Tyrell Wellick: The perfect executive who strangled a woman on a rooftop

In the seventh episode of the first season of Mr. Robot (Sam Esmail; USA Network, 2015), “eps1.6_v1ew-s0urce.flv”, Phillip Price announces at a party that Scott Knowles will be the new chief technology officer of E Corp. Tyrell Wellick, who was counting on the job, seduces Knowles’s wife, Sharon, and goes up with her to the rooftop of the building. They kiss. Then he puts his hands round her neck and squeezes until she stops breathing. When he realizes she is dead, he is shaken and leaves the rooftop. Until that night Tyrell had been a young, brilliant senior vice president of technology at E Corp, the corporation the protagonist, Elliot Alderson, wants to destroy. He is Swedish, elegant, attractive and married to Joanna, a cold and calculating woman who pushes him to rise at any price. Tyrell controls everything: he rehearses his lines, looks after his body, appears impeccable. But that control has cracks: he pays a homeless man to let him beat him until he has vented. The murder makes him a suspect and pushes him to join Elliot and fsociety. For the rest of the series he works with the Dark Army on Stage 2, the attacks on E Corp. He dies in the final season. A man who controls every gesture and loses it all in a few seconds is the case Roy Baumeister’s self-regulation failure model tries to explain.

// The theorySelf-control that runs out

The psychologist Roy Baumeister and his collaborators developed from the 1990s a model of self-control as a limited resource. According to this theory, known as the strength model or ego depletion, resisting temptations, controlling emotions or maintaining an image draw on a common energy. When that energy is depleted, self-regulation capacity drops, and the person becomes more prone to aggression, substance use or impulsive behavior. In Losing Control (1994), Baumeister, Heatherton and Tice described how small self-regulation failures can link up in a spiral of loss of control.

// The subjectA man who rehearsed himself

Martin Wallström plays Tyrell as a character both frightening and pathetic. He wants to be a god, a visionary leader, and seeks in Elliot someone who will recognize him as an equal. His relationship with Joanna is a mixture of devotion and submission: she decides and he executes. Beneath the surface is an insecure man, desperate to be somebody, who feels alive only when he crosses limits. The series gradually turns him into an increasingly lost fugitive, serving projects he does not control.

Two episodes before the rooftop, the fifth of the season, Tyrell shows Elliot that he knows he framed Terry Colby, the E Corp executive blamed for the hack. What interested him was not the crime but its motive, and he judges it with the contempt of someone who believes he is above his own impulses:

The irony is the whole case. The man who looks down on revenge as an ordinary weakness kills a woman out of resentment at a lost promotion, and it is not even a plan: it is a collapse. His end has the same shape. In the fourth episode of the final season, wounded in a forest, Tyrell tells Elliot he is just going for a walk and goes off to die alone, with no one to perform for.

// The crackA model under debate

The ego-depletion model has suffered a replication crisis over the last decade. A large study coordinated across 23 laboratories (Hagger and others, 2016) did not find the effect the original studies had described, and the debate over whether self-control really works as a limited resource remains open. Applying the model to Tyrell is useful as a metaphor, but its experimental basis is today more fragile than it seemed.

Moreover, explaining Sharon’s murder solely through a self-control failure leaves out what makes it possible: ambition, narcissism and Joanna’s pressure. Many people lose control without killing anyone. Self-control explains the moment, not the prior disposition.