Back to the Future, Brainwashing and Mr. Robot
Our little journey into rewatching Mr. Robot with our girlfriend continues and we ended Season 2 last night and got to the point of Angela's interview with Whiterose.
See, Season 2 Episode 11 asks a question that the show has asked a number of times "How do you hack a human being?" but this time applies it to Angela and Darlene. Elliot's two most trusted humans. His girlfriend and his love interest.
Is it possible for the FBI and Whiterose respectively to get them to betray Elliot?
Well, Elliot said it himself in season 1
"People always make the best exploits. I've never found it hard to hack most people. If you listen to them, watch them, their vulnerabilities are like a neon sign screwed into their heads."
Darlene even monologued about hers in the previous episode. All she needs is to feel special and you can own her.
But Whiterose does not exploits people like Elliot does. She owns them.
Let's talk about how she brainwashed Angela.
Before I begin I want to just mention that I am a hypnokink blog but there is a world of difference between consensual hypnosis play (I write a lot on the topic) and literal brainwashing.
My post/analysis is through a lens of muted horror because I know the tactics being employed and I want to break down the scene from the perspective of someone who reads the theory. I do not in any way shape or form endorse the methods being played out on screen.
I do know members of my community who would very much enjoy recreating elements of this scene in their play but it would be in a risk aware and negotiated manner. Full love and respect to y'all, I am not yucking on your yum. The difference is fantasy vs reality and consent vs coercion.
I know I shouldn't need to write that but I'm a hypnokink blog and this may reach fandom spaces and I want to make it clear that this sequence depicts psychological torture and it is not the same thing as my hobby.
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At the start of the episode Angela is in the back of a van being driven by two Dark Army agents.
The plot of the show is instigated by a leak at a nuclear facility that claimed the life of Elliot's father and Angela's mother. Much of the narrative is the pair of them on their relentless individual crusades to destroy the company that allowed this to happen, covered it up and took no accountability for the disaster. In fact E(vil) Corp knew the radiation levels were unsafe and hid that fact, allowing Mr. Alderson and Mrs. Moss to perish.
What's worse is Angela has evidence that the levels are still unsafe to this day and the company knows about it. She is about to whistleblow and that attracts the attention of the big bad of the series, Whiterose.
We do not yet know the connections but we do know that Whiterose refers to the facility as "my plant". It is clearly important to her. Enough that threats to the plant are motive to kill.
But they didn't kill Angela for her attempt at whistleblowing. They recruit her. A good idea, all things considered, as she is Elliot's exploit.
It is night time when Angela is taken and daytime when she arrives at her destination. During the ride she is kept in the back of the van while the two riders stare on ahead. Angela pleads with them, screams, tries every trick she can to get their attention and they refuse to acknowledge her.
All the while a song plays on the radio.
In universe we know that Back to the Future is Angela's favorite movie. It's come up a lot and much as Darlene's need to feel special was directly referenced in the prior episode, Angela's love of BttF was mentioned when she refers to a tender moment in season 1 when she wanted to get high and watch Back to the Future 2 with Elliot.
The show takes place in 2015 by the way. That becomes plot relevant later but at this moment it's just a lovely coincidence.
When Angela has run through her options her captors pump the volume on Marvin Berry & The Starlights.
Later in the episode we cut to Angela waking from a sleep. It is daylight now and there is still music playing on the radio...
I was watching the show with my girlfriend, @soveryverytired and she is as big a BttF fan as Angela and she recognized this instantly. These musical stings are diegetic and so they are for Angela but let's not forget that we the audience are a character in this show. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.
Angela is released from the van and guided into a house which seems to have been tailor made to mess with her. The brainwashing began the moment she was picked up but this is when the audience gets to share in some of Angela's emotional state.
The hallway she is guided down is full of family photos with the faces inked out.
Itself a reference to the artwork of John Baldessari.
In the portraits Angela sees she is given the idea of family and the image of a family home. A place which exists in memory for Angela as she may have been raised in Jersey but she's a New York girl now who lives in modern chic apartments.
The portraits have their features removed as a stand-in for an idea. Family. Comfort. Safety. Home. Just ideas right now of course, but it also evokes alienation. There is nothing for her to latch onto. Her captors refuse to look at her.
(Incidentally I am uncertain of why they picked the people who caught Angela. Neither of them look like Dark Army agents and they do not radiate nostalgia or identity in any meaningful form. They are disparate and just appear to be people who caught Angela. I cannot place anything on them)
Angela has been isolated and kept for an elongated period of time in transit. She does not even have the comfort of human faces to latch onto.
Which makes her entrance into the brainwashing room all the more startling.
Blue, Green and Red in stark contrast with White and Black. The room is barren of features spare for the objects that are intentionally placed there for her. A Commodore 64 computer, a red phone, a copy of the book Lolita.
There's also a copy "Hang in there" poster. Angela likes motivational posters and listens to confidence tapes a lot.
As I mentioned in my previous Mr. Robot analysis, Esmail really enjoys giving us parts of the code to go back and try and look at things again with context. In that analysis I spoke of how Whiterose detected Dom's sexuality from a single sentence. Here we have a more direct decryption.
Eliott comes into a room much like this later in the show and instantly identifies the pieces placed out for him and what their significance are. These are objects from Angela's childhood home. Whether directly the same ones or replicas created from Whiterose digging on Angela's life is unknown. But there's always the implication...
Between every phase of Angela's ordeal she is given a well of time to stew in her situation and remove all distractions. She tries the door and discovers it is locked. She is given time to understand and accept her circumstance. She stops struggling in the van and lets the BttF soundtrack lull her to sleep. She stops trying to escape the room and sits in the chair.
Every step of the process thus far has been to isolate her and allow time to guide her into compliance. Whiterose likes using time as a weapon after all... it's her obsession.
Then the interview begins and we are introduced to Angela's interviewer.
A young caucasian girl in a suit with blonde hair in a high pony tail. A child version of Angela.
We don't know this yet but in Season 3 there will be a flashback of a 9 year old Angela watching Back to the Future while her mother is dying. Both the interviewer (credited as "Girl") and 9-year old Angela are played by the same actress, Mabel Tyler.
The implication goes beyond her just being dressed to look like Angela did at that age. Whiterose found someone who looks exactly like she did.
Angela's stint of social isolation has finally been given reprieve with the dignity of a human face, even if it is her own (but that's impossible, right?) and she, bewildered and confused, asks for answers. "Who are you?"
The response is "There's water coming out of that fish tank. We don't have much time. Let's begin."
No urgency. No emotion. Just matter of fact.
Time, which was once drawn to unbearable stretches of isolation has now been flipped on its head and suddenly Angela is not allowed time to process anything. She is instantly asked a number of questions.
"Have you ever cried during sex?" - "Have you ever fantasized about killing your father?" - "Are you a giraffe or a seagull?"
Any attempt Angela makes to talk with the child results in the question being asked again. (The sequence makes direct references to text adventure games also, showing that Angela has no control in this situation, the prompts will continue repeating until she gives the desired answer)
After a number of failed attempts the phone will ring and the girl will get instructions to force the test to proceed. The first time she displays heavy bruising on her back and tells Angela she will be beaten if she does not complete the test.
The fish will die if she does not answer fast. The girl will be punished if she does not finish the test.
Empathy is being used against her. A time limit and the girl constantly forcing her to engage with the question prevent her processing.
So now should be a time to mention the real world mind control techniques on display here. They're brought up in movies a lot. For a simple and harmless version of it you need to look at the Baseline Test from Bladerunner 2049 and for a disturbing but all too realistic version of it you need to look at The Master.
Massive warning on the scene from The Master as it contains exceptionally dark content.
There are a number of factors at play and I feel even with as much as I've read there are others in my community who could break this down better than me.
The obvious ones are empathy and stress being put at play. Angela is being forced to capitulate via sheer aggressive coercion. If she does not obey the child will be punished, if she does not beat the time limit then a fish will perish. The captors would be punishing the girl and killing the fish but they have framed it in a way that she is volunteering responsibility. A simple and insidious manipulation that is all too common. How often are we informed that our not showing up to work will make things harder for our coworkers? The world is rife with people forcing us to take on empathetic responsibility for those around us despite the fact that the pain inflicted upon them is only our fault in that we allow others to force us to be at fault. Life is full of little trolley problems like that. After all... can Angela really ignore the fact that this child copy of herself will be hurt if she does not comply?
Then you have the more psychological ones. Fractionation is a term we in the hypnosis community use a lot. Within hypnosis it means to go in and out of hypnotic state often enough to maximize the impact of the altered state. Long story short, bringing someone down into a hypnotic state and then up again and then down again and then up and then down enough causes someone to become more susceptible, altered and heady.
It's fun!
Emotional Fractionation is a NLP technique that is so colonized by pick-up artists that I literally couldn't find a definition of it from a google search which wasn't buried in misogynistic dogma. The concept is simple. Put someone into several extreme emotional states of varying tempo to "prime" them. A person is more susceptible and emotionally malleable when they have been through a series of these quick short bursts.
"Have you ever cried during sex?" and "Have you fantasized about murdering your father?" are both examples of invasive questions that conjure extreme emotions of shame and disgust paired with topics of sexuality and violence which are typically taboo topics, especially when coming from a child's mouth. They are things that people would not casually answer. There is guard to them. The test is forcing Angela to answer questions which no person would give an unguarded answer to and doing so in a pressurized window where she cannot fully process the questions or continue to deny answering them.
The Master clip does something a lot more grounded with its blink test. Every time Joaquin Phoenix's character blinks the test starts again. He is forced to answer the same questions over and over. With that test his emotionally guarded replies are single word answers and denials. As the test deprives him and emotionally wears him down he begins giving honest answers. It's... not enjoyable to watch.
The interesting thing about Angela's questions is the Giraffe/Seagull question is how baffling it is.
Two emotionally volatile questions in a row and then a non-sequitur about animals. Emotional whiplash. But it serves a purpose. Flatten the landscape. Remove expectation. Interrupt an emerging. Allow answers to become automatic.
In hypnosis this kind of pattern plays with call and response to train a hypnotee to fall into a pattern of reactions that we guide. There's even a method of interrupting the pattern and creating a breakdown in critical thinking that allows us to communicate directly with the subconscious mind. That's not really at play here but I can't notice a pattern interrupt in emotional fractionation tactics without typing "transderivational search", it's a compulsion in me.
Anyway...
We cut away and next time we return the fish only has a third of the tank left.
"Are you red or purple?" and Angela, sat down and exhausted, simply answers "Purple"
As before exposure and time has caused her to just accept what is happening to her. She's going along with the process now and not trying to reason with her predicament. It's easier just to answer.
But as every other time Angela has become comfortable in her ordeal, a curveball appears.
"Is the key in the room?"
Every question until now, including during the implied time that the fish tank has been emptying, was a personality question. Personal and invasive or banal and trivial. Either way this provides another case of emotional whiplash. Angela is baffled and becomes frustrated. Her emotional resilience has been whittled into non-existence at this point, she cannot help but yell in frustration.
The phone goes again and this time Girl hands Angela the phone. A digitized voice says:
"You are standing in a dark room and can't see anything. There is a torch and a match. What do you do?"
The idea of a text based adventure is already on mind but now Angela is being trained to think how her captors want her to think. She obeys as she has been primed to do and says she lights the torch. No resistance. No confusion. No attempting to get the voice on the phone to identify themselves or answer to her predicament. She is given a prompt from a text based adventure and she follows the prompt.
Every other exploit in the show used the computer analogy as a metaphor for human behavior. Now we are seeing a human being programmed to run on simple prompts.
The voice continues this text based adventure until she reaches a door. She tries to open it but the door will not open. Much as the start of the test the voice keeps repeating prompts. Not deviating. Angela, frustrated begins yelling that she doesn't fucking know but the voice keeps saying "the knob doesn't turn, how do you open it?" until she breaks down and says that she uses a key. She opens the door with a fucking key.
The girl repeats her question.
"Is the key in the room?"
Angela looks at the copy of Lolita on the desk. The artwork depicting a closed fist.
She understands now and in an emotionally distant voice speaks, referencing a quote from the book "Yes. The key was in my fist. My fist was in my pocket."
The Lolita connection actually spans the entire show and this Reddit post does a better job explaining than I could.
The fact that both this show and the book are pastiches (one of modern cinema and the other of literary genres) is relevant though. Don't forget. The Back to the Future references are in universe and targeted specifically at Angela.
The interview concludes and Angela is left to wait a further 4 hours in the room. The fish dies. She's emotionally exhausted. She's no closer to understanding what is happening or what will happen to her. Then the big bad of the entire show, Whiterose, enters the scene.
Whiterose herself allots 28 minutes to their conversation. Which if you know her is remarkably generous.
The conversation is dense.
It starts with Whiterose following the format of the previous interview by noting the lack of time and saying they need to begin before playing some quick and easy mindgames. Insisting her time is more important than Angela's and simply shrugs off her request to leave with "No you wouldn't", she's already invested this much time (against her will or otherwise) and she's going to stick around for the rest.
Angela sits.
Whiterose then berates her lack of agency in attempting to do anything with the door. That she had simply remained in the room without attempting to change or alter her situation.
Angela says that the door was locked. That it was impossible for her to leave.
But Whiterose is training her how to think. She was presented a locked door in her interview and she manifested the key.
Angela, now faced with an actual human being who will converse with her, instantly attempts to claim some leverage in the conversation by accusing Whiterose of murdering the fish (she is not shaken) and hurting the girl.
Whiterose tells her it was make-up and that the child was not hurt at all. That her empathy was part of the test.
This is a subtle one but I want to highlight it. Whiterose killed the fish. The fish is dead. But she ignores that criticism and focuses on the child and tells Angela that it was make-up and the child was not hurt.
It's a brilliant bit of emotional manipulation because Angela has come at her with two immoral and disgusting acts and Whiterose ignored one and excused the other. The deflection throws Angela off her guard because her assumption was that Whiterose was torturing a child and now that's not true. That revelation (which is unconfirmed, mind you, we only have Whiterose's word) erases the accusation. Suddenly Angela is made to abandon her accusation despite the fact that this woman did force that child to conduct the psychological torture, that she kidnapped Angela from the subway and that the fish is dead and Angela can still see it.
Whiterose then gives a mild exposition dump about Angela's prevalence in the plot and the fact that her plot armor has kept her safe when by all estimations she should have been killed the very moment her actions threatened Whiterose's investment in the Washington Township Plant.
She then gives yet another emotional sideswipe to Angela by saying that she is important to Phillip Price (the head of E(vil) Corp) and Elliot Alderson. This serves to make her feel Whiterose knows everything about her because this unknown individual has intimate details about her childhood, her current life and her attachment to Elliot and the crime he committed on 5/9.
Plus after making Angela seem so important for the fact she keeps turning up in Whiterose's plans, she instantly puts her position as an attachment to Price and Alderson. Preventing Angela from even feeling as more than an accessory while giving her a taste of being important.
She then goes on to explain Angela's mother and Elliot's father died for her schemes and that both Angela and Elliot owe their current lives to that fact. After riling her up by insulting her mother's death and claiming personal responsibility for it she says she has no intention of killing Angela but she cannot be allowed to continue jeopardizing her plans.
Angela is broken by this point. Tears burning her eyes she finally says she will give Whiterose what she wants. Destroy the evidence. She submits.
But that's not what Whiterose wants. Elliot and F Society use fear and coercion to control people. Whiterose does not want Angela's fear.
She then asks if Angela has ever believed in something so hard that she could manifest it into being through sheer will.
Much like the key from the test.
Angela admits she used to but she is admitting that reality does not allow for such optimism. Whiterose asks her what "real" even is.
...and that's the sequence.
Next time we see her she is being driven by a Dark Army car to her lawyer's house to drop the case. It's night time and presumably she went straight from Whiterose's. She's been in captivity for over 24 hours at this point.
and she not only complies with Whiterose's request, she does so with zeal and a mildly disconcerting affect.
She's 100% a believer now.
...but of what?
Can you guess?
What do you think Whiterose convinced her of? Made her a believer of?
I think you know. She spent the entire episode priming Angela for it. We saw it. We were there.
Does that mean we were primed too?
So even if Angela's brainwashing is complete. We still have the audience to think of, we're a character in the show, we sit atop the forth wall, not behind it. Don't you want to be included in the brainwashing too?
The episode continues on without Angela, progressing the A-plot with Elliot and Mr. Robot. We also get Sam Esmail teaching the audience how to decode the cypher in the novel that covers Elliot's time in prison.
As the episode comes to an end and Elliot and Tyrell are reunited we get we hear this music in the background. This time it's not diegetic. It's the show's soundtrack.
Three times is a pattern.
As the credits roll and we get a tease of Silvestri's original score for the film. That is present in the track, you can hear it in the above YouTube clip. But the song itself, Earth Angel, is diegetic in the film and yet the final few moments of the song are part of the film's soundtrack. An outright confirmation for anyone watching that we are hearing Back to the Future right now.
See... Angela heard those songs in the van but only we heard the third, final and most crucial one.
Mr. Robot is a grounded show. Up until now everything has been remarkably realistic with all of the hacking based on real techniques and even the psychology of Elliot's delusions and his DID are associated with reality (sidenote: though like most media they happily pair schizophrenia and DID as a single condition which they are not. A successful DID diagnosis typically excludes the possibility of schizophrenia. To point Elliot should not be able to see or literally hear Mr. Robot. Those with DID are aware the voices originate within their head and any visualization of the alters is typically within and requires practiced/guided visualization in a therapeutic setting to accomplish)...
Yet...
The idea that Whiterose's plan involves time travel has entered your mind hasn't it?
Like a little seed. A virus that you can't quite delete from your mental operating system.
Every bit of evidence in this show tells you it's based in reality and time travel isn't real.
...but this episode has put the idea in your head... and it doesn't really go away, does it?
Esmail's script never says it. Whiterose alludes to parallel universes and creating the world that was always meant to be. But she never calls it time travel.
But there's the implication...
Either way. Angela believes it's possible now. She'd betray Elliot and let thousands of people die for her belief. One Whiterose worked very hard to give to her.
