Introduction

WARNING! SPOILERS ALL AROUND!

I have some really mixed feelings about Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot. It’s an awesome piece of television even though it’s script, characters and ideas suck on some very serious levels of suckery.

Starting from Bond-villain logic of F-societies master-plan and continuing with a Swedish antagonist who pays homeless to punch them. The whole script is made of awkwardness, cliches and convenient plot-devices.

But still… Mr. Robot is compelling, fresh and daring. It definitely deserves all the received acclaim but on the merits of production crew only.

In a series of small essays I want to analyse some of the tricks and techniques that make it so good.

Framing 101

And today we talk about framing — one of the niches where Mr. Robot made it’s very best storytelling decisions.

It is really something special, just have a look.

How would you place your actors? Is it a time for an exposition shot to introduce the setting? Would you use parallax to make everything look big? Yes, composition of the frame can tell the story without using any words. And, you probably noticed — when something is not spoken it feels more subtle and emotional.

I really loved S02E03 so let’s take it as an example of Robot’s framing in storytelling.

OK, let’s go.

Enter the void

How does Sam Esmail show pain and delusion?

He gives it some extra space.

Take a hero as a main emotional point of the scene and surround him with enough emptiness — can you feel how lonely and detached Elliot is? And it’s not just a creepy house and Malek’s great performance.

In this shot we barely see his face and the environment is much more optimistic and crowded. But the feeling of discomfort never leaves us during the whole scene. Is this because of emptiness? Yes and no.

Human eye first captures things in the center of the frame as the most important. But in this asymmetrical fucked-up universe it simply doesn’t work — each cut is a short “Find Elliot” game for your brain.

That’s how cinematography intentionally makes you feel just as deluded as the main character.

And that’s fucking clever. Any other series would share the whole frame between those too. But Tod Campbell and Sam Esmail know the value of space and leave it for something.

Or someone.

Just think about the whole range of metaphoric meanings we already got. And that’s just one case. This “asymmetrical void” thing has such a capacity of artistic language inside, it can show almost anything.

Revolt and struggle.

Grief and loneliness.

Positive changes.

Anything. Really.

Destroy it all

Now it’s time for a twist, because the pure excellence is not in building the system…

But in destroying it.

Hi, Elliot, so you wanted to be in the middle of everything like any normal person? Wanted your world to be symmetrical again?

Here you fucking are!

And here’s a close-up you didn’t have so long.

“You will miss your lonely paranoid void”, — that’s what Mr. Robot was trying to say with this pack of gory hallucinations.

And then you see Elliot sitting straight in the middle, ready for more pain and eating pills. He is trying to struggle and kill Mr. Robot. The straight beam behind emphasizes his intentions.

And you know what?

The foreshadow of his loss is here 40 minutes before finale.

That’s what I call nice frame composition. See you next time.