The Genius of Sam Esmail

Sam Esmail is an American film and television producer, director, and screenwriter who runs the production company Esmail Corp. He is best known as the writer and director of the television series Mr. Robot on USA Network, where he works as the Executive Producer. 

Esmail's work often centers on the themes of alienation, technology, and American society, all of which are present in his television series Mr Robot, which covers the experiences of a cyber-vigilante. Esmail examines the real life issues of hacking, corruption and privilege in American society and has even been known to say that the main character is a "thinly-veiled version" of himself. 

In a 2015 interview, Esmail explained, "I tend to write about alienated figures who can't connect with others and who are kind of distant from American culture. It's not something I am consciously doing but it's something that happens to be infused inside me because of my experience growing up in America." 

His own experiences and traits are fused into the main character who drives the story forward, allowing him to create a character of intense complexity, depth, and motivation. We learn more about Esmails main reasoning for the show's creation as we watch a team of hacktivists, hacker activists, known as fsociety on their mission to cancel all consumer debt by destroying the data of one of the largest corporations in the world. 

Esmail was born to Egyptian immigrant parents in Hoboken, New Jersey, and grew very interested in technology at a young age. He acquired his first computer when he was the age of nine and began computer programming a few years later. At NYU, Esmail worked in its computer lab before being put on academic probation for hacking emails. He then founded his own ISP software company, but later left his position as president and CEO to briefly attend Dartmouth College's creative writing program, later obtaining a Master of Fine Arts in directing. 

After struggling to find work and holding odd jobs, Esmail eventually began writing his own feature films. After some success, he was able to find representation in Hollywood and began working as a screenwriter. Esmail has received extensive praise for his direction of Mr Robot, the show having won a Golden Globe for Best Television Drama Series, a Peabody Award, and receiving six Emmy nominations.

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The way that Mr Robot is shot is key to understanding its characters and their agenda. 

In order to portray someone often confused, anxious and overwhelmed, creative editing styles that include jump cuts, varied lengths of takes, and shuffling scenes around within an episode, and sometimes even between episodes, occur often. Esmail is said to have encouraged experimentation in the editing as the personality of each character was explored. 

Each of the characters are so detailed and unique, and their traits can be further enhanced by how they are presented on screen through production. The main character, Elliot Alderson, wears the same outfit for the entirety of the show: black hoodie, black pants, black backpack. Only when the anonymous hacker is at work at his cybersecurity job is he forced to wear a button-down shirt, often wearing the hoodie on top. The purpose of this can easily be linked to a desire to be unknown, but as we learn more about the character, more reasons come to light. Not caring about societal expectations, a desire to be anonymous, and lack of self expression in a traditional sense, all play a role in why Elliot does what he does throughout his story. Shot from far away when representing the distance he craves from others, and close up when his emotional expression is important as to what will happen next in the story, all the angels play important roles in assuring who is dominant in a scene. 

While voice overs are often looked down upon in filmmaking, Esmial uses the technique in a unique way. By speaking directly to the audience, we get a window into Elliot's mind and learn how he really feels about what goes on around him, and learn things that his exterior would not tell us. Often starting episodes with the familiar saying, “hello friend”, speaking directly to the audience, as if we are integrated in the story and have say as to what he will do next. 

The shots between him and coworkers, as well as professionally upper ranked individuals, often entail a tilt upward at the other, and a downward shot toward Elliot, which express how he is seemingly below everyone else socially and professionally. These brightly lit scenes are usually followed by darkened ones of Elliot in his element: away from people, at his computer, center screen. By having the ability to continuously hack individuals' lives, he has an unknown power over others, a control that those around him are blind to. 

Taking place in New York City, shots often consist of Elliot walking through crowded streets, surrounded with the constant reminder of why he does what he does. Unable to escape from his impulses to hack those he knows, and those he wants to bring to justice, the setting of a large city acts as a reminder to “the top one percent of the top one percent, the ones who play god without permission”: the ones Elliot wishes to unveil, and how they negatively affect middle class people on a daily basis. 

Embarking on a mission mostly made up as they go along, the frenzied nature of the characters' emotions are presented in their behavior, as well as the manner in which scenes are shot in the show. Elliots scenes often consist of darkened shots, at strange angles and placing him in odd parts of the frame, showing his unhinged characteristics and tendencies. Since so much of the story is not what it seems, even to the characters themselves, scenes are crafted in odd ways. 

Scenes including the character of Mr Robot, are fixed in order to highlight the illusory sense from the character, being that the man called Mr Robot, is a figment of Elliot's mind, unbeknownst to Elliot, who perceives him as real. The sequence of complicated dialogue and action calls for uncommon, atypical forms of filming. 

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The desire to take down E Corp, and rid people of the irrational debt that holds them down and controls their lives is what drives Elliot Alderson throughout the series. 

Forever having felt like he has no control in his life, he presents himself to others as completely muted and repressed, when in reality he is arranging the single largest incident of wealth redistribution in history. The supporting characters, his team of hackers named fsociety, share the goal, but all for their own reasons, adding to the realism of the story, that these could be real people facing these real world issues presented in the series. 

The antagonists are usually described similarly as greedy, lying, corrupt, all in an effort to provide reasoning for why fsociety wishes to take down E Corp, the ones that hold citizens hostage to their debt. But this becomes complicated due to the fact that Elliot's thought process seems heavily influenced by paranoia and delusion, later revealing he has Dissociative Identity Disorder. Having a “main personality,” passive, dependent, and depressed, and an alternative personality named Mr Robot, that Elliot is not aware is really himself. When a personality is not in control, it dissociates or detaches and may be unaware of what is happening, causing him to have memory gaps and distress, only adding to the anxiety of his undercover life. 

Despite this, he is able to hold his lasting perspective on the world and what he can do in it. In the beginning, he started as a person who could only connect with people by hacking them, but as the show progresses, he slowly morphs into an individual who restarts old relationships and creates lasting new ones, while simultaneously trying to help those he can, however he can. 

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The themes of power and society each play a huge role in this series, being the story of an anti-consumerist, anti-establishment, and anti-capitalist spirit. 

In the series, power is centralized around one large corporation, E Corp, which Elliot calls Evil Corp, representing all corporations. The show highlights the effects that people at the top have on everyday people, debt holding them down and money controlling happiness in society. The show is unique in the way it does not present its villains as threatening silhouettes without faces, instead we learn about each of the E Corp leaders personally and why they make the choices they do, whether it be supporting their family, goals to display personal perfection, or simply a drive to be at the top. 

By showing motive and emotion behind the corporation's leaders, the series adds a layer of humanity and reasoning that other “good versus evil” shows leave out. The show shifts from Elliot and his team of hackers being at the bottom of the social rank to them holding the controls over what happens to the company and the freedom of its victims. 

Terms like gender, race, education, and class all play a small role in who has power in the series’s society, many of the strong minded leaders being male, female, trans, gay, it did not matter. What you defined yourself as had less importance over the impact you had over others lives, representing the diverse society that we are slowly moving toward in real life. The real source of someone's power lies in their motivation and the lengths one is willing to go to to see out their goals.

There is constant confrontation between these powers, whether it be Elliot fighting E Corp, fsociety battling Whiterose (a cyber-terrorist and head of the Dark Army), Dominique (an FBI field agent) who investigates the E Corp hack, Angela Moss (Elliot's childhood friend and a fellow employee at AllSafe) battling Phillip Price (the CEO of E Corp), who is responsible for covering up radiation from a power plant which contributed to the deaths of both Angela and Elliot's parents. Each character has something that drives them and relates back to where they lie both culturally and professionally. 

Eventually, E Corp is severely damaged by fsociety, Elliot stops the dark army from killing everyone he cares about, Angela finds out the CEO responsible for her mother's death is actually her biological father, and Elliot finds out that Mr Robot is actually an alternative personality in the form of his dead father, created from trauma in childhood that he has blocked out. This is important because he realizes that everything Mr Robot did was actually him, changing his idea of who he is and what he wants. All in all, culture and society, mixed with power and motive, keep the show running and act as a source for each of the characters' thoughts, feelings and behavior throughout the series. 

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The perspective of the show's creator Sam Esmail greatly reflects the characters and predicaments shown in Mr Robot by showcasing a world preoccupied with self rather than the collective good, specifically where multinational companies run, and ruin, the world. 

Although in the beginning, Elliot works for a cybersecurity corporation, a job forced upon him by his best friend Angela, his personal beliefs make it hard to resist the urge to take down the head of E Corp, and free people from the control he feels he is constantly denied. Represented in this fight are people of various demographics. Age, ethnicity, race, gender are spread out equally among the main characters, representing a diverse society where these terms don’t matter. A korean, transgender woman running the largest underground dark army, a caucasian young female FBI agent in charge of taking down fsociety, Elliot having both a caucasian and latino parent and running fsociety, and white middle aged men running E Corp, the demagraphics are spread out. 

The worldview perspective of both the show's creator, and Elliot, is surrounded around the idea of humanity/truth versus technology/falsity. By having Elliots main hobby being hacking those he knows in order to find out their secrets, obsessions, and communications, the show creates a main character who lies using technology, yet longs to be truthful with those he knows and connect to them, consistently unable to. When he has finished hacking a person, he wipes the data from his computer and stores it all on CDs kept in a binder, holding onto their lives the only way he knows how. 

By frequently breaking the fourth wall to converse with the audience, whom he refers to as his “imaginary friend,” he expresses the yearning he has to connect with others, but makes the reliability of events often unclear. So much of Elliot's actions are in response to what goes on in the world, so having a clear representation of Elliots emotions toward the globe, and his place within, it is crucial to the series’s continuous development. 

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By looking at Mr Robot from a critical perspective, it is easy to see the massive influence it can have on its audience. 

Being a well known, popular show, its ideals and themes are broadcasted into the minds of those who watch and can influence the way that they view a subject, or cause the springing ideas about topics one might never have considered before. While the show circles around a depressing topic, Esmial does a successful job of balancing sorrow and hope, providing multiple occasions of light amongst the darkness, as to not convince its viewers that the world is entirely a dark hole of corruption and pain. With most of Elliots issues including fighting oppression, drug addiction, mental health, estranged relationships and self doubt, these are counteracted with messages of liberation, recovery, therapy, reunion and finding self confidence. 

The show is original in the way it talks about corporate America and accomplishes a goal that not many series have been credited to have done. Esmial started a conversation about something he found to be a problem and inspired viewers to seek freedom in their own lives.