Murderbot as a ‘Cringe’ Litmus Test for the Audience (a.k.a., we are culturally the Corporation Rim)
One of the more interesting things I’ve seen in discussions of ‘Murderbot’ are how many people are not happy that the show made the Preservation team more explicitly hippies. After all, per our current cultural zeitgeist, hippies are silly, over-earnest, over-feeling, over-EVERYTHING. Why is this team of scientists holding hands and humming? Why are they taking breaks in the middle of a tense situation to reassure a colleague that they love him? Why do they stand around playing music and dancing during their downtime? Why did the show make them “Cringe”?
And that got me thinking again about the current cultural antipathy toward sincerity and openness. People who are seen as open and sincere beyond a fairly narrow scope of emotional expression are treated as deeply weird, off-putting, and most importantly for this conversation, as INCOMPETENT. You can’t be goofy and competent. You can’t believe in the power of love and friendship and holding hands and taking a dance break, and still be a good scientist. You can’t have one of the unsexy sorts of mental health problems (panic disorder) and be a good leader. In our current cultural moment, you have to be Cool. You have to be unaffected by both the horrors of the world and the day-to-day joys.
I think that a lot of people see themselves in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’, and a lot of them understandably love the very anticapitalist tone of the books. And they wanted Preservation to be Cool Space Communists. Hypercompetent at all times, serious, without flaw. Because any personal flaws might be taken as flaws in their cultural and political leanings, right? And we can’t have silliness or goofiness or fun in our Communist Utopia, or people won’t take us seriously.
But to me, the tension is so much better, so much more real and human and FUN. And it makes the audience question their own implicit biases as much as SecUnit is going to have to contemplate its implicit biases. This team is comprised of highly talented scientists from a culture that values emotions and, yes, activities that we the audience have been culturally trained to think are Cringe. They do have a humming consensus circle—so that anyone in the team can have veto power over a decision that has major ramifications not only for a research project, but for their own ethics. They do like to play music and dance when they’ve got some free time, even if that music would be considered embarrassing or offputting to outsiders. They do openly love one another and support one another, even in—no, especially in—challenging times. It’s good to have that tension, both to tell the story and to give the characters and the AUDIENCE an emotional and thematic arc.
Let’s use Dr. Mensah as a the best example so far of this tension. Mensah is a good leader. In every scene where she’s with the group, she’s the heart of it. She’s always weighing the fears, the thoughts, the feelings, and the arguments of her friends to come to a decision. She doesn’t feel like Gurathin’s right about not trusting SecUnit, but she’s also very aware that he knows more about the Corporation Rim than she does, and that his arguments, while rooted in his fears, are rational. So she ends up deciding that they’ll leave the SecUnit behind for their mission.
And it’s the wrong call. Going out to the dark site in the map without the SecUnit almost gets her killed. But her decision to climb the scree pile alone makes sense, because she doesn’t want to further endanger Bharadwaj, and if she doesn’t climb up there with her equipment, they won’t get important information about what’s going on with their survey data. And yes, while she’s climbing she has another panic attack. But she keeps climbing through it. Hell, she even takes a moment to encourage the teamwork between SecUnit and Gurathin, because that’s an important part of being their leader. And, yes, they both roll their eyes because they still don’t like one another. But the important thing is that she’s created this sense of openness, of acceptance, of love.
Being a good leader doesn’t mean making the right call all the time. It means learning from both right calls and wrong calls. It means creating an environment where people can be wrong, and learn from their mistakes, and try again to get it right. And it works! Gurathin may roll his eyes, but he also has the space to apologize for getting it wrong. He has the space to fuck up and try again. And that is created by her encouragement, by her openness, by her caring even when it becomes embarrassing to a man raised in our culture the Corporation Rim, where open emotion is something to smirk at.
And when she’s alone, Mensah falls apart. When no one can see her, she has panic attacks, because things are starting to go pear-shaped for these people she loves. Because one of her dear friends nearly died, and she wasn’t there, and apparently that could happen at any time because their maps are faulty, and the only real rescue is an untrustworthy bond company that is a week away at best. That’s a perfect recipe for a panic attack, but she hides them because she knows what she needs to be for her friends and colleagues. She is the leader, and damned if she’s going to let something like her panic disorder stop her from doing that.
That’s not incompetent, that’s incredibly courageous. Her bravery lies in being afraid and pushing through, not being flawless from the off. The bravery and the competence and the things that eventually are going to win Murderbot over to loving these humans ARE their flaws and the fact that they don’t let those flaws stop them from trying to be the best people they can be, while also being true to a culture of being open and loving to the point that they can come across, to the jaded construct or audience member, as Cringe.
I think we’re going to see more and more of that as the show unfolds. We’ve only just laid the groundwork, and established the initial impressions of all the characters. They are being set up for arcs, and by electing to let the Preservation team be more out-there, more earnest, more Cringe, they’re setting the audience up for an arc too.
Anyway, loving the show, can’t wait for the DeltFall storyline to kick off tonight. And I love this crew being highly-competent space hippies with realistic human flaws, who love and support one another. In an unrelentingly Cool, Bleak, and Edgy television landscape, it really is nice to have kind characters be free to be their kooky selves without the show judging them for it.
