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Between Therapy and Revolution: Mr. Robot’s Ambivalence Toward Hacker Masculinity

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Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture

Abstract

Focusing on Mr. Robot (2015–2019), this chapter examines how this television series, generally regarded as a dark dystopia of digital capitalism, contains a utopian counternarrative in its representation of masculinity. Although the series reproduces certain imaginaries of the hacker hero which cater to masculinist fantasies of control, it counterbalances this by decidedly emphasizing the hacker’s vulnerability and interdependence. Thus, Mr. Robot offers an ambivalently dialectical account of hacker masculinity: even though the hacker is still associated with toxic power fantasies, he is also capable of subversive change, potentially inspiring viewers to hack capitalism and patriarchy. By narrating a hacker’s personal and political struggle, the series can be interpreted as a powerful critical dystopia, both critical and hopeful toward contemporary masculinity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As an index of its popularity, among other awards, the series received a total of thirteen Primetime Emmy nominations, with three accolades: Rami Malek as outstanding lead actor in a drama series (2016), Mac Quayle for outstanding music composition for a series (2016), and Roxanne Paredes and Jeff McKibben for outstanding interactive extension of a linear program (2020).

  2. 2.

    Of course, the plot dynamics (primarily, the character’s revolutionary efforts) gradually move Mr. Robot’s diegetic universe away from its initial correspondence with the contemporary, thus making it a peculiar form of science fiction: one that departs from a strictly ‘empirical’ real world to gradually extrapolate into an alternate future.

  3. 3.

    It is this sense that, as Murphy suggests (2019: 530), Mr. Robot can be usefully categorized as post-cyberpunk, especially in light of its “[punk] attitude: an adversarial relationship to consensus reality”, an attitude which “is just south of cynicism but well north of mere skepticism” (Kelly and Kessel 2007: xii).

  4. 4.

    In this sense, this chapter could be read in dialogue with other approaches to US culture of the mid-2010s which symptomatize “a populist moment of repudiation of the elites amidst the fraying of American neoliberalism” (Orán Llarena 2018: 249).

  5. 5.

    For other approaches to the critical vein of recent speculative fiction, see also Combe (2021) or Workman (2021).

  6. 6.

    In this I am following Moylan’s well-known theoretical elaboration (2000: 183–221), which proposes that dystopias, far from being the simple negation of utopia, allow for a constant, dialectical contrast between the anti-utopian and the utopian: in other words, they abstractly stage a conflict between the bad and worsening state of societies, and lingering impulses toward a better state of thing.

  7. 7.

    For some critical approaches to Dune’s and The Matrix’s heroes, see Pearson (2019) and Bould (2009), who, respectively, consider Paul Atreides as a “proto-neoliberal” subject, and Neo as a cyberpunk version of the white savior.

  8. 8.

    Besides these, there are academic works of a broader scope which devote sections to masculinities in sf culture, such as Cornea (2010) and Baker (2015).

  9. 9.

    Berardi (2019) aptly calls our era “the age of impotence”, thus implicitly interrelating the era’s political sense of hopelessness with its ongoing crisis of masculine identity.

  10. 10.

    For a provisional attempt at theorizing the interplay between dystopian sf and melodrama, see Sebastián-Martín (2021).

  11. 11.

    As an American son of Egyptian parents, Rami Malek is evidently not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) representative of the American working class, although to a certain extent he may ‘pass’, especially in the series’ context, where white Christian Slater and Carly Chaikin play his relatives. This blurry or perhaps blurred ethnicity could be considered by comparison to the much more studied racial ambivalence of Keanu Reeves’ Neo in The Matrix franchise, as a presumably white character played by a white-passing Canadian actor with a very diverse ethnic background.

  12. 12.

    Home-edited cuts of Elliot’s rant went viral on social media—thus fueling anti-capitalist sentiments while also contributing to quench surveillance-capitalism’s endless thirst for what Zuboff (2019) calls surplus data. More tellingly, Amazon Prime Video uploaded onto YouTube a promotional compilation entitled “Rami Malek Ranting for 10 Straight Minutes in Mr. Robot” (2020).

  13. 13.

    In this regard, I am thinking through Connell’s concept of “transnational business masculinities” (2005: xxiii–xxiv) and Brown’s argument that neoliberal capitalism “transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic” (2015: 10).

  14. 14.

    This clearly illustrates how, as Connell insists in her definition (2005: 77), hegemonic masculinity emerges from the interplay of competing forms of masculinities, eventually leading to a favoring of the one form that most contributes to patriarchy’s legitimation.

  15. 15.

    The episode literally visualizes this metaphor, and Rami Malek and Christian Slater are last seen on screen as film spectators, in a movie theater presumably inside Elliot’s mind.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Miguel Sebastián-Martín

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  1. Miguel Sebastián-Martín
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Correspondence to Miguel Sebastián-Martín .

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  1. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Sara Martín

  2. Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain

    M. Isabel Santaulària

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Sebastián-Martín, M. (2023). Between Therapy and Revolution: Mr. Robot’s Ambivalence Toward Hacker Masculinity. In: Martín, S., Santaulària, M.I. (eds) Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22144-6_14

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