Page - 22 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

For Elliot, the computer hacker, there is a necessity to counter this conspiracy with a similarly secret cabal, fsociety, who can engineer a data wipe that will herald a new beginning. Traditionally, the apocalypse unveils and uncovers the hidden truth, and the narrative of Mr Robot revolves around this world-altering event designed to both liberate us from the burden of debt and as such to reveal the reality of the world that is clouded by this. As stated, however, effecting this event produces increasing levels of psychological conflict for Elliot: initiating the system hack ini- tiates his cognitive fragmentation into antagonistic personalities. The apocalypse will make a new world possible, but to whom or to what, can Elliot appeal as an authority that can validate his actions? The lack of such an authority threatens to undermine the entire process as he systematically retracts from trusting a smaller and smaller circle of people until finally in the last moments of the Season Two fina- le he cries out: “I am the only one that exists!”, at which point, unfortunately, he is shot by another character whom, in his uncertainty he has deemed be imaginary.24 Pressingly, he has bigger problems to address in relation to his apocalyptic hack of E Corp and its financial records. Predictably, the outcome of the data loss is a generalized state of economic chaos. Whilst the government struggles to achieve order and reassure a frightened public that it can resolve the sit- uation, a return to a small-scale cash economy is put into effect. Rather than this leading to the expected collapse of E Corp, however, the CEO Philip Price actually uses the crisis to maneuver the company into a position of even greater dominance through the introduction of its own electronic bit-coin currency. The drama usefully stages the potential within any revolutionary event for forces of reaction to mobilize at the moment of radical reconfiguration, potentially ‘every bit as innovative’, as the Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou puts in his work Eth- ics, and further raises the question whether all of this ‘subversive’ activity is not potentially another level of manipulation by rogue capitalists.25 By the end of Season Two, Elliot and his alter ego Mr Robot are about to blow up the building that contains the, by now, reassembled paper records of the world’s debt, a sign that Elliot/Mr Robot seem condemned to an endless repetition of their actions. Evidently, at this point in the narrative, Elliot has so systematically exposed the falsity of the truth claims that have been used to justify the measures taken by E Corp, the government, and everyone around him, that he is effectively left without any stable position from which to secure his own sense of reality, there is no authority left to which he can appeal as guarantor of meaning. Whilst he is the singular mastermind behind the hack, even if his underlings provide labor for the task, Elliot is trapped within an unstable relationship with his dead father who appears in hallucinatory form, driving him to ever more destructive actions 24 Mr Robot 2.12 (00:39:20). 25 Badiou 2000, lvii. 22 | John Lynch www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30