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Jul. 19th, 2016 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionMr. Robot:
... spoiler spaces ...
Possibility 1: Eliot created Tyrell as another personality. Just as his Mr. Robot persona appeared to be a Fight Club style Nietzschean de-superegoed self, only to turn out to be a version of his father (the one person he could ever talk to), this other one looks like an American Psycho dude but is in fact the fantasy of an executive sleeper agent. He pictures this self as Christian Bale like he pictures his pointlessly rebellious father-self as Christian Slater (choosing this 45 year old has-been ranting "rebel" bractor was a nice touch). He finds it way too easy to hack Tyrell's life not because Tyrell has trapped him but because he invented that life - he finds stuff in the first places he looks because that's where he assumed others would look, thus put it there. Why a pregnant Swedish BDSM-lovin' model was made part of this other life I couldn't tell you. Some sort of revenge buddy? Eliot's actual wife? She seems to exist, given her interactions with various others. The very name Tyrell is a Blade Runner reference, so what's behind the Fight Club trappings is presumably Dick. Since Eliot's presumably not an ACTUAL robot - except to the extent we all are, man - I assume we're instead to think of Total Recall, where (in the movie, no clue about the book) Quade is an evil dude who reprograms his memory to be that of a hapless normal buff person so as to remove himself from the grid or something, but accidentally becomes good in the process - a Locke/Rousseau type deal. Not the Lost characters, the thinkers. So presumably the self-hacking proto-Eliot decided he'd need to have an off the grid innocent self, an insider self, and a mastermind one to pull this off. (Though BD Wong and the Evil Corp CEO both act so smug it's likely they're behind all this somehow, so proto-Eliot too may be either made up, their employee or non-self-hacked.)
Possibility 2: Tyrell exists in a separate body and is hacking Eliot's self-hack in progress, perhaps by making a deal with the Mr. Robot persona. Or has been Eliot's partner in this endeavor from the first - perhaps even becoming another self-hacker to make it possible.
Anything in the first season rule out either of these possibilities? Can't recall.
Inception was a self-hacking movie, though I don't know that it's widely held to be. A trouble for both stories is that when a narrating protagonist's mind is untrustworthy everything is. Mr. Robot tries to evade this by showing us goings on Eliot is clearly unaware of, so those scenes will be important 1. for any clues they might provide about Eliot and Tyrell, 2. for establishing "thematic" reality - to what extent the Anonymous-meets-Occupy mentality of Eliot is shared by the show. I think even the independent characters now call E Corp Evil Corp, though, so ... yeesh. Or did they always? Will look out for that too, if I find time to rewatch everything.
... spoiler spaces ...
Possibility 1: Eliot created Tyrell as another personality. Just as his Mr. Robot persona appeared to be a Fight Club style Nietzschean de-superegoed self, only to turn out to be a version of his father (the one person he could ever talk to), this other one looks like an American Psycho dude but is in fact the fantasy of an executive sleeper agent. He pictures this self as Christian Bale like he pictures his pointlessly rebellious father-self as Christian Slater (choosing this 45 year old has-been ranting "rebel" bractor was a nice touch). He finds it way too easy to hack Tyrell's life not because Tyrell has trapped him but because he invented that life - he finds stuff in the first places he looks because that's where he assumed others would look, thus put it there. Why a pregnant Swedish BDSM-lovin' model was made part of this other life I couldn't tell you. Some sort of revenge buddy? Eliot's actual wife? She seems to exist, given her interactions with various others. The very name Tyrell is a Blade Runner reference, so what's behind the Fight Club trappings is presumably Dick. Since Eliot's presumably not an ACTUAL robot - except to the extent we all are, man - I assume we're instead to think of Total Recall, where (in the movie, no clue about the book) Quade is an evil dude who reprograms his memory to be that of a hapless normal buff person so as to remove himself from the grid or something, but accidentally becomes good in the process - a Locke/Rousseau type deal. Not the Lost characters, the thinkers. So presumably the self-hacking proto-Eliot decided he'd need to have an off the grid innocent self, an insider self, and a mastermind one to pull this off. (Though BD Wong and the Evil Corp CEO both act so smug it's likely they're behind all this somehow, so proto-Eliot too may be either made up, their employee or non-self-hacked.)
Possibility 2: Tyrell exists in a separate body and is hacking Eliot's self-hack in progress, perhaps by making a deal with the Mr. Robot persona. Or has been Eliot's partner in this endeavor from the first - perhaps even becoming another self-hacker to make it possible.
Anything in the first season rule out either of these possibilities? Can't recall.
Inception was a self-hacking movie, though I don't know that it's widely held to be. A trouble for both stories is that when a narrating protagonist's mind is untrustworthy everything is. Mr. Robot tries to evade this by showing us goings on Eliot is clearly unaware of, so those scenes will be important 1. for any clues they might provide about Eliot and Tyrell, 2. for establishing "thematic" reality - to what extent the Anonymous-meets-Occupy mentality of Eliot is shared by the show. I think even the independent characters now call E Corp Evil Corp, though, so ... yeesh. Or did they always? Will look out for that too, if I find time to rewatch everything.
