proximoception | (no subject)

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mr. robot

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New TV watched this last TV-type year:

Great:

Hannibal 3
Adventure Time 6
Better Call Saul 1

Maybe great:

The Walking Dead 5
Mad Men 7B
Community 6
The Leftovers 1

On the whole quite good:

Rick and Morty 2 (still a couple left)
Mr. Robot 1
Louie 5

Good at times:

Penny Dreadful 2

Some thing I watched:

Game of Thrones 5

True Detective 2:

True Detective 2

Can't remember what older stuff we might have watched. At least a couple: Nathan for You 1 & 2 were lots of fun. Black Mirror was a lot better than I'd've expected, though understandably uneven.

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I loved Mr. Robot.

Which it had a better title.

I like it. I assumed it meant he'd hacked his own brain, but they didn't quite get around to explaining how or even whether that happened (could be someone else, after all - and at the very least the self-hack seems to have hijacked by the Swede in the last episode).

I also want to nominate it for the Least Annoying Use of Christian Slater Ever award, but maybe I just mean Least Use. I can take him for like three minutes an hour.

Yeah. Makes sense. But I quote:

"No, I'm not gonna watch a show with robot in the title."
{my wife}

Aw maaaan.

How Mr. Robot from the beginning in many different ways told us it was aping Fight Club. Interesting strategy, to announce its spoiler early so you frustrate yourself looking at all the details trying to prove it to yourself. It wouldn't work in a movie, but after eight or so hours I can't say "I knew it all along" anymore. I have to say I knew it all along but then I convinced myself I didn't.

Christian Slater was still the most annoying part of it.

Yeah, exactly, that's large among what kept it out of the "great" running. You assumed the alarmingly xeroxed twist was either a bait-and-switch or something they'd be doing something new and awesome with. Which they still might, but since it wasn't made crystal clear that they had you're left wondering if they know what they're doing or are just making up even premise-level stuff as they go, which matters a lot in a twist/arc show. Gotta convincingly project that you'll be much more like Breaking Bad than Lost these days, and highlightedly self-conscious derivativeness is maybe not the best way to do that.

speaking of derivativeness, all the Kubrickian elements were strange as well. Hannibal had a point with all its stylistic nods to Lynch, but Mr. Robot's precursors are gritty 90s movies: Fight Club, Hackers, the Matrix, etc, not the glowing precision of Kubrick. Although maybe all the nods to Eyes Wide Shut in the last two episodes set us up for the post-credits scene, and the failure of that "now we are finally awake" line.

Huh. I didn't catch any of that. And am having trouble doing so in retrospect, probably because I watched that show at peak sleep debt.

I do remember seeing a near-replica of the Eyes chateau in something I saw recently, but forget what. Not True Detective, some other thing.

I caught a lot of Cronenberg in Robot. What was most Kubrickian? The hallucination bits? I guess the arcade had its milk bar aspects. And I could be convinced there's a link between his characteristic dwarfing of people in the center or lower middle of the frame with Robot's literal marginalizations.

Hannibal's use of Lynchness was pretty fascinating because it was very hard to catch actual debts, as comoared to all-encompassing debt. No one could miss it was Lynchian, but no one could easily say just how. The sign of a processed, maybe even somewhat superseded influence? Or just careful track-covering?

The music during the E-corp meltdown scene in ep. 10 is a synth version of the EWS opening credit music. The foyer of the post-credits scene was suspiciously close to the foyer in the first scene of EWS as well. Other music cues felt Kubrickian to me. The use of the title cards over shots w/music --- maybe not exclusively Kubrick, but has a certain old-fashioned feel (aped by wes anderson?)

There was a lot of shots of characters in the lower half of the frame too, yeah. What cued me to the Kubrickness was the frequent use of long shots with near-symmetrical architecture and one-point perspective.

I think it must have been that post-credits scene mansion was like the Eyes one.

I'm still in disbelief at how bad True Detective was. Almost the same level of disbelief, but inverted, at how good the first season was.

I still say only first-rate direction prevented everyone from realizing just how terrible the terrible last episode of S1 really was. Past-deadline Pizzolatto seems pretty consistent in the type and intensity of his badness.

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