Seite - 29 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

This age is one where everything you think is private can be made public and whose mood is increasingly defined by a growing sense of widespread para- noia, as the absolute level of surveillance becomes apparent. This gives Elliot a God-like power, but as he pushes at the limits of human ability, in this context, he continuously breaks down. If there is a reality to Mr Robot, it is this piling up of a compounded irreality where even perception itself is disrupted. Elliot might hate the world, try to turn away from it, but he is ultimately unable to escape it. The vision on offer here is not a utopian one but, rather, one of darkness, to the point where Season Two literally ends on a black out. As a cryptographer, Elliot prefers the dark seclusion of the crypt to the light of the chapel. Finally, in this sense the apocalyptic script of Mr Robot can be read as akin to Catherine Keller’s “crypto-apocalypse”, a counter-apocalypse as she describes it, which recognizes itself as an apocalypse but attempts to interrupt the interpre- tative habit through a shift from the sense fear to one of hope, one that remains open and ongoing rather than final and absolute. What holds the attention for a show such as Mr Robot is precisely the oscillation between fear and hope that the creator of the series has so far consistently repeated and is similar to the functioning of the Book of Revelation, which in Keller’s words, acts as “a coun- ter-cultural code for dissent” as it moves from “secrecy into public forecasting and open defiance”.43 Mr Robot is a contemporary manifestation of the impulse for thinking a possible revolution, yet, through its very dramatic staging as a consumable product of the culture industry, potentially functions to contain the movement for change it presents on screen. In this regard, this operative ambi- guity that we see in Mr Robot of ‘presenting the unpresentable’ is thoroughly apocalyptic, an “apocalypse habit”, as Keller describes it, one whose spiral of vi- olence starts with a self-destruction, a destruction of self in the case of Elliot, yet requires possibilities for action beyond the attraction of a messianic solution.44 BIBLIOGRAPHY Badiou, Alain, 2000, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso. Badiou, Alain, 2011 [1988], Being and Event, London: Continuum. Barr, Merrill, 2015, “Mr. Robot”: Creator Sam Esmail on Transitioning the Show from Feature Film to Pilot and More, Forbes, 24 June 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillbarr/2015/06/24/ mr-robot-usa-2/#6fa0f36f473a [accessed 12 September 2019]. Boothroyd, Dave, 2013, Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butsch, Richard, 2000, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television 1750–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtis, Adam, 2007, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, BBC. 43 Keller 1997, 10. 44 Keller 1997, 11. Mr Robot: Hacking the Apocalypse | 29www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 15–30