‘Mr. Robot': Natural Born Hacker

Mr. Robot (the edgy TV show which has just been renewed for a second season by USA network) is the story of a computer genius, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) who works in AllSafe, a cybersecurity firm that lends their services protecting big companies, among them E Corp (Elliot calls it Evil Corporation). Although his best childhood friend works as his supervisor (Angela, played by the beautiful Portia Doubleday), he feels remote towards most people and is incredibly insecure regarding human interaction. Surrounded by technical jargon as Gnome Dell, Tor network and rootkits, Elliot leads a double life as a vigilante hacker by night (i.e. exposing pedophile rings) and conspirator by association of the radical group FSociety.

A pivotal moment in his life is meeting the FSociety's mysterious boss, only identified by the logo Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), who progressively brings to light Elliot's painful memories about the shady circumstances of his father's death. Elliot materializes his drug-induced neurosis after his pilgrimage to Coney Island, where the FSociety's headquarters operate, turning his paranoia into something more threatening and politicized. He's highly suspicious of everybody's motivations and profoundly disenfranchised from the world, which he sees plagued with false heroes and social media anesthesia manifested in blind submission to corporations in return for ego satisfaction.

“Sometimes I dream about saving the world, saving everyone from the invisible hand,” Elliot fantasized during the pilot episode while mentally invoking a full-fledged debt-laden collapse in a near future, "but I can't stop it. I'm not that special. I'm just anonymous." Krista (Gloria Reuben) plays Elliot's loyal psychotherapist and when she asks why society disappoints him so much, his reply results in one of the most memorable monologues of this year:

"Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our commentary bullshit masquerading as insight.  I'm not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards." In the episode 7, Elliot offers Krista another awkward revelation: "I don't just hack you, Krista, I hack everyone. My friends. Co-workers. But I've helped a lot of people. I want a way out of loneliness, just like you."

An uncertain cross between Edward Norton's The Narrator in Fight Club and a more cynical Donnie Darko, Elliot seems desperately lost in his search for cracking the establishment's encrypted code. Back to the Future II is his favorite flick, where Marty McFly time traveled from the 1980s to October 2015. The irony here being our real 2015 a lot more somber than the tech-friendly utopia Zemeckis's characters visited.

An ambiguous villain, E Corp's sociopathic Technology Officer Tyrell Wellick (played eerily by Martin Wallström), considers himself not so different of Elliot, since both are "perfectionists."

Mr. Robot's Season 1 is, according to its creator Sam Esmail, basically exposition: "It was just the setup for the real story which really begins next season, which would have been Act 2 of our film."

It's testimony to Rami Malek's talent —acclaimed previously for his role of Snafu in HBO's The Pacific— that he seems to be "old-school" concerning his computer skills, and despite his vision of Internet technology as "scary," he effortlessly sells Elliot's robotic enunciation and languid demeanour —opposite to his effusive charm— even in the most harrowing scenes. That tension between Malek's suggestive presence and Elliot's spaced-out look is undeniably the greatest asset of the show.

"From Elliot's perspective, everything is real," says Rami Malek. And the difference with Fight Club is that in Fincher's film things didn't feel so real for the viewer, since the lead character was meant to give voice to an everyman who made symbolic use of "I am Jack's..." as self-concept. Although several reviewers have noted the parallel function between Fight Club's Tyler Durden and Slater's enigmatic character named Mr. Robot, it's clear Durden represented an Übermensch figure, whereas Mr. Robot is more of a fatherly type. Actually, an unreliable narrator is not so rare in disturbed personality-themed films like Somewhere in the Night, Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, Brazil, Total Recall, Donnie Darko, Memento, Shutter Island, Inception, etc.

In my view, it's not as important to reify Mr. Robot's alter ego as is to understand that its central plot is about an alienated geek who suffers from antisocial tendencies and a dissociative identity disorder.

In his head, Elliot Alderson has muted into a holy saviour and anticapitalist warrior, projecting his decadent victimism onto the virtual denizens, whilst obsessing over hacking and sex trysts. In Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Imaginaire (1940), we learn "the tragic character of obsession comes from the fact that the mind forces itself to reproduce the object it fears." Elliot has possibly PTSD added to his psychological malfunction, due to his traumatic family life, worsened by a mother who mistreated him. Having betrayed a promise he made to his dying father, the sense of guilt frequently torments him. To numb what is known in PTSD terminology as "the fear network" and the reactivation of the reminders of his trauma, he has been using morphine for a long time.

"If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself," Philip K. Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly: "Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then." When Elliot's core beliefs were disrupted in his infancy, his sense of safety, esteem, trust and intimacy entered a process of disintegration that continues latent underneath his hardened apathy. His transient derealization and hallucinations were more visible and their effects more toxic in the episode 4 Daemons.

Sliding by surreal dream vignettes throughout his withdrawal session, Elliot meets Angela who persuades him to confront his Demon: "Daemons. They don't stop working. They are always active. They seduce. They manipulate. They own us. And even though you're with me, even though I created you, it makes no difference."

The Western democracy appears weakened by internal crisis, the masses drowning in debt, so Elliot begins slowly to accept a revolution as inevitable. So far, the adrenaline rush provoked by FSociety's anarchist plans has proven too powerful to ignore. Elliot was a victim of an uncaring mother, but, unlike Fight Club's anti-feminist paranoia, in Mr. Robot, one of the most interesting and tenacious characters is Angela Moss, whose mother was another victim of E Corp. Portia Doubleday's portrait is captivating as Elliot's sentimental refuge and realistic heroine. "She cares about him deeply and loves him deeply," admits Doubleday.

Neuroscience pioneer Franz-Joseph Gall's motto was "Nothing but God and Brain," following Spinoza's theory of the spiritual mind being as real as the brain's circuitry, both "part of the intrinsic intellect of God." The dystopian landscape expands now into one of the last frontiers, our personal yet overexposed cyberspots, threatening to shut down our digital hubs by filtering a virus so malign that we never could guess if it comes from the controlling corporation or if it has been created by natural born hackers. Article first published as ‘Mr. Robot': Natural Born Hacker on Blogcritics.

Rami Malek "You don't need to be more than yourself" video

Rami Malek video: featuring stills and candids, soundtrack: "You don't need to be more than yourself" by Elliott Murphy.

"Mr. Robot" is centered on hacker Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), whose morphine-monotone describes to us in somber detail why he spends much of his life stealing people’s information and planting bugs in their machines. He often seems like a hopeless character, but nonetheless one who wields a lot of power. While he legitimizes his illegal activity with his own somewhat tired moral compass – hacking a drug dealing rapist and having him arrested – it’s not enough compensation to provide him with any kind of emotional stability or even ephemeral happiness.

The perils of hacking, especially when it involves social justice, is one of the fundamental aspects of the show. Hacking is portrayed as being a very lonely, slightly demented, and never truly fulfilling vocation – the more he knows, the heavier the burden. In some respects Alderson is suffering for our sins. He’s a martyr in the age of computer technology. In one scene he admits, “I’m good at reading people; my secret, I look for the worst in them.” And he finds it, in ample measures. When he’s not involved in hacker vigilantism, he’s working at his desk, a job he doesn’t enjoy, as an engineer for a cyber-security firm called Allsafe.

One of Alderson’s inner monologues should resonate with anyone who’s read Palahniuk: "The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our commentary bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking us into intimacy, or is that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend, because we’re cowards. Fuck Society." Source: siliconangle.com

Rami Malek in Mr. Robot (Sad & Beautiful video)

“What I do have? Clinical depression, social anxiety, a day job, a night job, confusing relationships, others depending on me, taking down the largest corporation in the world, and I chose it all,” Elliot says, speaking to the audience (or someone inside his head) in one of the character’s now-familiar voiceovers. In the fourth of 10 episodes this season, an audacious plan of Elliot’s puts members of the hacker collective F Society on a road trip to sabotage a data storage compound in upstate New York. A hallucinatory detox dream ensues, featuring images of a key, Elliot strapping on a mask, and recurring questions about who his “monster” is.

-A big question that we as viewers have is how much of this world is real, and how much is in Elliot’s head?

-The question gets asked in the dream: What is your monster? And that’s something I kept asking myself while working on Elliot. Once I started asking that question, everything in the dream made a little more sense to me. The show approaches these grand themes about the constructs of who we are as individuals and what we coalesce to be as a society. What we’re doing to either alleviate this stagnant, corrupt world we live in. The short answer is, working on this dream sequence allowed me to do some examination of who I am and what my monsters are, and that’s going to let people reflect in a way that’s not always offered by television. Source: blogs.wsj.com


A video featuring photos and stills of Rami Malek, mostly in Mr. Robot, also some scenes from the pilot episode and the episode 6 "Brave Traveler." Soundtrack "The Joke Explained" by Wilco and "Sad & Beautiful World" by Sparklehorse.

Happy Anniversary, Myrna Loy!

Happy Anniversary, Myrna Loy!

Myrna Adele Williams (Myrna Loy) was born on August 2, 1905 in Radersburg, Montana, USA. She was labeled "Queen of Hollywood" and "The Perfect Wife" in the 1930s and 1940s. Myrna Loy became a big star during the Golden Age, being one of the most popular box-office stars. According to a list published in the TLA Video & DVD Guide of 2005, Myrna was the #1 female star of the 20th century in estimated movie tickets sales. The rest of the top ten actresses in ticket sales after Myrna Loy were: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Ginger Rogers, and Katharine Hepburn.  Myrna Loy died on December 14, 1993 in New York City.

From the beginning, Myrna Loy’s screen image conjured mystery, a sense of something withheld. “Who is she?” was a question posed in the first fan magazine article published about her in 1925.

This first ever biography of the wry and sophisticated actress best known for her role as Nora Charles, wife to dapper detective William Powell in The Thin Man, offers an unprecedented picture of her life and an extraordinary movie career that spanned six decades. Opening with Loy’s rough-and-tumble upbringing in Montana, the book takes us to Los Angeles in the 1920s, where Loy’s striking looks caught the eye of Valentino, through the silent and early sound era to her films of the thirties, when Loy became a top box office draw, and to her robust post–World War II career. Throughout, Emily W. Leider illuminates the actress’s friendships with luminaries such as Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford and her collaborations with the likes of John Barrymore, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and William Wyler, among many others. This highly engaging biography offers a fascinating slice of studio era history and gives us the first full picture of a very private woman who has often been overlooked despite her tremendous star power. Source: www.ucpress.edu

“Myrna Loy and William Powell are the ham and eggs, the peaches and cream, the salt and pepper of the movies,” an MGM scribe commented as their fourth of six Thin Man films was being released. “They go together naturally as night and day.” The screen marriage of this matched pair of lithe bodies and insouciant spirits outlasted any of Myrna’s offscreen couplings and for their fans has never lost its luster.

Powell and Loy made fourteen films together between 1934 (the year they first worked together, in Manhattan Melodrama, and also the year of The Thin Man) and 1947. Their connubial bliss seemed so perfect that fans found it hard to believe that in real life they were never married to one another. During their heyday Loy regularly received fan mail seeking marital advice because of the obvious happiness of her union with Powell. When the couple came to San Francisco to make After the Thin Man in the mid-1930s, the St. Francis Hotel management, unaware that Jean Harlow, also in San Francisco, was Powell’s main squeeze at the time, booked Loy and Powell into its honeymoon suite.

Nick and Nora show their affection via mutual ribbing.“Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people,” says Nora as one thug after another joins their party. When Nora asks him if he goes for a particular type of girl, Nicks answers,“Only you, darling—lanky brunettes with wicked jaws.” Nick and Nora rarely speak a straight line, so much do they love verbal and physical pokes in the ribs. But in the privacy of their hotel bedroom they never seem to have sex; they just dodge bullets, converse, re-cover from hangovers, and now and then try to catch forty winks.

Loy’s talent for partnership allowed her to draw on one side of herself when she faced Powell, another side with Gable. She excelled at picking up and answering cues, falling into step, “listening” with her entire body. "Manhattan Melodrama" (1934) was the first film William Powell co-starred with Myrna Loy. Powell had shared the screen with several actresses—he was too much the gentleman to name names—who didn’t connect with him, actresses who, he said, “seemed to be separated from me by a plate glass window”. With Myrna there was instant connection, no plate glass. From their initial scene together, Powell would remember, “a curious thing passed between us, a feeling of rhythm, complete understanding, an instinct for how one could bring out the best in the other.” —"Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood" (2011) by Emily W. Leider

Laid-back David Duchovny in "Aquarius", "X-Files" comeback

Product Details - Actors: David Duchovny, Claire Holt, Gethin Anthony, Grey Damon, Emma Dumont - Number of discs: 4 NR (Not Rated) - Studio: ANCHOR BAY - DVD Release Date: September 15, 2015 - Run Time: 546 minutes

A gritty cop drama set in 1967 Los Angeles, Aquarius brings you the story of Sam Hodiak (David Duchovny) a decorated World War II veteran and homicide detective, responsible for policing a city ridden by cheap drugs, rising crime, protest, and police brutality. When Emma Karn (Emma Dumont), the 16 year-old daughter of an old girlfriend, goes missing in a sea of hippies, Hodiak agrees to find her. In doing so, he teams up with the young, idealistic undercover vice cop Brian Shafe (Grey Damon), who behaves like a hippie to infiltrate this new counterculture and find her. The two embark on an action-packed investigation which, unbeknownst to them, leads them to Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) and the Manson Family before their infamous murder spree.

The complete first season of the hit crime drama is planned for Blu-ray in September. In an early announcement to retailers, Starz/Anchor Bay is set to bring 'Aquarius: The Complete First Season' on Blu-ray on September 15. The Blu-ray will feature 1080p video, a lossless 5.1 soundtrack, and supplements include Webisodes and First Look: Aquarius.

Los Angeles, 1967. Welcome to the Summer of Love. Aquarius stars David Duchovny as Sam Hodiak, a seasoned homicide detective whose investigations dovetail with the activities of real-life cult leader Charles Manson in the years before he masterminded the most notorious killings of a generation, the Tate-LaBianca murders. A small-time but charismatic leader with big plans, Manson has begun to build up his "family", recruiting vulnerable young men and women to join his cause. Teaming up with a young cop who will help him infiltrate Manson's circle, Hodiak is forced to see things through the questioning eyes of someone who came of age amongst the current anti-establishment counterculture. Edgy, addictive and visually stunning, the Age of Aquarius is here. Source: www.highdefdigest.com

Gethin Anthony, who played a gay character on “Thrones,” has no qualms about doing love scenes with other men. “It’s never been too much of an issue for me. Because I happen to be heterosexual, there’s a different element at play,” he says. “It’s more of a transformation.” Sexuality, he says, was “irrelevant” to Manson. “In my mind he was using sexual congress as a weapon,” he says. “There’s much more at play than his charisma or his rhetoric, which is there,” says Gethin by phone from London.

“Charlie read books in prison on how to influence people. He was actively schooling himself on human attraction. He was interested in getting people to do his bidding.” Gethin was a choirboy at school and that is him playing the guitar and singing Manson’s actual songs on the series. “Aquarius” was renewed for a second season a few weeks ago and Anthony, who has a non-actress girlfriend, expects to report back to work in October, when series star David Duchovny finishes shooting “The X-Files.”

“I was a bit in awe of him,” Anthony says of Duchovny. “He’s really laid back and professional but he has this really serene presence. I had a blast.” Source: nypost.com


“Are you ready for this, Scully?” Mulder asks in the 17-second clip. “I don’t know there’s a choice,” Scully replies. Thirteen years after the original series run, the next mind-bending chapter of THE X-FILES will be a thrilling, six-episode event series helmed by creator/executive producer Chris Carter, with stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson re-inhabiting their roles as iconic FBI Agents FOX MULDER and DANA SCULLY. This marks the momentous return of the Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning pop culture phenomenon, which remains one of the longest-running sci-fi series in network television history. Production on THE X-FILES event series is set to begin in summer 2015.

THE X-FILES originally premiered in September 1993. Over the course of its nine-season run, the influential series went from breakout sci-fi favorite to massive global hit, and became one of the most successful television dramas of all time. The show, which earned 16 Emmy Awards, five Golden Globes and a Peabody Award, follows FBI special agents Scully (Anderson) and Mulder (Duchovny), as they investigate unexplained cases – “X-Files” – for which the only answers involve paranormal phenomena.