FIGHTING HACKING AND STALKING: TOXIC MASCULINITY AND THE REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-HERO
A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University A In partial fulfillment of 3^ the requirements for the Degree
kJQ Masters of Arts *0 4S In
Women and Gender Studies
by
Robyn Michelle Ollodort
San Francisco, California
May 2017 Copyright by Robyn Michelle Ollodort 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Fighting, Hacking, and Stalking: Toxic Masculinity and the
Revolutionary Anti-Hero by Robyn Michelle Ollodort, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Women and Gender Studies at San
Francisco State University.
Martha Kenney; Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies
Professor, History FIGHTING, HACKING, AND STALKING: TOXIC MASCULINITY AND THE REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-HERO
Robyn Michelle Ollodort San Francisco, California 2017
Through my analyses of the films Taxi Driver (1976) and Fight Club (1999), and the television series Mr. Robot (2105), I will unpack the ways each text represents masculinity and mental illness through the trope of revolutionary psychosis, the ways these representations reflect contemporaneous political and social anxieties, and how critical analyses of each text can account for the ways that this trope fails to accurately represent the lived experiences of men and those with mental illnesses. In recognizing the harmful nature of each of these representations’ depictions of both masculinity and mental illness, we can understand why such bad tropes circulate, and how to recognize and refuse them, or make them better.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.
O b / n J l 7- Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work would not have been possible without the guidance, care, and support of several key individuals. First and foremost, I would like to express gratitude for my committee chair, Professor Martha Kenney, who provided diligent support, incisive feedback, and academic inspiration over the course of this project. I would also like to thank Professor Catherine Kudlick and Emily Beitiks of the Longmore Institute on
Disability for investing in the next generation of disability scholars. I would like to thank all of the students and professors who trusted me while I was their TA, especially Leece
Lee-Oliver. I want to thank Alex Locust, for his unwavering companionship
(#disabiliteam). I am deeply indebted to the judges, organizers, and filmmakers who participated in Superfest International Disability Film Festival in 2016 and 2017, for broadening the horizons of diversity in film. I would also like to thank the team of expert healthcare providers I have seen while living in San Francisco, particularly Lianne
Gensler and her staff, for ensuring my quality of life as I manage (now multiple) chronic illnesses. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my dog, Alona, for always loving and supporting me. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction...... 1
Fighting, Hacking, and Stalking...... 5
Tropes and Terms...... 6
Chapter Outline...... 12
Chapter 1 - Taxi Driver. Veterans, Violence, and Vigilantism...... 15
Post-Vietnam War America: Masculinity in Crisis...... 23
PTSD and Revolutionary Psychosis...... 28
Psychosis, Violence, and Pursuant Masculinity...... 32
Conclusion: Taxi Driver as Template...... 34
Chapter 2 - Fight Club: Mayhem, Masculinity, and Multiple Personalities...... 37
Psychosis and Anti-Capitalism...... 43
Fucking and Fighting: Virility, Homoeroticism, and Hypermasculinity...... 50
White-Guys and the White Man’s Bruce Lee: Race in Fight Club...... 56
Conclusion...... 60
Chapter 3 - Mr. Robot: Blood and Disc Drives...... 61
Elliot’s revolutionary Psychosis...... 65
Sympathetic Reading of Elliot and fsociety...... 77
Conclusion...... 83
Afterword...... 85
Works Cited 89 1
INTRODUCTION
“I draw the line at 7 unreturned phone calls” - Lloyd Daubler, Say Anything (1989)
Growing up, I was equally perplexed and captivated by the figure of
Lloyd Daubler, John Cusack’s character in the film Say Anything (1989), a popular
coming-of-age drama directed by Cameron Crowe. Standing out on the lawn of the girl he likes, holding a boom box, he serenades her with a song by Peter Gabriel significant to
their relationship. Lloyd is an average guy in love with the overachieving girl from a
lower income family, and their romance is a story of love overcoming the odds. But, the events that lead Lloyd to make that grand gesture, now ubiquitous in American popular culture, are not what one would expect; faced with the mounting pressure of her ambitious future, lone Skye’s character, Diane, rejects Lloyd, leaving him heartbroken and apoplectic. Though Diane has expressed her disinterest in continuing their relationship, Lloyd, convinced that a bold gesture will win her over, defies her wishes to be left alone. Instead, he shows up at her house, under her window, at dawn; waking the neighbors and causing a scene, Lloyd’s actions completely disregard Diane’s wishes and invade her personal space. I do not find this gesture to be romantic; in fact, narratives depicting men aggressively pursuing women who have expressed their disinterest or 2
unavailability (or both) are equally common in romance as they are in the horror genre
The major differentiating factor of this trope in horror and romance seems to be the framing of the moral status of the male lead: in romance, he is the main character, the story is generally told from his perspective, and his actions and motivations are just (if not misguided); whereas, in horror, this pursuant male character tends to be a villain, competing with another, virtuous male lead, who ultimately prevails, for the affections of the female character. Both iterations of this trope assume heterosexuality as the norm, figuring the female character as a mere object, a conquest, or a vehicle for male character development. In juxtaposing the pursuant male figure in horror and romantic genres, intent and framing emerge as the fine line along which this character is meant to be repulsive or attractive, respectively, but practically, this line is constantly and consistently blurred, resulting in the conflation of pursuant masculinity and the attractive ‘good’ guy, as demonstrated in Say Anything, among numerous other examples throughout the history of cinema and television .
Lloyd’s intent blurs the line between consensual romantic pursuit and a violation of personal boundaries; repeatedly calling Diane’s home and showing up at her window unannounced, specifically after she has expressed disinterest, are actions that do
1 See Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom o f the Opera (1910), etc. for examples of this trope in literature 2For example in film, see: Pretty in Pink (1986), Eternal Sunshine o f the Spotless Mind (2004), 500 Days o f Summer (2009), Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010); for example in television, see Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) Spike’s failed courtship of Buffy in seasons 5 and 6. 3
not convey respect. Whether or not Lloyd’s actions could be construed as stalking lies expressly in Diane’s reception of Lloyd’s advances, but this is not what the film aims to address at all; indeed, the female love interest character in Say Anything has next to nothing in terms of character development, serving merely to advance the male lead’s narrative. That Lloyd’s gesture is framed as positive at all is concerning, revealing a cultural misconception that this kind of behavior is ‘normal’, even desirable. Focusing on white, straight, male characters and their actions, to the detriment of female characters, characters of color, etc., is a pattern rampant in Hollywood and often includes violence3, which becomes normalized in real life situations.
According to Title IX, a code employed by institutions receiving federal funding - like public high schools, attended by students like Lloyd and Diane - with the intent of providing safe and equal access to all individuals, stalking is defined as any persistent, unwanted behavior, including following, leaving gifts, showing up at places of employment, and generally giving unwanted attention to a person who has expressed at least disinterest or discomfort and at most fear, intimidation, and deliberate disruption of daily life. Originally enacted in 1972 to address the gaps left by the Civil Rights Act of
1964, which prohibited discrimination within workplace environments based on numerous identity categories, Title IX was created in the interest of providing
3 Examples can be found in such prolific film franchises as Batman, Superman, James Bond, Star Wars, and Star Trek; the premise of the Taken oeuvre; Jaws, Looper, Moulin Rouge!, Psycho, and on television in Supernatural, 24, and The X-Files. 4
opportunities for female athletes within high schools and colleges4; however, the scope of
Title IX expanded to include transgender students’ access to programs and facilities5, as
well as protections for students against sexual violence on campuses receiving federal
funding. This last protection is particularly relevant to my analysis as it establishes Title
IX as law of the land, capable of determining what behaviors, like assault, harassment,
and stalking, are considered crimes, what criteria make up those behaviors, and what
protections those who are faced with such violent behaviors may have. While the
prevalence of sexual assault on American college campuses is only one example of toxic
and damaging ideals of masculinity necessitating protections for those who have experienced sexual violence, it is particularly compelling when considering the scope and
severity of the problem of sexual assault, as well as the administrative resistance to the
rule when faculty and university administrators must punish student athletes for committing these offenses6. That campuses are reticent to protect students from such
serious acts of violence as sexual assault is unconscionable; even more concerning are the more mundane acts of violence, like stalking, that fly under the radar socially when even physical harm is not taken seriously.
4 For more information on Title IX and its history, visit the website here: http://www.titleix.info/ 5 Though these provisions have since come under political fire. 6 See: Staurowsky, Ellen, and Erianne Weight. 2013. Discovering Dysfunction in Title IX Implementation: NCAA Administrator Literacy, Responsibility, and Fear. Journal o f Applied Sport Management. 5, no. 1. 5
Fighting, Hacking, and Stalking
In what follows, I argue that the trope of revolutionary psychosis, as
established in Taxi Driver, solidified in Fight Club, and reproduced in Mr. Robot, valorizes toxic masculinity and reductive misunderstandings of mental illness. This trope
romanticizes a dangerous anti-hero figure, obscuring moments of mental health crisis
(generally in the form a psychotic break, though left intentionally ambiguous within the plot) for the sake of furthering insurrectionary politics. Typically portrayed as white, heterosexual, middle class, and cisgendered male, the revolutionary-psychotic anti-hero is presented as isolated from his peers, espousing radical ideals of social upheaval through the actions of an individual (himself) that are violent, destructive, and costly, oftentimes holding in contempt those of marginalized groups, such as women, people of color, and those of lower socioeconomic status, for their complicity with the status quo he finds to be so disheartening. Critical of the social transgressions around him and entitled to correct them, revolutionary psychosis leads the anti-hero to his apex, an act of violence facilitated by a psychotic break. Characters exhibiting revolutionary psychosis are touted as heroes, held up as fallible every-men who act on misguided impulse to better society; however, I argue the trope of revolutionary psychosis is, in fact, detrimental to mental illness and masculinity. Revolutionary psychosis comes to stand in for a variety of conditions and experiences, flattening both masculinity and mental illness into
“dangerous” and “crazy” respectively. As consumers of media, we deserve to see 6
complex, accurate, and relatable depictions of humanity; masculinity and mental illness
deserve better than revolutionary psychosis.
Through my analyses of Taxi Driver, Fight Club, and Mr. Robot, I will
unpack the ways each text represents masculinity and mental illness, the ways these
tropes reflect contemporaneous political and social anxieties, and how critical analyses of
each text can account for the ways these tropes fail to accurately represent the lived
experiences of men and those with mental illnesses. My hope is that in recognizing the
harmful nature of each of these representations’ depictions of both masculinity and
mental illness, we can understand why these bad tropes circulate, and how to recognize
and refuse them, or make them better.
Tropes and Terms
In order to understand the relationship between representations of
masculinity and mental illness in media and the real identities and lived experiences they
are based on, I will first define the recurring terms and tropes that have shaped my
analysis. The ways film and television have represented masculinity and mental illness have shown a concerning lack of depth and complexity, and these harmful tropes only
seem to be passed off as acceptable upon reiteration, without actually addressing the problems they espouse. My hope is that in understanding how toxic masculinity and psychosis convene in these representations, we as viewers can be more critical of the bad characterizations that are so abundant and demand better ones. Taxi Driver, Fight Club, 7
and Mr. Robot are all complicit in depicting masculinity and mental illness in toxic and reductive ways, and I aim to hold these representations accountable.
Toxic (Pursuant) Masculinity
A concept now well known across various disciplines, from politics to popular culture, what we call toxic masculinity today has its roots in a diverse, and oftentimes nebulous, array of intellectual locales. Masculinity as an object of study has been taken up by a variety of disciplines within the social sciences, including women’s or feminist studies, sociology, and psychology. With the rise of women’s studies in academia in the late 1980s, looking to gender as a category of analysis and location of oppression, feminists have applied the model of critiquing rigid notions of gender roles for women and for men, resulting in an offshoot field, masculinity studies7. Engaging questions of what masculinity means in particular places and times, masculinity studies takes up similar modes of inquiry as women’s studies (i.e. resisting essentialist understandings of gendered identities, revealing inequities along the lines of sex, etc.); however, as women’s studies figures patriarchy as the dominant structure of social organizing, studying masculinity/-ies inherently revolves around male privilege8.
7 Connell, R.W. 2001. “Studying Men and Masculinity”. Resources for Feminist Research. 43. O Connell, R, and James Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept”. Gender and Society. 19, no. 6: 829-859. 8
The term toxic masculinity was created by Shepard Bliss to account for
the negative, destructive characteristics aggregated through the repressive constructs of
gender in Western society9. Embroiled in the academic debates of the late 1980s and
early 1990s surrounding the implications of studying gender, Bliss argues against any one
monolithic understanding of masculinity, including traits and potentialities both positive
and negative depending on influence and context. Of the negative aspects, Bliss notes
that “Toxic masculinity poisons through means such as neglect, abuse, and violence...
Toxic behaviors can be accumulated in a sexist society. They are not essential or inherent,
but can become addictive” (302). Instead, he suggests remedy through refusal of the
damaging aspects and prioritizing of the positive (302). Thus, in studying the damaging
aspects of masculinity, scholars are able to articulate the pitfalls of problematic gender
performances, as well as offer possibilities for their remediation.
Stemming from this academic interest in gender roles, feminists and
masculinity studies scholars alike have named toxic masculinity as the fallout from
failure of individuals to meet the lofty gendered expectations of being a man, including
physical violence, competitiveness, and manipulation to gain control. Specifically, toxic
masculinity “is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster
9 Kimmel, Michael S. 1995. The Politics o f Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men's Movement (And the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 9
domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence”10. It gives a
name to the influences people are under when they buy guns, follow random girls on the
street, and violate the privacy of those they want to get close to.
Anti-hero/Vigilante
Taxi Driver, Fight Club, and Mr. Robot are all stories of vigilante anti- heroes: Travis Bickle, the Narrator, and Elliot Alderson all feel removed from society and,
deeply disturbed by the state of disorder they perceive, act on impulses to change it for
the better, resorting to extreme measures. The anti-hero has a long history in film, television, and literature, from Don Quixote11 to Dr. Gregory House12, and is part of the archetypal system of characterizing recurring types of literary character traits.
Characterized as disillusioned, submissive, and morally unconventional13, the anti-hero is reluctant to take up the main character’s duties in a story, oftentimes leading to a more complex relationship with an audience than a traditional hero. Similarly, a vigilante is a kind of anti-hero who takes matters into their own hands; they see an injustice endured without institutional address, and aim to resolve it on their own, oftentimes using
10 Kupers, Terry. 2005. Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison. Journal o f Clinical Psychology. 61, no. 6: 713-724. 11 From Encyclopedia Britannica; https://www.britannica.com/art/antihero 12 Jonason, Peter K., Gregory D. Webster, David P. Schmitt, Norman P. Li, and Laura Crysel. "The antihero in popular culture: Life history theory and the dark triad personality traits." Review o f General Psychology 16, no. 2 (2012): 192. 13 Neimneh, Shadi. 2013. The Anti-Hero in Modernist Fiction: From Irony to Cultural Renewal. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study o f Literature. 46, no. 4: 75- 90. 10
measures outside of, or in direct conflict with, the law14. Vigilantism lends itself to anti
heroism, and anti-heros are often vigilantes; they both require a rejection of status quo.
Moreover, vigilantes are often imagined as lone figures, solely capable of righting
whatever wrong they perceive in the fictional society around them. This relationship
between society and individual is interesting in that depicting main characters in this way
forecloses any collective action for change. Framing a single, disgruntled individual as
the arbiter of change elevates (and isolates) that individual, in ways that are detrimental
to both the social and the individual.
Revolutionary Psychosis
The main goal of my project is to forward a notion of a popular trope in
media, which I have named ‘revolutionary psychosis’, and to problematize it.
Revolutionary psychosis is the meeting point of toxic masculinity, anti-heroism and
vigilantism, and poorly executed representations of mental illness. The revolutionary
anti-hero seeks to change a society gone wrong through violent and extreme measures,
and demonstrates psychotic behavior in so doing. Tyler Durden, for example, aims to
level a society built on debt by blowing up the physical locales of credit card companies,
starting a vigilante group (Project Mayhem) to facilitate this desire. However, because
14 Ayyildiz, Elisabeth. 1995. “When Battered Woman's Syndrome Does Not Go Far Enough: The Battered Woman as Vigilante”. American University Journal o f Gender & the Law. 4: 141-535. 11
Tyler Durden is a split personality of the Narrator, brought on by a psychotic break with reality, the vigilantism serves as a symptom of his revolutionary psychosis. In reality, mental illness and mental health issues do not function this way, cleverly bifurcating someone’s psyche into trope-fitting characters: the conservative corporative type stifled by insomnia and monotonous consumerism and his aggressive, explosive, anti-capitalist foil. Mental health needs to be taken seriously; audiences deserve accurate representations of PTSD, psychosis, addiction, and so on, to counter the social stigma those with these illnesses face. In fact, mass media is extremely influential to mainstream understandings of mental illness, despite massive inaccuracies in representations; for example, cultural misrepresentations of schizophrenia have, in fact, resulted in lack of recognition and misdiagnosis of the condition15. If representations of schizophrenia were accurate, more people would understand and recognize the disease, instead of fear and stigmatize those who have it. Revolutionary psychosis takes the most difficult and disturbing aspects of both masculinity and mental illness and renders them as caricatures, undeservedly, to tell more palatable and easily understood stories, sacrificing accurate portrayals of mental illness for flashy narrative twists and “gotcha” moments. Storytelling, filmmaking, and popular cultural, generally, can, and should, do better.
15 Wahl, Otto. 1995. Media Madness: Public Images o f Mental Illness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 12
Chapter Outline
In the following chapters, I will combine methods of literature review and critical cultural analysis to discuss the films Taxi Driver and Fight Club and the television series
Mr. Robot, paying specific attention to the ways these texts mobilize tropes of masculinity and mental illness that are detrimental to broader understandings of these identities. These examples of what I call the revolutionary anti-hero, propelled by vigilantism and psychosis, only serve to further misunderstandings of both manhood and mental illness; however, reading Mr. Robot in the context of the two films that inspired it can provide a point of entry for changing these negative tropes into moments of narrative possibility.
In Chapter 1,1 closely examine the 1976 film Taxi Driver, noting the tropes of masculinity and mental illness in the film, as well as real-life events of violence that inspired and were inspired by the representations of masculinity Taxi Driver evinces.
Connecting the character of Travis Bickle to Vietnam War veterans with PTSD, I offer a reading of the character that troubles the neutral to positive framing of Bickle’s choices throughout the film. Revered and held up favorable within the American filmmaking community, Taxi Driver has inspired an entire genre of films and television shows revolving around revolutionary anti-hero types like Travis Bickle.
The 1999 film Fight Club has been a popular object of study for media, gender, and disability experts alike since its release; thus, I will conduct an abbreviated literature review of the existing academic engagement with the film in order to assess the 13
forms masculinity and psychosis cultural critics see at play. I then connect this gendered
and medicalized reading to the economic state of the late 1990s, an era of consumerism and economic uncertainty following the Cold War. Fight Club depicts participation in consumer capitalism as feminizing, and establishes its main characters as exaggeratedly
masculine, white, and middle classed to emphasize their critique of, and preference not to partake in, consumer culture.
Finally, Chapter 3 examines the 2015 television series Mr. Robot, a post
9/11 view of hacker vigilante-ism fueled by mental illness, drawing direct inspiration
from Taxi Driver's narration and Fight Club's “gotcha” plot twist. I read the series two ways: first, critical of the ways it depicts whitened masculinity in the tech industry; and second, with attention to women of color critiques of addiction and medicalization, advancing a transnational reading of the fictional hacker collective “fsociety” that allows
for possibility in media portrayal of a character of color with mental illnesses. Ultimately,
Mr. Robot fails at avoiding the narrative trappings of the revolutionary psychosis trope; however, it provides interesting points of departure that merit exploration, offering new ways to imagine massive social change at the hands of a diverse (and highly skilled) collective.
As it stands, the revolutionary psychosis trope is troubling in its misrepresentations of both masculinity and mental illness; social upheaval is not achieved by standing in the mirror and taunting your reflection like Travis Bickle, splicing pornographic images into children’s films like Tyler Durden, or self-medicating with 14
morphine to exorcise feelings of loneliness like Elliot Alderson - though with the help of fsociety, Elliot’s plan comes the closest to achieving the overall goal of taking down Evil
Corp. Continually relying on and reviving the trope of the long revolutionary seeking social change through an act of vigilantism, these three cultural texts only further solidify such toxic ideas about masculinity and mental illness. Realistically, social change is a collaborative effort, as is the effective treatment and management of mental illness; depictions of lone anti-heroes attempting anything otherwise are misleading and detrimental. Through exacting cultural critique of these representations, I urge viewers to demand better representations of gender and disability in the media. 15
CHAPTER 1
Taxi Driver: Veterans, Violence, and Vigilantism
“You’re only as healthy as you feel.
You’re. Only. As. Healthy. As. You. Feel.”
Ifirst saw her at the Palantine headquarters at 63,d and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel. Out o f this filthy mass, she is alone.
They. Cannot. Touch. Her. At the headquarters of Senator Palantine’s Presidential campaign, the woman in the white dress calls to a male coworker across the room. She hands him a report, and they discuss their assignments. “Now look,” he presses, “we have to emphasize the new welfare program. That’s the issue that should be pushed.” “First push the man, then the issue,” she retorts. “Senator Palantine is a dynamic man.”
Telephones ring in the background. She continues, “An intelligent, interesting, fresh, fascinating man.” He cuts her off, “You forgot sexy.” The coworkers continue their banter, but she becomes distracted. “Look over there,” she murmurs, affixing square plastic glasses to her face. “I love you,” he offers back directly. She ignores his statement; “Notice anything?” “No,” he replies, staring at her, almost drooling over her.
“Well, put your glasses on,” she quips. “Okay, just a minute. All right.” He sits motionlessly, still staring at her; his glasses were on the entire time. “That taxi driver’s been staring at us.” Outside, Travis sits in his cab, parked directly outside of the glass 16
double doors of the office, staring straight at the woman, sipping on a soda. Back in the
office, the man replies, clueless, “What taxi driver?” “That one, the one sitting there,” she
counters impatiently. “How long has he been there?” “I don’t know, but it feels like a
long time.” He asks, “Does he bother you?” “No,” she replies sarcastically. “You really
mean yes and you’re being sarcastic,” he observes. “Oh, you’re quick, you’re really
quick,” she fires back, laughing. The phones ring. “Well, I try to be real quick. I tell you
what. I’ll play the male in this relationship, I’ll go out and...” “Good luck,” she cuts him
off. “I’ll go outside,” he continues, “and tell him to move. And I don’t need good luck.
Thank you.” She smiles, adding, “Oh, yes you do. You just think you don’t.” Outside, in
the rain, Travis watches the woman, his window rolled down halfway to avoid looking
through rain-streaked glass. The man steps through the double doors of the office,
immediately opening a large umbrella and shouting, “Say, you’re blocking our doorway.
You think you might wanna move your cab?” But before he can finish the sentence,
Travis starts the engine and peels off down the street, tires screeching and engine roaring
against the rainfall.
**
Travis Bickel just bought a gun. Not just one, but four, and a holster. A Magnum, a .38, a Colt .25, and a .380 Walther. Back at his apartment, he does round after of
vigorous pushups, clapping his hands together at the top of each. With an overhead view, the viewer is drawn to large scars on his shirtless back, just over his shoulder blades, emphasized by his repeated movements. In the next shot, Travis lifts an improvised 17
barbell, fashioned from two cans of paint and a length of pipe. He stands among the clutter of his belongings: to his left, clothes hang from a makeshift line, spilling out of a closet; to his right, flower arrangements, at least four of them with disarrayed hues of yellow and orange, meant for the girl who will no longer return his calls. “June 29th. I gotta get in shape now. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on it’ll be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups.” He stands over a stove in a claustrophobic kitchen, extending a wiry arm over the range, the open flames grazing the bottom of his clenched fist. He flinches, but his arm does not lose contact with the flame. “There will be no more pills. There will be no more bad food.
No more destroyers of my body. From now on it’ll be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.” Still holding his fist over the flame, the tendons and muscles emphasized by the exertion. Cutting to a firing range, Travis practices using his newly acquired guns, one after the other, emptying their magazines one-by-one into the paper figure off in the distance. His face is neutral, controlled; he flinches at the kickback of the shots he fires, but only slightly.
Cutting to a darkened movie theater, where he frequently visits to view adult films,
Travis reclines, with his legs on the seat in front of him. “Wow! Look at the size of that,” the actress moans on the screen, and with one hand, Travis makes a gun shape, thumb up and index extended, aiming at the screen. The pornographic action continues, and Travis obscures his face with the gun-hand, covering one eye coyly with the middle finger, shifting it back and forth across his field of view. Again, his face shows no emotion, 18
which gives him a sinister appearance in the darkened theater. “The idea had been
growing in my brain for some time.” Back at his apartment, Travis has adorned the wall
with a series of posters and newspaper clippings promoting Senator Palantine in his
Presidential bid. The posters take on a new meaning, as they now represent the girl who
rebuffed his advances, a coordinator for Palantine’s campaign. “True force. All the king’s
men cannot put it back together again.” Once again shirtless, Travis stands in front of a
mirror, holster strapped across his chest and resting under one arm, extending the other
arm to aim his gun, blank shots snapping as he squeezes the trigger. He rotates his torso,
finding another point to aim at, and the gun snaps again. Stowing the gun in the holster,
Travis assesses his appearance, and practices bringing his hand to the gun, crossing his
torso and bending his wrist awkwardly to grip the weapon. He pulls the magnum, aims it,
and fires off a blank shot at himself in the mirror. Adding a second holster, Travis pulls
and aims two guns, one from either side of his ribs, replaces them awkwardly, and pulls a
third gun from the waistband of his jeans. Aiming it in the mirror, he fires off a pretend
shot at himself.
Taxi Driver, the 1976 film directed by Martin Scorcese, stars Robert de Niro as
Travis Bickle, the unstable anti-hero and 26-year-old Vietnam War veteran, in many
ways the template of the U.S. anti-hero at the time. Because he cannot sleep, Bickle
drives a taxicab at night, and fills his spare moments watching pornography and
following women on the street. The film features voice-over narration from Bickle’s perspective, often noting the date as though he were writing in a diary. Following 19
Bickle’s cab routes through the seediest parts of (what appears to be) New York City,
viewers are equally guided by Bickle’s narration of the degradation and detritus he sees,
both in the form of actual garbage on the streets and the presence of those who he deems
of low moral standing. Bickle’s opinion of the world around him, of humanity, drives (no
pun intended) his outlook; “Each night when I return the cab to the garage, I have to
clean the cum off the back seat. Some nights, I clean off the blood,” he narrates flatly.
His cab functions as a microcosm of the filthy city around him, a space where sex and violence are equally likely to happen, and happen often. Bickle presents himself as
surrounded by this violence, affected by it, and the bulk of the film follows his attempt to resolve it, through first an ill-fated attempt at assassinating Palantine, the presidential candidate (and welfare reformist), and then through the liberation of a child sex worker through the murder of her pimp. Climaxing in a shootout, the film ends with Bickle painted as a hero in the press and popular imaginary, warranting a return visit from the heavenly woman he picked off the street and followed at the beginning of the film.
Taxi Driver is a widely known and highly regarded film in American cinema, with the phrase, “Are you talking to me,” that Bickle repeats to himself in the mirror, becoming a ubiquitous expression of macho posturing into present day. Indeed, the movie is frequently cited as one of the best films of all time16, receiving a wide array of critical
16 According to TIME Magazine (http://entertainment.time.eom/2005/02/l 2/all-time-100- movies/), the Writer’s Guild of America (http://entertainment.time.eom/2005/02/l 2/all- time- 100-movies/), and Time Out New York 20
acclaim17 and solidifying the careers of both Martin Scorcese and Robert De Niro in a critical era for American filmmaking. Taxi Driver is rife with violence: the film was inspired by brutal killings, depicts death and trauma graphically, and was a source of inspiration for similar acts of violence following its release. Here, I will explore the relationship between the cultural climate in which the film was created, the American
1970s following the Vietnam War, and the ways the anxieties of the time influenced the film, and vice versa. At the core of my investigation is the following set of questions: what social and cultural influences make the violence of Taxi Driver possible? What are the gendered, racial, and classed implications of the representations in the film, and how does the film treat these identities? What role does mental illness play in Taxi Driver, and the surrounding violence that influenced and was influenced by the film? What does this film reveal about American ideals of gender, race, class, and disability in the time of and following the Vietnam War? To answer these questions, I will review literature about the film, as well as the acts of violence surrounding it, and their impact on American culture.
It all begins with Travis Bickle, a formative figure of revolutionary psychosis; isolated, disillusioned, and lonely, Bickle surveys the grimy metropolitan streets from his cab spewing political diatribe and searching for damsels in distress. He represents an entire generation of disenfranchised twenty-something white men, entangled in the
(https://www.timeout.com/newyork/film/new-york-movies-100-best#tab panel 10), to name a few. 17 Including the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1976 and four Oscar nominations in 1977 (from the film’s IMDb page - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075314/awards?ref_=tt_awd) 21
fallout of an unpopular war and unsure of their place in a dysfunctional society. But
Travis is more than a disenchanted veteran; he is violent, persistent, and impulsive. He targets a politician, purchasing weapons with the intent to kill him. He targets women, stalking them in his taxi. He spends his free time watching pornography. As the film progresses, his mental stability decreases; he shifts the target of his violence from the politician to the pimp in charge of an underage sex worker, resulting in a gory shootout.
Travis Bickle is a creep and a killer, but no one around him sees him that way (except for
Betsy, the woman he stalked). In fact, by the end of the film, many characters see him as an actual hero, and while viewers have a more comprehensive view of him than the local fictional press, I am concerned that Bickle’s character is to this day not viewed with enough scrutiny.
Taxi Driver is a highly regarded film, and while Bickle’s anti-hero status is never contested, I fear that the success of the film cements him as a prominent Hollywood figure. This is to say, I am concerned that viewers celebrate Travis Bickle, or find him cool or edgy because of his Mohawk haircut and physical toughness, particularly as the film ages, when in reality he is dangerous and unstable, a pinnacle of all the things masculinity should not want to be. Included in numerous ‘best films’ lists, such as TIME
Magazine18 and the BFI’s publication Sight & Sound'9, and even preserved in the Library
18 Via TIME Magazine’s website
of Congress under the National Film Registry20, Taxi Driver, and particularly De Niro’s performance as Bickle, has received notable praise, referring to Bickle as “the greatest performance ever committed to celluloid with the actor completely immersed in his role giving it everything both physically and emotionally to bring to life an enigmatic, troubled soul”21. While De Niro’s acting may have been immersive and engaging, the character he portrayed stalks women, plots to assassinate public figures, and kills people with guns. Thus, I want to take this space to explore the ways in which Bickle is a creep, to regard him as such. I wish to explore the implications of ignoring Bickle’s mental health status, as those who created and manifested the character did. Bickle’s erratic, often violent tendencies and mindset suggest the warning signals of mental illness; however, very few conversations about the film or his character indicate any concern for his mental health. Bickle is not benign, he is not simply a troubled young man as Paul
Shrader and Martin Scorcese describe him; he is violent, dangerous, and sees women only as victims in need of rescue. Depicting Bickle as an anti-hero “cleaning up the streets”, thereby refusing the mental illness that motivates his actions, romanticizes
Bickle’s vigilantism while erasing the political, social, and economic consequences of the
Vietnam War.
20 Via the New York Times
Post-Vietnam War America: Masculinity in Crisis
In seeking to understand the conditions and events that made Taxi Driver possible, plausible, or even a desirable project to create, no text is more informative than Amy
Taubin’s engagement with the film22. An unassuming, glossy-paged text, Taubin’s book, bearing the same name as the film, compiles the historical, creative, and social processes that went into the creation of Taxi Driver, from production details and behind-the-scenes images to attitudes about war, masculinity, and violence in America at the time. Indeed, the release of Taxi Driver in 1976 coincided with, and was greatly inspired by, the fallout of the Vietnam War and its influences on gender roles (read: masculinity) and a burgeoning feminist movement, changing rules and norms in cinematography, and a culture overrun with images of violence as the war in Vietnam was televised and circulated on mainstream news outlets. Taubin characterizes the climate of American media as such:
“By 1968, the television networks, which had at first cooperated with the
Pentagon by suppressing images of American dead or wounded, were pumping
images of the escalating horror of the war - bodies that bled and burnt when
assaulted by automatic weapons, bombs and napalm - into American households,
where they were consumed as a regular part of the dinner hour.” (13)
Not only did extreme depictions of violence become commonplace following media involvement in reporting the Vietnam War; so, too, did the technologies of war,
22 Taubin, Amy. 2000. Taxi Driver. London: BFI Publishing. 24
particularly high-power firearms, become recognizable to viewers. Connecting Taxi
Driver's depiction of firearms and the potential damage they can cause, Taubin’s analysis locates the film within a history of American film gun violence - citing a scene, early in the film, in which Scorcese himself portrays a character intent on killing his wife for having an affair, spewing vitriol from the backseat of Bickle’s cab, such as, “You should see what a .44 magnum can do a woman’s pussy, that you should see...”.
Taubin also suggests a departure from American cinema’s violent history regarding Bickle’s anti-hero-ism, particularly when considering the racial politics depicted in the film. While Scorcese’s cameo character, a foil to make Bickle seem embroiled in a society of homicidal bigots, champions outright murderous sexism, Bickle,
Taubin asserts, is just as racist; this fact is evidenced by the diatribes he espouses throughout the film, making not-so-subtle reference to the ‘filth’, the ‘scum’ of the New
York City streets filling him with a quiet rage, expressed in monotonous voice over narration. According to Taubin, Bickle’s racism is “there in his body language when he’s hanging out with a group of cab drivers, one of whom is black; it’s there in his eyes when he’s looking through the window of his cab at the action on the street... when he shoots a skinny black junkie who’s trying to hold-up a neighborhood deli” (17). Bickle differentiates himself from the so called ‘filth’ of the city, though his status is only slightly higher, from the relative security of the windows of his cab; his job, and the stable, if not meager, income it provides, separates - economically and physically - him from the streets, and those who spend their time, their lives, there. In fact, race is the 25
dividing line between Bickle and those he sees on the streets, the mostly black, mostly male (though any women depicted are assumed to be sex workers) figures inhabiting the comers of New York City streets. In fact, at the beginning of the film Bickle uses his discharged-soldier status to acquire the taxi driving position, using his participation in the armed forces as a means to get employment, a mark of social status, albeit stigmatized by the reputation of the war in Vietnam.
A veteran of the Vietnam War, Travis Bickle returns to New York City suffering from insomnia, psychosis, and delusions; Taubin characterizes these behaviors, which solidify into tropes with the critical success of the film, as “post-war trauma”, claiming,
“What World War II was to noir [genre films], Vietnam is to the story of Travis Bickle”
(14). The implication here is that noir films, known for their dark tones and jazz- influenced soundscapes, encapsulated feelings of questionable nationalism and geopolitical insecurity following a period of global conflict in a way similar to the affective response to the American war in Vietnam, with the exception that the latter involvement was publicly questioned and unpopular. Soldiers returning home from
World War II were welcomed as heroes; those in the Vietnam era were subject to scrutiny, stigmatization, and neglect for their participation in an unpopular geopolitical conflict. 26
In “Fathers, Sons, and Vietnam: Masculinity and Betrayal in the Life Narratives
of Vietnam Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”23, Tracy Kamer conducts
interviews with veterans of the Vietnam War in order to trace the ways masculinity
shifted during, and following, the war. Concerned with the incongruities in masculinity,
an otherwise rigorously upheld social construct, occurring at this time, Kamer situates her
work thusly: “through a gendered cultural analysis of these men's narratives, I argue that
the shift in notions of masculinity can be traced and the lack of supportive cultural
resources for a more progressive masculine ideal identified”, underscoring the disconnect
between the gendered expectations of the time and the performances the men returning
home from war were capable of as parents, spouses, and members of communities (64).
In examining the relationship between the notions of masculinity operating in the U.S. during following the Vietnam War and their effects on the lived experiences and traumas
of men and their sons, Kamer’s work identifies the fractured gendered and political
climates that made men like Travis. This generation of men, navigating participation in
an unpopular war, experienced untold trauma and then returned to society with the
expectation of immediate reintegration and social functioning.
On top of these, many veterans experienced mental health challenges, including
symptoms and/or diagnoses of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Kamer’s
23 Kamer, Tracy. 1996. “Fathers, Sons, and Vietnam: Masculinity and Betrayal in the Life Narratives of Vietnam Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”. American Studies. 37, no. 1: 63-94. 27
interviewees describe the challenges of reintegrating into an already unwelcoming society with the newly branded stigma of mental illness added, and the tolls taken on their relationships, employment, and overall wellbeing. Indeed, Kamer notes, “Vietnam veterans with PTSD were ‘prone to resort to physical violence against others or themselves to regain control over the behavior of other family members.’ The veterans interpreted their need for control over their immediate surroundings as an attempt to alleviate the aftereffects of combat stress and to prevent abandonment by family members”
(85). This connection between violently controlling behavior and PTSD could provide insight into Travis Bickle’s motives in his relationships with Betsy, Iris, and society around him, generally; however, I find it more compelling, and concerning, to consider the motives of those who created Travis Bickle - like director Martin Scorcese and writer
Paul Shrader. While I visit Shraders motivations later in this chapter, I want to briefly consider the climate in which Taxi Driver was written and how it represents issues like gendered violence and mental illness. Drawing from real-life and literary instances of psychosis and vigilantism, Shrader crafted Bickle’s persona meticulously, from his social alienation to the confessional, diary-like narration; Shrader wrote Bickle to be just unstable enough to cause drama in the plot, but not so conflicted as to seek or require psychiatric care. Moreover, given Scorcese’s penchant for morally bankrupt, love-to-hate main characters (oftentimes played by Robert De Niro), the film’s production wreaks of unchecked “boy’s club” masculinity, as evidenced by the character Scorcese himself embodies in the film. Narratively convenient, Bickle’s mental-illness-as-plot-device 28
alleviates Shrader and Scorcese of having to represent such crises faithfully, instead using
Bickle’s psychotic episodes to support his vigilantism. At a time when veterans were particularly vulnerable, and social safety nets were entirely lacking, creating a character whose mental illness is obscured by vigilante anti-heroism and left unresolved is irresponsible at best and deadly at worst.
PTSD and Revolutionary Psychosis
While Taxi Driver never names Travis Bickle as suffering from Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD), I would like to take the time to ask what would happen if we were to name this PTSD. Mostly, I believe that reading Bickle’s character within the frameworks of mental illness and psychiatric trauma would provide context and understanding, allowing viewers a level of sympathy for the troubled young man they end up spending almost two hours watching on screen, particularly because Shrader and
Scorcese establish him as someone you cannot, should not, level with. Bickle is erratic, on edge, paranoid, and at no point in the film is he portrayed otherwise. But also because when he is read as suffering from a mental illness, Travis Bickle becomes a beacon, a glaring and unavoidable admission that veterans, particularly those with PTSD, have been neglected by society.
Taxi Driver is not a story about disability, per se; my assessment of Bickle’s
PTSD is merely speculative (though highly likely), and any explicit engagement with his mental state within the film is intentionally vague. Reducing Bickle’s instability to a mere 29
plot device allows Taxi Driver to play on Bickle’s inner turmoil without having to follow
through with providing psychiatric assistance or resources, or asking questions about
what resources were available to veterans. However, to read Taxi Driver with a disability
lens, and to treat Bickle as a person with a mental illness, opens up possibility for
understanding Travis Bickle as struggling, traumatized, and in turmoil, with few means to
help him.
Disability studies has long been concerned with the nature of representations in
film, of what it means culturally to depict characters with disabilities. In fact, disability
scholars focusing on cinema are divided when it comes to the impact of representations
on real life perceptions; some argue that the marginality of characters with disabilities in
early cinema reflected the stigma faced by actual disabled people and merited political
investment from activists, while others view the history of disabled people in film as
artistic renderings shaped by cultural beliefs, a more neutral critical positioning24.
Aligned with the latter ideology, disability and film scholar Christian Keathley offers
analyses of cinematic representations grappling with the pre- and post-trauma of the
Vietnam War in “Trapped in the Affection-Image: Hollywood’s Post-Traumatic Cycle
(1970-1976)25. Keathley uses the representations of the Vietnam War, and the changes in
storytelling over time, to track the negative affect associated with the war, arguing that
the films of this time period provided catharsis for the traumas American culture endured
24 Enns, Anthony and Christopher R. Smit. 2001. Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. 25 See previous footnote for citation. 30
and maintained. While the text does not directly refer to Taxi Driver, which came out a year too late to be included in the cycle of films concerned with representing the trauma endured by returning veterans, the film does fall into the following cycle of Vietnam and blockbusters that show the fallout of enduring PTSD, which includes insomnia, feelings of guilt, and hyper-vigilance - characteristics Travis Bickle readily displays. Though
Keathley notes that the blockbuster era of the late 1970s effectively ended representations of post-Vietnam trauma, the films of the post-traumatic cycle, which includes films like
The Candidate (1972) and Chinatown (1974), incorporate the types of catatonic responses to conflict and troubled protagonists the Vietnam War elicited. Thus, Taxi
Driver fits into a larger oeuvre of post-Vietnam War films, which attempted to process the ruptured psyches and masculinities caused by traumatic experiences of violence.
Moreover, reading the film alongside the other cinematic endeavors Keathley names with characters that could have PTSD - though similarly unnamed - gives the necessary context for understanding Travis Bickle as such, a juxtaposition that brings to light the lacking discussion within the film.
Similarly, cultural critic Jason Katzman, in “From Outcast to Cliche: How Film
Shaped, Warped and Developed the Image of the Vietnam Veteran, 1967-1990”26, notes the progression of characterizations of Vietnam veterans in films. Katzman notes the presence of “four stages of Vietnam veteran films. From 1967 to 1976 motion pictures
26 Katzman, Jason. 1993. “From Outcast to Cliche: How Film Shaped, Warped and Developed the Image of the Vietnam Veteran, 1967-1990”. Journal o f American Culture. 16, no. 1: 7-24. 31
generally characterized the veteran as an outcast, and a caricature. From 1975 to 1979, he became a shameful character, a man itching for the chance to do something violent.
However, a slight shift occurred from 1977 to 1984, as the veteran garnered more sympathy” (7). Taxi Driver clearly falls somewhere between the second (shame) and third (sympathy) stage, because while Bickle is absolutely prone to violence, I believe there is a humanizing element to his characterization, underscored by the intimacy his voice-over narration conveys. “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere.
In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man,” he intones, explicitly indicating his feelings of isolation to the viewer, while simultaneously playing on the universality of these sentiments, which viewers can readily relate to.27 Katzman continues to characterize films of this period in time, noting that during this time, “Hollywood formed the image of the Vietnam veteran mostly through his violence, and occasionally through his drug use, ignoring both the real problems of the veterans and the impact of the war on American society” (11). Here, both PTSD and substance abuse emerge as obstacles for returning veterans, though social assistance was scarce, leading to stigmatized characterization of veterans, both on-screen and in reality; as Katzman states, “The emphasis on mental problems, violence, and drugs, created a cultural image of the Vietnam veteran that ignored many of his other problems” (11), a
27 In fact, this sentiment is similarly rendered in Mr. Robot: Elliot Alderson, the main character and fellow revolutionary-psychosis-sufferer, often refers to his feelings of loneliness in voice-over narration. “I hate when I can’t hold in my loneliness,” he discloses, 20-minutes into the pilot episode, as he crouches in a dark comer of his apartment, crying. The next scene shows his coping mechanism - snorting morphine. 32
truly distorted image of the Vietnam veteran circulating in the American imaginary.
Through relentless repetition of inaccurate tropes, these representations cemented false notions of these veterans’ experiences in the minds of the American public, furthering the stigmatization actual veterans and those suffering from PTSD and addiction faced.
Unfortunately, those involved in the production of Taxi Driver were not concerned with the social implications of the fallout of the Vietnam War or with the prevalence of violence in American cities; in fact, the connections between on-screen and real life violence only became more dire leading up to and following the film’s release.
Psychosis, Violence, and Pursuant Masculinity
Taxi Driver's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, drew heavy influence from Arthur
Bremer’s attempt to assassinate an Alabama Governor in 1972; according to Taubin,
“Schrader read the Bremer coverage while he was in a Los Angeles hospital, recovering from a gastric ulcer, at what he describes as the low point of his life”, and then proceeded to write the script for the film in approximately ten days (10). Padded with influences from Bremer’s diaries and the headlines from his case (in which his defense used his diagnosis of schizophrenia to argue his purported ‘insanity’), “along with Sartre’s Nausea,
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Robert Bresson’s film Pickpocket (1959)”
(9), Schrader’s creative process is tinged with white male angst and entitlement.
Furthermore, following the release of the film, John Hinckley, Jr., enthralled with Jodie
Foster’s character, Iris, acted on his infatuation through attempted assassination of then- 33
President Ronald Reagan, drawing a direct line between Taxi Driver and an act of real- life violence, albeit mediated by Hinckley’s mental illness, also diagnosed as schizophrenia (among other diagnoses). These two incidences underscore the inevitable connections, pre- and post-Tax/ Driver, between Travis Bickle and real discontented white men with murderous designs, fanatical inclinations, and court-ordered psychiatric diagnoses. “Fan Friction: How the King of Comedy heralded a deadly new era of celebrity obsession” provides another example, as Dorian Linskey details the connections between popular films and the violent acts committed in their wake. Including discussions of both Taxi Driver's Bickle and Robert Di Nero’s character Rupert Pupkin in Raging Bull - another Scorcese film, depicting an unstable anti-hero with obsessive tendencies - Linskey tracks the real-world violence committed by unstable individuals with obsessive tendencies, modeling their behavior after characters to stalk and harm celebrities.
Taxi Driver was inspired by, and then inspired, real life acts of violence; however, my concern lies with the potential for acts of violence on a more mundane level. While
Travis Bickle is by no means a positive figure, a role model, or even an accurate representation of mental illness, he is a compelling figure. In fact, the troubling aspect of
Taxi Driver lies in the insidious nature of its violence; following women he doesn’t know, purchasing and concealing numerous weapons, these are small acts that can, and do, easily go unnoticed, especially when the person lives alone and has a small social circle, as Bickle does. How many Taxi Driver viewers found at least some aspect of Bickle’s 34
character relatable? How many women recognized that moment when Betsy, in her glowing white dress, realized a strange man was watching her, had been watching her for some time, because they had experienced it themselves? Travis Bickle speaks to more than just veterans of the Vietnam War; he has come to represent the disillusioned, discontented, and disjointed from reality, looking for an anti-hero who wants to make drastic changes to a disjointed society, and that appeal has only persisted with time.
Whether due to the feigned intimacy of voice-over narration, the vigilante diatribe, or simply the hyperbolically grotesque nature of practically every other character in the film, people remember Travis Bickle and his anti-heroic attempts at social upheaval. This fantasy, that one (cisgendered, straight, white, otherwise able-bodied albeit “crazy”) man’s bold vision can challenge the status quo, is a compelling one, but it is also toxic, in that it relies on inaccurate and reductive depictions of masculinity and mental illness to do so. A vigilante who “cleans up the streets” is only a compelling fantasy when we choose to ignore the real, multiple and overlapping forms of oppressions people experience.
Conclusion: Taxi Driver as Template
Ubiquitous within American popular culture , Taxi Driver set an example for generations of films to come. References, either direct or thinly veiled, to the film are too numerous to list; however, the narrative style Travis Bickel pioneered that has set the
28 “Are you talkin’ to me?” 35
tone for American cinematic storytelling. Elements of this style include: voice-over
narration in which the narrator expresses dark thoughts to the audience otherwise not verbalized to other characters, as seen in Mr. Robot', do-good intentions with law- breaking actions; a white male lead whose actions consistently cross the line between
sexual pursuit and stalking; and excessive violence. Notable examples of this Taxi Driver template include films about Jack the Ripper90 , the television • series • Dexter 10 , the
Hannibal Lecter cannon31 (which includes books, films, and a television series), and
American Psycho's Patrick Bateman 19 - all white men, all serial killers, and all
‘psychotic’.
Taxi Driver is the thematic jumping off point for troubling tropes of mental illness and masculinity, which have continued in works like Fight Club and Mr. Robot. I have established revolutionary psychosis as a the driving narrative force of the film, propelling
Travis Bickle to embark on a killing spree with the intent of liberating a child sex worker; now I will examine the contributions Fight Club makes to the trope, with the addition of the dissociative plot twist. While Taxi Driver's revolutionary psychosis is technically not
9Q Boyle, Karen, and Jenny Rebum. 2014. “Portrait of a Serial Killer: Intertextuality and Gender in the Portrait Film”. Feminist Media Studies. 1-16. 30 Arellano, Lisa. 2015. “The Heroic Monster: Dexter, Masculinity, and Violence”. Television & New Media. 16, no. 2: 131-147. 31 DeLisi, Matt, Michael Vaughn, Kevin, Paul Beaver, and John, Paul Wright. 2010. “The Hannibal Lecter Myth: Psychopathy and Verbal Intelligence in the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study”. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment. 32, no. 2: 169-177. 19 Baker, Brian. 2006. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945-2000. London; New York: Continuum. 36
related to any particular psychiatric condition (though PTSD is most likely), Fight Club adds the layer of diagnosis to the trope, which lends credibility and plot coherence to the representation (if only slightly). While Taxi Driver emerged at a time when it was more convenient to ignore the mental illness(es) that made a vigilante, particularly due to lack of social services to diagnose and treat him, Fight Club leverages diagnosis, mediated by consumption of prescription drugs, as a form of capitalist consumerism - the force its main character(s) seek to level. 37
CHAPTER 2
Fight Club: Mayhem, Masculinity, and Multiple Personalities
“With your feet on the air and your head on the ground Try this trick and spin it, yeah Your head will collapse If there's nothing in it And you'll ask yourself,
Where is my mind?” - “Where Is My Mind” by The Pixies (1988)
“If you wake up in a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?” - The Narrator, Fight Club (1999)
Providing a succinct description of Fight Club is not a simple task: a yuppie-type leaves his life of white-collar melancholy and insomnia for anarchic soap-and-mischief- making, fueled (with gasoline, and other highly flammable materials) by a strangely dressed revolutionary - and so much more. The Narrator, played by Edward Norton, who remains nameless for the majority of the film, is introduced as a sleep-deprived, corporate type living a meticulously groomed lifestyle (“Like so many others, I became a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct... If I saw something clever, like a little coffee table in the shape of a yin-yang, I had to have it... I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles 38
and imperfections, proof that they were crafter by the honest, hardworking, indigenous
peoples of... wherever”). His insomnia stifles him (“When you have insomnia, you’re
never really asleep, and you’re never really awake”) as he fumbles through his office tasks and absentmindedly bemoans consumer capitalism, simultaneously, to the point that
upon begging his doctor for sleeping pills, the healthcare provider sarcastically suggests he visit a cancer support group, to witness those in ‘real’ pain, to contrast with his own meager suffering. Frequenting support groups for those with chronic illnesses or fatal diseases, the Narrator is able to cry, and thus, to sleep, and so he frequents the meetings, not actually suffering from any illness. However, the Narrator’s preferred method of self- medicating quickly comes to an end, when a new meeting attendee shows up, frizzy- haired, sallow, and chain-smoking: Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter. With
Marla in attendance, the Narrator can no longer cry, and thus can no longer sleep, so he musters his courage and vows to confront “the big tourist”. Following her to a
Laundromat, where Marla steals clothes and sells them at the thrift store across the street, the Narrator explains the situation, and they reach a compromise to attend alternating sessions so as not to cross paths. In the middle of a busy street, they exchange phone numbers, Marla almost being hit by oncoming traffic. Next, on a business trip plane ride, the Narrator meets Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, a brazen soap salesman and overall interesting “single serving friend” (a clever moniker for the bite-sized, pre-packaged experiences the Narrator frequently consumes on his business trips, not unlike the sanitized meals and accommodations provided to travelers), complete with ostentatious 39
wardrobe and explicit demeanor. Seated in the emergency exit row, the Narrator and
Durden discuss the utility of oxygen masks in emergency landings, among other topics; as Tyler gets up out of his window seat, he remarks to the Narrator, seated in the middle of the row, “Now, the age old question: do I give you the ass or the crotch?” Durden
shimmies across the row of seats, facing away from the Narrator, but when presented with his next obstacle, a female flight attendant, he faces toward her, giving her ‘the crotch’. The Narrator and Durden bond over having the same briefcase, business cards are exchanged, and the pair go their separate ways when the flight lands. We later learn that Tyler works other odd jobs, including food service at the esteemed Pressman Hotel
(where he seasons the main courses with his bodily fluids) and as a projectionist at a movie theater (where he splices single frames of adult films into family movies).
Immediately following their meeting, the Narrator comes to move in with Tyler when, returning from the airport, he finds his apartment has been blown up, with its contents scattered and smoldering on the sidewalk below a gaping hole on the fifteenth floor. Meeting at a bar, Tyler and the Narrator wax poetic on the current state of masculinity (“We're consumers,” Durden quips. “We are the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.
Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.”), and Tyler offers the Narrator a place to live, with a caveat (“I want you to hit me as hard as you can,” Tyler requests of the Narrator nonchalantly).
Thus begins “fight club”, a respite for men, who are predominantly white, middle-class, 40
thirty-something, able-bodied and heteronormative33, who have come to feel powerless in
a world of consumption under capitalism, which has them “chasing cars and clothes,
working jobs [they] hate so [they] can buy shit [they] don't need”, according to Durden’s
monologue to a room full of fight club attendees, much later in the film; “We're the
middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great
Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all
been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods,
and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very
pissed off.”
Fight Club takes the revolutionary psychosis trope and adds a narrative twist: that
one character is, in fact, the physical manifestation of the others’ psychosis, and is not
actually a separate person, as the character and the audience were lead to believe. This
splitting has the narrative effect of interpolating the viewer into the character-in-crisis’s
psychotic episode, a storytelling sleight of hand unique to Fight Club, giving the viewer
the “loss of altitude” sensation the Narrator is describing. However, no matter the
physical or emotional impact this turn adds, it only further reinforces the film’s
complicity in bad tropes of mental illness and masculinity.
33 With a few notable exceptions, including Bob a.k.a. Robert Paulsen (played by Meat Loaf), a former body builder whose use of testosterone resulted in his growing “bitch tits” - an increase of breast tissue due to his body’s increased estrogen production to correct the hormone imbalance. Bob’s chest, as well as his mannerisms and overall demeanor, suggest a masculinity so exaggerated it became inverted into femininity, which is included in the story as a source of comic relief. 41
In this chapter, I will perform a literature review of the works previous scholars have written on the 1999 film Fight Club, unpacking themes and tropes in order to draw connections between the ideals of masculinity offered in the film, and the cultural constructs and contemporaneous climates that account for the salience of those ideals in pre-9/11 America. Fight Club had, and continues to have, a cult following, and the film continues to influence media today34, almost two decades later, mobilizing themes of hypermasculinity (to the extent of implicit homoeroticism), capitalist consumerism, and mental illness-induced revolutionary anarchy across generations of disenfranchised 20- somethings with some degree of college education and an ambivalent relationship with the ‘American dream’. What makes Tyler Durden an appealing, properly masculine anti- hero (rather than a threat) in the context of 1999 consumer culture that is imagined as feminizing men? Why is psychosis the trope through which his resistance is imagined?
And what, from a disability studies perspective, are the consequences of this?
The literature analyzing this film comes from a variety of disciplines, from psychoanalysis and sociology to media/film studies to feminism, each shedding light on a different aspect of the impact the film had, and continues to have, on American culture, culminating in the present-day example of the television series Mr. Robot, which will be discussed in the following chapter. Mr. Robot draws on both Taxi Driver (discussed in the previous chapter) and Fight Club stylistically and thematically, and in unpacking the
34 From use of the term “special snowflake” to characterize millennials among alt-right media to the incessant repetition of the mantra, “The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club” to convey an ironic call for secrecy which is to be ignored. 42
work that each of the films does, I hope to provide a fuller and more complex understanding of representations of masculinity and mental illness in American culture.
It is worth noting, before I move further into my analysis, that while Fight Club, the film, is based on an eponymous novel published in 1996,1 have chosen to focus primarily on the film version of the story here. While the book and film follow similar narrative trajectories, the book has a vastly different ending to the film; and, the majority of the works written on Fight Club analyze the film, rather than the book. While the novel more explicitly involves the medical industrial complex, discussion surrounding the film has proven to be both abundant and generative to my discussion, both here and in the next chapter35. The novel version of Fight Club ends with Tyler Durden waking up in a mental hospital after his moment of psychotic crisis, offering ironic closure through medical intervention, while the film resolves with Norton’s Narrator shooting himself in the head/mouth, effectively killing Pitt’s character Durden, and the film ends with
Norton’s character watching Project Mayhem’s final destructive effort hand in hand with
Marla Singer - revolution. Ultimately, although the novel’s ending refers more specifically to psychiatric hospitalization, a theme commonly explored in disability literature, I have chosen to focus on the film as it employs all of the other themes and plot devices of the novel, with the added bonus of American media cult popularity. Moreover,
35 Similarly, television series director and writer Sam Esmail specifically regards the film version of Fight Club as inspiration for Mr. Robot (2015-), going so far as to gesture to specific moments in the film within the series. See Chapter 3 for this discussion. 43
the film’s vagueness regarding the main character’s mental illness adds to my overall argument that, as demonstrated in my analysis of Taxi Driver, revolutionary psychosis serves as an alibi or allegory, absolving all storytelling responsibilities to treat the underlying cause of psychosis in the service of the revolutionary plotline. Fight Club perpetuates harmful notions of mental illness and masculinity by relying on the hallmarks of revolutionary psychosis, which manifests as anti-capitalism, hyper-masculinity, and racist stereotyping.
Psychosis and Anti-Capitalism
The narrative of Fight Club is driven by the Narrator’s desire to revolt against consumer capitalism, which is tied to his gender performance. In numerous seemingly offhand comments made by both the Narrator and Durden, desire for material goods or personal wellbeing via products apparently makes one, somehow, less of a man. In a poorly lit bar, following the explosion of his former home (a meticulously groomed condominium), the Narrator engages in the following verbal exchange with Durden:
Tyler Durden: Do you know what a duvet is?
Narrator: It's a comforter...
Tyler Durden: It's a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and
me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-
gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then?
Narrator: ...Consumers? 44
Tyler Durden: Right. We are consumers. We're the by-products of a
lifestyle obsession.
This dialogue implies that ‘guys’ should not know the meaning of the word duvet, and that consumerism has alienated men from their masculinity via the desire for accumulating possessions. The Narrator’s previous interests in collecting IKEA furniture and curating the perfect wardrobe become, in this moment, a point of ridicule, and when his apartment is blown up (we later learn by Durden), he is propelled into the mindset of hyperbolically reclaiming his masculinity through disavowal of materialism, participation in fight club, and the eventual establishment of Project Mayhem with Tyler, whom the viewer comes to know as a figment of the Narrator’s fragmented identity. Tyler Durden’s revolutionary drive exists as part and parcel with the Narrator’s psychotic break, and vice versa, and this is the surprising plot twist: the timid and emasculated Narrator’s moment of revolutionary psychosis. Thus, the relationship between these two characters is complicated, and there are several ways to unpack the Narrator and Tyler Durden that are both productive and interesting.
In their article, “Fighting for Father: Fight Club as Cinematic Psychosis”, Joshua
Gunn and Thomas Frentz36 assert that the main conflict of the film revolves around a love triangle between the Narrator (Norton), Tyler Durden (Pitt), and Marla Singer (Helena
Bonham Carter); the Narrator finds Marla annoying yet appealing, Tyler and Marla have
36 Gunn, Joshua, and Thomas Frentz. 2010. “Fighting for Father: Fight Club as Cinematic Psychosis”. Western Journal o f Communication. 74, no. 3: 269-291. 45
a vivid sexual relationship, and Marla tries to make sense of it all, as the audience comes to learn that the Narrator and Tyler are the same person. Gunn and Frentz choose to read this entanglement as Freudian, wherein “the Narrator struggles with the Oedipal complex in the classic way—he has sex with his (symbolic) mother and seemingly kills his
‘personal father’—but that he neither completes the complex nor is reintegrated into the heteronormative matrix”(270). According to the authors, the Narrator is deemed psychotic because of his failure to integrate (reintegrate?) with the social; as they put it,
“Fight Club is a vehicle of psychosis by showing how the film stages a failure to emerge from the Oedipus complex at the level of figure” (271) - locating Norton’s Narrator’s psychosis in his revolutionary politics as well as his maintained hallucinations. While
Gunn and Frentz embark on an overdone psychoanalytic journey, explicating the thinly- veiled Freudian mother and father figures Norton’s Narrator seeks in the numerous other characters and institutions the film provides, their analysis delivers two useful concepts to my reading: one, a working definition of psychosis in the context of the film37; and two, this:
37 “Understood as a failure to accept limits or internalize one’s identity, psychosis is thus a kind of infinite, narcissistic regress prior to sexual differentiation, prior to the object- choice of secondary identification, a failure to be “ cut” or “ castrated” by the symbolic order such that one can get some distance between objects and the names for those objects. Consequently there is no “ difference” in psychosis. The failure to complete the Oedipus complex thus results in a psychosis that is neither homosocial nor homoerotic, despite appearances: psychosis is simply homohomohomo-ad infinitum, as the individual has no sense of (m)Other, only an undifferentiated whole, an unmediated sense of self without limits.” (278) 46
“If we read the Oedipal configuration of Fight Club in terms of situating
consumer-capitalism as the mother, then the true institutionalized father
figure in this film is Project Mayhem, which represents the Narrator’s
attempt to bring about secondary identification himself (an impossible
delusion, of course). If corporate America is the societal extension of all
absent personal fathers, then what else could the critique of late capitalism
be than an exposure of consumerism as the psychotic plenitude of the
mother=child dyad lacking prohibition? ...Project Mayhem is thus the
institutional analogue of Tyler Durden—a father dreamed up in psychosis
to put an end to psychosis. (282)”
Here, we see Gun and Frentz’s linking of the Narrator’s mental state, characterized by both delusion and anti-capitalism, which plays out in an enactment of the Oedipal complex with Marla Singer. While Freudian analysis tends to over-simplify relationships, and ignore the social constructs that produce them, the authors’ situating of
Durden and the Narrator’s delusions with anti-capitalism, manifesting in Project Mayhem, provides an interesting point of entry for analysis in that is centers the Narrator’s relationships with both Tyler and Marla. Moreover, characterizing the Narrator’s relationship with capitalism in this abstracted way underscores Fight Club's lack of investment in engaging, discussing, or accurately representing mental illness; instead, the thinly-veiled metaphor psychosis comes to stand in for is, in fact, nothing more than the critique of a social structure and relies on toxic tropes of mental illness to do so. The 47
Narrator clearly has a moment of psychotic break, in which he realizes that someone he thought was real is actually an offshoot of his damaged psyche; however, the specifics of his mental state are left intentionally vague in the interest of furthering the plot.
In “Virility and Vulnerability, Splitting and Masculinity in Fight Club: A Tale of
Contemporary Male Identity Issues”38, Caroline Ruddell examines the popular trope of splitting in fiction, a form of mythical bodily changing, either in a literal bifurcation of identity into two (or more) bodies or a similar upheaval of relationship between the internal (“mind”) and corporeal (“body”) nature of a character, typically for plot-driving purposes. Ruddell notes the fairly common nature of this trope, particularly in science fiction or similarly fantastical genres, which stems from the need to allegorize a psychological shift for a character. However, this trope of splitting, particularly in the context of Fight Club, takes on added anxieties about the impossible ideals of masculinity, reflecting the Narrator’s insecurities about his own lacking gender performance that he expresses, and eventually embodies, in Tyler Durden. For the Narrator, Durden is the ideal man, and this ideal manifests specifically in response to the Narrator’s relationship with Marla Singer, a potential romantic interest. Tyler is eveiything the Narrator is not; he is brazen, crass, and direct, sexual, exuberant (even flamboyant), and attractive, and, most importantly, he is self-reliant - he, and he alone, will be responsible for the revolution (despite the numerous - unnamed - “space monkeys” Project Mayhem has
38 Ruddell, Caroline. 2007. “Virility and Vulnerability, Splitting and Masculinity in Fight Club: A Tale of Contemporary Male Identity Issues”. Extrapolation (Pre-2012). 48, no. 3: 493-503,439. 48
absorbed into its ranks). At first, the narrator finds himself channeling Durden, confessing, “Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth,” in voice over after threatening his boss at work when he finds a copy of the fight club manifest in the photocopy machine.
Splitting, in Fight Club, only serves as a vague metaphor; a relatively rare psychiatric condition, which deserves accurate representation due to its infrequency, becomes eclipsed (and thereby erased) by the main character’s quirky-neurotic personality.
However, the moment the Narrator begins to suspect Tyler is doing something without him, he starts to investigate, and it is revealed, though a conversation with Marla, that they are the same person. “We have just lost cabin pressure,” the Narrator intones, and his psychosis is revealed as he loses consciousness. Unlike Taxi Driver's Travis
Bickle, who probably suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, the main character of
Fight Club is relatively easy to diagnose. In Reel Psychiatry: Movie Portrayals of
Psychiatric Conditions39, author David J. Robinson, a Canadian psychiatrist and media enthusiast, provides diagnostic analyses of mental disorders in popular cinema, along with rankings for accuracy. Fight Club is listed squarely under the entry for Dissociative
Identity Disorder (DID), formerly called multiple personality disorder. Robinson’s text outlines the characteristics of each condition, the diagnostic criteria, and relevant statistics on the prevalence of the condition; in the case of DID, Robinson mainly describes the presence and characteristics of “alters”, the other identities or personalities
39 Robinson, David J. 2003. Reel Psychiatry: Movie portrayals o f psychiatric conditions. Port Huron, Mich: Rapid Psychler Press. 49
someone with DID has. Robinson’s characterization of Fight Club includes a brief description of the plot, how it incorporates elements of DID, and the following critique of its portrayal: “Perhaps the most inconsistent aspect of DID in this film is that one of the alters can be removed by some physical means, which Jack [the Narrator] does by shooting himself in order to remove Tyler. Tyler’s identity does not reside in a discrete area of Jack’s brain, this it is not possible to male an immediate and complete removal of
Tyler’s personality” (154). Robinson’s assessment of the mental illness in Fight Club, while instructive from a diagnostic perspective, ultimately reflects the films disregard for accurately portraying mental illness, as evidenced by the dramatic denouement, and facilitated by the twisted, “gotcha” moment.
The moment the Narrator realizes that he and Tyler Durden are the same person, he acknowledges his participation in revolutionary acts, facilitated by his psychosis.
From the start of their relationship, the Narrator finds Tyler to be “by far the most interesting single-serving friend” he has met, pursuing a relationship and emulating his behavior more and more throughout the film. Tyler frees him of his worldly belongings, shows him how to stand up to his obnoxious boss, and gets him involved in something he feels gives his life purpose -for once. A vehicle for his anti-capitalist transformation,
Tyler also intimidates the Narrator, both physically (starting physical fights for fun) and emotionally (sleeping with the vexing Marla Singer, franchising fight clubs and giving assignments to “space monkeys” without including him). That moment, when the
Narrator begins to realize that his relationship with Tyler might be more than just friendly 50
housemates, is equally disorienting for the viewer, who trusts the Nararator’s worldview; in that moment, we all lose altitude together. But real conditions, diseases, and disorders do not function in this way: carefully paced progression, symptoms disguised by clever banter and cheap narrative effects. Though the Narrator’s experience explicitly matches the experiences of those with DID and/or psychosis, this assessment is purely speculative, as the rest of the film following his moment of realization is spent trying to undo what
Tyler planned - his anti-capitalist revolution. Mental illness in Fight Club functions mainly as a clever and convenient plot device, using real symptoms of conditions and crises as an allegory to facilitate character and narrative development; however, it is also never specified, investigated, or addressed (beyond the Narrator referring to himself as
“crazy”). Because of his revolutionary psychosis, the Narrator is able to resolve his mental illness-induced anti-capitalist actions (leveling the headquarters of major credit card companies with explosives, as Tyler envisioned) without having to seek help for his internal crisis - or needing the help of anyone at all.
Fucking and Fighting: Virility, Homoeroticism, and Hypermasculinity
The depiction of gender roles and their subversion make Fight Club a popular case study of the functioning (or dysfunctions) of gender in an age marked by geopolitical uncertainty and media mass marketing. Moreover, the gendered representations in the 1999 film are inextricably linked with tropes of a revolutionary anti-consumerist politics facilitated by the main character’s psychotic break - all in all, a 51
complex and often convoluted web of identity formations, which merits further investigation.
In “Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women: Fight Club and the limits of anti- consumerist critique”40, Sally Robinson asserts that the critique of capitalism that the film attempts to make only obscures its argument about gender. According to Robinson, the film is preoccupied with authenticity, and represents gender as linked to authenticity:
“while femininity is a social construction—and, thus, ‘fake’—masculinity, rooted in the male body and its elemental sensations and desires, is a brute fact of nature. The film pursues a masculine authenticity, rather than an authentic masculinity, and masculinity, thus, becomes the location of the real, the authentic” (7). This sentiment is reflected in many of Tyler’s anti-consumerist comments throughout the film, including the duvet- related exchange in the previous section, which implies that the ‘inauthentic’ knowledge of home furnishings should not be in the masculine vocabulary. Consumers, by his logic, passively spend money to obtain possessions (“We buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like”), whereas men are expected to be active, dominant, and able to start and finish a fight with anyone of their choosing. This reading of gender in the film, though extremely incisive, is only so because of the hyperbolic means through which
Tyler and the Narrative express their points of view. Gender and capitalism are linked and essentialized in Fight Club to emphasize the differences between the Narrator (the
40 Robinson, Sally. 2011. “Feminized Men and Inauthentic Women: Fight Club and the Limits of Anti-consumerist Critique”. Genders. 53. 52
feminized consumer) and Tyler Durden (the hyper-masculine revolutionary). Those idealized qualities the Narrator sees himself lacking are thus exaggerated in Tyler, to the point of ideological - and aesthetic - maximalism, a tactic of guerilla resistance.
Project Mayhem’s mission has been described as falling under the banner of
“culture jamming”41, defined as “the usurpation of mass media to produce negative commentary about itself’, a term discussed at length by cultural critic Mark Dery, in his article “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs”42.
Culture jamming, in the context of Fight Club, includes the mundane acts of guerilla prankster-dom, like splicing frames of pornography into children’s films, to the endgame of Project Mayhem itself, leveling corporate high-rises with homemade explosives for the sake of debt alleviation. While my discussion of culture jamming as a tactic of revolutionary impulse will continue into the next chapter43, here I would like to note the importance of linking revolutionary psychosis with anti-consumerist cultural disruptions in discussing Fight Club. Tyler Durden uses Project Mayhem to turn culture in on itself; altering billboards, destroying coffee shop chains, emblazoning smiley faces on corporate buildings (literally, with fire), Project Mayhem’s mischievous ways are, in fact, the manifestations of the Narrator’s revolutionary psychosis. An extrapolation of Tyler’s
41 Oleson, J.C. 2007. “Is Tyler Durden Insane?”. North Dakota Law Review. 83, no. 2: 579-650. 42 Found here: http://markdery.com/?page_id=154 43 As it relates to Mr. Robot, culture jamming in the digitized age includes computer hacking, though Dery’s attention to the possibilities therein is scant at best 53
hyper-masculine anti-capitalism, Project Mayhem serves as an equally hyperbolic subversion of consumer culture.
The members of Project Mayhem are all male, almost all white, and, due to the rigors of fight club, have the same lean body type44; they undergo initiation rituals of head shaving and finger print removal, receive chemical bum smooch-marks on their clenched fists, and surrender their driver’s licenses to Tyler Durden. They become, in effect, anonymous, and are thus able to carry out Project Mayhem’s directives with little concern over being caught. Aside from, or maybe due to, the homosocial “male bonding” element of the initiative, Project Mayhem becomes a crystallization of the gendered ideals Pitt’s portrayal of Durden espouses - a hypermasculinity so vigorous it borders on homoeroticism. “Is this a testicle thing,” Marla queries, a reference to the terminal illness support groups at which they met. Fight club is only for men — a testicle thing, indeed. In creating a homogenous, homosocial army of “space monkeys” willing to act as pawns in his anti-capitalist revolution, Tyler Durden’s status as white, straight, male, and able- bodied (mental illness not withstanding) continually reinforced, underscoring his separation from women and people of color in the film as his revolutionary politics become practice. In this sense, that an anti-capitalist revolution would be led by the brute force of scrawny white-guy ex-service industry types (who, though providing services, are supposedly oppressed) is ironic, considering their disconnect from experiencing social oppression via discrimination. While Project Mayhem mobilizes these unmarked
44 With the exception of Robert “Bob” Paulson. 54
men to resist capitalism, playing up their “space monkey” sameness and franchising the movement, viewers are ultimately reminded that the movement comes at a steep cost - the Narrator’s mental health. This is where the sorely lacking specifics of mental illness come into play in discussing Fight Club.
In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies o f Discourse45, disability scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder examine the construction of disability within literary narratives, paying particular attention to the modes through which disability functions in relation to a plot, how disability is situated rhetorically to indicate social and cultural attitudes or beliefs. In their discussion of the ways disability has functioned in literature as a metaphor, marking the physical body to convey character development, they argue that, historically, characters with (physical) disabilities were
“marked” to convey their difference; in this case, they cite Oedipus’ exchange with a sphinx, whose riddle refers to a man with a cane. Oedipus’ disability makes him particularly adept at answering the question, but also signifies his character development.
They concede that, “To give an abstraction a body allows the idea to simulate a foothold in the material world that it would otherwise fail to procure” (62-3). This statement, though referring to the corporeal manifestation of a disability on a literary character, also applies to the Narrator’s manifesting of Tyler Durden as a separate character, giving materiality (if not permanently) to his mental illness, his revolutionary psychotic persona.
45 Mitchell, David T, and Sharon L Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies o f Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 55
Though the depiction of mental illness in Fight Club lacks any kind of specificity, apart from the psychosis-tinged realization that Tyler Durden is the Narrator’s split personality, it is persistent and rife with storytelling mileage, in this sense “marking” the Narrator as a disabled character. In bifurcating one character into two parts, the sleep-deprived neurotic who works to meticulously gather the right material possessions and the impulsive man- child intent on pressing society’s reset button, Fight Club literally gives the revolutionary psychosis trope a human form, named Tyler Durden. Because he technically is not ‘real’, he can do anything and say anything he wants, because the consequences do not fall on him; moreover, as he functions as an alibi for the Narrator’s internal crisis, Tyler’s quirky, cool, sexy-dangerous persona completely overshadows the tawdriness of poorly representing mental illness for dramatic effect. Conflating a mental health crisis with anti-capitalist revolution, Fight Club's plot twist only furthers the stigma and misunderstanding of complicated mental health symptoms, like psychosis, and diagnoses, like DID, as many other films who refuse to name, and then poorly represent, such mental illnesses. Viewers are falsely led to believe that stories where a main character’s cool, quirky, and helpful best friend turns out to be imaginary46 are the best and/or only ways to depict complex mental illnesses like schizophrenia, which is simply not the case.
46 A trope used in such notable films as Donnie Darko (2001) and The Machinist (2004), as implicit but unnamed mental illness, and A Beautiful Mind (2001) as an explicit reference to John Nash’s schizophrenia. This trope is also a major plot device of the television series Mr. Robot (2015), as discussed in the next chapter. 56
White-Guys and the White Man’s Bruce Lee: Race in Fight Club
In “White Guys Who Prefer Not To: From Passive Resistance ('Bartleby') to
Terrorist Acts (Fight Club)”47, Robert Schultz reads the two texts comparatively, explicating a view of “white male angst” that becomes invested in troublemaking as a means of resisting a humdrum existence. These characters have agency allotted to them through their whiteness and maleness, and are given the opportunity to rebel against their careers and life opportunities through this white-guy protagonist position, albeit facilitated by schizophrenia . Gesturing to the classed stratification and subsequent animosity underpinning the fight clubs in the film, Shcultz notes, “In Fight Club spiritual awareness is realized in part through brute force against others and against the corporate bureaucracies that make life so meaningless”(598). Indeed, Schultz notes that Pitt’s
Durden is the liberating force, enabled by psychosis, behind Norton’s Narrator, the former spouting anti-capitalist diatribe for the sake of motivating the latter into action. At the heart of Schultz’s contribution is the notion that the main character in Fight Club is able to ‘prefer not’ to adhere to the norms of his generation (pursuing career and material goods) because of his white-guy, white collar position in society, and that break is facilitated by his mental illness; to frame this another way, had the Narrator not been
47 Schultz, Robert. 2011. “White Guys Who Prefer Not To: From Passive Resistance ('Bartleby') to Terrorist Acts (Fight Club)”. Journal of Popular Culture. 44, no. 3: 583- 605. 48 A diagnosis Schultz offers immediately and without questions, one that is directly challenged and refuted by Robinson’s diagnosis in Reel Psychiatry. The Narrator’s condition is left intentionally unspecified in the film. 57
white and middle class, his resistance to capitalist consumerism may indeed have landed
him in an institution or prison, and not as the main character of a well-known motion
picture. The revolutionary subject, then, must be a white male.
Similarly, in “The White Man’s Bruce Lee”49, Brian Locke centers his
investigation of the film on a peripheral character, Raymond K. Hessel, who spends his
brief time on-screen blubbering at the other end of Tyler Durden’s gun. Hessel, who is
described in the Fight Club book as a white man with green eyes, is played by an Asian
American actor, and only really functions in the narrative to provide contrast to Pitt’s
hypermasculine Durden. Using the example of the subordinated Raymond K. Hessel as a jumping-off point, Locke argues for a reading of the film that pays equal attention to the
literal and the metaphor as a way to understand its complex representations of race.
Hessel, according to Locke, is shown in stark relief to Tyler - whimpering, indecisive,
and small (literally, shown at different camera angles in the scene to enhance his
cowardly appearance) - just as the Narrator was, but even moreso, as the scene obscures his racial identity (Hessel is played by an Asian American actor, placing Raymond K.
Hessel within two stereotypical tropes, “Asian shopkeeper” and “future-doctor”50).
Moreover, he furthers an understanding of race and gender in the film that defines a
49 Locke, Brian. 2014. "THE WHITE MAN'S BRUCE LEE": Race and the Construction of White Masculinity in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). Journal o f Asian American Studies. 17, no. 1: 61-89,130. 50 Through Raymond K. Hessel confounds the “Asian doctor” trope in a number of ways; he gave up his dream of becoming a veterinarian because school was too expensive. Enter Tyler Durden, to remind him of his potential. 58
normative position through representing extreme polar opposites; for example, Marla
Singer is caught between Tyler’s violence and aggression, to the point that he requests to have her killed because she knows too much about Project Mayhem, and the Narrator’s51 complete cowardice in relating to a woman, which he is forced to overcome to save her
from Tyler’s threat. Raymon K. Hessel’s blubbering, quasi-racialized presence in the film underscores the brute hyper-masculinity Tyler embodies. Most significantly, Locke describes the numerous ways in which Tyler Durden’s hypermasculinity is derived relationally to nonwhite men. From the angles at which the camera captures Tyler’s body to references to genitalia (both Tyler’s and others), the ‘cool’, ‘hipster’ persona to the
‘pimp’ outfits he wears, Locke notes the various forms of black and Asian male appropriation present in Fight Club, functioning to mark Tyler as mimicking racialization in order to bolster his whiteness.
Both Schultz and Locke note that white masculinity operates in Fight Club to distinguish both male leads, but especially Tyler Durden, as exceptional, juxtaposing oversimplified representations of Asian and black identities with the stark middle-classed whiteness of the two male leads to underscore their participation in subverting consumer capitalism. Whiteness and masculinity facilitate this preference not to adhere to the normative trajectory of success in life, and while the presence of mental illness would otherwise hinder a narrative for a character with a marginalized identity (i.e. female,
51 Locke refers to Norton’s character as “Jack”, a gesture to the books, which some commentators use in taking about the film. 59
queer, non-white, etc.), the Narrator/Tyler Durden generally benefit from their white-guy positioning in society. Moreover, Durden’s sartorial cool, and the Narrator’s preference
‘not to’ are symptoms of revolutionary psychosis, supported by their polarized characterizations. Yet, it is particularly due to the classed privileges afforded by their whiteness that the Narrator and Tyler Durden are able to embody revolutionary psychosis; their white-guy statuses afford them he particular social positioning necessary to perform the guerilla acts under Project Mayhem. And although Project Mayhem is seen as a collective, at its core the group is organized around the ideology of one man, who is solely culpable for the final outcome of this revolution - Tyler Durden, who is, in fact, also the Narrator. Here I want to recall Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, and his desire to rid the streets of “filth” (by which, it is generally understood, he is referring to people).
Underpinned by racism (and classism, though they are deeply imbricated anyway),
Bickle’s revolutionary psychosis similarly inspired his actions, taking down those he believed to be guilty of the greatest social evils. Bickle’s access to a job, his taxi, separated him from those on the streets, “the filth”: people of color, poor people, people with disabilities; Tyler Durden’s middle class, white collar social status similarly separates him from those suffering from the income inequality he wishes to erase. The whiteness of both the Narrator/Tyler Durden and Travis Bickle is as central as it is unmarked, because a non-white man committing crimes while undergoing a mental health crisis would most likely end up in prison. 60
Conclusion
Following the revolutionary psychosis established in Taxi Driver, the cinematic undertaking of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club, remains invested in this trope, indulging in white masculinity to manifest an anti-capitalist/-consumerist critique of post-
Vietnam War, pre-9/11 America, a society obsessed with consumerism, while maintain a vague engagement with mental illness that only serves as an alibi for this anti-capitalist revolution. The psychotic splitting of the Narrator and Tyler Durden, intentionally left vague in the film but closely resembling Dissociative Identity Disorder, relies on gendered and racialized hyperbole, depicting stark binaries to establish a normative subject position that white-guy characters can comfortably occupy. While the playful homosocial undertones can be entertaining52, the film draws on themes of the lone revolutionary anti-hero, defined hyperbolically against a backdrop of women and people of color who renders collective action unthinkable, suffering from intentionally vague mental illness (a scapegoat for his actions, but one that bears no apparent need for resolution). These themes are only reproduced in Mr. Robot, albeit with the addition of addictive/self-medicating tendencies in a non-white male main character.
52 1999. Repressed Guys Probed but Get No Satisfaction. Toronto Star. 1. 61
CHAPTER 3
Mr. Robot'. Blood and Disc Drives
“I wanted to save the world.”
- Elliot (“Epsl.8_mlrr0rlng”)
“You didn’t commit to the sacred pact you had formed”
- Mr. Robot (“Epsl.l_ones-and-zerOes”)
Elliot hurries down a dark apartment building hallway, backlit with green light; he’s just had a bit of a shock. His hack, committed under the name of the collective fsociety (a play on ‘fx k society’), of the biggest conglomerate in the world, E Corp aka
Evil Corp (as Elliot refers to it), was successful, but in his celebration, he kissed a girl he forgot he was related to, his sister, Darlene. Panicked, having realized he may have forgotten an entire relationship, possibly even his entire childhood, Elliot stumbles hurriedly to his dingy apartment. “Is this amnesia? What else am I not remembering? I’m crazy. I should have stayed on the meds.” Looking at himself in a dirty mirror, Elliot frantically muses, in his monotone-yet-paranoid cadence, “I avoid myself. Why?” His appearances changes while he stays in the same place; he leans in closer. Faces flicker in place of his own: Mr. Robot, the Monopoly man mask that symbolizes fsociety (and also evokes the Guy Fawkes mask and the Occupy movement), another figure the viewer 62
cannot quite make out. “See me. Elliot Alderson. I am here.” Who is he demanding this of: the viewer, his ‘imaginary friend’, or himself? He punches the mirror repeatedly, and it shatters into thousands of shiny, sharp pieces. Blood flows from the wounds on his knuckles. Elliot’s phone vibrates; he throws it and it bounces, hitting the wall then the floor, across the room. “We have to hack... me.” He walks to the next room, where his computer waits. With bleeding hands, he types his own name into various search engines and social media sites. No results. “Nothing. No identity. I’m a ghost.” Turning to a disc storage binder hidden under his bed, he flicks through the plastic pages of what would appear, to the untrained eye, to be compact discs containing music. The viewer knows, however, that these discs are the product of his hacks, forays into the online lives of those
Elliot deems important enough to look into, his form of intimacy. “Did I erase myself?”
At the front of the case, in the first sleeve of the wallet is an unmarked disc he clearly does not remember being there. Placing it on the tray of his CPU, with his injured hand, he un-encrypts the contents of the disc. Photo after photo shows a man with glasses, posing happily in various locations. Family photos. Then, the photos show the man with a boy; a boy who looks like Elliot. Photo after photo after photo, Elliot realizes the man is
Mr. Robot, leader of the hacktivist group fsociety. The man is his father, Edward
Alderson, who has been dead for at least a decade. How is this possible? Elliot is in crisis.53
53 Mr. Robot (2015); Season 1, Episode 8 “Epsl.7_whlter0se.m4v” 63
This scene is crucial to the trajectory of the first season of the 2015 television series Mr. Robot, which aired over the summer on the NBC-owned USA Network, in that it establishes the main conflict of the series: Elliot (played by Rami Malek), entangled in a complex web of mental illness, social anxiety, revenge against a corporation, and an inflated sense of self-importance, who breaks the fourth wall with his narration, may not be entirely (maybe not even at all) reliable. Moreover, Mr. Robot (played by Christian
Slater), whom the viewer believes to be some random, unpredictable, sometimes violent, stranger who brings Elliot into an underground group of hackers focused on bringing down Evil Corp, is revealed to be his dead father, and then his hallucinated alter-ego, all in the span of an episode54. This twist, that a main character is actually a foil of another main character’s mental illness, is a direct reference to the 1999 film Fight Club, which I analyzed in the previous chapter. Even the moment revealing that Mr. Robot is really a figment of Elliot’s twisted psyche recalls Fight Club - the song “Where is My Mind” by the Pixies signals this narrative shift in both. Similarly, the manner in which Elliot comports himself, directly addressing the audience while avoiding interaction with other characters, and the extent he is willing to go to in order to address the wrongs he believes society has allowed, are reminiscent of the 1976 film Taxi Driver. Elliot, like Travis
Bickle, is discontented with society at large, believing it to be out of control, and expresses it in monotone voice-over narration.
54 Mr. Robot (2015); Season 1, Episode 9 “Epsl.8_mlrr0rlng.qt” 64
Looking comparatively at these texts, I argue that Mr. Robot employs tropes and ideals initially expressed in both Taxi Driver and Fight Club, namely revolutionary psychosis, anti-capitalist white masculinism, and the ambivalent female love interest, using the cult appeal of the films to proliferate the figure of the revolutionary/unstable male anti-hero in present popular culture, albeit with a non-white main character. In what follows, I intend to trace these tropes and tactics through Mr. Robot, in order to think through their implications and limitations for both masculinity and mental illness as it is represented today. A figure like Elliot Alderson would not be possible if there had not been a Travis Bickle and Tyler Durden before him; these two figures typify the trope of psychosis induced revolutionary politics put into practice, and modeling Elliot’s persona and narrative tone after these characters secures their influential status in American culture. Moreover, Elliot is the prefect crystallization of the positive elements of Travis and Tyler: he is tortured and damaged by his past, inspiring sympathy, and also unpredictable; his ideology draws on collective ennui maintained by quotidian technology that alienates people from each other (i.e. Facebook). The attractiveness of this subversive figure, emerging post-NAFTA and right on the cusp of the ‘War on
Terror’, seems to have grown following 9/11. Characterized by paranoia, various economic crises and subsequent bailouts, and the rise of impersonal technology that folds into everyday life, this time period of increased reliance on technology and decreased economic stability directly impacted the outlook of an entire generation, seemingly 65
disenchanted with previously agreed-upon standards of wealth accumulation - owning homes, buying cars, etc. - with the rise of a debt-based economy.
I find that Mr. Robot's impact is best understood within the context of two separate readings: one, in which we see Elliot as an extension of the genealogy of unstable male leads established by Travis Bickel and Tyler Durden, whose psychoses stemmed from and encouraged their revolutionary beliefs about society that were previously suppressed by normalcy or the need to fit in; the other, in which fsociety represents a diverse collective of malcontented technology experts, lead by an Egyptian-
American cybersecurity engineer, willing to risk everything to level their debt-ridden economy and unmask the already-crumbling facade of the ‘American dream’. The possibility of these otherwise-incompatible readings makes the television series fascinating, but also troubling considering racialized, gendered, and disability-related implications of the tropes at play, namely the resurgence of the revolutionary psychotic anti-hero. In other words, I will first use the optic of disability studies to critique the forms of masculinity and revolutionary politics at play in Mr. Robot, then I will offer a reading of Elliot and fsociety that accounts for the ways mental illness, addiction, trauma, and racialized experience shape the narrative of the series.
Elliot’s Revolutionary Psychosis
In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickel attempts to right the wrongs of the world, first by trying to assassinate a senator and presidential candidate, then by killing men involved in 66
prostituting a child. Tyler Durden, Fight Club's quirky foil to the unnamed Narrator, is motivated by a cynical proclivity for anarchy, amassing nameless (and hairless) followers who unquestioningly acquiesce to Durden’s absurd requests for mischief with the end goal of exploding the offices of the largest banks, alleviating debt and returning society to a utopic state of nature55. Representing a toxic combination of elevated self-importance and misguided revolutionary ideology put into practice, and facilitated by a mental breakdown, this trope of revolutionary psychosis makes these figures ubiquitous among disenfranchised youth seeking role models in the media56. Indeed, Travis Bickel inspired real life violence57, and real life underground boxing clubs began appearing after the release of Fight Club5*; more alarmingly, with representations repeatedly utilizing these misguided tropes of masculinity and mental illness, we are further condoning toxic masculinity and misunderstanding mental health in more mundane ways. Each film, respectively, maintains cult status, and Taxi Driver is widely regarded as a classic of
American cinema.
55 In the film, an ailing Narrator zones in and out of Durden’s diatribe, revealing the intent of his project: “In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding com, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” 56 Re: Fight Club; see Mitchell, Kevin. 2013. “’A Copy of a Copy of a Copy’: Productive Repetition in Fight Club”. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. 5, no. 1: 108-131. 57 See Chapter 1 58 See Chapter 2 67
That these films and figures are cited as inspiration for Mr. Robot, then, is equally concerning and expected; the television series plays on those readily available tropes of revolutionary psychosis mapped onto the body of a male lead. Elliot is paranoid like
Bickel and sleep deprived like the Narrator59, with the added bonuses of an undisclosed psychiatric disorder (for which he is prescribed a medication he does not take), morphine addiction (a self-medication tactic), and unparalleled computer skills. In fact, his proficiency with computers serves to juxtapose Elliot with the white masculinity that
Bickle and Durden possess. Where Travis Bickle is overly withdrawn and violent, and
Tyler Durden completes the shift from buttoned-up corporate consumer to leading a group of space monkeys to blow up the debt record, Elliot is presented as an ordinary,
21st century guy, someone you could sit next to on the subway: a cybersecurity ‘tech’ in a black hoodie, with lacking social skills and anxious demeanor, who has emotional baggage and a caffeine addiction; a figure immediately recognizable to anyone bom in or after the 1980s in America. He grew up with technology, and it has shaped his worldview and informed his expectations of middle-class lifestyle aspirations. He resents that social media has come to replace face-to-face intimacy, though he actively avoids any form of human connection. He is conscious of geopolitical politics; 9/11 happened when he was in his teens, and he was old enough to understand the implications of a “War on Terror”.
He could have been critical of the Occupy movement in the late 2000s, wanting to support grand-scale change in wealth distribution while maintaining skepticism of a
59 And split into two seemingly discrete characters. 68
movement executed through peaceful protest. In Elliot’s mind, the necessary change could only come in the form of a cyber attack, and fortunately he was in the right place at the right time, with the right person - Mr. Robot.
Fragmented Persona, Fractured Gender
Like Project Mayhem, fsociety has revolutionary intent; indeed, when pressed for an explanation as to why he got involved with the ‘hacktivist’ group in the first place,
Elliot explains, “I wanted to save the world”60. The Oedipal analogy offered by Gunn and
Frentz about Fight Club is both spot on and wholly lacking when applied to Mr. Robot: spot on in that where Pitt’s Durden is just a stranger Norton’s narrator meets on an airplane, Mr. Robot is actually Elliot’s father, Edward Alderson (granted, he has been dead for almost two decades). Just as Gunn and Frentz imagine Project Mayhem as dad and capitalism as mom, the same can be said of Elliot, in that he ‘dreams up’ his father to wage insurrection on big mother Evil Corp. Indeed, one could even say that Elliot is, in a sense, haunted by his father’s ghost; in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination, Avery Gordon outlines the meaning of the presence of absent figures; as she puts it, “If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign... that tells you a haunting is taking place” (8). Mr. Robot’s “seething presence”
60 Mr. Robot (2015); Season 1, Episode 9 (“Epsl.8_mlrr0rlng”) 69
figures as the unruly manifestation of Elliot’s grief, which he takes out on Evil Corp - the company responsible for his father’s death.
Where the Oedipal bit falls short in the case of Mr. Robot is the overreaching psychosexual, Freudian metaphor, wherein Tyler aims to resolve his Rexian desires for mom/Marla Singer through dad/Tyler Durden. Elliot Alderson has no Marla Singer; instead he has Shayla (his drug dealing neighbor-tumed-girlfriend-tumed-refrigerator bait61, whom he has sex with, develops feelings for, and then mourns), Angela (Elliot’s childhood friend and coworker; Elliot and Angela have two very confusing moments of something resembling romantic tension, but both have significant others and the moments fizzle immediately), Krista (Elliot’s psychiatrist, who seems to be the closest thing Elliot has to a mother figure), and Darlene (Elliot’s younger sister, though he spends most of the season thinking she is just another fsociety hacker, until he tries to kiss her62). Elliot does allude to his mother in flashback moments, but she is depicted as abusive, forcing him to eat or sit still or throwing him to the floor. In these moments, we understand why
Elliot would experience difficulty connecting to others, especially women, and we understand why he would want to find alternative methods of closeness (like hacking),
61 In the sixth episode of season one, Shayla is abducted by her drug supplier, Fernando Vera; to spite Elliot, Vera kills Shayla and leaves her body in the trunk of the car Eliot is forced to ride around in for the entire episode. The term refrigerator-bait refers to the FeministFrequency trope “Women in Refrigerators”, as seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DInYaHVSLr8 62 I’m sure Freud would have something clever to say about this moment! 70
why he would choose to self medicate with morphine (and suboxone for withdrawal, both of which he buys from Shayla).
Angela Moss is like the human embodiment of a snowflake: pale, vaguely glimmering, and packed so full of ideals of uniqueness and perfection she can’t help but fall to the ground. Every line actress Portia Doubleday delivers is so brimming with doe eyed naivete, one feels almost obliged to write Angela off as the saccharine nearly-love interest character; yet, her glistening pallor packs a bit more punch than that. With her long silvery-blonde hair, lips frosted to match the color of her skin, and the facial features not unlike that of a female character from the Disney film Frozen63, Angela is clearly meant to be visually and narratively in contrast with Elliot, the swarthy, black and/or gray clad, hooded figure anti-hero. Moreover, Angela serves as Elliot’s narrative foil, an equal opposite to his dark, lonely conflicted hacker-turned activist with skewed morals but ultimately good intentions; Angela, on the other hand, begins the series with a committed relationship, stable job, and straightforward moral compass, and ends the series haughtily defending herself to a designer shoe salesmen, replacing her blood-soaked pumps after an
Evil Corp executive shoots himself in front of her, on television. Apart from the Elliot/Mr.
Robot storyline, Angela is given the next most narrative focus of the show, and while she and Elliot have a mostly platonic relationship, the second season holds more possibility for their romantic entanglement.
631 need not specify which princess here, because, as we now know, they all have the “same face”: http://turbomun.tumblr.com/post/80012362197/sameface-syndrome-and- other-stories 71
Shayla is the true tragic figure of Mr. Robot. Elliot has a casual sexual
relationship with her, and she is also his drug dealer. Because of the specificity of his
illicit requests, she becomes entangled with gang activity, which eventually gets her killed. The audience learns very little about Shayla over the course of the handful of
episodes she is in prior to her death; we learn that she gave Elliot his fish, she likes attending concerts, and she crafts textiles. Her function within the narrative is mostly to give Elliot jarring motivation to pursue Mr. Robot’s project, and while the show features other strong female characters, including one extremely powerful transgender woman,
Shayla’s function within the story, serving mainly to further Elliot’s narrative through her death, is an atrocious missed opportunity. Apart from her quirky charm and awkward-girl mannerisms, her only utility is her relationship with Elliot, and what it ultimately conveys to the viewer about his emotional state.
While Elliot’s relationship with Krista, his therapist, will be explored more in the following sections, I would like to take the moment to name her as a surrogate mother figure for Elliot. While he spends most of his therapy sessions entangled in internal monologues, Elliot expresses the desire to communicate with Krista, more so than any other character on the show. Moreover, he is deeply protective of her; he takes the information he gains from hacking her deeply to heart as indicative of her character, and uses his cyber skills, in what amounts to a complete violation of her privacy, to intervene in her relationship with a conman, breaking them up and separating him from his abused dog, whom Elliot saves as well. As his therapist, Krista functions as the closest analogy 72
Elliot can muster to emotional intimacy, with the exception of his relationship with the
viewer, with whom he is much more candid.
Elliot’s depression and anxiety make it difficult for him to connect to people; he is
withdrawn and reserved in person, often thinking of the right thing to say but only saying
it in his head (which the viewer hears as narration). He feels comfortable on the Internet,
and so he hacks into the emails, social media profiles, and bank accounts of those around him in order to glean those small, personal details other people obtain from face-to-face interaction. He hacks Angela and learns about her overwhelming student loan debts, and
her boyfriend’s infidelities; he hacks Krista and learns about her favorite books, her relationships with her family, her affair with a con artist, and her taste in caffeinated beverages and pornography. While superficially this quality is endearing, because he genuinely cares about these women and disagrees with how their respective partners are treating them, he is in fact hacking into their lives, making them extremely vulnerable
(without their knowledge or consent) so that he can know them. In fact, Elliot practices this breach of privacy with everyone he encounters, from Tyrell Wellick - whose manicured accounts reek of insincerity - to Ron - the coffee shop owner who also traffics
child pornography. And while his hacking skills enable him to do heroic things, like
shutting Ron’s server down, they also make him dangerous, equally capable of cyber- stalking the women in his life as he is taking down Evil Corp. This ambivalent relationship with women is part and parcel of revolutionary psychosis, because it takes a fair amount of entitlement to believe that he, alone, is capable of righting society’s 73
wrongs. What motivates Elliot has to save the world is the same isolation and entitlement that he uses to justify hacking his friends.
The Fourth Wall and the Unreliable Narrator
“Hello friend. ‘Hello friend?’ That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name. But that’s a slippery slope; you’re only in my head. We have to remember that. Shit, it’s actually happening, I’m talking to an imaginary person.” This is how the series begins, with Elliot’s voice-over addressing the viewer as ‘friend’, albeit an imaginary one. This type of narration continues throughout the series, sometimes even accompanied by Elliot making eye contact and directly addressing the camera. This form of narration is strategic, meant to make the viewer feel like part of the story through the force of interpellation.
This style of monotone voice-over narration, delivering information the character would not otherwise express, has its origin in Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle’s narration style, resembling the recitation of diary entries, conveyed a candid, confessional relationship between himself and the viewer, which in effect centered the film on his experience, and his internal, troubled mental state. Fight Club, too, has a direct style of narration, where
Norton’s character explicitly discusses plot points for the audience’s benefit; however, the Narrator here does not directly address the audience as such, nor does he make sustained eye contact with the camera, resembling instead the manner in which one talks to oneself internally. Mr. Robot uses voice-over narration for this same effect, establishing a personal relationship between Elliot and the viewer (whom he refers to as 74
“friend”). This rapport Elliot takes up with the viewer, similar in its imaginary nature to his interaction with Mr. Robot, is not entirely trustworthy; at times, Elliot ignores the viewer, or looks to us for confirmation of his reality (“Please, tell me you are seeing this, too,” he intones to the viewer at the end of the first episode, making direct eye contact with the camera, breaking the fourth wall, in order to confirm that what he is seeing is, in fact, real). His relationship with the viewer, and Mr. Robot, is at times likened to an imaginary friendship, in that Elliot has made up whomever he is talking to in order to escape his loneliness, or approximate external processing (via conversation) when no external confidante exists. As the story progresses, Elliot becomes increasingly unsure of reality, and communicates it through this direct style of narration. What, then, does it mean for a story to be narrated by someone for whom reality is relative, and certainly not guaranteed?
I want to underscore its importance as establishing Elliot as our narrator, and then as unreliable, leading to the ultimate deterioration of his mental state. Through addressing the viewer, Elliot negotiates his own stability, repeating words like ‘crazy’ and referencing medications (presumably psychiatric drugs) that he should have been - but is not - taking. In this sense, Elliot discloses his instability; he is seeing Krista on a psychiatric order, and has been prescribed medications to manage a condition; though, what that condition specifically is, he does not reveal, similar to both Taxi Driver and
Fight Club - though the films neglect any sort of relationship between their respective main characters and psychiatric care. And while the instability of his mental state, and 75
thus the accuracy of his narration, would seemingly alienate the viewer, because a narrator who cannot distinguish hallucination from reality is confusing and can easily mislead, this factor only seems to make the show more interesting and exciting, because the viewer does not know what to believe. Elliot’s narrative is exciting and unpredictable, which makes for engaging television, especially when that “gotcha” moment, the big reveal that Mr. Robot is not real, occurs.
As articulated by Wayne C. Booth, in his definitive text The Rhetoric o f Fiction, an unreliable narrator is defined in opposition to a reliable one, as well as to the author’s intent; as Booth states, “For lack of better terms, I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (158-9). Booth’s work draws on literary examples of relationships between authors and narrators, and unreliable narrators emerge when the authors intentionally construct this central figure as flawed, fallible, or in any other way outside of the norms of the work. Elliot certainly fits this descriptor, when considering his complicated relationship with reality. Moreover, both Fight Club and Mr.
Robot rely on the trope of narrator unreliability in order to underscore the mental instability of their respective main characters; in fact, unreliability serves as a function of mental illness in these examples, using a plot device as evidence of the main character’s disconnected relationship with reality. Elliot seems to only know a fraction of his own story, as the missing pieces lie within his fragmented alter-ego, Mr. Robot - and the same can be said of Tyler Durden and the Narrator in Fight Club. But while this plot device 76
makes for neat storytelling, it collapses the symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder, while also conflating it with schizophrenia, resulting in a sloppy and inauthentic representation of complex and misunderstood conditions in a neat narrative package.
Indeed, mental illness comes to be signified as this type of edgy, unreliable narrator.
While Elliot himself may be considered unreliable, the series Mr. Robot would actually be more accurately categorized as an ambiguous narrative, “one which does not enable us [the viewer] to answer all the significant questions which arise concerning the story”64. This ambiguity allows for partiality of narration as it is situated within the perspective of the narrating character, a partiality that will be further explored later in this chapter. Mr. Robot habitually introduces facts and circumstances that are not immediately clear to the viewer, beginning and ending with Elliot’s mental health; this treatment, of psychosis, as a variable in a storyline that serves to move the plot forward, is a reductive and harmful way to drum up dramatic interest. A symptom of his revolutionary psychosis,
Elliot’s unreliability as a narrator results in the now infamous ‘gotcha’-type moment of reveal, both contributing to and fueled by his intentionally ambiguous mental illnesses; because he is ill, he is uncertain of reality, and because he is uncertain of reality, he is less culpable of the actions he may or may not have committed. Mr. Robot relies on tired storytelling conventions, like the plot-twist reveal of psychosis, to bring the audience in to Elliot’s perspective, underscoring the visceral nature of the show’s events while further
64 Currie, Gregory. 1995. “Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film”. The Journal o f Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 53, no. 1: 19-30. 77
obscuring the real-life conditions that make such representations possible. Indeed, narrative unreliability lends itself to revolutionary psychosis, in that the kind of main character the trope necessitates must be capable of narrative misdirection, obscuring the need for psychiatric intervention with plotted insurrection. Elliot Alderson is precisely this type of narrator, using fourth-wall breaking and hacking, respectively, to secure his place as the most recent iteration of revolutionary psychosis incarnate.
Sympathetic Reading of Elliot and fsociety
While the critiques of Mr. Robot's depictions of mental illness and masculinity are readily available, especially considering their toxic origins in Taxi Driver and Fight
Club, the television series is not without is successes. Most broadly, Mr. Robot tells the story of a person of color struggling with multiple (oftentimes conflicting) mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, and addiction, and his struggles with stigma and social injustices. The hacker collective, fsociety, consists almost entirely of people of color, who are portrayed in complex, nuanced ways that adeptly avoid the predominantly formulaic representations of people of color in the technology industry, which stem from the “model minority” stereotype65. At a time of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, imagining a collective of highly skilled and undervalued people of color, wearied by debt
65 Jonathan Freedman. 2005. "Transgressions of a Model Minority." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal o f Jewish Studies 23, no. 4: 69-97. 78
and disenfranchisement, who have reached their wits’ end and decide to take drastic actions to enact change, is exciting and enticing and I want to acknowledge that as well.
Self-Medication and Racialization
Despite the readily available critiques of Elliot Alderson and Mr. Robot, I want to instead take time to take Elliot seriously, as a person of color with a mental illness. To understand the relationship between social stigma and prescription or self-medication, in
“When Black Women Started Going on Prozac”, Anna Mollow reads Meri Nana-Ama
Danquah’s memoir, Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through
Depression (1998), bringing disability to bear as a location of knowledge production within Black feminist thinking. Mollow’s reading of Danquah’s novel, which addresses
Danquah’s struggles with depression, complicates the established methodology of disability studies in that it engages pain and suffering caused by depression; moreover, the narrative Danquah produces effectively characterizes her struggle as an eventual
“overcoming”, a trajectory oftentimes read by the disability community as problematically representing a person’s relationship with their body, and ascribing to the misconception that disabilities are obstacles meant to be surpassed with individual achievement and an upbeat temperament (67). Mollow finds Danquah’s narrative productive in that it necessarily counters predominant assumptions of the field, and spends the bulk of her analysis assessing those moments where the triumph of the texts indicates a shortcoming of disability studies. Of particular interest in this context is 79
Mollow’s accounting of Danquah’s relationship with the medical industrial complex; following an elucidation of the ways doctors prioritize institutionalization over treatment of mental illness, Mollow then explicates Danquah’s various methods of treating her own depression, including prescriptions and controlled substances, depending on the inconsistency of access Danquah experiences due to systemic inequalities:
“Danquah sees adequate medical treatment for her depression as a
necessity, to which poverty, racism, and gender bias have created almost
insurmountable barrier... she seeks treatment but has great difficulty
locating a mental health clinic she can afford. Danquah is able to pay for
only one of the medications she is prescribed, Zoloft, an antidepressant.
Anxiety is a side effect of Zoloft, so her doctor writes her a prescription
for BuSpar, an anxiety controllant. This drug, however, is prohibitively
expensive, so Danquah resorts to alcohol to manage the side effects of her
antidepressant. Indeed, the Zoloft seems to cause an insatiable craving for
alcohol, which disappears when she discontinues the medication” (72).
As a multi-billion dollar industry66, the pharmaceutical industry represents its products - drugs - through rigorous advertising campaigns, as the ultimate solution to physio-bio chemical ailments; however, the American institution of racism is an extremely efficient
66 Ironically, on both viewing platforms I have used to view the show, Hulu.com and USAnetwork.com, the predominant form of commercials shown at breaks are for prescription drugs, including treatments for fibromyalgia (Lyrica), deep vein thrombosis (Xarelto), and erectile dysfunction (Viagra). 80
barrier to access, and we see women of color in Mollow’s analysis self-medicating in ways their doctors may not approve.
Under similar social conditions, though not experiencing the gendered repercussions as Danquah, Elliot sees Krista for depression and social anxiety, and self- medicates with morphine and suboxone. He was explicitly prescribed medications to mediate his psychological distress, but does not take them. While this disregard for medical advice, when seen in white characters (like Edward Norton’s Narrator in Fight
Club), renders them visionary or vulnerable, in characters of color - even as vaguely racialized as Elliot, who is played by an Egyptian-American actor but can be read as whitened by his proximity to the ‘tech’ world - this contempt for society is seen as dangerous and threatening. Like the Narrator/Tyler Durden characters, Elliot can be easily construed as a victim of his social constraints, an unstable addict with technological prowess; however, unlike the main character(s) of Fight Club, Elliot is also at the center of the organization succeeding at taking down the world’s largest corporation, the biggest hack of the century.
This racialized differentiation is even more striking when comparing the stakes for Project Mayhem and fsociety, and the risks involved in participation. While both organizations are premised on complete social restructuring via erasure of debt, and both potentially engage life-and-death risk, the legal and social framing differ substantially.
Project Mayhem, Fight Club's mischievous collective that began as an underground boxing ring, employs methods including splicing pornography into children’s films, 81
mixing bodily fluids into hot foods at banquet halls, and the occasional destruction of corporate coffee chains (with no casualties intended)67. Project Mayhem’s inductees are white men with shaved heads and kiss marks acid-burned on their hands, and they all refer to Tyler Durden (Pitt or Norton) as ‘sir’. In contrast, fsociety is a hactivist group - portmanteau of hacker and activist - is comprised entirely of non-white computer experts68. Everything fsociety does is highly dangerous, and because of this, members take extreme precautions to not implicate themselves or one another, including not exchanging contact information, only meeting in real life at a secret location, fsociety collaborates with the Chinese hacker group the Dark Army, led by an elusive and mysterious transgender woman69, landing numerous Evil Corp employees either in jail or dead, and leaving millions of Americans without access to their bank accounts after the hack is successful. Comparatively, the stakes for participating in fsociety are exponentially greater than those of Project Mayhem, and the on screen body count is higher for fsociety (3:1).
The discrepancy I am describing in comparing Project Mayhem and fsociety on racialized (and thereby classed) terms is precisely what Grace Kyungwon Hong is describing as “surplus” in her book Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics o f
67 His name was Robert Paulson. His name was Robert Paulson. 68 Excluding Mr. Robot, as Christian Slater is white; and, while a white actress (Carly Chaikin) plays Darlene, the character is racialized in proximity to her ethnically ambiguous brother Elliot. 69 WhiteRose, played by B.D. Wong (SFSU alumni!), possibly the best character of the entire show, who only appears in two scenes but is SO! CAPTIVATING! 82
Difference70. In her second chapter, called “On Being Wrong and Feeling Right: Cherrie
Moraga and Audre Lorde”, Hong writes, “I explore the ways in which the ‘surplus’ upon which neoliberal capital is predicated is constituted increasingly through the production of social values (or, in other words, economies of morality) in concert with, but also in excess of, the processes of labor exploitation” (64); as such, within neoliberalism, there are those whose mere existence, let alone their contributions to labor, are seen as adequate, and there are those who are configured, through inequities of race, gender, ability, sexuality, etc., as surplus, who are deemed unmanageable by capitalism (67). We can see these necropolitical stakes at play when Project Mayhem and fsociety are evaluated comparatively; while those in Project Mayhem are potential nuisances to society, their white male bodies still remove them from harm at the hands of the state, while fsociety members are social surplus71. While Fight Club frames Project Mayhem as a group of well-intentioned troublemakers, the actions fsociety take are much more easily coded as criminal, worthy of more severe punishments that are more easily exacted.
Moreover, at its core, fsociety is five New Yorkers working out of an arcade, while
Project Mayhem is hypothetically a well-established, nationally syndicated organization of hundreds (thousands? millions?) of identical, anonymous individuals. The stakes are clearly, exponentially higher for fsociety, for what is, effectively, an updated - if not
70 Hong, Grace Kyungwon. 2015. Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference. University of Minnesota Press. 71 This could explain WhiteRose’s elusiveness; as a transgender woman of color, she is potentially at the most risk of biopolitical excess. 83
more diverse - version of the same ideological project. In Taxi Driver, we see one lone individual taking specific, targeted action to change an entire society; while Fight Club offers Project Mayhem as an alternative, the resolution lies in the Narrator alone. Mr.
Robot brings to this conversation the outright necessity of the collective to facilitate the kind of change Elliot envisions, and even though his revolutionary psychosis takes center stage in the story, fsociety is absolutely invaluable to his efforts, valorizing a group effort and the importance of each member rather than proliferating the ‘lone revolutionary’ trope. As much as Mr. Robot is invested in maintaining revolutionary psychosis through
Elliot, it counters also counters the trope with fsociety’s collaborative efforts and diverse character portrayals.
Conclusion
Based on these two reading of the 2015 television series Mr. Robot, I hope to have advanced an understanding of the show, how it has emerged in the context of
American cinematic political history, how it has recycled and revised tropes of mental illness and masculinity. A generative reading of the series provides insight into ways of making more relatable to American audiences, accurate representations of mental illness and masculinity. While Mr. Robot falls into the traps of revolutionary psychosis previously established by the films Taxi Driver and Fight Club, the television series departs from the tired tropes of entitled-yet-‘crazy’ white masculinity, portraying a highly skilled, non-white main character that struggles with oftentimes conflicting mental 84
illnesses, working with other non-white specialists with nuanced goals and personalities to fight against the world’s largest, and most corrupt, corporation. Mr. Robot shows that revolutionary psychosis is a tired trope, and the “gotcha” moment that reveals one character to be the hallucination of another is tired and unoriginal; however, it also forwards a new kind of anti-hero, a collective of flawed, fallible, and diverse individuals whose experiences of social inequality motivate their skillful play at taking down a major source of oppression. As a viewing public, we deserve accurate, accountable representations, and we should no longer accept easy tropes of masculinity and mental illness, which further reduce both categories of identity to harmful stereotypes. Taxi
Driver, Fight Club, and Mr. Robot all rely on revolutionary psychosis to poorly represent masculinity and mental illness; however, Mr. Robot also provides opportunities in depicting collective social reform that are promising, paving the way for a world full of complicated, interesting representations, where women, people of color, and people with disabilities do not need to die, or fall into the background, in order to make change, but can instead thrive at the forefront and inspire social change. 85
AFTERWORD
Consider Betsy; Saving Iris
I would like to take a moment to consider Betsy. A white, blonde-haired, blue eyed woman, tall and slender, attractively fashioned and neat in every aspect, Travis spots her walking on the street and singles her out as extraordinary, an angel, no longer human due to divine perfection. But, Betsy is presented through Travis’ perspective; what would the film look like through Betsy’s? Realizing you are being followed or watched, particularly by a stranger, is an alarming experience. She alerts a coworker, and he responds, “I love you,” an irrelevant interjection that only further objectifies her.
When a stranger decided to make her an object, how must she have felt? Did she stand in front of a mirror and scrutinize her appearance, wondering what signaled this unwanted attention? Was her outfit too tight, too revealing? Did something in the way she smiled, the way she laughed, the way she walked, convey to him an open invitation?
Did she reflect on the words she said, parsing for sub textual invitations to invade her privacy? Or did none of this faze her, because she was so used to engaging unwanted attention from men, strange or otherwise? Did she even realize that something was, indeed, wrong with this situation, that a man she does not know following her into her office from off the street to tell her that she is lonely is not acceptable behavior? 86
There are not adequate words to express the sheer terror you feel when being followed by a stranger. When that stranger persuades you to go on a date with them, and makes you excruciatingly uncomfortable, and repeatedly calls you at your home or work, showing up to events because they know you are there; this experience is all the more sinister, precisely because perhaps you can sense that something may be wrong, but you may not question it. In fact, many times you can even make excuses for this kind of behavior; Betsy may have been flattered by the attention Travis showed her, and she may have even felt bad for Travis, and humored him. There are structures in place to make persistent, toxic masculinity seem reasonable, and those structures operate on the intersections of identities. The young, black woman sex worker in the back of the cab tolerates vulgarities flung at her from an older white man, and laughs even; the insults pass through her body, leaving traces in bodily fluids on a vinyl seat.
In Taxi Driver, the violence committed among men is exceptional, and the violence committed against women by men is commonplace. A shootout at a cheap hotel is a spectacle; unwanted sexual advances are conversation. This is precisely the problem that Taxi Driver presents: with violence as a norm, how are we to imagine otherwise?
The final scene of the film has Betsy in the back seat of Travis’ cab. He drives her to her destination, refuses her fare, and drives away. How might the film change if, instead of avoiding the topic of their failed relationship, Betsy confronts Travis about his bad behavior, speaking the lines left unspoken, face flushed with rage? Or, as I like to imagine, drawing her own weapon, Betsy places a cold muzzle to Travis’ recent neck 87
wound, instructs him to drive to a discrete location, and finishes the job he started. She steels herself to the kickback, squeezes the trigger, and Travis goes willingly at the hands of his merciful angel, answering the call of violence with violence.
Perhaps Martin Scorcese or Paul Shrader would not approve of this ending; but, to any person who has experienced violence at the hands of a stranger, this alternate conclusion is certainly cathartic. For anyone who has been the subject of pursuant masculinity or violence, this ending feels good.
**
Women, people of color, people with disabilities - these are all examples of underrepresented and marginalized identities in American cinema and television. And when these characters are included in mainstream media, they are often poorly written background characters with little depth or complexity, relying on stereotypes and bad tropes, and oftentimes not played by actors with similar identities or experiences 72 .
Representing a diverse array of characters with respect and accuracy in American cinema and television is extremely important, because media shapes and influences our understandings of the world and the people around us. Successful representations expose people to new ideas and ways of being, and so when representations are reductive or
72 Notable, recent examples of this include white actors playing Asian characters, like Emma Stone’s character in the film Aloha (2015) and Scarlett Johansson’s character in Ghost in the Shell (2017). Examples of nondisabled actors playing characters with disabilities are equally omnipresent in Hollywood, including Jack Nicholson’s performance in As Good As It Gets (1997) and practically the entire cast of Margarita with a Straw (2014). 88
stereotype-ridden, that opportunity of exposure and education is foreclosed. Most importantly, movies and TV shows are oftentimes considered to be frivolous or unimportant, which is precisely what makes them so powerful; the modes of expressions that are taken the least seriously, oftentimes also relegated to the realm of the feminine, in fact hold the most power because they are so underestimated.
In exposing the problems and pitfalls of revolutionary psychosis, I would also like to imagine a future in which women, people of color, and people with disabilities do not merely serve as the backdrop for the white-guy anti-hero, but can influence change by their (our) own right. I want to see deaf, black superheroes73, victim-turned-vigilante sorority girls74, and badass trans businesswomen pissing on the graves of capitalism75.
Consuming media is not a passive act; we identify with characters whose stories best approximate our own, and when those characters are killed or made into victims, we internalize that violence. Moreover, representations in media expose us to new ways of being, and those depictions of different must be reflective of lived experiences; otherwise, we risk furthering stereotypical and bigoted understandings of real people. It is time to let go of the revolutionary psychotic figure, in lieu of more complex, diverse, and accurate portrayals of gender, race, and disability in American television and cinema.
73 See independent film Supersonic (2014); watch here: http://www.bslzone.co.uk/watch/supersonicl/ 74 See the now-cancelled MTV series Sweet/Vicious (2016) 75 Love you, whiterose! 89
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