In Apple TV's Silo, You Might Recognise The Villain

Dystopia Rising

Apple TV's sci-fi thriller Silo has a disturbing parallel in the real world, writes Prahlad Srihari.

WHEN the Big Bad of Apple TV+’s dystopian drama Silo is revealed about three-quarters into its debut season, it doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, come as a big surprise. Not if you have been paying attention to the red flags from the start. Not if you have been reading the news of late. Not if you have been keeping track of the kind of villain who has grown more and more into Hollywood’s first choice. The series, based on Hugh Howey’s Wool saga, finds the last remnants of human civilisation living in a bunker deep underground. If humanity has retreated to an underground silo, it’s because the world above is a toxic and desiccated wasteland. Or at least, that’s what the surviving inhabitants have been led to believe across several generations.

Society has devolved into a walled city state ruled by a law enforcement agency with an iron fist and unspeakable secrets. But the man secretly pulling the strings from behind the scenes is Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins), the Head of IT who pretends to be a pawn while being the chief architect of every murderous scheme and despotic plot to prevent society from expanding upon its horizon. A man prepared to keep the peace and the people placated at whatever cost.

As Head of IT, Bernard has a special knack for hyper-surveillance. There is a whole team of operatives charged with monitoring any dissident activity via the CCTVs planted across the Silo and the spy cameras hidden behind wall mirrors in people’s homes. At Bernard’s behest is a SWAT-like secret police squad who can perform no-knock raids. As the season progresses, a series of devious stratagems, including political assassinations, allows Bernard to take office as interim mayor. All in the name of safeguarding the Silo. All reasoned with a twisted Spockian logic: “The needs of the many require the sacrifices of the few.” A trade-off he readily and willingly makes under the delusion it is for the Silo’s smooth functioning and humanity’s well-being. Robbins’ casting is ironically contrapuntal: his Bernard is the kind of oppressive authority figure in a place of confinement his Andy Dufresne (from Shawshank Redemption) would have rebelled against.

STREAM SILO

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

Why The Villain In Silo Is Alarmingly Familiar

By Prahlad Srihari

IF there is a kind of authority figure Bernard most resembles, it is the Elon Musks of our world. That rarefied breed of narcissists with a messiah complex wishing to remake the world according to their vision. Those self-styled visionaries who have turned technology from a democratising force to an autocratising one. Those unregulated capitalists who think their ideas are too big to fail. Those insufferable know-it-alls who are too short-sighted to know what’s best for humanity and may end up bringing us to ruin. Bernard is, in other words, a dystopian tech bro.

For Vulture last year, film critic Bilge Ebiri investigated how the tech bro has become a stock on-screen villain, as admiration for the likes of Musk curdled into anxiety over the years. Not only because the world has come to recognise the true toll of their disruptive innovations. But also because of the cult of personality that develops around them. Musk is a man-child pretending to be a rebel genius, who spent $44 billion on a social media platform in a futile exercise to get everyone to like him. He habitually spreads lies, once described the death of a Tesla driver as a “statistical inevitability”, and wants to colonise Mars and put microchips in our brains. Yet, he has his fans who remain convinced he is their saviour and press who oblige his every plea for attention, like they have all been brain-chipped already. Mark Zuckerberg leads a terrifying misinformation, data-mining and political destabilisation operation called Meta; Jeff Bezos has gone from cosplaying Lex Luthor to channelling Lex Luthor with Amazon partnering with ICE on its immigration crackdown; Tim Cook-led Apple has no qualms about siding with the Chinese Communist Party in opposition to Hong Kong’s democracy protestors. Between Ayn Rand advocates, tax dodgers and sanctuary providers to the internet’s bigots, there is a tech bro of every kind ready to be recast as villain on screen.

BEFORE Bernard, there was Mark Rylance’s Peter Isherwell in Don’t Look Up. Peter dresses like Jobs and becomes gripped by cosmic delusions like Musk, convinced he can mine an Earth-bound comet for minerals and save the planet at the same time. Describing Silicon Valley’s tech bros who inspired his character, Rylance had said, “These people have very high-minded ideas of what they’re doing. They don’t think they’re bad people, quite the contrary. You get that impression from Elon Musk. They think they’re going to save humanity. I think they’re dangerous.” The incompetence of Edward Norton’s tech bro Miles Bron in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Glass Onion brings to mind Musk’s own. The Jesus Christ-styled hair of Nick Offerman’s quantum computing overlord Forest in Alex Garland’s sci-fi series Devs evokes the messiah complex that drives a lot of tech CEOs. Oscar Isaac’s passive-aggressive recluse Nathan Bateman in Ex Machina, Chris Hemsworth’s sociopathic biotech bro Steve Abnesti in Spiderhead, Riz Ahmed’s shady biotech bro Carlton Drake in Venom are all more or less variations of the same archetype. Even when the tech bro is sold to us as a hero, he can appear like a right douchebag. Case in point: the arms dealer we know as Tony Stark/Iron Man who brags about having successfully “privatised world peace”.

Though Silo initially misleads us into thinking the head of security Robert Sims (Common) or the head of Judicial Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie) is the Big Bad, the feeling of both being under someone else’s thumb grows more palpable with each episode. While Sims and Meadows seem like temporary custodians of power, Bernard gives the impression of someone whose designs are more permanent. Bernard is a man with a blinkered view on how society should be run and who should run it. “The Founders knew someone would have to make the hard decisions to keep our Silo alive. A person that possessed the knowledge, the intelligence, the information about everything that happens here,” he explains. “Lucky me.”

THE Silo is a self-sustaining fishbowl and factory of sorts connected by a single large staircase. Its architectural design is purposeful. Walls compartmentalise information and resources. Levels, 144 of them, enforce a strict hierarchy, with miners and maintenance workers at the bottom and the ruling classes overseeing them from above. Keeping everyone divided ensures the hierarchy can’t be easily overthrown. Keeping everyone in the blind ensures they are unaware of the shackles that bind them. The truth, Bernard believes, could destabilise the entire structure and doom mankind.

Life inside the Silo is all its inhabitants have ever known. Where they live, what they learn, who gets to reproduce — everything is determined according to the laws written in The Pact. Indoctrination runs so deep just about no one questions what lies beyond. As every book of history has been burnt and every bit of data wiped clean, the people have no frame of reference about the surface world. The only view of it is projected on the walls, which may or may not be a simulation. Declaring the forbidden desire to go outside will get you sent outside, where certain death awaits. Curiosity can thus be lethal. When the protagonist Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson), a mechanical engineer who is picked as the next sheriff, starts asking one too many questions about a series of murders and the conspiracy tying them all, Bernard pretends to be her ally in an effort to misguide her quest for the truth. When she gets close to the finish line despite his best efforts, he sentences her to go outside.

AS The X-Files suggested, the truth is out there. Literally in this case. As part of the sentence, those sent outside are asked to clean the toxic smudge off the camera that shows the world outside to those inside. Even those who refuse to follow this ritual end up doing it upon seeing the world outside isn’t the desolate wasteland as warned but a lush landscape. The real truth is revealed in the season finale however, where Juliette steps out to learn the lush landscape is in fact an illusion designed to urge those sent outside to “clean” and keep those inside from wishing to go out.

Therein lies a cautionary lesson for all those eager to believe the utopian promises of tech bros. If we get caught in the grip of these false prophets claiming to have humanity’s best interests at heart and continue to believe the problems caused by tech today will bring about a better tomorrow, we may be staring down a dark and desolate road. The Musks and Peter Thiels are already insulating themselves against a societal collapse they had a big role in accelerating. Needless to say, all their doomsday prepping does not factor in the rest of us. Come doomsday or dystopia, don’t count on being provided with an escape hatch.

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