# 4 // "fsociety" autocorrects to "society"
# 4 // "fsociety" autocorrects to "society"
[note: Hi! It's been a while for a number of reasons—the main one being that I wrote and attempted to send a letter about HBO's great The Night Of early last week, but TinyLetter flagged it for unknown reasons and held it hostage until it was no longer timely. So, sorry? The other thing to say is this: I'm starting this month as the new TV editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books! I'll still be writing and doing all the other stuff I normally do, but I'll also be commissioning a couple essays a month for the site. So, friends, if you have any hot takes on new series, put them in a microwave-safe tupperware and pitch them to me at phillip@lareviewofbooks.org.]
We watched the premiere of Mr. Robot earlier this week, but I’d been reading reviews for a few days, and I noticed a trend in some criticisms of the new season. Chuck Bowen’s review for Slant is a case-in-point. Bowen begins his review thusly: “USA’s Mr. Robot offers the televisual equivalent of an insufferably self-righteous barista, normally tattooed with a man bun, who always talks of having returned from a four-day concert,” yada yada yada, you get it: Mr. Robot is insufferable, clichéd, boilerplate, anti-corporate ranting. Sam Esmail threw it on the GROUND. James Poniewozik put it more succinctly when he tweeted, “Rami Malek is amazing, but so much MR. ROBOT is like being cornered at a party by a guy who was blown away by this Intercept article he read.” And Mo Ryan, even as she praises the show, brands it as the poster child for “wake-up-sheeplism.” The rants and the Fincher allusions and the hallucinatory camera-movements all add up, as Bowen says, to a show on “the edge of inadvertent self-parody.” As a fan of the show's first season, all of this felt like missing the point. Wake up, sheeple! Until I watched the episode and it happened to me. (Maybe I was the sheeple all along.) Man, is this show annoying.
As great as Rami Malek is, Elliot’s voiceover is a nuisance, Hot Tub Time Machine’s monologue about Reality is like a Baudrillard Wikipedia, I was waiting for the EvilCorp CEO to end his speech on confidence and con-men by shouting, “Get it? GET IT?” But here’s my question: does what Mr. Robot says matter?
Before we get into that, there are a few disclaimers. First, I have been, historically, predisposed to forgive Mr. Robot’s status as the kid in Intro to Philosophy who won’t stop raising his hand because it looks and feels so great. I thought its cheeky, visual loop-de-loos and de-centerings were both charming and provocative from a storytelling perspective. But I also acknowledge its pretentiousness, occasionally carried away by a sense of its own charm and provocativeness. Second, sometimes, possibly always, what a show says does matter. The Wire, for instance, had (has) important things to say, and those things are spoken by the mouths of D’Angelo Barksdale and Bunny Colvin and Lester Freamon and a dozen other proxies. They say what they mean, and the show means what they say. And even if a show doesn’t mean it, its content—spoken or seen—is still important. Benioff and Weiss may not be misogynists, but sexposition as a practice communicates a structural misogyny that Game of Thrones’ creators seem inexplicably baffled about how to escape.
So I’m not advocating that we all become agnostic to the content of television shows. But Mr. Robot is not the first show featuring characters whose speeches are grating. (For what it’s worth, I’m not saying critiques of corporate capitalism are in-and-of-themselves grating—they’re not!—but I bet Glenn Greenwald would be endorsing Hillary Clinton today if he had to listen to twelve hours of Christian Slater inveighing against the Big Mac-ification of America or whatever.) Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White—we listen to criminals, hucksters, and narcissists rant and rave all the time, but we manage to separate out their ideology and its tone from the show itself. Isn’t “I am the one who knocks” a really douchey monologue, too?
But there's a difference. Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad all signal their narrative distance from what they represent, or they give us enough wiggle room to feel ambivalent, and so we watch generously. We don't conflate creators and shows with characters because that's not what you do. (A notable exception: despite the show’s clear contempt for, like, 60% of its own lines of dialogue, Lena Dunham has long suffered for being conflated with Hannah Horvath. And, consequently, Girls is assumed to be ratifying and endorsing the behavior and ideas of its characters. I wonder if there’s some obvious, binary difference between Lena Dunham and those other creators and protagonists that could explain this ungenerous reception?) In his Mr. Robot review, Bowen chooses not to observe this narrative distance on Esmail’s part. Okay! He suggests a hypocrisy in Sam Esmail railing against corporate America even as his show is funded and distributed by a corporation. This is maybe a little bit too red-pill/blue-pill of a critique for me, but I think it’s a point well-taken. Either fsociety’s critique of consumer capitalism is entirely aesthetic, or it’s at odds with Esmail’s own constant conspicuous consumption (and regurgitation) of cultural products in service of corporate media. But Esmail doesn't need to be a hypocrite for Mr. Robot's stony humorlessness about fsociety's rhetoric to be a pickle. Twitching ECorp into "EvilCorp" is either funny because it's a joke or because it's lol ridiculous that it's not a joke.
Last year, I wrote a long piece defending Mr. Robot’s impish appropriation of cinematic influences. I liked the boldness of plagiarizing Fight Club, in part because I thought it signaled that Esmail was interested in doing better than Fight Club, in actually crafting a complex response to life in the surveillance state rather than a frat guy Power Point of one. And, in the near term, I thought that laying out such an obvious, copy-and-paste twist was a brilliant way of distracting from the other twists that came toward the end of that season. But I think I want to take a turn reading Mr. Robot ungenerously this season. People can’t disentangle Hannah Horvath from Lena Dunham, and I think they’re wrong, in part because I think Girls, while less byzantine structurally, has a clearer sense of its own audience’s bullshit detector. It sounds simple, but Girls isn't Hannah Horvath, it's about Hannah Horvath. Partly because of the way that the show is powered by its manipulation of its audience, partly because of the way it deploys an immersive unreliable narrator, but partly because Sam Esmail wants me—me, specifically—to think he's cool, I think Mr. Robot just is Elliot. And that means that the things that are ridiculous about Elliot as a character are also ridiculous about Mr. Robot as a show. Anyway, even if Lena Dunham and Sam Esmail are doing the same thing, maybe it's time to not give a cinephile dude showrunner the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of self-awareness. I was annoyed by that episode, and I choose to believe that it's because that episode was annoying. There, I said it.
Maybe I’m being unfair. For what it’s worth, it’s entirely possible that I’m just mad that Esmail stole the ending to the fifth season of Mad Men. (“Are you alone?”) Or, it’s that I’m not sure he realizes he stole it. Either way. Not cool, Sam. Not cool.
Finally Starting // UnREAL (Lifetime, S2)
More on this soon, but we're caught up, and it feels like the show has lost the thread a little bit. Read D.T. Max's profile of Sarah Gertrude Shapiro for a fascinating glimpse of a prestige-y drama at odds with its network.
Flagging // Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
I don’t know that this is a horrible indictment, but the thrill is gone here. We were traveling for several weeks and so missed a number of episodes, but, upon our return, we have made the devastating—to John Oliver, I'm assuming—choice to not catch up. Still watching week to week, but my heart's been stolen by Samantha Bee.
Finally Finished // The Americans (FX)
A hearty congratulations to the wonderful Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell for their Emmy nominations! And also their baby!
Recommendations //
The great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami died recently. There are lots of wonderful remembrances online, and you should read them, but my primary recommendation is just to watch Taste of Cherry or Close-Up or any of his films on Hulu this week. I've taught Taste of Cherry every year I've been a teacher, and, if I'm being honest, it's hard for students to figure out. (The best times are when I pair it with Robert Bresson's Pickpocket.) But this quote from Kiarostami always gets them: "[Cinema] can can send viewers into raptures. Under the circumstances, I suppose this is akin to picking pockets in the dark. By captivating the viewer, we rob him of his reason, which is even worse than emptying his pocket." What can we get from a film that doesn't try to take us captive? You should find out this week, if you haven't already.
Regardless of what I said above, Lindsay Zoladz and Lili Loofbourow were both really good on Mr. Robot this week.
I finally started listening to the Yo, Adrian podcast with Fariha Roísín and Kiva Reardon, and it's fun and funny and really smart.
On NewYorker.com, this week, there are awesome excerpts from two new books: Evan Kindley's Questionnaire and Hua Hsu's A Floating Chinaman. Read, then purchase.
Sometimes Clickhole just really gets me. "You Have to Check Out Edison's Earliest Designs for the Light Bulb" is one of those times.
This week's recipe is just a strong suggestion that, this summer, if you're going to put mayonnaise on something, take five more minutes and make it an aioli! (Easy one: couple globs of mayo, a lime, one crushed garlic clove, rough-chopped cilantro, salt, pepper, mix 'em up. Put it on a fish taco or something.)
***
Finally, in light of the tragic deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this month, and, specifically, the fact that those deaths were captured on camera and circulated, here are three essays, two new, one old:
"Why Do We Look? On Gazing at Dead Black Bodies" / Tara Bynum
"The E-Snuff of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile" / Courtney Baker
"American Horror Story" / Ezekiel Kweku
The insights in these essay—about race and violence and spectatorship and the classroom and empathy and responsibility and mourning and complicity and action and media—seem worth sharing, re-reading, and sitting with.
Thanks for reading,
Phil.