first aired

1: June 2015

2: July 2016

3: October 2017

4: October 2019

Creator: Sam Esmail

Showrunner: Sam Esmail

Main Cast: Rami Malek, Christian Slater, Carly Chalkin, Portia Doubleday,

Martin Wallström, Grace Gummer, BD Wong, Elliot Vilar

Cinematography: Tod Campbell

Composer: Mac Quayle

Location: New York City

Original network: USA Network

The pilot episode of Mr Robot, with the title “eps1.0_hellofriend.mov”, premiered via online and video on-demand services on 27 May 2015, before starting its run on the cable channel USA Network a month later. The final episode was screened on 22 December 2019. It had a surprising level of success given, not least, its hacker-culture focus and anti-capitalist theme of the first few seasons. The drama is centred on the character of Elliot Alderson, who works as a cyber-security engineer in New York, whilst secretly being the leader of a hacktivist group, fsociety, which works out of an abandoned amusement arcade on Coney Island. The show received critical acclaim with all seasons scoring high on meta-review sites and won a Golden Globe, Emmy, and Peabody Award. Cyber-security organizations and hackers universally praised its portrayal of computer hacking and IT security issues for their verisimilitude. Across its four seasons, multiple plot lines were constructed and aesthetically the serial created stand-out episodes that showcased the possibilities of cinematic form and ambition within the format. As a completed serial, it highlights the way in which narrative can be operationalized to recuperate the many expressive moments that seemed to offer possibilities of other worlds, metaphorically and, in this case, literally, as the suggestion of an alternate reality is ultimately closed down. At its conclusion, it presents itself as not primarily motivated by these “fantasies” of anti-capitalism but rather a story of the intimate workings of a troubled mind.

The focus in this chapter is therefore directed rather more towards the earlier seasons as the show’s aesthetic techniques provided challenging imagery that expressed something of the dislocation of Elliot’s sense of self and his world that was driven by rage at the system and a desire to bring down those who seem to control it. This is a show that exemplifies the ways in which contemporary serials can have a conceptual and aesthetic density with episodes that have outstanding levels of acting, writing, direction, and design.

Wide-eyed fear (The ZX Spectrum Said)

And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1984: 151)

The strong fascination with the eyes, across cultures and ages derives, I suggest, from basic evolutionary mechanisms.

(Baron-Cohen, 1997: 114)

The title of this section is a play upon Brian Massumi’s article from 2005, “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”. In this complex and detailed essay, Massumi is concerned to map out the transformation of the US government’s strategy of fear management as one that shifted into a mode operating at an affective level of social control, as well as a more familiar ideological one. For Massumi, fear has become dispersed throughout the minds and bodies of the citizens who respond to the affective modulation of the colour-coded terror alert-system in complex and, ultimately, unpredictable ways as an individual’s life oscillates in self-perpetuating cycles of differential reinforcement driven by mass media activations of fear stimulus. I am not concerned here to critique his argument but, rather, to try and connect with certain aspects of its formulations to evaluate how the serial Mr Robot can be argued to make manifest certain of these processes in a further moment of enfolding of the imaginative world of television drama into the techniques of fear. As was explored in the introduction, the delivery systems of cable television and streaming content connect more dynamically to the habits of viewers than conventional TV and this process can be perceived aesthetically in the cinematographic strategies by which the serial communicates these affective circuits of fear that Massumi identifies as culturally emergent. Further, Massumi is referring to the colour-coded spectrum that was used as part of the terror alert but “being on the spectrum” is a phrase used to describe someone who is diagnosed with some symptoms of autism, or, as he correctly describes it, “neurodiversity” (Massumi, 2014). This is something that can apply to the main character of Elliot Alderson and is central to how the show navigates the paranoid and uncertain world we encounter on screen through his point of view.

As a popular TV serial, Mr Robot very effectively connects with a number of contemporary anxieties produced by a profoundly destabilized global financial and personal economy that is subjected to invasive tracking and threatening data leaks, all of which effects a generalized state of paranoia and fear of societal breakdown. Similarly, Elliot suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder and his fragmented and confused state of mind, whilst engaging in a plot to disrupt the functioning of the world’s biggest financial corporation, is the dramatic conceit that drives the narrative. His drug addiction, inability to differentiate truth from illusion, and skill at computer hacking, all encompass key features of contemporary cognitive-cultural capitalism. What the opening quotation from Deleuze and Guattari points to is the potential for the active incorporation of the decoding and scrambling of codes, intrinsic to their conceptualization of schizophrenia, into the processes of capitalism itself rather than the belief that this process is necessarily subversive. Whilst they assert that the revolutionary nature of the schizophrenic cannot be finally subsumed by capitalism, the question is whether a popular drama such as Mr Robot can be seen as a persuasive attempt to precisely effect this subsumption or, on the contrary, whether it contains any fragments of thinking that can initiate a different response to the strategies of affective capture driving this neurological-economic machine. Inspired by William Connolly’s assertion in relation to films that, “[t]echnique provides a medium through which culture and brains infuse each other” (2002: xiii), I want to start by mapping out some key techniques of the show’s televisual production.

Mr Robot (2.10:0.37.10)

(1.01:1.04.18)

Mr Robot How can you tell … that it’s me? How do you know you’re not talking to him right now?

Angela Your eyes … you never try to look away.

(3.01:0.44.45)

The organ privileged in this network through which the flows of Mr Robot are organized is the eyes of the central characters. The title of this section makes a reference to “wide-eyed fear” and places this motif as a key element of the show’s visual focus. Throughout the serial, the eyes of the actor-characters are used to generate a sense of fear and apprehension. This is indeed a “wide-eyed” fear that operates at a level of affective intensity that circulates between the on-screen world and ours, where we as viewers act as the conduit between these ocular circuits. As a communicative medium, the TV serial has the potential to work as a formation that can connect in different ways with the outside. Mr Robot takes numerous existing televisual and cinematic codes and creates something original; it breaks new ground, new televisual territory, so to speak.

This focus on eyes is not an exaggeration of an incidental detail to support a tenuous speculation; rather, it is an integral part of the show’s approach to the subject of creating the world of this, apparently, anti-capitalist hacker drama. In an interview, the show’s Director of Photography, Tod Campbell, exclaims at the actor Rami Malek’s facial features how “[t]his ocular casting coup” helped determine how he came to shape the distinctive look of the serial (Collins, 2015). For the cinematographer, this element relates to the alienating effects of technology and how to convey this and, according to Campbell, Malek’s eyes thus influenced his choice of lenses used to shoot the drama:

We use Cooke S5s, which are more round than other lenses, they really accentuate curves, and they help sculpt the face a little more. I chose those lenses because Rami’s eyes are so big, and so are a lot of the other characters. Elliot, Darlene, Angela, – all of the people we love have these big, giant, bulbous eyes.

(quoted in Collins, 2015)

These three characters, Elliot, Darlene, Angela, are the ones traumatized by the loss of a parent to the corporate maleficence of E Corp and so carry the emotional energy for the act of revenge that seemingly motivates the hack event.

For the show’s creator and controlling vision, Sam Esmail, this use of eyes is a key element in the way in which he can maintain a delicate tension when exploring the intricacies of the mental health of the character. His instruction to Rami Malek, the actor who plays the central character, was to internalize the big emotions. Malek responds to this: “When things leak out of your eyes or your facial expressions, it’s so much more effective than spilling it all” (quoted in Drumming, 2015). So, the focus on the eyes of the actor-characters connects elements of technology, bodies, fear, and the perception/reaction gap, in an affective assemblage that disturbs the familiar and often clichéd image of this world of computer hackers. The working through the eyes of the characters seems to replicate the central quality of the show, that of whether we can trust what we “see”? This replication undermines the coherence of the bodies on screen and gives them a sense of vibrating, a deterritorialization or a dis-organ-ization that opens up this process of creating multiple connections (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988: 30).

Today, in contrast to even the relatively short time since Massumi was writing, the fear that is stimulated is not simply of a terrorist attack. What Mr Robotdescribes in detail is the fear of the data hack, the Sony hack, the personal server hack, and the Ashley Madison hack, where all that is private is made public and searchable.¹ Here, shame is often the fuel for the engine of fear in this media machine. In an age of sophisticated web-tracking mechanisms, network activity and records are never truly deleted; traces are always left and available to be recovered and exposed. Elliot, on the other hand, does forget. He forgets who he is, whom he has talked to, who the people around him are, what he has done. This is figured as part of his Dissociative Personality Disorder that, of course, has a dramatic function, allowing for reveals and surprises that challenge the viewers’ expectations right up until the final plot revelation. However, it also usefully points to how, in many ways, the serial channels so effectively characteristics of contemporary capitalism and the symptoms it produces in certain subjects. As Mark Fisher writes: “[M]emory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009: 60).

Elliot is special not simply because he is a genius hacker; those have been seen before to the point of banality in film and television and they are just wish-fulfilment fantasies. Rather, he is special because of the way he breaks down. He gives us the sense of the desperate struggle of existence on the line between one and the other: Elliot/Mr Robot; Allsafe/fsociety; one/zero, a corruption of a binary code that he keeps losing control of. Elliot does have the power to move through the walls of this world but the cost to him is the fragility of his sanity. His fragmenting into multiple personalities is a dramatization of what happens when you position yourself on the edge, the edge of the actual and the virtual, the edge of the apparatus. If you tilt this apparatus, the danger is that you will tip into the abyss. So, Elliot splits, he divides, as a strategy for coping with this. In her 1989 book, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Avital Ronnell writes of how:

The schizophrenic gives us exemplary access to the fundamental shifts in affectivity and corporeal organization produced and commanded by technology, in part because the schizophrenic inhabits these other territories.

(1991: 109)

Later, she states: “Schizophrenia never had an easy access code” (1991: 111). For Ronnell, as for her inspiration of this idea, Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is a figure of a subject who is not contained by the processes of Oedipalization and has not acceded to the regulatory framework of identity formation. Not limited by the psychoanalytic lack that drives desire in its theatre of representation, the schizophrenic evades the webs of signifiers that saturate society and works to create the real. A central preoccupation of the serial Mr Robot is the constant questioning of whether Elliot, in those moments of the greatest destruction of the system of capital, is not simply being manipulated by a different, more powerful agent seeking to emerge stronger out of the catastrophic destruction he enacts. Nevertheless, the attraction of Elliot as a character is precisely his refusal to be contained by any of these individual strategies and his constant oscillation between the contradictory poles of schizophrenia and ego. The point is that both are necessary and rather than Elliot being an exception, he articulates the generalized state of being within capitalism where we are coerced into enacting the phase of primary identification of looking in the mirror to see who we are. Because Elliot is located at the boundary limit between individual and collective, he is prone to breaking down and collapsing from Elliot into Tyrell, Angela, or Mr Robot, each connecting with the other through their eyes in an ocular network of anxiety that activates each one in an endless cycle of what Massumi describes as “bodily irritability” (2005: 46). This is illustrated here as Elliot looks into the mirror and in subliminal flashes all the key personalities are recomposed in a series of hooded faces.

Mr Robot (1.08:0.39.30–0.39.36)

The sch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Introduction: streaming, seriality, and spirit
• 1 Mr Robot: eyeing the apocalypse
• 2 Billions: nomadic flows
• 3 The Leftovers: empty spheres
• 4 Rectify: being-in-the-world
• 5 Westworld: we live in the wrong world
• Conclusion: between habit and thought
• Bibliography
• Index