natalie pont's List: Clip

• Just as disturbing, however, is the pattern of what the comedians said came next: Male comedians would ignore or avoid the story when they heard it, and the reactions from people within the industry seemed to reinforce a single message—that women who went public would jeopardize any chance of career advancement.
• The women who spoke to the Times said that C.K.’s manager, Dave Becky—one of the most powerful men in the comedy business, who also works with other famous performers like Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart, and Amy Poehler—was upset that they were openly talking about the incident
• But the accusers who come forward have also often described how perpetrators seemed to know they were protected by their fame and by their close associations with other powerful men in Hollywood. If true, C.K.’s flimsy attempts at apology and references to “issues” in the past would show just how little he has personally reckoned with his behavior, even as he went on to make art
• that alluded to masturbatory compulsions and an inability to take “no” for an answer from women.
• More broadly, the C.K. allegations point to a narrative that is reverberating throughout Hollywood as accusations about sexual misbehavior and assault keep emerging—a narrative that is about power consolidated among a select few, usually white men, many of whom may have placed a higher value on their friendship with suspected abusers than on protecting or listening to those who came forward.

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• “Right, so you never know if his mind is lying to him or his illness is creating things or if it’s a generic television plot twist.”
• “Or, does it even matter because when shit gets hairy on the show, Elliot just stares at us and asks us. HE LOOKS RIGHT AT US. And I’m like ‘whaaa? You’re asking me, bro? I’m still trying to figure out what happened to Bill and his fuckin’ cats, man.”
• “Dude, when they broke those fuckin’ dogs out of death row, man? I’m still worried about all those dogs roaming the streets.
• “And you know what else? Where’d they get all those masks? Like did some genius mask manufacturer in Saugerties, NY go ‘this is the new mask, guys. We need to stop production on every other mask-“
• “And how did they pay for the masks? Like, every credit card becomes invalid and then there are like 10,000 Fsociety masks made and they were all bought by people who had cash? When’s the last time you carried cash? How much cash do you guys have on you right now?”
• “What I don’t get is that the big thing is to wipe out debt, so why isn’t that crowd made up entirely of like middle aged fathers who are like THANK HEAVENLY JESUS I don’t have to pay for the house
• Why is it like, young people? We have college loans but we’re too young to realize how fucking debilitating debt is yet.”
• That crowd shouldn’t be a bunch of hipsters. It should look like an open casting call for The King of Queens out there.

• Put simply, Mr. Robot is what happens when you take:

    

  — a stellar cast
   — absolutely beautiful camera work
   — rock-solid writing
   — some universal concerns like the weight of debt and people hacking your home made porn and mistrust of the government and drug culture
   — add job security woes
   — frame it inside a disenfranchised generation of young people
• borrow the trick from Lost where you answer no questions and just basically distract everyone with new plotlines
• and sprinkle in the movies Fight Club, The Matrix, American Psycho, Blade Runner, Wall Street and V for Vendetta
• I’m guessing Tyrell Wellick built a back door for him to move the assets into his control. But he’s not working by himself. He’s got this rocket hot pregnant Lady Macbeth wife who whispers to him in Swedish about how he’s supposed to Ayn Rand the fuck out of everyone and you know she’s serious because she breaks her own water with a fucking fondue fork she jams up her vajingle while the cops are zeroing in on her husband for when he strangled his boss’s wife on a roof deck during a party. And when the baby is born she dresses him down and is like “if you want to keep being around me jamming myself with stuff, you better come correct.”
• “So Darlene is like this girl whose voice has -I’m not kidding- it’s so shrill and nasally that it chased the mice out of my apartment. If you don’t notice it, then you’re okay but once you do,
• “Okay so Shayla is obviously the low-level drug dealer that Elliot falls in love with or doesn’t. Maybe he just likes her. I don’t know.
• “You’re asking what changed when she died? Um, well nothing I guess. She was just some neighbor but based on the amount of screen time she had and all the resources Elliot devoted to saving her, we’re like ‘well, she must be important.’ But I guess she wasn’t? I honestly don’t know. One second it’s like this show is Ocean’s Eleven let’s break into an impenetrable fortress and the next it’s the Jesse / Jane relationship on Breaking Bad. It’s like all things to all people and maybe nothing to no one. I can’t tell you because I have no idea what’s going on. The point is that Elliot, who may or may not be Tyrell and is absolutely his dad
• I don’t know if this is important television or a complete circle jerk, but despite it being on USA Network, it feels closer to A than to B. It feels like the cast is strong enough and the writing is interesting enough and the visual experience is provoking enough to give it the benefit of the doubt, so I will.
• But honestly, by the time I got to the end I was irritated. It didn’t feel fresh to me, it felt lost and unhinged. It’s like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except instead of a rabbit, it’s just a bunch of more hats. And he’s charming, so you stick with it, because there’s the promise of a rabbit coming out of one of these hats and the performance on its own has merit. But as more hats keep coming, you start to wonder if the magician actually knows where the rabbit is.

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• I suspect the bug is Mr. Robot himself — a character initially presented as a pontificating, hot-tempered revolutionary played by Christian Slater, a V-type (as in V for Vendetta) then revealed by our humble narrator, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), to be a hallucinated vision of the now-dead father who pushed him out of a window as a kid.
• This series about a computer hacker/revolutionary/mentally ill man-child is pretty openly catering to aficionados of Cinema de Dudebro, referencing a number of films and filmmakers that absolutely pass muster as art while also just happening to look and sound frickin’ awesome when you put them up on that 57-inch plasma screen with surround sound that hangs on a wall opposite your black leather couch.
• Here’s the thing, though: As much fun as this sort of thing is, and as much comfort and joy as it might give “fan theory” junkies who see movies mainly as puzzles to be solved and conquered rather than engaged with as emotional and aesthetic objects,
• I could not be less interested in the outward manifestations of Elliot’s breakdown and denial — not because I don’t care about Elliot (I do care very much, mainly because of the hilariously dry narration and Malek’s uniquely tortured performance), but because all this is the least original thing about Mr. Robot.
• But none of this is as fascinating, as original, as urgent, as necessary, as the show’s casual critique of what modern society has become. What initially captivated me about Mr. Robot was its vision of life, which was not new or especially deep, but nonetheless bracing because it was being presented on a major commercial cable channel, in an offhand way that just seemed to assume that large numbers of people would shake their heads and think, Yes, this is right, this is what life is like; this series understands my disquiet. Elliot is the first network protagonist to talk about the “invisible hand” of capitalism forcing people into slots and creating “prisons of debt” (an idea developed with vastly more moral urgency here than in Fight Club,
• Although Malek’s character has a nondescript, Waspy name, his very presence diversifies commercial TV because his chiseled Egyptian-American face and gigantic Albert Einstein eyes make a statement that’s much more powerful than the words that appear on the character’s work badge
• I can’t think of the last American TV drama that was so defiantly rooted in the perspective of a cultural and psychological outsider — somebody who was participating in the circus of social media and late capitalism and virtual existence not because he enjoyed it but because he was conditioned to participate by virtue of having been born into it, and knew this, and resented it. “Our choices were premade for us a long time ago,”
• I like how the show sees the outsider in almost every character and occasionally feels for the very worst of them
• (“People who are violent get that way because they can’t communicate,” Mr. Robot reminds Elliot); and Martin Wallström’s hateful scumbag one-percenter Tyrell Wellick, who rehearses his “Please hire me as CTO” speech over and over before approaching the board, not just because he’s nervous but because English is not his first language. Having BD Wong’s Whiterose turn out to be a transgender character was movingly right,
• I have no idea how the show’s cultural and technological jokes and references will date (probably quickly, and badly; that’s how this sort of thing tends to go), but I love them.
• spits out cringe-inducing, in-crowd locutions like a ketchup dispenser (“We have this Groupon for four at Morton’s”; “I’ll tweet, but only if I like it”).
• This is the true heart of the show: the continual tug-of-war between conformity and outsiderhood, self-awareness and narcoticized consumption, idiosyncrasy and normalcy
• Is it enough to make fun of a world where students carry tens of thousands in debt throughout their lives to become certified for jobs they probably won’t get anyway, or that will pay miserly freelance wages?
• The more you listen to Elliot, the more likely you are to have those kinds of thoughts, and they’re not bad thoughts to have, tritely obvious as they might sound. The reflex to dismiss such questions as “trite” is smug, and is itself evidence of social conditioning. It’s great that a TV show is obsessing over this week after week, and making the ruminations uncomfortable-funny rather than ha-ha funny. It’s great that a TV show is weaving in footage of protests about economic disparity and consumers getting fat on processed, mass-produced corporate food.
• It’s great that all this is filtered through a hero as complex, wounded, eloquent, and observant as Elliot,
• He is, after all, a revolutionary. When’s the last time a major TV series was built around a guy who wanted to burn it all down, and gave you no choice but to find him likable?
• This is what I want more of from Mr. Robot. Not “big reveals” of who somebody’s sister or dad is, or exactly why a character is so sad and depressed.
• I am not particularly interested in seeing another lovely, charming, trusting, troubled young woman fall in love with the hero, as Shayla (Frankie Shaw) did, only to be fridged (look it up) to amplify the hero’s distress and cause problems for his revolutionary cellmates.

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