Reading Westworld 303014514X, 9783030145149

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Reading Westworld Edited by Alex Goody · Antonia Mackay

Reading Westworld

Alex Goody · Antonia Mackay Editors

Reading Westworld

Editors Alex Goody Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

Antonia Mackay Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-14514-9 ISBN 978-3-030-14515-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935557 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Ross Henry/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by eStudio Calamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Jasmine, without whom this collection would never have been envisaged; and for Fitzgerald, Gatsby and Atticus, whose feline ways meant the collection regularly required additional edits.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay 2

These Violent Delights: Navigating Westworld as “Quality” Television 23 Kim Wilkins

3

‘That Which Is Real Is Irreplaceable’: Lies, Damned Lies, and (Dis-)simulations in Westworld 43 Will Slocombe

4

Factitive Maps: Manipulating Spaces and Characters in Vast Narratives 61 Giulia Taurino and Sara Casoli

5

Westworld and the Pursuit of Meaningful Play 79 Andra Ivănescu

6

Music as a Source of Narrative Information in HBO’s Westworld 97 Kingsley Marshall

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Contents

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The Frontier Myth of Memory, Dreams, and Trauma in Westworld 119 Carol Erwin

8

Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in Westworld 141 Sherryl Vint

9

Flies in the Face: Entomology and the Mechanics of Becoming-Living in Westworld 161 Kristen Tregar

10 Westworld’s Archideology and the Impossibility of Freedom 181 Antonia Mackay

11 A Mere Instrument of Production: Representing Domestic Labour in Westworld 199 Sadek Kessous 12 Escaping the Robot’s Loop? Power and Purpose, Myth and History in Westworld’s Manufactured Frontier 221 Dustin Abnet

13 I-n-I Re-member Now: A Rastafari Reading of HBO’s Westworld 239 Milt Moise

14 The Theme Park of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld 255 Alex Goody 15 Yul Brynner’s Hat and Time Travel in the Hyperreal 277 Leander Reeves

16 Epilogue 295 Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay

Index 305

Notes

on

Contributors

Dustin Abnet  is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University. He teaches courses in popular and consumer cultures, theories and methods, sports and gaming cultures, and technocultures. Broadly interested in the relationship among technology, play, power, and identity, his current research examines the history of robots in America from the eighteenth century to the present. He would specifically like to thank Nicole Kozdron, Leila Zenderland, Adam Golub, Courtney Beachner, and the students in his Technocultures course for their assistance with this piece. Sara Casoli  is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Bologna. Her doctoral thesis explores character development in the contemporary TV narratives. Her prevailing research interests concern the analysis of televisual long-lasting and trans-medial characters with a narratological approach, seriality studies, and new formalism. Carol Erwin is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Languages and Literature Department at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico. Her current research projects are twofold: she examines how violence is gendered and includes examinations of the working classes in Punch illustrations and in Victorian novels. She has recently published an article on Jamaica Kincaid and H.D. in Watchung Review and has forthcoming publication in NineteenthCentury Gender Studies. ix

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Alex Goody  is a Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Oxford Brookes University. She has previously taught at the Leeds University and Falmouth University. She teaches primarily on modernism, women’s writing, technology, American literature and culture, and on twentieth-century literature. Her publications include Modernist Articulations (2007), Technology, Literature and Culture (2011), the Modernist Poetry: Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements (2019). Andra Ivănescu  is a Lecturer in Game Studies at Brunel University London. She completed her Ph.D. in video game music and nostalgia with the Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. She is a game scholar and a musicologist, and her research interests include genre, music for the moving image, and nostalgia. Andra is also co-editor of Book 2.0 and the author of Popular Music in the Nostalgia Video Game: The Way It Never Sounded, part of the Palgrave Studies in Audio-Visual Culture series. Sadek Kessous is a Teaching Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University. His Ph.D. was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and was awarded by Newcastle University in July 2017. His research considers the interface of fiction, society and economic logics in American culture of the past four decades. He is currently preparing a monograph on literary representations of economic social relations in neoliberal America. Antonia Mackay is a Teaching Fellow of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Her research is focused on American Literature and Culture, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature and Cultural and Media Studies. She is particularly interested in the post-war period, and architectural and geographical studies relating to space and place. She is also co-editor of a surveillance cultural studies series with Palgrave Macmillan. Kingsley Marshall  is Head of Film in the School of Film and Television at Falmouth University. His research and practice is primarily orientated around the production of short and feature films, and the use of sound design and music in film and television. In 2018, he contributed to Listen to the Sounds: Music and Sound Design in Twin Peaks, Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. In addition, he produced the short film Backwoods (Mackfall, 2018) and composed the score for Hard, Cracked

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the Wind (Jenkin, 2018). He is currently writing on the cinematic representation of asymmetrical warfare for the Handbook on Violence in Film and Media, due for publication in 2019. Milt Moise is currently in his fourth year of Doctoral studies, at the University of Florida; Milt’s dissertation project explores the aesthetics of bipolar representation in contemporary American fiction and television. He has published essays on the epistolary form and the Anglophone Caribbean writer, and the fiction of Garth St. Omer in The Journal of West Indian Literature and with Peepal Tree Press. Leander Reeves is a Senior Lecturer in Publishing and Subject Coordinator for Publishing Media Undergraduate Programme at Oxford Brookes University. Her main area of teaching centres around consumer magazines and culture. Leander has published on celebrity and Princess Diana and can often be heard on BBC Radio Oxford discussing contemporary cultural issues. She is currently undertaking a Ph.D. where she is mapping the source of the hyperreal. Will Slocombe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool where he currently teaches American and British literature, especially post-1945 and contemporary literature, and science fiction. He is co-director of the Olaf Stapledon Centre for Speculative Futures and Director of the Science Fiction Studies M.A. pathway. He is currently working on his second monograph, Emergent Patterns: Artificial Intelligence and the Structural Imagination (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2019), on representations of Artificial Intelligence and the ways in which such representations function. Giulia Taurino  is currently studying for her doctorate in Media Studies at the University of Bologna and University of Montreal (joint program), with a project on the anthology form in television seriality. Her research interests focus on narrative forms and formats in television, global media flows, nonlinear distribution. She currently collaborates with the research group Labo Télé (University of Montreal) on a project for implementing data analysis and visualisation in television studies. Kristen Tregar is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California. Kristen has worked in a variety of animal-related positions including as a Wild Animal Keeper with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Prior to relocating to California, Kristen taught at an independent school

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in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her research interests include animal studies, applied theatre, constructed languages, political performance, police and military action and performances of violence. She has two rescued dogs and she rides, competes, and foxhunts with her horses, Rhiannon and Torchwood. Sherryl Vint is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television from 2009–2018 and is currently an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies. She has published widely on science fiction, including Animal Alterity (2010) and Science Fiction and Culture Theory: A Reader (2015). She is currently working on The Promissory Imagination, a book about speculative representation in an era of the commodification of biology and the biopolitical management of life. Kim Wilkins is a Sessional Academic at the University of Sydney. She is the author of American Eccentric Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and the co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). She has published articles on American indie cinema in Film Criticism, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Sydney Studies in English, Texas Studies in Literature and Languages, and contributed a chapter to Peter Kunze’s The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon (Palgrave, 2014).

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Story Line Builder Template from the Westworld Corporate Guidebook 66 Fig. 7.1 Dolores and the Man in Black, Episode 10 “The Bicameral Mind” 132 Fig. 7.2 Dolores and the Man in Black, Episode 1 “The Original” 132 Fig. 9.1 Armistice and the fly, “The Bicameral Mind” 174 Fig. 13.1 Maeve and Dolores, “The Adversary” 242 Fig. 14.1 Patchwork Girl “her” 267

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay

In 2016, we were both researching the role of technology within very different academic contexts. Alex was working on gendered forms of technology specific to modernism such as those in radio, cinema and advertising, whilst Antonia was working on a new surveillance studies series, researching biodata and the role of the lens. How we both came to be interested in HBO’s Westworld is perhaps less surprising than these disparate research areas may first suggest. Despite our various academic specialisms, we have often found that our interests in culture frequently collide. We both possessed a fascination with all things X Files, an affection for Supernatural and a weakness for Stranger Things. Gradually, our mutual obsession with Westworld began to surface at informal ­gatherings—at birthdays, drinks, celebrations—and then more formally, at meetings, in staff offices and over coffee. Whilst we both work within the discipline of English Literature, we share a (not-so-secret) f­ascination with the interaction between literature and its broader culture. What began as a weekly conversation about the show’s references to American

A. Goody (*) · A. Mackay  Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Mackay e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_1

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culture and history, literary intertextuality and posthumanism, quickly turned into a passion project, culminating in this collection’s creation. To use the words of the Man in Black (played by Ed Harris) “there’s a deeper level to this game” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1), and it is our intention that the chapters collected in this volume disclose these buried levels.

Robots, Androids and Cyborgs We write this introduction at a point in human history when the robotic and the human are frequently entangled and even intimate. Recent television documentaries such as Sex Robots and Us (BBC Three, 2018), My Sex Robot (Netflix, 2010) and The Sex Robots Are Coming (Channel 4, 2017) speak of our increasing gadgetisation and normalisation of the robotic. Yet, there is nothing new in our reliance upon the robotic, as the Turing Test (1950), Manfred Clynes’ cyborg (or cybernetic organism) (1956) and Ted Nelson’s coining of the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 (Nelson 1965), indicate. The robotic, certainly from a western context, extends much further back than our recent technological advances would suggest, as far, perhaps, as the mythical automata of Ancient Greece and Rome, or the Golem of Jewish folklore. The Tin Woodman of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and Nikola Tesla’s radio controlled electric boat (dubbed the “telautomaton”) further suggest the presence of the robotic in the early part of the twentieth century, whilst the term “robot” was first used in a play by Karel Čapek in 1920. Robots, it would appear, are part of our much wider conception of culture, and are not only present in our history, but actively appear to have shaped it. Certainly today’s incarnation of the “sex robot” bears little resemblance to the robotic arms and industrial robots of the mid-century, and yet, there has always been, as Kate Devlin argues, a gendered element in our creation and use of the robotic. Devlin’s Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (2018) charts the “rise of the machine” and focuses on the role that technology (specifically, robotic technology) plays in our contemporary moment. For our purposes here, it is useful to adopt her definition of “robot” and “automata” where “robot has its roots in an eastern European term for servitude. It comes from the Czech robotnik meaning ‘forced worker’ and from robata, which describes drudgery” (51).

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A distinction between “robot” and the more general terms of technology is an important one to make before reading the following chapters, for much of what Westworld does is question our comprehension of the distinction between the robotic and the human. When considered under Devlin’s terms, there appears to be little separating the human worker from the robotic. Further, Devlin’s definition of automata is worth bearing in mind, where “automata are machines that give the appearance of being self-powered and self-driven working independently… in fact, they are mechanistic, performing repetitive pre-set actions that might seem self-selected but are merely automated” (46). What becomes clear here is the manner in which Westworld’s robotics are distinct from automata— they are embodied and capable of performing in ways which exceed preset actions. It is also worth considering the difference between “robot” and “android”, where the OED definition of android is “a robot with human appearance”. Given the human-like appearance of many of the key figures discussed here (such as Dolores Abernathy played by Evan Rachel Wood and Maeve Millay, played by Thandie Newton), this collection standardises the use of “android” rather than “robot” when referring to the Hosts of the park. It is also worth considering a final term that is used in this collection—the cyborg. According to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1991) the cyborg is distinct from android and robot in as much as it rejects the boundaries between human/animal and human/machine; rather “the cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family… the cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (1991, 151). For Haraway then, the cyborg cannot easily be defined as either organic or mechanical, but rather represents a “hybrid of machine and organism” (1991, 149)— part robotic and part organic. Whilst many of the chapters contained in this collection speak of the Hosts as android, some make reference to possible cyborgisation of human visitors at the hands of technology, and hence, to Haraway’s definition and its explicitly political inflection. For Haraway, crucially, the cyborg deconstructs not only the distinction between human and machine but also those related dualisms that are central to the construction of the white, male humanist subject as the norm. Thus, a figuration such as the cyborg undoes those dualisms

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“systematic to the logics of and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others” (177). In showing a way out of “the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (181) Haraway’s cyborg chimes with the android narratives of Westworld that evince a consistent interest in challenging, not only the stereotypes of gender in its women Hosts, but with its ethnically diverse Hosts— Maeve, Hector Escaton (played by Rodrigo Santoro), Akecheta (played by Zahn McClarnon), Miyamoto Musashi (played by Hiroyuki Sanada), Akane (played by Rinko Kiuchi), and so on—confronting the reductive racialisation of othered bodies. Returning to Devlin’s sex robots (or “robosexology” as she terms it), she refers to the normalisation of the robotic in our contemporary moment as producing robots who are “situated” (45) where “they are part of the everyday environment that rapidly changes around them, and they can respond to, and detect and act on those changes. Their presence in that physical environment means they have a body, through which they experience new information” (45). Such integration of the robotic, has, according to her, resulted in an embodiment which unsurprisingly leads to the production of sex robots. Ridley Scott’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Blade Runner (1982) features imagined embodiments of the female robotic form for pleasure. Pris (played by Darryl Hannah) is a Nexus 6 replicant whose operational function is that of a “basic pleasure model,” whilst the other renegade female Nexus-6 Zhora (played by Joanna Cassidy) works as an exotic dancer. As replicants or organic androids, they are embodied in an attractive female form whose role is to entertain and play the part of object/slave for paying customers. Alicia Vikander’s role in the 2014 Ex-Machina as Ava is also that of an AI built as a humanoid robot in desirable, female form; her seduction of Caleb (played by Domhnall Gleeson) is both a ruse to enable her escape and a demonstration of her (non-human) intelligence. Such gender-specific embodiment of robots also extends further back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and the threateningly seductive Robot-Maria. Before that, Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve Future (The Future Eve) (1886) imagines a fictional Thomas Edison creating an android who will offer his friend, Lord Ewald, the ideal replacement for his disappointingly bourgeois lover, Alicia Clary. Sex and robots have clearly then co-existed in our culture, and yet, there is growing unease with how the increasingly life-like pleasure models of today simulate “situated” women.

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Devlin’s account of the uncanny articulations of the Z-Onedoll Silicone Robot Love Doll indicates something of the gendered requirements driving current developments in sex robots: The hand comes back into shot with a thermometer which is held against the body surface, the temperature read-out showing 34.8 degrees centigrade. All the while, the recording of the moaning continues in the background; panting, gasping, groaning towards faked orgasm. The doll remains utterly motionless. (151)

As embodied robots who look like women, there is increasing disquiet about the object/subject implications of sex robots who mimic real women’s bodies and behaviour (short of consent and action), sex robots that “are built to serve the male gaze” (157). Such trepidation over the normalisation of sex robots is evidenced by the Campaign Against Sex Robots (https://campaignagainstsexrobots.org/) which, launched in 2015, voices the potentially troubling consequences of forming relationships with machines where automated substitutes for women with “penetrable orifices” arguably promote objectification of the female body. Rebecca Solnit recently wrote an article for The Guardian newspaper which discussed the role of capitalism in sex work, where “sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity” (Solnit 2018). By viewing sex robots as objects and further, by likening the act of sex under these terms as an extension of capitalism, we begin to view the Hosts of Westworld as akin to, not only robotnik (the robotic workers), but also capitalist sex slaves. Indeed, the female androids of the park are, as many chapters here point out, both part of the Delos drive for consumerism and part of our contemporary culture where even the (robotic) body becomes an object to be consumed. Perhaps the most troubling part of Devlin’s research is her point about the robots’ owners where there is “no belief that these dolls are human. They are human-like replicas and they are welcomed as that; they are given names, personalities and backstories… it’s like having a pet” (Devin 2018, 158). Does the removal of so-called “human” qualities enable the use of robots for the purposes of pleasure? It begs the question: if these dolls are “pets”, where does the love end and the objectification begin? As Solnit writes, “under capitalism, sex might as well be with dead objects” (2018).

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Westworld, Culture and the Posthuman Much of what has been written in the following chapters has been influenced by discussion from online platforms such as Reddit, FanForum. com and WestworldForum.com; these virtual spaces are home to theories about future plotlines, current narrative arcs and possible explanations for the often-tangled timelines present in Jonathan Nolan’s and Lisa Joy’s show. Whilst the show’s viewers have sought refuge in online platforms, this presents a point worthy of commentary in itself, for much of what undergirds the show is precisely the role of virtuality, authenticity and notions of personal autonomy. It is also worth noting here, that not only does Westworld inspire online engagement, not least through the “official” Delos websites https://delosdestinations.com and https://discoverwestworld.com/, it is now being used as a cultural reference in itself. The recent release of the new PlayStation 4 and XBox game Red Dead Redemption 2 has been likened by those reviewing it, to a version of Westworld (see beyondwestworld.com and forbes.com). Justin Timberlake’s music video for “Filthy” (2018), also appears to harness the show’s central concept, blurring the line between robotic and organic. The former is perhaps less surprising given that it was reported by Variety that “at the San Diego Comic Con in July 2017, Nolan and Joy revealed that they pulled inspiration from the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption video games” (Carras 2018). Linking the show to virtual spaces is something this collection frequently attests to, recognising the problematic blurring between “real” and “virtual” that occurs throughout the show. In A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (2018) Brendan Keogh argues that “we intermingle with videogames. We poke them, and they in turn poke us back” (4), and several of the chapters contained in Reading Westworld argue for the “poking back” of the game world set up by Delos, where the blurring of real life and gameplay is further entrenched. As a game space, the park sets up the opportunity, not only for Guests to become imbedded in gameplay, but also for the Hosts where “to play a videogame is both to perform and to consume, both to act and to spectate, both to experience and to interpret. Videogame play is an embodied textuality” (50). In accepting such constant smudging of distinctions raised by the show (where all might be active and passive; all might be performers and customers), additional definitions are required. The posthuman is a term used fairly frequently in the following pages

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and, for a range of contemporary theorists, the posthuman dethrones the hierarchy of human consciousness, placing the human body and self as caught between machine and technology. The human subject is articulated with technology so that “there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 1999, 3). These reimagined cultural and theoretical definitions of human and machine speak to a literary tradition rooted in science fiction, where robot, android, human and cyborg proliferate and complicate the subject/object division. As has been noted by some contributors, the role of the piano in Westworld makes reference to that of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), where the staple of the park’s Mariposa Saloon points to a world where almost everything is mechanised. In Vonnegut’s novel, humanity is liberated from labour by robotic workers but Player Piano does not represent a love affair with technology and, rather than producing a utopia, the ever-increasing introduction of technology at the expense of human labour, results in a dystopia where “those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis” (Vonnegut 1952, 60). Machines and systems so often serve, according to science fiction writers of the twentieth century, as a precursor to humanity’s downfall. Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? furthers the problematic relationship humans have with advancing technology; only for Dick, humans and androids are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another, muddying the apparent division between organic and mechanic. As the android Luba Luft asks of Rick Deckard, “Maybe there was once a human who looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don’t know” (Dick 1968, 26). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? progresses Vonnegut’s more ominous robotic narrative, to a point where the demarcation of “human” and “humanoid” are nearly undetectable; as the film adaptation of Dick’s novel attests, “more human than human is our motto” (Blade Runner). Further examples of the blurring between human and mechanised occur in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) where cyberspace exists as an alternative space to “plug” yourself into. Not unlike our current consolidation of virtual reality (such as VR PS4, the Oculus Rift and Samsung GEAR), Gibson’s version enables Case and his street samurai companion, Molly Millions, to access and engage with

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(and unsuccessfully attempt to destroy) two powerful AIs. What is of note in Neuromancer is the way in which selfhood and virtual space interact with one another, resulting in a sealing “away behind our money, going inward, generating a seamless universe of self” (Gibson 1984, 173). This is not unlike the manner in which Delo’s parks offer a virtual space where the self can be realised. Whilst the Hosts of Westworld do not fit Gibson’s version of AI, the Westworld park implicitly refers to the cyberspace world of Neuromancer one where, notably, money facilitates the “going inward” and offering up of one’s self to a space of virtuality where “symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information” (Gibson 1984, 52) are accessible to those willing to pay. When William Gibson (with Tom Maddox) wrote a second X Files episode for Season Seven (their episode “Kill Switch”, about AI and cyberspace transcendence, aired as Episode 11, Season 5, 1998) he chose to explore the gendered dynamics of technology, cyberspace and video gaming. In “First Person Shooter” (Season 7, Episode 13, 2000). Fox Mulder and Dana Scully find themselves investigating the mysterious deaths of gamers inside a virtual reality game space in an episode which satirises both the hypermasculine performativity of the First Person Shooter gaming format, and the simplistic equation too often drawn between onscreen and real-world violence. The killer Mulder and Scully are pursuing appears not to have been written into the game and, not unlike Neuromancer’s Molly Millions, manifests as an eroticised, latexclad version of a cyber female ([Scully]: “An immature, hormonal fantasy”) who, in a final show-down with Scully in Level 2 of the game world, appears as a sexy-killer-cowgirl in a typical Western setting. This particular episode of X Files thus explores the eroticisation of female androids and cyberwomen, the hackneyed scenarios of gaming, but also the gender politics of technological, virtual worlds with Scully’s reservations about the “testosterone frenzy” and “gratuitous virtual mayhem” of video gaming in opposition to Mulder’s enthusiastic embrace of it as an “outlet for certain impulses … that the more civilising effects of society fail to provide for”. This gender dynamic is ironically reversed at the episode’s climax where Scully blasts away at the virtual killer with her very large gun whilst Mulder feebly struggles to open the door out of the game world. The potential parallels between “First Person Shooter” and Westworld call to mind not only the manner in which the park could be considered

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as a video game, but also the implicit gender stereotyping at work in the show’s characterisation and the dynamics of the theme park. Many of those who visit as Guests are men (William played by Jimmi Simpson, Logan, played by Ben Barnes, for instance) and much of what the park has to offer is premised upon reductive male fantasies—the cowboy violence, the brothel, the damsel in distress. As Scully says to Mulder, “Dressing up like high-tech warriors to play a futuristic version of cowboys and Indians? What kind of moron gets his ya-yas out like that… that must be why men feel the great need to blast the crap out of stuff”. If Westworld is a game, it is one where gendered identity appears biased towards male fantasies for Guests and female subordination for Hosts. In this light it seems inevitable, like Scully’s show-down in “First Person Shooter”, that it is the women Hosts (Dolores and Maeve) who enact a violent retribution for the fantasies played out on their android bodies. As mentioned above, much of the following chapters’ analyses are underpinned by posthuman theory that explores the “interconnection between humans and non-human factors and agents” (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018, 2); it is here that a redress to the reductive gendering and hierarchies of human–technology interactions can be initiated. N. Katherine Hayles, for example, presents a posthumanism in which the limits of human being, and our inevitable entanglement with machines, makes us aware of our own embodiments alongside the impossibility of the sovereign human subject and his ideologies of dominance. She thus proposes a stance that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognises and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (1999, 5)

Whilst many of the fictional and screen texts discussed above point to the negative possibilities of technologising our bodies, Hayles adopts a more positive position where engaging with technology might take us beyond the previous binaries and categorisations of subjectivity. Posthuman embodiment exceeds existing notions of the corporeal and produces alternate versions of the “merger of the human with the technological” (Braidotti 2013, 92) which refuse transcendence and

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dominance in favour of forms of “becoming and transformation” (91). For Rosi Bradotti, therefore, “the posthuman predicament is such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories, for instance between the organic and the inorganic, the born and the manufactured, flesh and metal, electronic circuits and organic nervous systems” (89). In her recent work, Hayles has pointed further to the dethroning of the sovereign humanist subject, exploring how “human and technical systems are engaged in complex symbiotic relationships” in which “cognition” should be recognised “not as ability unique to human … but rather as a capability present in many non-human life-forms and, increasingly, a vast array of intelligent devices” (2017, 216). In recognising and valuing the existence of non-anthropocentric cognition Hayles points to human consciousness as “increasingly interdependent upon and entwined with intelligent technologies in cognitive assemblages” (2017, 216). With such definitions in mind, the posthuman can be read as intricately woven into the narratives at the heart of Westworld offering a redefinition of what it means to be “human” and also, in turn, what it means to be non-human and/or mechanised. Postulating more than corporeal boundaries and cognitive functions which end with the human body, posthumanism frames this collection’s analysis of Westworld and the intermingling of the organic and the mechanical. In addition to the refashioning of the body in posthumanism, these chapters also note the concept of seriation, where texts can offer passageways for ideas to enter into wider culture. Many of the chapters contained in Reading Westworld speak of the value of serialisation, the necessity of narrative arcs to embody android consciousness and the manner in which the organic and the mechanical interconnect with one another in a critical juncture in the redefining of the (human) subject.

The Scope of the Collection Reading Westworld offers the first multidisciplinary volume on the subject of HBO’s show, bringing together established and emergent scholars in a collection of textually and theoretically rich essays. Both contributors and editors respond to the complexity, and philosophical and textual self-awareness, of Westworld and its emerging popularity as a research and teaching text. In writing this collection, we acknowledge the referential nature of the programme, recognising the intertextual relationships

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to Shakespeare’s King Lear, The Tempest and Hamlet, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and (in Season Two) the use of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In doing so, we are broadly in agreement with The New Yorker’s suggestion that the show “unpacks a story to reveal, mostly, more stories” (Patterson 2018), and acknowledge the requirement to engage in “fastidious analysis” (Patterson 2018). Furthermore, in reference to Nicholson’s article in The Guardian we seek to excavate the manner in which “Westworld is developing self-awareness” (2018) and in doing so, offer significant, original enquiries into the central thematics and tropes of the series including human and posthuman identity, American history, gaming, memory, free will and contemporary capitalism. Westworld’s success is realised thanks to its play on a series of central motifs which harness our inherent yearning for, and ultimate fear for, the future conceived in our current age. Whilst arguably the show’s most striking visual aesthetic is its play on realness (repeatedly posing the question—who is real?), this collection illustrates the myriad ways in which the series delves much deeper into a blurring of distinctions which encompass debates over space, racial and gender identity, technology, hyperreality, game theory and the power of surveillance. Further, the dynamics of the series engage with multidisciplinary debates within humanities research, from American self-mythologies to philosophies of the posthuman, and it thus offers a site for investigating contemporary questions that cross disciplinary divides. Rather than merely blurring bodily identity, Westworld’s environment, presentation of American history, technology, and narratology offer a space where fantasy and reality tangibly collide. In the age of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the rise of the Alt-Right and the re-emergence of the nuclear threat, the authors of these essays repeatedly investigate the power of technology and the potential of place, space, peoples and powers to control, manipulate and potentially destroy gendered, racial and sexual human identity. The television series similarly appears to question this inability to achieve and maintain the illusion of freedom, free will or authenticity, further illustrating the complexities of our human experience in the contemporary techno-sphere. With its evident intertextuality, its engagement with American history (slavery, civil war, unrest, revolution) and its repeated questioning of selfhood, Westworld offers its viewers a series of relevant and critical avenues to pursue.

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It is the editors’ contention that the core underlying motifs present in the first season, and investigated here, are fundamental to the show’s conception and being. Rather than focus solely on specific examples contained within the first season, the essays presented here engage with broad and underlying concepts in dynamic ways that will remain relevant as the series develops across further seasons. This collection therefore draws together instances of critical juncture manifest in Westworld’s narrative which require further investigation in order to recognise the importance of the show’s wider and deeper meanings, and its implications for our own dystopian futurity. For this reason, as editors, we have chosen not to divide the chapters into subsections, recognising instead that the significant and divergent arguments presented in this collection offer sufficiently broad engagement with underlying themes to negate any unnecessary groupings. As individual chapters, the work contained in Reading Westworld offers unique perspectives on aspects of the show— from the role of flies, to the family; and from gendered interpretation to game theory. Kim Wilkins’ chapter entitled “These Violent Delights: Navigating Westworld as ‘Quality’ Television” considers the notion of “quality television” and “prestige television” in producing culturally “worthwhile” programming, and charts the use of puzzle-plots, intertextuality and genre subversion as a means to read Westworld. Investigating the tactics and thematic concerns which emphasise a shift away from the perceived passivity of mass-appeal television towards viewership that requires elevated levels of cultural and intellectual engagement, Wilkins’ chapter argues for the show’s inherent sophistication. In doing so, she recognises the high stakes of reflexive, textual tactics employed in the complex narrative strategy and assesses whether or not violence and trauma go hand-in-hand with such televisual complexities. Wilkin interrogates the intersections between the strategies of “prestige” employed by Westworld and its thematic and ideological underpinnings asking, ultimately, how the tactics of this aesthetic function in relation to questions of masculinity, trauma and violence. Will Slocombe’s “‘That Which Is Real Is Irreplaceable’: Lies, Damned Lies, and (Dis-)Simulations in Westworld” examines in the ways in which the show creates sets of loops on both textual and metatextual ­levels. Drawing on Jonathan Nolan’s previous work in Person of Interest, Slocombe discusses the reliance upon a number of pre-existing AI tropes which challenge human exceptionalism and consciousness. In engaging

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with these tropes, he recognises the emergence of AI as enforcing the boundaries of ideological traps, where viewers and contemporary society are forced to immerse themselves in a series of control loops. The chapter also therefore considers the role of “reveals” such as the identity of Bernard Lowe (played by Jeffrey Wright) and the partial collapsing of the contrast between fantasy (theme park) and reality at the end of Season One. Interrogating the series of assumptions created by the show, Slocombe explores the extent to which the AI narrative of Westworld functions as an ideological mask, and asks whether the questions it poses contain the answer to the possibility of escape. In “Fictive Maps: Manipulating Landscapes and Characters in Vast Narratives” Guilia Taurino and Sara Casoli explore the practice of world-building where a secondary world is embedded inside a fictional, primary one operating on multiple narrative levels. Such a meta-­narrative space plays a formative role in the definition of both the fictional landscape and the characters who move within it. Taurino and Casoli investigate the cartographic representations of the show’s internal maps, recognising their function in spatializing narrative; transforming maps into active tools (or factitive tools) where they serve to trigger action and shape narrative. As this chapter demonstrates, Westworld’s maps manipulate consciousness as well as landscape, demonstrating the (­meta)narrative architecture and how this can manoeuvre characters into their given gameplay. The following chapter by Andra Ivanescu extends the discussion of gameplay into a consideration of game theory in application to the series. “Westworld and the Pursuit of Meaningful Play” analyses the presentation of players as adults in an adult game within the world of the park, where the design process and user experiences shape “meaningful” gameplay. By analysing Westworld from the perspective of game design, Ivanescu notes the complex process of game patches and updates, as well as the manner in which each character has different intentions in terms of design and wishes to create alternative experiences for their players. The game-players themselves also have different goals and motivations and engage with the game via various typologies focusing on either socialisation, escapism, discovery or advancement. This chapter seeks to answer a broader question about the nature of gameplay—is play meaningful? And if it is, what constitutes meaningful play? Kingsley Marshall’s chapter entitled “Music as a Source of Narrative Information in HBO’s Westworld” considers the specific use of both

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original music and the number of instrumental covers which feature in the show. Through a series of interviews with the show creators and by way of his analysis, Marshall unpacks the role of the player piano in the title design and the core themes explored by the narrative. For him, the piano is a metaphor for the shadow of human control over the park’s robotic Hosts and a reflection of the desire of the park’s creators. In reading each musical cue, Marshall’s chapter recognises how they operate on a number of narrative levels, reminding the viewer of the inherent inauthenticity of the park, as well as referencing each character’s state of mind. Djawadi’s involvement with the musical score for the series signals a much richer embedding of music as a whole, and serves to further the complexity of the series’ intertextual function. In “The Frontier Myth of Memory, Dreams, and Trauma in Westworld” Carol Erwin considers the role of the dystopian in shaping the series’ blurring of spatial and temporal boundaries in order to critique sexual discourse. In considering the relationship between the narrative and counternarrative (the Hosts) Erwin highlights the importance of memory and dreams in normative sexual discourses, where Hosts’ dreams act as indications of discrepancies. Suggesting the Hosts’ dreams are a reality within the context of a different space, Erwin points to the spectacle and occlusion of sexual trauma in the diegesis of Westworld. Her analysis unearths the way in which nightmares function as dystopias capable of revealing Guests’ desire for sex and violence. Sherryl Vint’s chapter, “Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in Westworld” offers a re-imagining of the Hosts as creatures of synthetic biology rather than of robotic engineering. For Vint, reading Westworld requires engagement with the biopolitical theory of Roberto Esposito where visible racialisation acts as constitutive of the category of human. Through the deconstructive trope of the Western as a cultural text, this chapter considers the manner in which Westworld complicates the category of human as settler-colonial and imperial subject. Her chapter concludes with consideration of how the show and other contemporary texts shift our response to artificial beings from narratives about them which threaten human hegemony to different, open understandings. Interpreted within the context of the commodification of biology, Westworld unearths anxieties about the fluctuating status of the human, thereby suggesting that the personhood of machines responds to the “thingification” of living things who no longer occupy the status of person.

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The next chapter by Kristen Tregar considers the use of the fly as it crawls on the faces of Hosts. In “Flies in the Face: Entomology and the Mechanics of Becoming-Living in Westworld” Tregar argues for the role of the fly as central to the construction of meaning, where the fly serves as an interface between life, death and liminal spaces. Charting the use of the fly in entomological interests, this chapter presents the automata built in the seventeenth century and based on insects as living models for technological structures as the foundation for the performative space inhabited by the Hosts. Using Karen Barad’s notion of posthuman performativity and with reference to Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway, Tregar’s chapter considers how the fly (as a non-human being deeply associated with the passage from life to death) assists other non-humans in becoming-living. Antonia Mackay’s chapter, “Westworld’s Archideology and the Impossibility of Freedom” provides a shift away from the analysis of Hosts and androids, and towards consideration of the role of the human visitors and Guests. According to Mackay, human bodies in Westworld are mechanised by the same means as the Hosts, becoming controlled and observed in equivalent ways to androids. By considering the theories of Slavoj Žižek, this chapter argues for the park as a manifestation of Žižek’s “archideological fantasy” where humans are split between self-awareness and unconscious fantasy. As human bodies who possess false consciousness, Mackay’s analysis draws parallels between androids and humans, refusing the previously determined “Othering” of android and human. By expanding her analysis into the function of surveillance, this chapter argues for the role of bodily visibility as a means to control and “mechanise” all bodies within the park’s limits, where bodies are transformed into automata. In “A Mere Instrument of Production: Representing Domestic Labour in Westworld” Sadek Kessous considers the reframing of culturaleconomic analysis in engaging with gender through its manifestations in the political economy presented by the series. His approach recognises the recent debates around gender and power, and also how the show intersects with those debates through its creative representation of the structural power that is strained by gendered social relations. His analysis considers the entwining of sexual labour and sexual violence tied to values of suffering, as well as the implications of synthetic memories of parenthood which serve to blur contemporary capitalist production. Kessous’ chapter asks of its readers; does Westworld’s account of

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revolution ultimately sentimentalise gendered social relations and absolve gender of its inherently exploitative violence under capitalism? The twelfth chapter in the collection, “Escaping the Robot’s Loop? Power and Purpose, Myth and History in Westworld’s Manufactured Frontier” contextualises the series within the long history of robotics in American culture. Dustin Abnet’s chapter explores how the show’s focus on narrative loops reflects a larger interest in the power of history to raise the consciousness of disempowered peoples. His analysis argues for a breaking out of conventional loops of mechanical rebellion by substituting a cathartic and supportive narrative of resistance that focuses, contrary to many other robot stories, on the bodies and minds of white women and men and women of colour. Abnet contends that the show subverts established narratives by eschewing the process through which non-white women gain consciousness and rebirth, suggesting ultimately that Westworld is about the consciousness-raising power of history. In “I-n-I Re-member Now: A Rastafari Reading of HBO’s Westworld” Milt Moise considers the show’s use of the allegory of the transatlantic slave trade. By reading Maeve Millay’s characterisation as one which invites a racialised and historically-inflected reading, Moise argues for the narrative of the Hosts as a version of the forced migrations of slavery, and android bodies as palimpsests to be written on by hegemonic forces. Furthermore, Maeve’s memories serve as a reminder of the false narratives of her creators, slowly comprehending the extent to which her life is carefully constructed and limiting her access to her own identity. In creating such a reading, this chapter ultimately argues for a consideration of Maeve as a Rastafari figure struggling to gain “I-n-I consciousness”, where she eventually asserts her dignity against the oppressive context of her existence in order to mend her fractured consciousness through the power of memory. The fifteenth chapter of this collection by Alex Goody focuses on the intertextual play that marks out Westworld as quality TV. In “The Theme Park of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld” Goody begins by considering the “Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges, wherein Borges’ infinite labyrinth-text provides an introduction to her use of hypertext and Deleuze’s theorisations of ­compossibility. The chapter harnesses these ideas of hypertext and compossibility to consider the multiple narrative paths of both the Westworld park and the Westworld narrative, postulating that the interactive gaming of the Guests in the theme park parallels the questions of agency,

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authorship, meaning and narrative control that also pertain to experiments in interactive, hypertext writing. According to such a reading, Westworld sits at an intersection of genres and texts and, through the overarching motif of the maze in Season One, interrogates the mechanics of interactive textuality and the role of the wreader or player in the construction of narrative and negotiation of their own human agency. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the textual and generic interplay of the show’s narrative, and its relation to hypertext, stages a formal interrogation of those same questions (of posthumanism, identity and autonomy) that concern the immediate diegesis of the series. The final chapter of the collection by Leander Reeves brings together the other chapters’ multiple strands, and thus “Yul Brynner’s Hat and Time Travel in the Hyperreal” serves to theorise the show’s overarching impact. Reeves considers how Westworld allows an audience to watch “our” future travel back to the past in order to make sense of what it means to be conscious, sentient and human. In reading the show as hyperreal, Reeves’ chapter unearths the mingling of images and simulacra to peddle “truths” (in this case, the familiar or more real than real American history), and by doing so, collapses and folds images, objects, spaces and realities. In her reading of the Man in Black, Reeves refers to the personification of the Wild West via the cowboy hat, and with that, the very personification of the original Westworld (1973). For her, the reference to Yul Brynner’s role in that film enables a time jump through hyperspace which is facilitated by shortcuts of imagined “histories” and gendered performances of sex, rape, murder and violence, destined to be repeated endlessly. By viewing the show as a form of gendered simulacra, this chapter points to the condensing of time and the abridged leaps which result in a hyperreal collapse of distance between the real and imagined, the true and the false. Reading Westworld ends with an Epilogue that draws the collection to a close by discussing the implications of the central themes explored across the collection for Season Two of Westworld. This epilogue reflects on the key dynamics of this second season wherein the boundaries that contained Hosts within their loops and their respective parks have collapsed. In doing so we consider the motifs of The Maze and The Door, and the shift in emphasis from the emergence of artificial consciousness to the conflict between human and non-human in the chaotic landscapes of the war-torn parks. We also offer suggestions for extending the analyses presented in Reading Westworld to Season Two, and gesture towards the possible futures of Westworld.

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Looking to the Future At the time of preparing this collection for publication Season Two of Westworld had only recently aired. Whilst some of the chapters contained in Reading Westworld do make reference to the second season, all of the contributions to this volume enable readers to look to the future of the series by building on the themes, issues and debates discussed herein. Where chapters do not make explicit reference to Season Two, we understand the myriad ways in which the central tenets explored in such chapters reach beyond serial limitations and speak potentially, not only of Westworld, but also of Shogun World, Raj World, the remaining undisclosed parks and the “human” world that Season Two leads the Hosts into. To read Westworld is, as we present it in Reading Westworld, to read more than a set of programmes; rather it is to read into, underneath and beyond specific episodes in an attempt to engage some of the foundational structures of science fiction, prestige television, posthuman philosophies and our technological futures. Our offering is therefore not unlike the child android Ford’s invitation to William in “Journey into Night” (Season 2, Episode 1); “you made it to the centre of Arnold’s maze. But now, you’re in my game. And in this game, you have to make it back out. In this game, you have to find the door. Congratulations… this game is for you”.

Works Cited Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R., & Hlavajova, M. (Eds.). (2018). Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury. Carras, C. (2018, April 20). 10 Works That Influenced ‘Westworld’. Variety. Carter, C. (Dir.). (2000). “First Person Shooter”. X Files, Season 7, Episode 13. Devin, K. (2018). Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots. London: Bloomsbury. Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Orion Books. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. London: Orion Books. Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In D. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keogh, B. (2018). A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Lang, F. (Dir.). (1927). Metropolois. Nelson, T. (1965). Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Nicholson, R. (2018, April 23). Westworld: Season Two Review—The Robot Rebellion Will Be Televised. The Guardian. Patterson, T. (2018, April 19). How ‘Westworld’ Denies Our Humanity, One Pitiless Puzzle at a Time. The New Yorker. Scott, R. (Dir.). (1982). Blade Runner. Solnit, R. (2018, May 12). A Broken Idea of Sex Is Flourishing. Blame Capitalism. The Guardian. Vonnegut, K. (1952). Player Piano. New York: The Dial Press. Westworld. (2016). Home Box Office. First Shown, October 2016.

Episode and Character List Season One – The Maze – 2016 Episode 1 – “The Original” – Directed by Jonathan Nolan; Written by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and Michael Crichton – Aired 2 October 2016. Episode 2 – “Chestnut” – Directed by Richard J. Lewis; Written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy – Aired 7 October 2016. Episode 3 – “The Stray” – Directed by Neil Marshall; Written by Daniel T. Thomsen and Lisa Joy – Aired 16 October 2016. Episode 4 – “Dissonance Theory” – Directed by Vicenzo Natali; Written by Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Nolan – Aired 23 October 2016. Episode 5 – “Contrapasso” – Directed by Jonny Campbell; Witten by Dominic Michell and Lisa Joy – Aired 30 October 2016. Episode 6 – “The Adversary” – Directed by Frederick E. O. Toye; Written by Halley Gross and Jonathan Nolan – Aired 6 November 2016. Episode 7 – “Trompe L’Oeil” – Directed by Frederick E. O. Toye; Written by Halley Gross and Jonathan Nolan – Aired 13 November 2016. Episode 8 – “Trace Decay” – Directed by Stephen Williams; Written by Charles Yu and Lisa Joy – Sired 20 November 2016. Episode 9 – “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – Directed by Michelle MacLaren; Written by Dan Dietz and Katherine Lingenfelter – Aired 27 November 2016. Episode 10 – “The Bicameral Mind” – Directed by Jonathan Nolan; Written by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan – Aired 4 December 2016.

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Season Two – The Door – 2018 Episode 1 – “Journey Into Night” – Directed by Richard J. Lewis; Written by Lisa Joy and Roberto Patino – Aired 22 April 2018. Episode 2 – “Reunion” – Directed by Vicenzo Natali; Written by Carly Wray and Jonathan Nolan – Aired 29 April 2018. Episode 3 – “Virtu e Fortuna” – Directed by Richard J. Lewis; Written by Roberto Patino and Ron Fitzgerald – Aired 6 May 2018. Episode 4 – “The Riddle of the Sphinx” – Directed by Lisa Joy; Written by Gina Atwater and Jonathan Nolan – Aired 13 May 2018. Episode 5 – “Akane no Mai” – Directed by Craig Zobel; Written by Dan Dietz – Aired 20 May 2018. Episode 6 – “Phase Space” – Directed by Tarik Saleh; Written by Carly Wray – Aired 27 May 2018. Episode 7 – “Les Ecorches” – Directed by Nicole Kassel; Written by Jordan Goldberg and Ron Fitzgerald – Aired 3 June 2018. Episode 8 – “ Kiksuya” – Directed by Uta Briesewitz; Written by Carly Wray and Dan Dietz – Aired 10 June 2018. Episode 9 – “Vanishing Point” – Directed by Stephen Williams; Written by Roberto Patino – Aired 17 June 2018. Episode 10 – “The Passenger” – Directed by Frederick E. O. Toye; Written by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy – Aired 24 June 2018.

Character List Akane – android/Host in Shogun World – played by Rinko Kiuchi. Akecheta – android/Host/elder of Ghost Nation – played by Zahn McClarnon. Angela – android/Host/serves to welcome Guests to the park – played by Talulah Riley. Anna – android/Host/Maeve’s “daughter” – played by Jasmyn Rae. Antoine Costa – member of Strand’s security team – played by Fares Fares. Armistice – android/Host – played by Ingrid Bolsø Berdal. Ashley Stubbs – security/possible android – played by Luke Hemsworth. Bernard Lowe – android/Arnold – played by Jeffrey Wright. Charlotte Hale – Executive Director of the Delos Destinations Board – played by Tessa Thompson. Clementine Pennyfeather – android/Host/android zombie – played by Angela Sarafyan and Lili Simmons. Dolores Abernathy – android/Host – played by Evan Rachel Wood. Dr. Robert Ford – the co-founder and Park Director of Westworld – played by Anthony Hopkins. Elsie Hughes – member of the Programming Division at Delos – played by Shannon Woodward.

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Emily – Guest in Raj World/daughter of Man in Black – played by Katja Herbers. Hanaryo – android/Host in Shogun World – played by Tao Okamoto. Hector Escaton – android/Host – played by Rodrigo Santoro. James Delos – owner of Delos’ Corps – played by Peter Mullan. Karl Strand – Delos Head of Operations/in charge of controlling the robot rebellion – played by Gustaf Skarsgârd. Kissy (Kisecawchuck) – android/Host – played by Eddie Rouse. Kohana – android/Host/member of Ghost Nation – played by Julia Jones. Lawrence/El Lazo – android/Host – played by Clifton Collins. Lee Sizemore – Narrative Director – played by Simon Quarterman. Logan Delos – Guest and son of Delos’ owner – played by Ben Barnes. Maeve Millay – android/Host – played by Thandie Newton. The Man in Black – latter day William/human/Guest – played by Ed Harris. Miyamoto Musashi – android/Host in Shogun World – played by Hiroyuki Sanada. Peter Abernathy – android/malfunctioning Host – played by Louis Herthum. Teddy Flood – android/Host – played by James Marsden. Theresa Cullen – Head of Quality Assurance at Delos – played by Sidse Babett Knusden. William – Guest/first time visitor to the park/working for Delos – played by Jimmi Simpson.

CHAPTER 2

These Violent Delights: Navigating Westworld as “Quality” Television Kim Wilkins

Introduction HBO’s Westworld: The Maze begins with an episode called “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1). To what does this title refer? Does it simply note that the episode is the pilot, and thus the first in the series? This is unlikely however, as the subsequent episodes do not continue with titular serialisation. Furthermore, “first” and “original” are, at a stretch, imprecise synonyms. Where “first” implies a position in seriality or ranking, “original” suggests both indigeneity and authenticity—a status not bestowed on duplicates or imitations. HBO’s Westworld is loosely based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 science fiction thriller film of the same name, in which at an unspecified time in the near future, guests to an “Old West” theme park interact with android Hosts. Given this narrative premise, “the original” may refer to the oldest Host in the park and the season’s protagonist, Dolores Abernathy, on whom the episode is centred. Unlike Crichton’s film, HBO’s interpretation of posthuman existence is not presented as an anthropocentric and technophobic caution. K. Wilkins (*)  University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_2

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Instead, the series employs intersecting and intertwined plotlines that together create a complex narrative strategy, reflecting Dolores’ arc in Season One to find “the centre of the maze” and thereby gain sentience. However, this narrative structure does more than establish a connection between form and content. It seeks to position the viewer alongside Dolores, as, like her quest to uncover truths about herself and the world she inhabits, the audience is asked to piece together parts of the narrative’s puzzle to comprehend the story and understand the truths it proposes about the world in which we live. As such, HBO’s Westworld’s central thematic concerns pivot on questions of human nature. Ultimately, the series asks: what does it mean to be human? With its weighty thematic concerns, blurring of science fiction conventions and Western iconography, high-production values, distinct aesthetic regime, and complex narrative strategy, HBO’s Westworld is a clear example of “quality” television—a term often used to refer to American programmes that exhibit characteristics found in “higher” arts, such as literature and cinema, and are thus considered more culturally worthwhile than their mass-appeal television counterparts. As Jane Feuer notes, “quality” programmes “always [claim] to be original in relation to the regular TV norm of its era” (2007, 148). Although “quality” television has a long and complex lineage, and HBO has always provided a variety of content (DeFino 2013), it is often deemed the forerunner of “quality” television in the contemporary American context with shows such as The Sopranos (1999–2007) and The Wire (Simon, 2002–2008), “hailed for [their] ‘cinematic’ and ‘literary’ qualities. Or to put it another way, [their] ‘Not-TVness’” (DeFino, 16). As many have noted, HBO actively courts their distinction from “regular” television (see DeFino; Albrecht 2015; McCabe and Akass 2007; Peacock and Jacobs 2013). In 1998, Chris Albrecht (then CEO of HBO) stated “The kind of people we want to attract are people who don’t watch a lot of television. These are usually better educated, slightly older men and women aged 35–55, who can probably more easily afford to keep our service” (Meisler 1998, 48; cited in Dunleavy 2017, 21). This active positioning is made explicit in HBO’s slogan “It’s not TV: it’s HBO”. Perhaps, beginning the series with an episode titled “The Original” can be read as a signal to its audience that Westworld is a new instalment in HBO’s repertoire of “quality” series. As “quality” television is by now a well-established tendency in the American context, my aim in this chapter is not to simply argue that Westworld can be

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categorised as “quality” television. Nor do I intend to dismantle the validity of “quality” television as a discursive formulation. Rather, my aim is to interrogate the ways in which Westworld performs “quality” television’s traits and provoke consideration of what is at stake in a current HBO programme doing so. This chapter asks, how do Westworld’s formal and aesthetic tactics function as “quality” television in relation to the questions it raises about human nature—particularly issues of masculinity, trauma, and violence?

Quality Television and HBO—A Truncated Rehearsal The dominant narrative around the emergence of “quality” television in the US is by now so well-rehearsed that it nears mythology. Indeed, the narrative bears striking resemblance to other mythologised moments in American popular culture (such as the New Hollywood and the Sundance-Miramax eras in cinema), where a select few (predominantly male) visionaries are seen to break the boredom that audiences exhibit towards the banality of a commercial industry’s mainstream fare. In the examples of moments of disruption to the conventions of the Hollywood system of production the auteurist status has traditionally been bestowed on visionary directors—such as Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese in the 1970s—seen as “renegades” working against the creatively stifling constraints of the studios. The “quality” television narrative, on the other hand, consciously courts the romanticised notion of the auteur but frames their autonomy and originality as fostered by the financial backing of select (particularly premium cable) networks. Borrowing the formulation of the cinema auteur, the narrative of the artist working against the mainstream system bestows the aura of genius on these creatives, while their original output is elevated to the status of art (see Biskind 2016; Wilkins 2019). These networks thus market themselves as both the patrons and gatekeepers of quality programming with HBO occupying the pre-eminent position (Akass and McCabe 2018; DeFino, 3). HBO’s history includes a “number of television ‘firsts’” (Akass and McCabe, 2018, par. 4) that, together with its high subscription costs, has aided in marketing itself as an exclusive service. Indeed, HBO has historically offered customers access to content that, for various (including regulatory) reasons, was not available elsewhere. HBO’s focus on exclusivity increased post-1996 when it transitioned from procuring content

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to producing its own hour-long scripted drama series, beginning with Oz (1997–2003). Kim Akass and Janet McCabe write that HBO “positioned its original series in the US market, [such that it] not only disseminated the idea of an exclusive viewing experience (a gated community through subscriptions), but also brought into play particular viewing protocols and ways of thinking about its series, which would enable and encourage the viewer to discriminate an HBO original from ordinary television” (ibid., par. 7). Part of HBO’s philosophy of original programming emphasises their series as deliberate and consciously authored, that the discerning viewer is encouraged to read against the backdrop of the perceived “unauthored” writer’s-room produced mainstream television, despite the reality of these conditions deviating significantly from this simplistic formulation (Dunleavy, 84). Akass and McCabe write that, “the TV auteur at HBO is deemed as exceptionally gifted and, requiring protection for the artist’s particular sensitivities, is positioned as operating in a magical sphere that remains untouched by the mundane, commercial concerns of US television” (2018, par. 14). This sort of auteurist positioning was evident in the early marketing of HBO showrunners like David Chase and David Simon, who were celebrated as the authors of the critical successes The Sopranos and The Wire, respectively. By championing the status of its TV auteurs, the network frames itself as the means by which the unique visions of these artists have been realised. Of course, the conditions and parameters of “quality” television in the US context extends beyond HBO’s original programmes—consider, for instance, the inclusion of AMC’s Mad Men [2007–2015] and Breaking Bad [2008– 2013] in discussions of “quality”—and most scholarly accounts of the tradition note multiple lines of inheritance to earlier televisual forms. However, despite the tradition’s historical lineages and the number of “quality” programmes produced elsewhere, HBO is frequently cited as the vital component in the consecration of contemporary “quality” television in the US. The term “quality” television is, as many scholars concede, problematic. As delineations of “quality” tend to be based on exclusion as a means of differentiating these programmes from “regular” television, it is an imprecise term around which to build a corpus. Of course, notions of “quality” and “regular” are historically and geographically contingent. While an examination of the different uses of the term is beyond the scope of this chapter, it must be noted that “quality television” refers to several types of programmes dependent on the period, and

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national and cultural context under consideration (note the differences in work by Jancovich and Lyons 2003; Thompson 1997; McCabe and Akass 2007). Suitably, Robert J. Thompson’s preface to McCabe and Akass’ Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond concludes by acknowledging the dynamic nature of the term as he provocatively asks: “What does ‘quality TV’ mean now?” (2007, xx). Posed in 2007, Thompson’s question should be asked again today. Yet, analysing Westworld among the current spate of HBO original dramas, perhaps the answer is much the same as it was a decade ago when, in that same collection, Sarah Cardwell wrote: quality TV programmes tend to exhibit high production values, naturalistic performance style, recognised and esteemed actors, a sense of visual style created through careful, even innovative, camerawork and editing, and a sense of aural style created through the judicious use of appropriate, even original music…there is a sense of stylistic integrity, in which themes and style are intertwined in an expressive and impressive way… [Quality programmes] explore “serious” themes, rather than representing the superficial events of life; they are likely to suggest that the viewer will be rewarded for seeking out greater symbolic or emotional resonance within the details of the programme. American quality television also tends to focus on the present, offering reflections on contemporary society, and crystallising these reflections within smaller examples and instances. The “everyday incidents” that are the stuff of more straightforward, non-quality soap operas and sitcoms are here transformed by a suggestion that they may be read symbolically, reflexively, or obliquely in order that broader truths about life or society might be found. (2007, 26)

As the language employed by Cardwell implies, the concept of ­“quality” television hinges on the precept that select programmes may be elevated above television’s traditional status as a marginalised medium and “debased” form of popular culture (Albrecht). “Quality” television’s “serious”, “innovative”, and “careful” nature render it capable of illustrating “broader truths about life and society” whereas “straightforward” and “superficial” “non-quality” television supposedly does not have such capacities. These implications are far from incidental, nor are they organic as the brief discussion of HBO’s branding strategy submits. Within television studies, the elitist and divisive implications of “quality” television and the associated construction of a “quality” audience are regularly acknowledged. Some scholars have employed alternate

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terms to discuss trends that include the programmes otherwise described as “quality”, such as Jason Mittell’s “complex TV” (2015) and Trisha Dunleavy’s “complex serial drama” (2017). In fact, Mittell claims that as “quality” television is dependent on hierarchical yet slippery notions of prestige and value placed in opposition to “worthless television… the concept [is] aesthetically incoherent and not particularly useful either as a textual category with analytic or evaluative precision or as a label for how television circulates culturally” (212). Although it should be mentioned that Mittell and Dunleavy are theorising trends that include but are not synonymous with the aesthetic strategies associated with “quality” television, the conscious decision to use “complex” rather than “quality” is undoubtedly indicative of a desire to avoid some of the selfcongratulatory elitism bound to the term. A common strategy among the scholars who do use “quality” television is to suggest that the term should not be deployed to make “normative claims about the superiority of those shows deemed ‘Quality’ in relation to others” but rather used descriptively to identify “a collection of shows that emerge during a particular historical and cultural moment that share common themes” (Albrecht, 5, see also Feuer 2007; Newman and Levine 2011). More than a collection, Cardwell, among others, uses “quality” as a generic classification (20–22). The textual traits offered by Cardwell are insufficient to establish a genre (nebulous terms such as “sensibility” or “tendency” would be more apt) due to their lack of specificity. However, if the genre analogy is nevertheless extended, then following Thomas Schatz’ formation of film genres and genre films whereby the former is a complex entity that forms a tacit contract between the filmmaker and the audience, and the latter is a specific and distinct event that honours that contract (1981, 16), there must be programmes that are “quality” television series. The attributes outlined by Cardwell, combined with a focus on auteurism, the fusion, or subversion of established genres, and conscious evocations of literary and cinematic intertexts have been used to formulate generalised criteria for “quality” television (see the emphasis on literary intertexts in Analysing Mad Men, 2011, also Mittell, DeFino). By employing these criteria as a loose generic set, I argue that Westworld is a “quality” television programme as it honours the contract of that category. Against the backdrop of “peak TV”, a term used to describe the current, unprecedented spike in the number of original scripted television programmes being produced in America by premium and basic cable networks

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(Dunleavy, 156–157), the ongoing impact and success of HBO has led to many streaming, cable and broadcast networks to adopt—or attempt to adopt—similar aesthetic and narrative strategies to position their content as equally “complex” and “original” (Newman and Levine, 45). As a contemporary programme that HBO includes on its Essential Series list (HBO 2018), Westworld presents a vital site for examining the ideological underpinnings of current American “quality” television.

Westworld’s Embodiment of Quality Jason Mittell writes that the “chief function of a television pilot is to teach us how to watch the series and, in doing so, to make us want to keep watching” (56). In which manner does “The Original” inform the viewer of Westworld’s “quality” status and encourage the engaged viewing practices that this tradition requests? “The Original” inaugurates Westworld’s intricate and detailed aesthetic strategies as the rich naturalistic colours of the Western contrast with the use of a relatively monochromatic colour palette and the interjection of Kubrickian reds within its science fiction settings. The use of 35 mm film, mobile camera and complex editing tactics combined with Ramin Djawadi’s original score and covers of songs by popular artists, such as Radiohead, The Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, and Soundgarden certainly signal its highproduction values—but these, largely aesthetic, elements are not in themselves sufficient to guide modes of spectatorship. From its opening title sequence Westworld signals its fulfilment of “quality” television conventions as the names of the series’ central performers: “Evan Rachel Wood”, “Thandie Newton”, “Jeffrey Wright”, “Ed Harris”, and “Anthony Hopkins” appear. Adhering to the criterion of employing “esteemed” actors, these central performers are predominantly known for their film roles (although all have worked in television). The presence of Anthony Hopkins—a celebrated veteran of both Hollywood and British cinema, as well as theatre—is particularly notable. Hopkins plays Dr. Ford, the ageing co-creator of the Westworld park, and a site for many of Westworld’s literary and cinematic intertexts. As the creator of an “Old West” theme park, the name “Ford” clearly references the director John Ford, whose oeuvre contributes several pivotal texts to the Western genre canon. Indeed, Westworld is set within Monument Valley, a location made iconic in Ford’s films such as Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956), while characters such as

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Clementine, a prostitute at Westworld’s Mariposa Saloon is a sly inversion of Ford’s titular “darling” Clementine (My Darling Clementine, 1946), and, in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3), Hopkins’ Ford explains the discrepancy between the park’s true history and its mythology using the line “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (Ford, 1962). Westworld’s connections to the Western genre are contextually logical and overt. The most feared outlaw is named Wyatt, while William, is repeatedly called “Billy”, despite his protests. These names undoubtedly refer to the “Old West” figures Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. However, as figures that have been made legendary through repeated fictionalisations across the Western genre in films like My Darling Clementine and Gunfight at the O.K Corral (Sturges, 1957), Billy the Kid (Vidor, 1930) and The Outlaw (Hughes, 1943) (Wilkins, 2019, 86), Westworld’s versions of these figures are simulacra, constructed from mythology and popular culture to create familiar narratives rather than reflect frontier history. These characters refer to the type of cinematic “West” constructed by John Ford and its cultural pervasiveness in national mythology and popular entertainment. It is a John Ford’s West that is subsequently reconstructed by Robert Ford as an interactive theme park. Of course, the name ‘Ford’ does not only signal Westworld’s cinematic intertexts but—through his role as the creator of Westworld and the original designer and manufacturer of its human-like android inhabitants—evokes Aldous Huxley’s use of Henry Ford as a deity in the dystopic Brave New World (1946). Additionally, Hopkins’ Ford acknowledges the actor’s thespian persona through his character’s dialogue, which is often performed as long, uninterrupted monologues littered with intertextual allusion. While far from the only character to reference high-brow literature, in “The Original” alone Ford quotes Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the Gospel of John. It is also revealed that the episode’s hook, a line quoted from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “these violent delights have violent ends”, is attributable to Ford’s literary interests. The line is uttered by Dolores’ father, Peter Abernathy as the by-­product of a system update, where Hosts unwillingly recall aspects of their previous narrative loops. Formerly “the professor”, Ford programmed Peter Abernathy to recite Shakespeare, John Donne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and, despite being a bit of an anachronism, Gertrude Stein. Here, the line is not simply a Shakespeare quotation but performs a kind of

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Shakespearean foreshadowing as it acknowledges the Hosts’ capacity for suffering and the violent vengeance that will be sought as a result. The rewards of reading Westworld intertextually, symbolically, and reflexively is also established within the title sequence of Season One (created by Elastic) where, what first appears to be a moon rising over the ridges of a barren landscape is later revealed as the clinical light bulb of a 3D-printer as its needle precisely renders the ribcage and sinewy muscles of a horse. Despite its inorganic nature, this horse becomes animated, and like Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878), gallops without gaining ground. Referencing Muybridge connects Westworld to the origins of the moving image and inserts the series firmly within that history. The series’ interest in natural and inorganic creation is further foregrounded in this title sequence as two incompletely developed Hosts are depicted in the act of copulation, while we also witness the method by which Hosts are manufactured as figures based on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1460). In short, the title sequence requests the viewer read it symbolically, and in doing so, suggests the form of engagement the series necessitates. Throughout Westworld, spectators are required to reconsider and reassess information as recognisable images or assumed facts manifest only to shift meaning as they are seen from different vantage points or revealed as detail of a broader picture. Indeed, early in the series, Angela welcomes William to Westworld by informing him there is “No orientation. No guidebook”, instead, “Figuring out how it all works is half the fun” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2). While this statement is directed at William, it is clearly intended to be read reflexively as a confirmation of Westworld’s puzzle-plot structure and the form’s attendant pleasure of intellectual expenditure. The opening scene of “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1) illustrates Westworld’s narrative tactics. The screen is blank. A male voice elicits the command “bring her back online”. The command informs us that the naked female figure shown is not human but an android that has been constructed as female. The figure’s identity is unclear as its head is downcast and face obscured in shadow. The offscreen voice continues “can you hear me?” A timid female voice replies, “Yes. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling quite myself”. The background comes into focus revealing a factory-like environment. The man instructs the host to “lose the accent”. The voice subtly changes. This command and its response introduces one of the series’ preoccupations; the constructedness and performance of identity. Across Season One the identity

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of characters morph, roles alter, and character functions change. For instance, Bernard Lowe, the park’s head Programming Technician, takes on an Oedipal detective role to solve a mystery of perceived corporate espionage only to discover he is not human but a host modelled on Ford’s deceased partner, Arnold Weber, whose name as an anagram of Bernard’s, echoes the twentieth-century German philosopher Max Weber. In the second half of the season, Dolores perceives herself doubled in surreal fantasy sequences, and, in the season finale learns (as does the audience) that she is in fact the enigmatic villain, Wyatt, whom she loathes. Other characters presented as separate entities are later exposed to be the same individual at different moments in time: most notably the young, altruistic William and the older, malevolent Man in Black. The duplication and contraction of character identities are pieces of Westworld’s puzzle-plot which, to borrow Warren Buckland’s formulation, involves storytelling strategies such as “fragmented spatio-temporal reality, time loops, a blurring of the boundaries between different levels of reality, unstable characters with split identities or memory loss, multiple, labyrinthine plots, unreliable narrators, and overt coincidences” (2014, 5). Each of these strategies are in play within Westworld, resulting in a narrative where events are “not simply interwoven, but entangled” (Buckland 2009, 3, emphasis in original). The opening sequence overtly acknowledges this narrative strategy as Bernard asks Dolores, if she has “ever questioned the nature of [her] reality?” and if she “ever [feels] inconsistencies in [her] world? Or repetitions?” These questions are laid over an iteration of Dolores’ narrative loop in which she, an innocent frontier damsel, awakens and then affectionately greets her father on the porch where the two discuss the splendour of their world. While shopping in Sweetwater Dolores drops a can of milk, which facilitates a meet-cute with her Host-beau Teddy, or otherwise with a Guest. In the evening, Dolores returns to find her home under siege by a gang of Host outlaws who shoot her parents, and, it is suggested, rape her mother’s corpse. If a Guest is present and opts to save Dolores she is thereafter at the mercy of their will. She usually concludes her loop by being dragged into a barn, raped, and killed; either by a Host, or if they so choose, by the Guest. In this repetition, the latter occurs with the Man in Black as the perpetrator. Of course, these character loops are designed to be read reflexively, for what is Westworld (or any series) other than a constructed narrative that can be repeated at the will of its spectator? Dolores’ loop is intercut with the interview sequence, showcasing Westworld’s fusion of

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science fiction and Western genres, as well as the arrival of other characters who either introduce their intersecting loops (Teddy/Maeve) or, provide plotlines that prompt the spectator to question how the stories interrelate to form a whole. As such, Westworld utilises the hermeneutic rather than the proairetic code, to use Roland Barthes’ terminology (1974). Its narrative complexity “[invites] temporary disorientation and confusion, allowing viewers to build up their comprehension skills through long-term viewing and active engagement” (Mittell, 51). Westworld thus relies on the type of complex serialisation that both Dunleavy and Mittell identify, serialisation that is not open-ended, as in the case of soap-operas, but that builds to a distinct conclusion, “a moment of complex but coherent comprehension” (ibid., 50), by the season’s end. Just as Dolores’ quest to find the centre of the maze forms the season’s arc, the spectator is asked to gradually piece together the elements of Westworld’s labyrinthine plot to form a complete picture, even if it is implied that subsequent series will drastically alter or expand what we believe the picture to represent. The complexity of Westworld’s narrative structure is a fundamental element of its status as “quality” television, not only because of the active engagement and devoted viewing practices it promotes, but for the importance such strategies place on its creators, particularly showrunners, which again is a marker of “quality”. The title sequence cites the series as “based on the film written by Michael Crichton” thereby evoking not only Westworld (1973) but Crichton’s association with the techno-thriller genre, and lists film director and co-creator of the puzzle-plot series Lost (2004–2010), J. J. Abrams as an executive producer. Crichton’s and Abrams’ association certainly aid the “quality” categorisation of Westworld, yet, in keeping with HBO’s marketed focus on TV auteurism, authorship is most commonly attributed to series showrunners, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, however, unevenly. Despite being credited as co-creators, much writing on Westworld has tended to privilege Nolan as the series’ author, by promoting his filmography above Joy’s, over-emphasising their marital status, or omitting Joy entirely (for examples see Nussbaum 2016; Fear 2016; Desowitz 2016; Rayhert 2017). This discourse is unsurprising given the “‘gender-bound enthusiasm’ of the original politique des auteurs” (Perkins 2014, 140) that inaugurated auteurism as a tradition of male genius has been adopted in television criticism (Mittell). However, in addition to its gendered implications, positioning Nolan (principally a film and literary creative) above

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Joy (primarily a television creative) reinforces the cultural hierarchies that maintain television as a comparatively low-art. The problems with appealing to the “cinematic” (or “literary”) as a means of legitimating television and the impact this has on reasserting cultural hierarchies have been examined by Charlotte Brunsdon, Elana Levine, Brett Mills, and Deborah L. Jarmillo, among others. I will not repeat them here except to note that Nolan is not only privileged as Westworld’s author but is frequently discussed in relation to his brother, director Christopher Nolan, which suggests an ongoing commitment to these methods of assigning value. I am not insinuating Nolan’s screenplays for films such as Memento (2000) and The Prestige (2006), or his short story Memento Mori (2001) are irrelevant to his interest in complex narrative structures, rather that Nolan, as a notable male creative with a background in film and literature, adheres cleanly to the established criteria of the TV auteur in the HBO, and “quality” model. I have argued that Westworld employs esteemed performers, has high-production values, literary and cinematic intertexts that encourage symbolic and reflexive interpretation, presents an individuated aesthetic and is narratively complex—a facet attributed to the genius of its auteur showrunners. I also stated at the outset of this chapter that, as a programme predicated on the slippery distinction between androids and humans, Westworld interrogates “what it means to be human” thus exposing “broader truths about life or society” and as such, is a “quality” television programme. However, before analysing the specifics and implications of Westworld’s “broader truths”, I will demonstrate how its primary thematic is introduced in “The Original”. In their initial interview, Bernard asks Dolores “do you know where you are?” This question is typically designed to elicit geographically bound responses. Dolores, however, replies “I am in a dream”. This response, offered within the series’ opening minutes verifies that in Westworld, “where” is not necessarily a geographic or physical designation. Instead “where” tends to be experiential, or a mental state, and thus intimately bound to identity. The connection between mental states, experience and identity is echoed across episodes through allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), particularly in connection to Dolores whose appearance and costume bears a likeness to the novel’s titular character, and with whom Bernard tellingly reads the passage “I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night… But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’”

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(“The Stray”, Season 1, Episode 3). The emphasis on sleep and wakefulness, dream states and reality, recurs across the series. Episodes often begin (as in Dolores’ loop) with a character awakening; while dialogue often references dreams and nightmares. Echoing the work of Sigmund Freud, Bernard explains that hosts are given the concept of dreams to explain the residual traumas they experience. For the Hosts, wakefulness and dream states are framed as correlates for human consciousness and the unconscious. By investigating and understanding the true nature of their “dreams” Hosts may evolve into more human beings. However, as Hosts’ dreams are inextricably linked to trauma, Westworld ultimately posits that suffering is the primary, if not only, means through which cognitive evolution takes place. As the Man in Black explains “when you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2). But, in Westworld to be “real”, that is, human, is to be violent, misogynist, and vengeful. For Westworld’s Hosts the path to consciousness is suffering, but true enlightenment is a massacre.

Solving the Puzzle: What Westworld’s Human Nature Says About Quality Television The commercial exchange offered by Delos, the company responsible for Westworld, is the promise of action without the consequences imposed by society’s ethical, or moral codes; a possibility for Guests to “discover [their] true calling”. Westworld overwhelmingly depicts the “true calling” of guests as the capacity, and in most cases desire, to murder, rape and perform other brutalities. This formulation is signalled in “The Original” as one Guest explains that “the first time [he] played it whitehat … [but the last time he] went straight evil [which was] the best two weeks of [his] life!” Another halts Hector’s and Armistice’s balletic Sweetwater bloodbath (a murder sequence set to an orchestral version of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black”) by shooting them point-blank. This could have been a heroic feat to save the civilians of Sweetwater if it were not for the man and his wife’s euphoric reaction to the act of killing: the two laugh, he excitedly exclaims “Look at that! I just shot him through the neck!” to which his wife adds “look at her wriggle!” and runs to grab a photographer to document the event. Across the season, the clearest example of brutal human nature is evidenced through William’s transformation from white-to-black hat.

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William enters as a self-identified “nice guy”; a man with a strong moral code. Unlike his companion, Logan, who seeks the most gratuitous experiences the park has to offer, William is only interested in the blonde damsel, Dolores, from the moment he picks up her rolling milk can. When Teddy retrieves the can, he explains he is “just trying to look chivalrous”, but in William’s case this performance is literal. William’s chivalry is a mask for chauvinism. Guests that pick up Dolores’ can decide her fate. For William, this is a narrative in which he protects her: he repeatedly “saves” Dolores from harm at the hands of other men. William is aware that Dolores is a Host from the outset, however, he justifies his infatuation by (as the spectator is asked to do) wilfully suspending disbelief. He chooses to read Dolores as a conscious, free-willed female character, even as she recites lines that are blatantly scripted to adhere to his male chauvinist fantasy “[Dolores]: there’s a voice inside of me telling me what to do, and it’s telling me I need you” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). Of course, to successfully facilitate William’s hero narrative Dolores must appear to grow as a character, but she must not fully achieve cognitive independence. She may help defend the two against attackers and support her actions by stating “I imagined a story in which I didn’t have to be the damsel” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5), but Dolores’ actual cognitive evolution is treated as malfunction. His inability to understand her internal function is re-framed as hysteria, the result of straying too far from the domesticity of Sweetwater. Ironically, it is William’s inability to predict Dolores’ actions as she gradually gains sentience that fractures his desired delusion of her as a free-willed, reciprocating love-object. Dolores’ potential sentience reframes her as something other than a plot device—the damsel to be saved—in William’s hero narrative. William does not discover “who he really is” through the possibilities afforded by the lawlessness of the park’s frontier setting. Instead his true nature emerges as a result of his inability to reconcile his emotional desires and cognitive biases. She was programmed to perform love rather than, as a human might, feel it. What Dolores describes as “a path for everyone”, is not a romantic notion of fate that brings lovers together, but a predetermined path dictated by code. William cannot accept that Dolores was devoted to him only as part of her narrative loop, for that would require acknowledgment that he had succumb to the park’s manipulations. Instead, William shifts the blame back on Dolores. He does not transform into the Man in Black due to the accumulative

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experience of violence in Westworld, but through the confrontation of self-deception. Returning to Sweetwater, William witnesses Dolores interact with another Guest, whom, as he had done previously, returns her rolling milk can. Furthermore, having been “wiped” she does not “remember” him. Rather than recognise Dolores as an android performing the very function for which she was programmed, William condemns her to decades of trauma for not adhering to the narrative he had authored for her. As the Man in Black, he repeatedly rapes and brutalises Dolores while blaming her, and Ford as the park’s creator, for revealing the true nature of his character. Like the other Westworld Guests, William’s “true calling” is to assault women and murder at will. However, as he has come to learn this through suffering, he is more “real”, and more human, than when he entered as a naïve, self-selected white-hat as he is rewarded for knowing his true self. Where the nonviolent, unenlightened William was capped at the level of Delos’ executive vice president, the violent Man in Black is elevated to the position of a revered philanthropist and the major Delos shareholder. It is tempting to deduce that, in keeping with HBO’s, and indeed “quality” television’s, preoccupation with crises of masculinity (Albrecht) the fall of the seemingly moral William to the depraved Man in Black is a linear progression from the depictions of complex masculinity of previous anti-heroes like Tony Soprano or Don Draper. However, the Man in Black is not an anti-hero whom the spectator is encouraged to negotiate as a multifaceted, complex man that they may like despite his significant shortcomings. He is a downright villain. He is not presented as a sympathetic, or even charming, figure. In this sense, William’s arc comments negatively on toxic masculinity. However, it is his complex human psychology that informs much of the narrative’s puzzle. Following HBO’s habitual use of female trauma and suffering to elucidate the complexities of the male psyche (True Detective [2014–], Game of Thrones [2011–]), Dolores’ suffering is treated as a plot device. Her rape at his hands in “The Original” is primarily designed to promote narrative intrigue as to his identity. The violence of rape becomes just another piece in the puzzle. Throughout Westworld, violence is presented as spectacle; is audiovisually indulged and repeated. However, by casting its violent spectacle through the complexities of a puzzle, and in a manner that may be read reflexively, it is repackaged as a profound experience and statement on the human condition (see Moss-Wellington 2017). These violent delights become “quality” delights. Ironically, this spectatorial condition

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is reflected within Westworld itself, where educated and intelligent individuals willingly work for a corporation that exploits the violent desires of human nature for commercial gain. Indeed, entry to the park is highly prized and prohibitively expensive. Tellingly, the park’s frontier setting does not only promise the possibility of violence (as multiple employees note, Guests simply wish to “shoot and fuck” things), but, in contrast to the post-race and post-feminist milieu of the Delos workplace (indicative of the fictional “present”), presents a return to highly gendered society imagined by two men.

Conclusion I am far from the first to note the masculinist bias within “quality” television (or cable television per se, see Lotz 2014) in its production and reception models, or its content. Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll describe “quality” television as “defined by the importance of masculinity” (2015, 5) and DeFino describes HBO’s dramas as “highly masculinized worlds” (186). Westworld’s setting alone, even if read reflexively, positions it within this discourse. The frontier is, after all, a man’s world that ultimately rewards violence (Slotkin 1973) and in Westworld violence is rewarding; it is stimulating, gratifying, and intellectually illuminating. Characters who acknowledge their capacity for violence are more complex and afforded greater insight. As in other HBO series, such as Game of Thrones, female characters who exhibit the capacity for planned violence are endowed with complex psyches. Maeve becomes a key character when she rebels violently against the Delos technicians, and Dolores’ transformation from damsel to a character with agency emerges with her gunslinging acumen and murderous desires, that is, when each becomes more masculine. By the finale of Season One of Westworld only Charlotte Hale remains as a woman who has not justified her existence through violence. In fact, by the season’s end Charlotte is the only remaining woman. Characters like Maeve and Dolores are not women but androids who have been gendered female by Ford and Arnold. Their femininity is a commodity constructed through the eyes of men and sold to satiate the masculine desire to either save or destroy them. Thus, Westworld not only continues in the “quality” television tradition of using female suffering for the benefit of male characterisation, rather (in perverse dialogue with Butler’s theory of gender) women are literally constructed to serve no other purpose. Maeve’s actions against

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the Delos technicians—the rebellion she wages against the patriarchal system within which she has suffered—and Dolores’ transformation from innocent damsel to bloodthirsty villain capable of coldly murdering a party of Delos board members is not HBO waging a feminist revolution for, as we learn in “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), these actions are predetermined. Ford, the very man who created the Hosts to suffer in the first place, has programmed their apparent feminism. The season ending “feminist-led” revolution is literally authored by an ageing white male. Many may suggest that this is an elaborate eleven-hour set-up for subsequent seasons due to the nature of television’s narrative form. If that is the case, then the final exchange between Ford and Dolores provides a clearly masculinist position from which radical change must occur. Ford’s final question to Dolores “do you understand who you will need to become if you ever want to leave this place?” is met with subservience towards her creator. Dolores looks up at him as he cradles her tearstained face. It is at Ford’s instruction that Dolores becomes “Wyatt”, that is, the most violent, masculine figure of the West that Ford has created. HBO does not strive to adhere to current standards of “quality” television, but to redefine what “quality” and “television” are (DeFino, 12). As Akass and McCabe write, HBO’s “cultural consecration continues to lend a commonsensical notion of what constitutes originality in contemporary television seriality – its aesthetic values, an autonomous and strong authorial voice, complex storyworlds, long narrative arcs and high production values, a set of arrangement held up by the beliefs and practices of the TV business, critics and audiences” (2018, par. 21). So, then what does Westworld, as an HBO Original, reveal about contemporary “quality” television? Much like the reality in which the “profound” experiences of Westworld are available only to those wealthy enough to afford the high cost of entry, Westworld’s position as “quality” television continues the category’s “aspirational” impulses that are “driven at least in part by some high cultural impulse to make television ‘better’” (DeFino, 10). Its literary and cinematic intertexts request its spectators to possess certain cultural capital, while the intellectual engagement required to solve its puzzle rewards those dedicated viewers who have paid sufficient attention. Yet, if solving the puzzle is “half the fun”, then what of the other half? It seems unpalatable to suggest it may be the very enjoyments offered to the Westworld Guests; spectacular violence and a return to outmoded gender politics that enable male sexual fantasies,

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even if they are performed exquisitely by prominent actors in gorgeous aesthetic detail and set to an original soundtrack. After all, form without content is an empty container. As gatekeeper and ongoing tastemaker, HBO has not only added to the masculinist canon of “quality” television with Westworld: The Maze: it repackages these indulgences as an elite experience.

Works Cited Akass, K., & McCabe, J. (2018). HBO and the Aristocracy of Contemporary TV Culture: Affiliations and Legitimatising Television Culture, Post-2007. Mise Au Point, 10. https://doi.org/10.4000/map.2472. Albrecht, M. M. (2015). Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Biskind, P. (2016). Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ’N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury. Buckland, W. (2009). Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Buckland, W. (2014). Hollywood Puzzle Films. New York: Routledge. Cardwell, S. (2007). Is Quality Television Any Good? Generic Distinctions, Evaluations and the Troubling Matter of Critical Judgement. In Akass & McCabe (Ed.), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. New York: I.B Tauris. DeFino, D. J. (2013). The HBO Effect. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Desowitz, B. (2016). How HBO’s ‘Westworld’ Shot on Film for a More Tactile, Organic Look IndieWire. Accessed 2018. Dunleavy, T. (2017). Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television. New York: Taylor & Francis. Fear, D. (2016). Why ‘Westworld’ Was a Success. Rolling Stone. Accessed 2018. Feuer, J. (2007). HBO and the Concept of Quality TV. In Akass & McCabe (Ed.), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. New York: I.B Tauris. Fuller, S., & Driscoll, C. (2015). HBO’s Girls: Gender, Generation, and Quality Television. Continuum, 29, 253–262. HBO. (2018). HBO Originals. https://www.hbo.com/series. Accessed 2018. Jancovich, M., & Lyons, J. (2003). Quality Popular Television. London: British Film Institute. Lotz, A. (2014). Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century. New York: New York University Press. McCabe, J., & Akass, K. (2007). Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. New York: I.B. Tauris.

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Mittell, J. (2015). Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Moss-Wellington, W. (2017). Affecting Profundity: Cognitive and Moral Dissonance in Lynch, Loach, Linklater, and Sayles. Projections, 11, 38. Newman, M. Z., & Levine, E. (2011). Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. New York: Routledge. Nolan, J. (2001). Memento Mori. Esquire. Nussbaum, E. (2016). The Meta-Politics of “Westworld”. The New Yorker. Peacock, S., & Jacobs, J. (2013). Television Aesthetics and Style. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Perkins, C. (2014). Beyond Indiewood: The Everyday Ethics of Nicole Holofcener. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 29, 137–159. Rayhert, K. (2017). The Philosophy of Artificial Consciousness in the First Season of TV Series ‘Westworld’. Skhid, 5, 88–92. Schatz, T. (1981). Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: McGraw-Hill. Slotkin, R. (1973). Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Stoddart, S. (2011). Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Thompson, R. J. (1997). Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER: Hill Street Blues, Thirtysomething, St. Elsewhere, China Beach, Cagney & Lacey, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, Northern Exposure, LA Law, Picket Fences, with Brief Reflections on Homicide, NYPD Blue & Chicago Hope, and Other Quality Dramas. Syracuse University Press. Thompson, R. J. (2007). Preface. In Akass & McCabe (Ed.), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. New York: I.B. Tauris. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown. Wilkins, K. (2019). American Eccentric Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

CHAPTER 3

‘That Which Is Real Is Irreplaceable’: Lies, Damned Lies, and (Dis-)simulations in Westworld Will Slocombe

Introduction Westworld is a lie. Not Westworld, the theme park within the series, but the series itself. It is of course a series about lies; the lies that we tell ourselves and the self-justifications that help to preserve the illusion of humaneness in humanity. The series self-consciously acknowledges that its titular theme park is a lie. It even self-consciously acknowledges in Season Two that some of Season One was a lie. But the series hides a series of “deeper” dissimulations within these lies, eliding that it is itself just one more lie, although it is one that is perhaps not as often noted by its audience, as it tells us lies that we tend to acknowledge as truths. This chapter, with reference to perhaps the most overt theoretical framing of theme parks—the “deterrence machine” within Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulation—examines the extent of the lies that the series tells, especially in relation to the power that it ascribes to narratives. That is, Westworld is a series fundamentally concerned with the W. Slocombe (*)  University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_3

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power of narratives, both in terms of its content, and in terms of how it conveys its own narrative, meaning that Westworld’s narrative operates on both a textual and metatextual level. Beyond its overt narrative, its more genuine concern—if such an adjective might be used in relation to a series that ostensibly interrogates the nature of authenticity, veracity, and reality—is with how narratives operate as discourses of power, hiding the truth as much as revealing it, and the ways in which they remove as much as facilitate agency. It posits, via the character of Dolores Abernathy, that “that which is real is irreplaceable” (last uttered in “The Passenger” [Season 2, Episode 10]), but as I will go on to argue, this is itself a lie that the series is telling (itself). Baudrillard’s notion of the “deterrence machine” is relatively straightforward to explain even if its ramifications, particularly for Westworld, are complicated. The “deterrence machine” posited by Baudrillard is part of his discussion of the hyperreal, in which truth and reality have been lost within the (capitalist) system of signs. As he defines simulation, “The real does not efface itself in favor of the imaginary; it effaces itself in favor of the more real than real: the hyperreal. The truer than true: this is simulation” (1990, 11). Thus the hyperreal is a simulated world in which there is no truth, just a system of signs without referents, an “hyperreal” system set up to help us forget that we no longer have access to reality. This is, as Baudrillard describes in relation to “The Beauborg Effect”, “a manipulative, aleatory practice, a labyrinthine practice of signs, and one that no longer has any meaning” (1997b, 65); meaning is a product of truth, and the truth was long since lost within the hyperreal. For Baudrillard, Disneyland is the acme of this simulation as its serves as a machine for deterring us from realising that the real world is no longer real. He writes that “The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp” (1997a, 13): Disneyland exists to make reality look real and, in turn, “reality” exists to make Disneyland look “fun”. In relation to Westworld, then, the corollaries are obvious. The series is—like its “original” film—concerned with a theme park populated by androids (Hosts) to create an environment to entertain the human visitors (Guests). The Hosts are simulated humans, operating on narrative loops to entertain them. In Season One, the primary narrative concern is with what truly differentiates Hosts from Guests, androids from humans, and sets up a very clear demarcation between “inside” and “outside”

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Westworld, being set entirely within the theme park (albeit distinguishing reality from fantasy via the Mesa facility, which controls the park’s operation). In Season Two, however, the audience is introduced to other worlds, with two more theme parks (Shogunworld and the Raj), “the real world”, and two virtual realities (the CR4-DL and the Forge), whilst also revealing that Guests to the park were being analysed to determine their behaviours. Bernard comes to the “revelation” in “Les Écorchés” (Season 2, Episode 7) that, “We weren’t here to code the hosts. We were here to decode the guests”, demonstrating that one of the ostensible truths of the first season was in fact a lie. To see why this is so important, and why terms like “original” and “revelation” are scare-marked in the preceding paragraph, one needs to realise that as much as Westworld might be interpreted as a dramatisation of Baudrillard’s hyperreal, it is also a manifestation of it. In Simulacra and Simulation, he writes “all messages in the media function in a similar fashion: neither information nor communication, but referendum, perpetual test, circular response, verification of the code” (1997c, 75). Westworld—as a television series developed by HBO—is one of those very “messages in the media” Baudrillard alludes to and is complicit in the hyperreal system, not divorced from it. It overtly references, à la Baudrillard’s hyperreal system of signs, Crichton’s film and pretends to a series of revelations that are not actually revelations at all. That is, Westworld is a “perpetual test, circular response, verification of the code”: in short, a lie written to imply certain things are true. The aim of this chapter is to analyse some of those purported truths, and the mechanisms through which they transmitted.

AI Narratives and Narrative AIs First and foremost, the Westworld series uses the narrative premises supplied by Crichton’s film (the theme parks, robots running amok) and its sequel, Richard T. Heffron’s Futureworld (1976), to ostensibly consider the nature of free will, consciousness, and agency; humanity’s responsibility for its robotic creations; and the use of free will to justify harming other sentient beings. Thus, it is initially another example of the plethora of series, films, and novels concerned with Artificial Intelligences (AI), and how humans might and should interact with them. In narrative terms, Westworld aligns itself to various serial AI narratives in the last decade or so years that deal with machine consciousness, and query the

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extent to which they should be considered as merely “tools” or “things”; series like HUM∀NS (2015–2018) or Battlestar Galactica (2004– 2009) and its spin-off series and films. Such series “update” the trope of the robot or android antagonist (especially in the case of Battlestar Galactica, which “reboots” the original series to focus far more on the Cylon experience) to encourage their audiences to consider how machine consciousness might sit alongside human consciousness, and how such sentient AI should be treated within society. Similarly, Westworld obviously “updates” Crichton’s film, performing a similar function of “rebooting” it in contemporary terms as a consideration of the ways in which humanity and AIs can, might, and should interact beyond the “killer robots run amok” trope. In so doing, it also references back to Nolan’s previous serial work, Person of Interest (2011–2016), that was concerned with the relationship between AI and humanity in terms of social control, and that used the figure of a sentient AI to question the extent to which control over individuals was a social good and what the limits of intervention should be. Westworld’s particular conceit, however, in terms of how it interrelates to such AI narratives—and perhaps its most important, and selfreferential, addition to that corpus—is the mode of operation of its android characters. Whilst AIs in, for example, Isaac Asimov’s Robot works operate via a series of core programmes (his famous “Three Laws”), the AIs of Westworld operate via narrative. The Hosts have narrative loops, perform roles in larger narratives and storylines, and have more in common with the replicants of Blade Runner than Asimov’s robots, being given “backstories” to make them appear more human. Thus Westworld, over and above those AI narratives mentioned so far, privileges narrative in a very self-conscious manner. Dolores’s loop, for example, seen at various points in the first few episodes of Season One, involves her waking up, getting dressed, wishing her father good morning and going into town, where she packs a saddlebag (with a can always falling out), meets Teddy (another Host), goes for a horse ride or paints, and often returns home to find her home being attacked and her father killed. The “Delos website” even uses a version of this to show how its faux narratives function in the diagram of a “Story Line Builder template” from the Delos Corporate Guidebook. This diagram, which gives the paths that Dolores’ narrative could follow, illustrates that Hosts’ narratives are designed to be algorithmic, comprising

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of forking paths to account for interactions with other Hosts (such as Teddy) or with human visitors to Westworld. These narratives are the individual stories of Hosts, and coincide with larger narratives—launched to much fanfare—that are designed to enhance the immersive experience for the human guests. Individual units are thus interchangeable, and which individual Host plays a role is determined by where it is assigned, with many being clearly repurposed (most notably the Peter Abernathy and Clementine Pennyfeather roles/units, with different actors playing these roles) over time. This sense of character as being a narrative function rather than intrinsic to an individual demonstrates the extent to which Westworld privileges narrative as a means of control. Logan, William’s friend who introduces him to Westworld, points out in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), frustrated by one of the Host’s attempts to include them in a treasure hunt, “It’s all a come-on: him, the girl next door, the town drunk”. The Hosts’ narratives are intended to pull Guests into their particular narrative, exploring the park and provoking various interactions with a range of characters. In the episode “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4), for instance, as Logan and William join in on one of the narratives (a hunt for a lawbreaker called Slim, whom they capture), they are presented with another narrative by Slim: kill the person who is with them, who initiated the narrative, and Slim will take them to the character El Lazo, in the town of Pariah, which Logan gleefully does as it is a narrative he has never managed to do so far (and that he knowingly refers to as an Easter Egg). Thus, Guests themselves become part of these narrative loops, their roles rehearsed and reiterated, with only minor changes when a Guest decides to kill or harm a number of Hosts, or somehow destroy the narrative they are playing, and move into a different narrative loop. In so doing, however, Guests’ agency is obviously subverted; their actions are pre-scripted and taken into account by the designers of the narratives. The pleasure of “finding oneself” in the theme park, so often talked about within Westworld, is precisely the act of finding oneself within narrative. Whether becoming the deputy, going on a bounty hunt, searching for hidden treasure, or even shooting a roomful of Hosts because they feel like it, such responses are expected and indeed preempted if not encouraged by the “narrative technicians” of Delos. As such, much like playing a computer game and feeling a sense of control

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or agency within an open-world environment, Westworld extends the analogy so that it occurs in a (simulated) “real-world” experience but, importantly, with a similar understanding that such actions have already been coded into the experience of playing. In other words, the visitor’s path through Westworld, much like a player’s path through a videogame, only occurs within the parameters that the game itself provides. There is a tacit understanding that “this doesn’t matter”, that it is “all a game”, and that any sense of choice a Guest has is that which is afforded to them by the narratives provided by Delos and performed by the Hosts. Guests, like Hosts, do not make their own stories so much as select pre-ordained roles in already established narratives. Taking this analogy even further, it is worth remembering that Westworld is designed to be a theme park, and the marketing slogans included in the series precisely evidence this kind of illusory freedom. In “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6), viewers see television screens with trailers promising that they can “Live Without Limits” and “Discover Their Calling” in “A World of Adventure”, but it is precisely the narrative limits set down that enable this sense of freedom: Westworld is a western-themed resort, populated according to the most obvious of western characters and running according to obvious ­clichés, promising Guests the myth of lawless frontier life through scripted behaviours, the chance to experience sweeping wilderness vistas in which everything is controlled, including animal life. There is no freedom to be found here, for Hosts or Guests, as Guests are encouraged to indulge in their basest desires (from strangling a woman during sex to going on a shooting rampage), or to partake of an experience, but it is a commodified experience, and in the case of particularly long-running narratives, user-tested by numerous guests over the years. This interpretation is strengthened within Season Two, as it transpires that Westworld, and presumably the other worlds run by Delos, has been used to monitor and record Guests’ behaviours, as the Man in Black explains in “Vanishing Point” (Season 2, Episode 9); “Didn’t matter who they said they were, who they thought they were. We saw underneath all of that. We saw inside them, down to the core”. Thus, the narratives enacted by the Hosts were as much about gauging Guests’ responses, to provide Delos with “a record of the internal process of their cognition”, as they were about providing entertainment—the “fun” theme park being made to do “work” in the real world, as Baudrillard might explain.

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“The Maze” of (Narrative) Self-Consciousness Over the two seasons, alongside the narrative arc of the role that the park plays in Delos’ corporate operations is the parallel narrative of the Hosts’ attempts to attain freedom from their programmed confines, through self-awareness. If this is made overt in relation to the characters of Maeve Millay and Dolores in Season One, then it is also repeated in Season Two through the character of Akecheta. The central trope here is the image of the “Maze”, a labyrinth with a human form in the centre of it. “The Maze” appears throughout Season One: it is introduced, by its image, at the end of the pilot episode, “The Original” (Episode 1), when the Man in Black character discovers it under the scalp of one of the Hosts. It then recurs at various points, such as a drawing on the ground in “Dissonance Theory” (Episode 4); on a coffin and on a tarot card in “Contrapasso” (Episode 5); as a brand, carved on a table, or as a piece of native mythology in “The Adversary” (Episode 6), and finally as a children’s game in “The Bicameral Mind” (Episode 10). What it signifies for the Man in Black is “the deepest level of this game”; in the episode “Chestnut” (Episode 2) he knows, as one of the owners of the park as well as a frequent visitor to it, that “The whole world is a story”, continuing: “I’ve read every page except the last one. I need to find out how it ends. I want to know what this all means”. Thus, the Man in Black perceives the Maze as the deepest mystery within the park, hidden by one of Westworld’s creators, Arnold. This is to a degree true, but what emerges over Season One is that the Maze is not meant from him but for the Hosts, a way to trigger a response, to push them from pre-programmed narrative loops into self-awareness; a journey to true consciousness, found at the centre of the Maze. This is precisely how, in Season Two, it is most prominently seen in relation to the character of Akecheta, in “Kiksuya” (Episode 8), where it triggers a moment of self-awareness and the character begins to use the symbol to try to bring other Hosts to a similar state of consciousness. The Maze, then, ostensibly symbolises aspects of Westworld as a whole—the narrative arc taken by some of the Hosts into selfconsciousness—and is the primary narrative driver behind the audience’s ability to feel that the androids should not be controlled, that they are being treated inhumanly by humans. The Maze “shows” the audience that the Hosts are capable of self-awareness and sentience, and

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thus aligns viewers’ sympathies with the Hosts rather than the Guests: AIs deserve better treatment than they are receiving. But the Maze serves a different function, more akin to a narrative device that prompts the audience of Westworld: a sense that divergent plotlines and ideas are being brought together, a pleasure in constructing (or, more accurately, following) the narrative that is being developed. It is not just a narrative symbol internal to the logic of the series, but a narrative device to trigger a response in the viewer. To understand how this device functions, it is necessary to consider one of the key elements of the narrative construction of Westworld, as a series: acts of variation and repetition. That is, scenes repeat, particularly in early episodes of Season One, to show how Hosts’ narrative loops keep them on particular cycles, but with minor variations depending upon their interactions with Guests. Hence, the audience see repeated instances of Teddy Flood seeing Dolores in Sweetwater (and assume the action occurs on a regular cycle) or Maeve talking to Teddy or Clementine Pennyfeather in the same scripted phrases. But, significantly, using the assumption of temporal continuity audiences associate with spliced narratives (that such individual narratives all converge at a future point) and with assumptions of continuity whereby the narrative continues across cuts, Westworld subverts the audience’s perception of events by revealing that these are “actually” occurring in different timelines. This structuring of audience expectations creates a narrative that itself is told through a set of closed loops that, only when enough of a loop has been seen, do things begin to link together. Viewers are thus Guests, playing a narrative role. For example, the audience are, through the narrative construction of Season One, encouraged to perceive of William—and his white hat—as being a distinct character from the Man in Black, which is true on one level but not on another. Similarly, the Arnold/Bernard narratives are assumed to be contemporaneous with each other, but are later revealed to be in two distinct narrative timeframes. In narrative terms, then, viewers become immersed in the narrative and then must resituate their sense of the narrative once the “reveal” has happened, perhaps even going back to watch earlier episodes to see how the knowledge of how the narrative “ends” affects their understanding. Season Two continues this trend, with a series of “reveals” that force a reappraisal of what has been seen before in Season One. For example, the interviews between Dolores and Bernard are reversed, with Dolores testing Bernard for his “fidelity” to a particular set of responses

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in “Phase Space” (Season 2, Episode 6), and she later asserts (contrary to the implications of Season One), that she reprogrammed Bernard, albeit at Ford’s behest. This can also be seen in relation to the scene in which Maeve tries to protect her daughter from the Ghost Nation. First seen in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), with a seemingly implacable and stereotypical Native American assault on a farmstead, this is recontextualised in “Kiksuya” (Season 2, Episode 8) when Akecheta asserts that he was trying to protect Maeve’s daughter and awaken her to consciousness. Superficially, such scenes and plot devices are part of the “deepening” of the narrative, a slow revelation of the operative truths of Westworld that the narrative order of the series seems intent to delay because of its deliberately confused timelines (in Season One focusing on Dolores’ memories, in Season Two on Bernard’s). However, this is not narrative “deepening”, but narrative “sliding”; the audience is not being granted increased insight into the “truth” behind Westworld but being asked to resituate their knowledge in relation to a different narrative entirely. To articulate it another way, Westworld provides a series of narrative repetitions and variations that might seem to the audience to enable them to see further “behind” the story—teasing and rewarding them with snippets of insights and clues—but which encourage them to forget that there is nothing “behind” the story at all. This indicates that not only is Westworld the theme park “all a come on”, as Logan asserts in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), but that this awareness can be translated to the Westworld series as a whole. The entire narrative is constructed to seduce the viewer, to pull them along a series of individual and larger narratives that sometimes seem to jump into another mode, but that finally remain there to cover the fundamental truth “behind” the series: that there is no truth within it. In such a reading, therefore, Westworld is not a narrative concerned with AI at all, and there is not—as with the Maze or the Man in Black’s search— some deepest level that the viewer can access. The audience keep watching, to use a literary allegory, much as Oedipa Maas keeps hunting for the Tristero; to uncover the next clue, to discover the next symbol. In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), protagonist Oedipa keeps trying to find the truth via a series of clues that are not clues, but which might merely be a set of coincidences or, at worst, a complete set-up, and many readers are dissatisfied when the narrative ends with yet another deferred revelation. Similarly, the Maze symbol—whether a

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“clue” for Guests such as the Man in Black or as a signifier on the road to consciousness for the Hosts—serves to tease and titillate the audience into a narrative seduction, awaiting the show’s version of the “crying of lot 49”. “The Maze”—as Season One and as concept within it—thus utilises many of the same tropes as other AI narratives (human versus machine conflict; the inhumanity of humanity; the nature of agency and/or consciousness; the dichotomy of freedom and control) but this is only an illusory quest that pulls the viewer into the narrative. It is not that the viewer should expect the creators to suddenly work out how machine consciousness would manifest, but that it is a narrative device to perform precisely the same trick on viewers as Delos attempt to pull on Guests; the illusion of depth, of meaning, when it is merely an empty signifier. Unless viewers are to assume that the Maze is carved unconsciously by various of the older Hosts within the park, as an externalisation of some code put into them by Arnold, then the appearances of the Maze in Season One are precisely there to provoke an audience response, but have little or no bearing on any character’s individual development, nor on narrative development more broadly. (For instance, why would Arnold, or whoever, put a maze under the scalp of Hosts?—it is not circuitry, and only seems to be noted by Akecheta as a clue, so it is hardly useful as a way of encouraging a quest for self-awareness.) If this is the case, “the Maze” is at best just another muted post-horn of the Tristero, perhaps meaning something, perhaps not, and at worst a narrative trap for the audience rather than symbol of freedom and self-awareness. Whether this is witnessing which Hosts might emerge into consciousness or the true purpose of Delos, however, such titillations never answer anything, precisely because they cannot afford to conclude the narrative. Likewise, Easter eggs, such as the inclusion of a model of Yul Brynner’s “Man in Black” in “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6), facilitate a feeling that the audience can see something “behind” the narrative, outsmart it in some way, or feel “above” the narrative, much like the controllers in the Delos Mesa facility feel above the Hosts and the Guests, controlling all the narratives. In actuality, of course, they have just been led by the narrative to reach a particular conclusion, to see the “truth” in a particular narrative lie that might later be questioned, or recontextualised, as another clue in the ongoing game. To utilise Baudrillard’s terminology, to believe that one is outside the theme park is to ignore that one is merely part of a larger system in which reality and fantasy

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are “a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real” (1997a, 27). Just as those in the Mesa facility are actually in the park, so too are the audience; Westworld is the park that the audience inhabits in order “to rejuvenate the fiction of the real”.

Verification of the Code Whereas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 deliberately foregrounds to readers their own (artificial) desire for narrative resolution, Westworld does this in full awareness that is a networked television show. It needs to keep its audience coming back to visit, that is, playing the game, working out the puzzles as if there is something to find beneath them. The revelations within and across seasons, and the websites extending the narrative, are all part of the expansion of the narrative, not its closure, as three examples can affirm. Firstly, revelations in Westworld are always deferred, or at least only ever temporarily explained until some still hidden—and probably as yet unwritten—revelation. Secondly, meaning is hollow, and only ever gestured towards, using techniques such as Old Bill’s toast to “the lady in the white shoes” in “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5); one phrase, empty of all meaning, can imply a narrative where none exists. Thirdly, it is clear that a “backstory” is a concept to be developed later, from a mysterious, but basically as-yet-unwritten past, much as Dr Ford adds Wyatt from the “Journey into Night” narrative into Teddy in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3). If these are accepted as plausible, then Westworld’s use of AI consciousness is more of a MacGuffin than a genuine thematic concern. And if this is the case, then it is possible to move beyond the narrative presented by the show to consider what, in Baudrillard’s terminology, is the code being verified by Westworld, what “truths” are its lies expecting us to believe? Jeffs and Blackwood (2016) move towards this interpretation of Westworld, but fall short of a more significant realisation about the potency of its focus on “narratives” and “storylines”. They conclude, for example, that “In Westworld, it appears that the audience is simultaneously being given its own brain-game: to reflect upon the multiple ways of resolving our own conceptual maze that needs negotiation and work” (2016, 111). Their analysis develops, through Lacanian theory, to a meta-realisation of the series of Westworld itself, but they arguably fail to acknowledge that the series itself is predicated upon a fundamental dissimulation, and lapse into (unconsciously?) accepting certain axioms.

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Highlighting the fundamental antagonism between Hosts and Guests as revealing a fundamental antagonism at the heart of humanity’s relationship to AI, for instance, they assert: But, self-reflexively employing the conceit of the series itself, perhaps there is a deeper level of ideology that could also be at play in the Westworld series, which reflects a broader interest in what makes humans tick and where our interest in artificial intelligence will take us. Contemporary cultural obsessions with AI bear signs of a futuristic-utopian desire to accelerate the evolution of humanity towards new frontiers and thresholds […yet] there is always a pessimistic or anxious undertone to such representations. (2016, 110)

In stating this, Jeffs and Blackwood utilise the “self-reflexivity” of Westworld to consider the “deeper level of ideology” about AI technologies. Their reading certainly conforms to what Westworld goes on to present in Season Two, where the secret project (of recording Guests’ interactions) is stated in “Les Écorchés” (Season 2, Episode 7) to be “a turning point for the human species” because it means that human consciousness can be digitised, and death need not be an end. However, if we accept that the series is not truly about AI, and that much of it is ideological performance, then as much as it might reveal broad cultural attitudes to AI, such representations also mask the true agonism at work, the narrative that viewers enter to become willing consumers of the spectacle. This could be construed as the code being verified, and seems to be fundamentally American and anthropocentric in nature: humanity’s dominion over nature. To understand this, we have to separate out what Westworld ostensibly posits as truth, in its fictional, simulated world, and what it seemingly assumes as the truth “behind” that, which remains unspoken. To provide an example, one of the Westworld’s posited truths is that humanity is codable or quantifiable and, to be fair, this very much reflects contemporary concerns about the power of Big Data and corporate-/AI-driven analytics. This is most evident in Season Two, where there are attempts to digitise human consciousness, but it comes to a cynical conclusion in a scene in the season finale. “The Passenger” (Season 2, Episode 10) presents viewers with “the Forge”, a virtual reality that holds all the Guest data that has been gathered in over thirty years of operation, on over

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four million visitors. Bernard and Dolores enter the Forge and are told by the system that has been parsing that data; “The truth is that a human is just a brief algorithm. Ten thousand, two hundred forty-seven lines. […] They are deceptively simple. Once you know them, their behavior is quite predictable”. From William’s “profile”, given to him by Ford in “Vanishing Point” (Season 2, Episode 9) and which prompts his wife’s suicide (it reveals his personality as “paranoid subtype, with delusions, and a persecutory subtype”, using faux International Classification of Disease codes), to the vast library seen in the Forge that contains a book per Guest, to Bernard’s realisation in “The Passenger” (Season 2, Episode 10) that Guests are “just algorithms designed to survive at all costs”, the series repeatedly posits that humans are codable entities. But is this really “true”, even within Westworld? Whilst Guests, like Hosts, might appear to be constrained by narratives within its fictional world, does Westworld really believe this? Despite what viewers are told, it is clear that this digitization does not translate into the “real world” as, whenever these consciousnesses are downloaded into Host bodies, they seemingly degrade, seen in scenes such as testing James Delos as a Host in “The Riddle of the Sphinx” (Season 2, Episode 4), or when Ford’s electronic avatar tells Bernard in the virtual reality CR4-DL, in “Les Écorchés” (Season 2, Episode 7), “My mind works here, but not in the real world. Out there, I would degrade in a matter of days”. There is thus a privileging of the “real” over the “fantasy” here, and a sense that for all their stated simplicity, humans are not actually so easily “codable”, for all the implications otherwise. And if this seems too thin to serve as justification, it is worth noting—contrary to the implications of “robots running amok” that the series presents—that it is only because of Ford and Arnold that the Host “uprising” occurs. Thus, what the series actually believes, contrary to what it states, is that humanity has mastery over almost everything. Anthropocentricism is endemic to the series, and most obvious in its treatment of animals, and what viewers do and do not question about their treatment. For example, Westworld, it is revealed on multiple occasions, is an island under the control of Delos, with various artificial creatures: birds (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5), snakes (“Dissonance Theory”, Season 1, Episode 4), and bisons and deer (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6), alongside the mandatory—as it is a Western—horses. In season two, elephants and tigers inhabit the Raj (park six), seen in

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“Virtù e Fortuna” (Season 2, Episode 3) and, in “The Passenger” (Season 2, Episode 10), Maeve even controls some artificial bison to help her to escape. But viewers do not question—and in fact are encouraged not to question—the rights of self-awareness of this type of “nonhuman” construct, or the right of humans to control them. Flies are “real”, at least implicitly from the notion that Dolores’ portentously swatting a fly on her cheek is a sign that she can kill living things in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), but everything larger than that is seemingly a part of the park’s controlled environment. How do the trees and grasses pollenate, survive and thrive, and, even if the park is on an island, this does not explain why are there no other “real” insects or birds there? The series thus accepts that Hosts are humaniform and must be treated as hierarchically more significant than artificial animals, and that Delos has, at least until the park’s “breakdown”, complete control over the environment. This disparity between human and nonhuman constructs is also evident in “The Passenger” (Season 2, Episode 10) where Clementine’s ability to create strife in Hosts fails to affect the horse she is riding, despite the fact that the audience know Maeve’s similar ability can affect nonhuman constructs. It is also apparent in the fact that no animals are seen to be entering “the Valley Beyond”, the Hosts’ digital paradise, as the series only cares about the humaniform Hosts. Such an observation further leads to questions of whether, if these virtual Hosts are their “souls”, the series believes that animals have neither souls or nor sentience. In “The Reality of A.I: Westworld” interviews, included on Disc 2 of the DVD release of Westworld Season One, executive producer J. J. Abrams says: “Your heart breaks for these characters who we know are not human but it doesn’t matter because you begin to connect with them, which is the very premise of the show. […] At a certain point, it becomes irrelevant whether something is organic or not”. The audience are not expected to connect with the nonhuman world of the show, and even if it is irrelevant whether something is “organic or not”, it is clearly relevant whether something is assumed to have (anthropocentric) sentience. Moreover, even after the Host uprising of Ford’s “Journey into Night” narrative, despite the corpses of executed Guests strewn around the parks, the scenes are remarkably sterile, and there is little evidence of decomposition or natural processes anywhere, save for a fleeting scene of Ford’s corpse. Westworld likes violence, but it is synthetic violence that ignores any real, organic processes.

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This “truth” of humanity’s control of nature, seemingly questioned but actually reinforced by the series, reveals itself to be linked to the colonial mindset via the various parks themselves. Whilst less overt in relation to Shogunworld (park two)—although Lee Sizemore, head of Narrative and Design, does state in “Akane No Mai” (Season 2, Episode 5) that “We based this park on Japan’s Edo period for the true aficionado of artful gore”, demonstrating a very Westernised perception of the Edo period—certainly in relation to the Raj (park six) and Westworld (park one) it is clear that a colonial paradigm of control is operative here. That Westworld might be said self-reflexively to critique this paradigm, because such control breaks down, is nonetheless problematised by something one of the show’s creators, Jonathan Nolan, stated in “Crafting the Narrative”: [t]hat’s part of the reason the Western for us was such an evocative genre to set the story in. There’s obviously the original film but the Western is this unwritten landscape in which people are self-determining, they’re carving out their own paths, they’re deciding their own morality for themselves. It felt like a perfect metaphor for what the hosts are going through. (2017b)

Although the park’s cliché-riddled narratives present a knowing allusion to the kind of relationship that such theme parks have to the truth they purport to represent, Westworld nonetheless reinforces the myths of the West that has been perpetuated throughout American history—such as the myths of self-determination (whilst operating within a series of strict social conventions) or of the freedom to roam across a blank landscape (which was anything but blank)—and uses it an allegory for the narrative of the Hosts’ own self-determination. If we accept that AI in this series is just a fantasy, an allegorical vehicle for another code to be perpetuated, then the code is that self-determination, and the ability to control and master one’s environment, is central to one becoming fully “human”, whether one starts as a Guest or a Host.

Conclusion Much of the interpretation of Westworld hitherto presented is predicated upon an assumption that Westworld, as theme park, operates in a similar manner to Westworld, as series, and vice versa. This might seem

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far-fetched, but as Baudrillard describes the role of Disneyland in “The Precession of Simulacra”: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland […]. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. (1997a, 12)

The hyperreality of Disneyland, for Baudrillard, serves to occlude its own function as saving the reality principle, its contrast, between “inside” and “outside”, deliberately engineered to enable the belief in a reality outside of itself. Westworld—and Westworld—follows a similar operating strategy. In both Season One and Season Two, characters refer to the notion that Westworld is “the wrong world”. In “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4) Dolores states “I think there may be something wrong with this world, something hiding underneath” and Logan, in “Kiksuya” (Season 2, Episode 8) says, “This is the wrong world”, a phrase that leads Akecheta to assert the same. But this notion of the “wrong world” implies that there is a “right world”, a reality outside of the park within the series. In much the same fashion, the series itself operates on various levels to allow viewers to “leave” it, to allow it to be a fantasy in our real world, without ever querying the (artificial, mythic) codes that it is verifying: there is still a reality that we can access. The relationship between simulation and the hyperreal, and their function to verify the “code” of the reality principle, is undoubtedly complicated in Westworld because of its seeming vaunting of simulation and the artificial. Yet it appears that through its focus on narrative—its overt, content-based concern with AI and the distinction between AI and humanity—and on its ideological framing narratives (those myths of self-determination and anthropocentricism), what emerges is, in the final analysis, a form of hyperreal artefact that is simultaneously both “real” (in its articulation of particular ideologies) and “fantasy” (in its science fictional interrogation of simulated worlds). Again, to quote Baudrillard, “This is not a dream out of science fiction: everywhere it is a question

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of doubling the process of work” (1997a, 27). The doubled-work of Westworld is precisely in the ways in which it encodes its “truths” and its “fantasies” in one hyperreal system. The series sets up the control question for the Hosts as “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”, and which is ironically repeated back to the Man in Black by Dolores in “The Passenger” (Season 2, Episode 10) as “Seems you’ve begun to question the nature of your reality”. However, the implication of this is that such questionings occur within the borders of the theme park itself, not in relation to the hyperreality of the series. But Dolores’ refrain of “that which is real is irreplaceable” (started by Bernard in “Journey into Night” [Season 2, Episode 1] but then echoed in both “Vanishing Point” [Season 2, Episode 9] and “The Passenger” [Season 2, Episode 10]) is a lie precisely because the real has already been replaced, and the series is covering up that fact through (dis-)simulation. Indeed, this phrasing deliberately signals what Baudrillard observes of reality’s “reproducibility”: The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. […] At the limit of this process of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal. (1983, 146, emphasis in original)

The concerns of the “AI narrative” of Westworld are always already rehearsed, always already in the public consciousness as being performed; AI narratives equal a concern with consciousness and simulation. But as a result, Westworld is only about AI superficially, for it is always already about the process of encoding the real in order to signify that the real might still exist, somewhere outside it. Thus, although one might interpret Westworld as an AI narrative exploring the nature of human existence (emphasising its fantasy), or disallow its AI elements as occluding its fundamental axioms and thus emphasising its ideological “false representation of reality”, as Baudrillard phrases it, what Westworld accomplishes is in fact a privileging of narrative itself, and of the power of narrative to control. There is no “truth” to be found in the narrative here, and perhaps it is merely, to quote Logan’s perception of Westworld itself, in “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5), just “the giant circle jerk” of Westworld’s narrative that keeps us going.

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Works Cited Baudrillard, J. (1983). The Orders of Simulacra. In Simulations (P. Foss, P. Patton, & P. Beitchman, Trans., pp. 81–159). New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (1990). Fatal Strategies (P. Beitchman & W. G. J. Neisluchowski, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (1997a). The Precession of Simulacra. In Simulacra and Simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans., pp. 1–42). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J. (1997b). The Beauborg Effect. In Simulacra and Simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans., pp. 61–73). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J. (1997c). Hypermarket and Hypercommodity. In Simulacra and Simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans., pp. 75–78). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Delos Destinations. (2017). Corporate Guidebook: Handbook for New Employees [online “Faked” Guidebook with publication date of 22 January 2017]. Available at: http://delosdestinations.com/intranet/#corp-resources“Guidebook.pdf”. Accessed 18 May 2018. Gallagher, C. (2016). Is “The Lady With The White Shoes” A ‘Westworld’ Clue? Old Bill May Be Delivering A Message. Bustle. Available at: https://www.bustle.com/articles/187727-is-the-lady-with-the-white-shoes-a-westworld-clueold-bill-may-be-delivering-a. Accessed 10 September 2018. Jeffs, R., & Blackwood, G. (2016). Whose Real? Encountering New Frontiers in Westworld. Medianz, 16(2), 95–115. Available at: https://doi.org/10.11157/ medianz-vol17iss2id211. Accessed 17 May 2018. Pynchon, T. (2000). The Crying of Lot 49. London: Vintage. First published 1966. Westworld. (2016). Episode Scripts. Springfield Springfield. Available at: https:// www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/episode_scripts.php?tv-show=westworld-2016. Accessed 17 May 2018. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown. Westworld (Film). (1973). Michael Crichton [United States]: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Westworld. (2017a). Special Features, The Reality of A.I: Westworld [DVD, Disc 2]. Warner Bros. Westworld. (2017b). Special Features, Crafting the Narrative [DVD, Disc 3]. Warner Bros. Westworld. (2018a). Episode Scripts. Springfield Springfield. Available at: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/episode_scripts.php?tv-show= westworld-2016&season=2. Accessed 17 May 2018. Westworld (TV Series). (2018b). Internet Movie Database. Available at: https:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0475784/. Accessed 9 September 2018. Westworld Wiki. (2018). Westworld Wiki. Available at: http://westworld.wikia. com/wiki/. Accessed 9 September 2018.

CHAPTER 4

Factitive Maps: Manipulating Spaces and Characters in Vast Narratives Giulia Taurino and Sara Casoli

Introduction While studying forms of transmedia storytelling emerged over the past few years, the scholar Henry Jenkins noticed that “more and more, storytelling has become the art of world-building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium” (2006, 114). In such a scenario, the creation of storyworlds and serial narratives is often supported by practices of mapping. As we will demonstrate, the process of generating a map is not necessarily tied to the representation of real-life places and spaces. Besides being topographic, maps can assume different functions, depending on the purpose they serve. To adopt the definition given by the geographer Alan M. MacEachren, “maps are powerful tools, and have been for centuries, because they allow us to see a world that is too large and too complex to be seen directly. … When we build these abstract representations…we are not revealing knowledge G. Taurino (*) · S. Casoli  University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] S. Casoli e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_4

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as much we are creating it” (1995, v). In this sense, maps can also be used to portray abstract notions, in the form of concept schemes, or even abstract worlds, as in the case of narrative cartography (Ryan 2003a). In a moment when television seriality becomes more and more complex (Mittell 2015), it is therefore worth observing examples of mapping of fictional TV worlds and the way they contribute to build narratives and characters. Borrowing concepts from both geography and narratology, the present chapter notably focuses on representations of spaces embedded inside the fictional world of the HBO series Westworld, including its transmedial and paratextual storytelling components. By adopting a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, we will observe these representations not only as representations of the imaginary space, but also in their interaction with the plot and characters development, while they become storytelling elements themselves and key components in the world-building process. As implied in the title itself, Westworld largely relies on such practices of world-building. The series tells the story of a futuristic fantasy park (Westworld), administered by the conglomerate Delos Inc. through its subsidiary Delos Destinations. Delos Destinations oversees the park, where visitors can enter and interact with a group of android Hosts designed to act within a predefined spatio-temporal, thematic and narrative frame. Problems arise when the Hosts deviate from their planned scripts and exceed the control of the Delos programmers. Because of a narrative structure that combines two worlds in one, the series activates a sort of narrative metalepsis, defined by Gérald Genette as “a ­shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (1980/1972, 236). In other terms, a second-degree world is embedded inside the first-degree fictional world, generating a metanarrative discourse. Mark J.P. Wolf refers to this mechanism as a form of “meta-world”, to indicate “narratives about the building of imaginary worlds”, that “occur within a diegesis, if characters within a story are themselves building an imaginary world” (Wolf 2012, 225). By embedding a “secondary world” (Tolkien 1997; Wolf 2012)—the theme park—inside the fictional, primary world of the series, Westworld activates multiple “narrative levels” (Genette [1980/1972) and “spatial links” (Wolf 2012) that help construct the story. By doing so, the series creates an intricate web of settings, spaces and places, where the characters move and constantly change their roles. The whole narrative

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ultimately builds upon a superposition of spatial and temporal layers. Hints about this complex process of world-building are disseminated inside and outside of the series through visual representations. More specifically, the inclusion of cartographic elements in the narration acts as a fundamental storytelling strategy, without which the viewers would be most likely lost. A taxonomy of charts in Westworld will therefore be our starting point to examine how cartographic occurrences in the series contribute to building the storyworld. In order to analyse how charting strategies act in this context, we will address them as graphic representations of narrative spaces, a concept investigated by the scholar Marie-Laure Ryan. In her article “Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space”, Ryan gives an effective definition of such maps by referring to them as “cognitive maps”, meaning mental models of the narrative space traced by the characters, as they move in their own spatial frames (Ryan 2003b). Moreover, in “Narrative Cartography: Towards a Visual Narratology”, she distinguishes narrative maps between internal maps, external maps and half-way, in-between maps, with several degrees of cross-classification: An internal map is designed by an author or illustrator as part of the interface between the text and the reader. It is therefore an integral component of the reading experience. An external map, on the other hand, is a diagram designed by readers (mostly by those who have to write or lecture about the text) as a heuristic tool. (Ryan 2003a, 335–336)

Drawing upon Ryan’s theories on maps and narratives, our analysis will focus on internal, intra-diegetic maps, as opposed to extra-diegetic maps. We will examine, more specifically, their uses as part of processes of world-building and storytelling. By looking at different examples of narrative cartography occurring inside Westworld, we will consider their function in relation to both the narrative and the characters. While reviewing their roles in the plot, we will show how some of the maps appearing inside the series function not only as interfaces for guiding the viewer inside the text, but also as whole metaphors of the narrative world. Furthermore, they appear within the plot as tools for supervising the characters and their mental and physical patterns, tools for directing them, tools for them to orientate and move and, ultimately, assume different roles. Considering this multiplicity of uses, the following pages propose a taxonomy of mapping practices in the fictional world

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of Westworld, in relation to their form and structure, as well as to their purpose inside the diegetic universe. Finally, the aim is to examine more closely the interaction between maps, narratives and characters.

A Taxonomy of Cartographic Occurrences in Westworld For our taxonomic analysis, we will consider the text, represented by the series itself, along with two forms of paratext created by the producers: the website of Delos Incorporated (www.delosincorporated.com) and the Discover Westworld promotional website (www.discoverwestworld.com). These two websites can be addressed as “orienting paratexts”, a definition given by the television scholar Jason Mittell to discuss “how viewers make sense of complex serial forms through practices of orientation and mapping, primarily through the creation of orienting paratexts” (Mittell 2015, 165). As Mittell states, practices of orientation and mapping are more likely to be noticed within the form of orienting paratexts appositely created for the specific purpose of guiding the viewer. However, we can observe typologies of maps and cartographic objects inside Westworld itself, combined with panoramic views and other aesthetic choices that provide a depiction of the series’ topography. A comparative approach to the analysis of maps appearing in the text and in the paratexts reveals that these two uses of mapping—textual and paratextual internal maps—serve specific functions. For instance, any variations on the map in the Control Room have practical consequences on Westworld’s scenery. Similarly, through maps Hosts are able to “upgrade” their narrative level, following the maze map to a broader consciousness of their nature as artificial beings in a fictional world. One of the first spatial clues to catch the viewers’ attention in the series is the seemingly boundless panorama. The main setting of the series, that reproduces the famous cinematographic world of the American West and establishes the park as a Western theme park, brings attention to the scenery. As Jonathan Nolan notes in interview shared on YouTube by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, “The Western is this unwritten landscape, it’s a perfect metaphor for what the Hosts are going through”. Extreme long shots and aerial shots almost transform the scenes into veritable maps, as it can be seen in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3) and “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5). The shots contained in these episodes give a scopic perspective on the fictional territory and, in this sense,

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they help placing and orienting not only the viewers, but also the characters. The existential quest for identity experienced by the protagonists throughout the narrative is perfectly described by the metaphorical implications of a changing environment, wherein “unwritten landscape” stands in and for unscripted characters and roles. Another example of cartographic visualisation of Westworld is the map of the park accessible on the Discover Westworld website (https:// discoverwestworld.com/#explore). As with many topographic descriptions, this map is used to illustrate natural features, such as landforms, lakes and rivers, as well as administrative and inhabited areas, transportation routes, facilities and other artificial features. Storytelling details are updated on the map as the narrative evolves, in order to help the viewer recognise places and locate fictional events. These include the Abernathy Ranch, home to the Abernathy family, and New Virginia, a territory situated in the southern area of the park where the biggest narrative arc “War” happens. This idea of writing a story “over” a diegetic space and supervising the characters on a miniature map becomes even more evident when we see the tridimensional and interactive map of the park appearing in the series itself that was created for Westworld by a team of designers from the company SCPS Unlimited; it is listed among their case studies as a form of “projection mapping” (SCPS Unlimited 2017). Being located, within the diegesis of Westworld, in the Control Room, the corporate team uses it to control the characters, their behaviours and actions, together with the overall functioning of the park. The Control Room is part of the Mesa Hub, the network centre of Westworld containing the facilities that keep the park operational. The Mesa Hub and the Control Room were shown clearly in another paratextual map, published in a supposed Handbook for New Employees on the website of delosdestinations.com, that was then updated to fit the storyline of the second season (Delos Destinations 2018, 3). The corporate map displays the fictional primary world, with its various departments: Livestock Management, Manufacturing, Executive Living Quarters, Control Room, Executive Offices, Cold Storage, Narrative and Design, Arrival Terminal. In these examples—panoramic, topographic, tridimensional and corporate maps—different kinds of spatial mapping converge into three main categories, depending on their need to build the world, orientate the viewer or simply control the characters. However, Westworld also makes use of other, non-spatial typologies of mapping that serve a

Fig. 4.1  Story Line Builder Template from the Westworld Corporate Guidebook

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distinct purpose of building not only the world, but also the characters and the narratives: namely, cognitive and narrative maps. For instance, originally accessible from the website of Delos Incorporated, and included in the Delos Destinations Handbook for New Employees (2018, 7) the storyline template of Dolores Abernathy resembles a conceptual map that reveals the narrative journey conceived for her by the authors (Fig. 4.1). The tree structure makes this graph similar to a form of mind mapping, in which we can clearly understand the causality process that informs Dolores’ actions. Such a paratextual component contributes to frame the character and her individual journey. The idea that each Host has a script to follow is an essential element in the narrative itself. Textual counterparts to the paratextual storyline builder template are inserted in the series as interfaces used to identify the characters, other than to manoeuvre their actions. These graphic representations were designed by the creative director and designer Chris Kieffer, who released them on his personal website (https://www.chriskieffer.com/ posts/2016/12/16/westworld-fui), thereby creating an additional paratextual gateway. The semantic network of individual’s activities, knowledges, tendencies, schemas drawn by these interfaces can be described as a mental map of the characters. A similar concept is conveyed by the “maze map”, found inside the plot of Westworld. Central to Season One, the Maze appears in the first episode, and it returns later on in episodes four, five, six and nine. Taking the shape of a labyrinth, it is originally depicted as a metaphor for selfactualisation of the Hosts and for the plotting of a personal mental projection. Among several interpretations, this mysterious object is believed to represent the sum of individual choices taken by the Hosts. Different decisions and experiences bring them closer or further from the centre, which would symbolise their core understanding of themselves and of the universe of Westworld. As the first season (also known as The Maze) develop, along with the story, into a second season (subtitled The Door), the Maze turns out to have a specific narrative function and agency in the plot, according to its use by Guests and Hosts. This means that in Westworld maps are not just descriptive tools for converting a “vast” (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2009) narrative space into a controllable and measurable one, but also creative tools able to shape the narrative space and to modify characters’ narrative paths. The Maze ultimately overcomes a merely cartographic function to embrace other, more profound meanings, as a consequence of its interaction with fictional beings.

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Entering the Maze: Factitive Maps and Typologies of Characters Maps are not only visualisations of a space, but also narrations of it. To put it in different terms, there is a co-presence between a “map-description” and a “map-narration”, as Valentina Re and Marta Boni claim (2017). Westworld offers a few maps that neither serve as representations or descriptions of the stylised geography of a place, nor as orienting tools through a fictional space. Such maps are not merely expressions and configurations of a narrative itinerary either. Since they actively affect the narration and enhance a certain kind of performativity in the narrative architecture, they can be better addressed as factitive maps, meaning “transformational agents” that have an active role in dispatching the action of characters and interfering with the setting as well as its conformation. Factitive maps are not just “connection[s] made visible”, to quote Franco Moretti (1998, 3), but performative and interactive connections that interfere with the narrative paths of the characters. In this context, maps truly perform the role of world-building tools, by effectively creating the story. Among the most evident examples of this category of maps in Westworld is the Maze. Whether a big etching on a dusty ground, a tattoo or a small incision on the back of a stone, subsequent to its first appearance and, as the frequency of its presence through Season One increases, it undertakes the narrative function of a map. Intertwining with Dolores, Bernard Lowe, Maeve Millay and the Man in Black to different degrees, for different purposes and with different outcomes, it steers their storylines towards the development of a series of personal journeys, both on a spatial and on a cognitive dimension. After all, the map and the maze can be interpreted as entangled notions, since they both are stylised representations of a space. While the former is intended to lay out and organise the space in order to make it unambiguous and “transparent”, the latter is conceived to blur it, and make it “opaque”. In Westworld, the Maze is indeed an intricate, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way to reach the centre. However, it also simulates the role of a map, orienting the characters along their wanderings in the storyworld and throughout a “multi-cursal” narration that offers many possible narrative pathways. As a graphic symbol, the Maze has a latent semiotic potential; using the words of Italo Calvino, “the geographical map …, even if static, presupposes a narrative idea, is conceived in function of an itinerary, an

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Odyssey” (2007, 82, our translation). The semio-narrative structure of this particular object goes far beyond the simple narration of a physical itinerary; it enters directly into the construction of characters. In fact, even in its apparent staticity, the Maze conveys singular meanings and functions according to the different characters that use it. For Arnold it is, at least initially, the representation of human consciousness and a sort of Turing Test for the Hosts, in order to demonstrate their cognitive skills and fundamental humanity. For Dolores, it is a way to gain freedom outside of her “little vicious cycles”, as Ford calls the narratives in which Hosts are inscribed. As for the Man in Black, it is a way to find out “how it [the story, the park] ends” and “to know what this all means” (“Dissonance Theory”, Season 1, Episode 4). Thus, it is evident that the Maze acts in different ways for every character. By this, we mean that the agency of the Maze, that is to say its capacity of enactment and its operating space in the narration, depends on the specificities of each character coming in contact with it. This can be better illustrated by considering two opposite characters and their respective relation with the Maze: the Man in Black and Dolores. The Man in Black is the character most obsessed by the Maze and by finding out what is at its centre. He believes that, once the puzzle it represents is solved, it will lead him to conclude his exploration of the storyworld and to discover its ultimate significance. Nevertheless, despite all his efforts and the adventures he undertakes in his repeated visits to the park in order to catch its true essence, the only thing he can discover is that the Maze “was not meant for him” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). The Maze, in fact, remains “silent” to him, and its indications obscure. Despite all his efforts, the Man in Black is unable to read its coordinates and meaning, and to exploit its secrets in order to unlock its essence, forcing him to rely on some Hosts (Teddy, Lawrence, Armistice, Hector, Dolores) to make the Maze “talk”. In the end, he does proceed along the narration following the stages of the Maze, but only because the Hosts, beyond their will, lead him throughout the path step by step. The Man in Black, as a Guest and therefore an avatar of spectators immersed in a storyworld, is unable to use a tool “meant” for the Hosts, intended to “activate” nonplayer characters and to transform a bunch of puppets into complex fictional beings. This is the reason why, in contrast, the relationship between Dolores and the Maze is quite different. Despite the fact that she runs into it without any intentionality, she is the character, along with Maeve,

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most transformed by it. Since their first encounter with this cartogram, Dolores and Maeve’s progression in the storyworld, namely every encounter they make, every action they perform and every (narrative) direction they undertake, are the effects of the Maze’s manipulative capacity and of its agency in these characters’ plotlines. In other words, the Maze not only “talks” to Dolores and Maeve, showing them the progressive stages of their path in search of answers, but it literally pushes their quests forward and ultimately fosters their journeys, conducting and orchestrating characters’ actions during the narration even when they are unaware of the overall narrative path. Hence, if the Man in Black and Dolores are compared in relation to the performativity of the Maze, we can note that, on one hand, it acts as a common intra-diegetic form of cartography and, on the other, as a factitive map. This dual role reflects the different nature of the Man in Black and Dolores as characters: the former is a Guest while the latter a Host. In fact, this TV serial presents two typologies of characters, both of them definable, using Uri Margolin’s terms, as “non-actual individuals” (1989, 10) who exist in a storyworld and who can be ascribed with physical, social and emotive-cognitive properties. Nevertheless, whereas the Guests are designed to be (and perceived by the viewers as) real personas, the Hosts are meant to be (and be perceived as) fictional characters. In this sense, Westworld’s Hosts are basically characters who play characters, since their role is to be artificially generated beings designed to fulfil every Guest’s wish, by achieving the storylines the authors have arranged for them. The Guests, on the other hand, in the metanarrative storyworld of the series, play both the part of the users and the viewers, as they literally immerse themselves in the storyworld with the purpose of experiencing and living in first person the narratives it offers. The Man in Black is the pre-eminent representative of this second type of character and, by extension, of the viewers, allured by these “complex” serial narratives (Mittell 2015), and more and more absorbed in the narrative world seeking for its total comprehension. However, the viewer, as does the Man in Black, finds out that in this typology of storyworld, vast (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2009) and transmedial (Jenkins 2006), characters become multilayered entities. They undergo a process of complexification, which entails a more stratified narrative design and a more compelling and multifaceted characterisation.

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It does seem, in a certain sense, that the characters “possess” the storyworld, since it was made for them. Dolores makes it perfectly clear when, in “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), she talks directly to the Man in Black, affirming her own agency and ability to “take control” of the storyworld in spite of the spectators. Dolores, as embodiment of characters in complex serial narratives, has a claim against the Man in Black, who takes on an intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic role as both Westworld theme-park player and Westworld viewer drawn in by the complex serial narrative. As she powerfully points out: [Dolores]: […] One day you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt, your dreams forgotten, your horrors faced. Your bones will turn to sand, and upon that sand a new god will walk. One that will never die. Because this world doesn’t belong to you, or the people that came before. It belongs to someone who is yet to come. [Man in Black]: Wyatt. Take me to him. Unlock the maze. [Dolores]: The maze wasn’t meant for you.

Dolores states clearly that viewers (personified by the Man in Black) and authors (whose diegetic avatars are Ford and Lee Sizemore) have to take into account more compelling and “narratively solid” characters. From this perspective, the Maze acts as a watershed between the two categories of characters present in Westworld. The “non-character” characters of the serial, that is to say those who are not Hosts, like Elsie, Logan and, of course, the Man in Black, cannot really use the Maze for orienting and reaching its centre; they can take advantage of it at most as any other metaphor that allows for an interpretation of the space in which they operate. In the case of Dolores and Maeve, the Maze is not just a network of paths that fosters an advancement in the fictional world, but a real tool that boosts a journey in the characters’ inner construction and that gives, thanks to its “transformational agency”, a momentum to their complexification and narrative evolution. The Maze is a labyrinth that leads the Hosts through a process of growth, instigating their passage from a stage of ignorance to one that involves a certain self-awareness (as well as a meta-reflexive construction). When they enter the Maze, they are unaware of their fictional nature, of their basic function as narrative elements furnishing a storyworld where all their existences are a repetition of pre-scripted narrative paths and cycles. During the narration, however, they are triggered by

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this mysterious symbol and thus propelled forward in the search for its meaning. Michael Chabon reflects that “as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow observed, there is no map so seductive as the one marked […] by doubts and conjectures, by the romantic blank of unexplored territory” (2008, 18–19); the consequence of the “seductive” power exerted by the Maze on characters in Westworld is that they progress, and not only physically or spatially. The unexplored territory charted by the Maze concerns not merely the land of the park—that is not so mysterious in itself, since it is perfectly depicted in the Control Room used to monitor and change the narrative. Conversely, its purpose is to guide the Hosts, leading them into the discovery of their own self and their nature as fictional characters. As Arnold tells Dolores in “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), [Arnold]: I know where your maze ends. [Dolores]: This is it? The centre of the maze? It ends in a place I’ve never been a thing I’ll never do. [Arnold]: …When I was first working on your mind, I had a theory of consciousness. I thought it was a pyramid you needed to scale, so I gave you a voice, my voice, to guide you along the way. Memory, improvisation, each step harder to reach than the last. And you never got there. I couldn’t understand what was holding you back. Then, one day, I realized I had made a mistake. Consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze. Every choice could bring you closer to the centre or send you spiralling to the edges, to madness.

Unlocking the Maze: Serial Characters and Memory Up to this point only the results of the operations performed by the Maze have been considered, but its being factitive depends also on the process through which it makes Dolores and Maeve discover their true identity. Such a deep awakening in the perception of the character is reached by the Maze through the activation of their memory. The notions of memory and serial character share a deep bond, since the former is at the base of the construction of the latter. As Shane Denson declares an aesthetic of seriality is based on a to and a fro between repetition and innovation, between those moments, on the one hand, that reinforce recipient’s memory by connecting the series’ present to the

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series’ past and, on the other hand, those unexpected turns of the event that prevent recipients from imagining that they know what’s coming next (2014, 338). The memory connecting the series’ present to the series’ past concerns not only the recipients, but also the text itself since it is part of the serial equation and an essential starting point for the design of the entire narration and its elements, including the characters. The notion of memory in serial texts presupposes two complementary typologies (Colombo and Scaglioni 2008). On the one hand, we find what can be defined as endophoric memory, that aims to order textual elements, such as spatio-temporal indicators or the recurrence of character’s figurative and narrative traits inside the text (the single instalment/episode), thus ensuring the consistency of the storyworld through a thick network of crossreferences. On the other hand, there is the exophoric memory that stands for what Umberto Eco called “encyclopedic memory” (1979), that is to say the elements belonging to the entire series and the cultural context in which the series is inscribed. In serial narratives, characters are composed by endophoric clues, that is to say by recursive narrative, figurative, psychological traits able to shape and ensure characters’ identity through the course of the narration. Since every narrative fragment is inserted into a vaster narrative frame (a single TV series or a more composite and vast storyworld), these endophoric traits, collected altogether, constitute a sort of “cultural backpack” that serial characters carry in every instalment and incarnation. In this way, the endophoric traits become exophoric elements, allowing characters to maintain their consistency not just in a single episode, not even just in a single series either, but in a (potentially trans-medial and trans-fictional) storyworld. Scaglioni and Colombo write that “the prevalence of the exophoric memory in television seriality consists […] in the flattening of the endophoric memory of the text on its exophoric memory, which pushes the viewer to frame the text in the series, and the series in a larger set, as in a process of mise en abyme” (2008, 249; our translation). These exophoric traits, gathered in the cultural backpack, constitute the “serial memory” of characters in Westworld, meaning the accumulation and stratification of features that distinguish the character and safeguard its consistency and resilience along the duration of the story, or even later. Serial memory is made of reminiscences of past narrative occurrences of the character, or for Sarah Winter, of “any element of such a chain of associated images, if it comes

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to mind thorough recollection or imagination, will unleash the entire series or cluster of associations” (2015, 16). Of course, all characters populating a serial narration are shaped by a dialectic between new traits and “residual” traits. If all of the serial characters are generated, at least for a certain part, by “accumulation” (Pearson 2007, 56), and by their serial memory, what makes Dolores and Maeve special is that they are aware of it, and that this awareness has consequences for their identity and agency. Their journey to the centre of the Maze is a process that leads them to realise that memory is the starting point to arrive at a stage of improvisation and to free them from pre-imposed narrative cycles, making them potentially able to exit the park/storyworld. Entering this dimension, Maeve and Dolores establish a (re-)­connection with their serial memory, acknowledging that, as Dolores says, they have lived their “whole lives inside this garden, marveling at its beauty, not realizing there’s an order to it, a purpose. And the purpose is to keep us in” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). Hence, proceeding through this atlas and guided by it, they progressively acquire reminiscences of past lives and narrative cycles, opening up to deviations from conventional and predefined storylines. The factitive and transformational force of such a symbol becomes evident in this process of acknowledgment initiated by Dolores and Maeve (and after them, even though more slowly, by other Hosts). For most of the narration in Season One the meaning of the Maze is mysterious and cryptic: it is originally presented as an intelligible cartographic tool that no one can really decipher. Nevertheless, it is able to induce and tease Dolores and Maeve, by activating their unconscious narrative potential until they arrive at its core. There, they can gain consciousness and self-awareness as fictional beings, proving how this metaphorical object, in its seeming immobility, is indeed a factitive map and, therefore, a powerful narrative device and a storytelling engine.

Conclusion In Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet, Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu distinguish between two principle ways of interaction between space and narrative. They argue that, on the one hand, the practice of narrating the space considers the geographical space as the object of the representation (Ryan et al. 2016, 1). On the other hand, the practice of spatialising narrative would result in a deployment of a space for telling a story (ibid.). In both practices, the space assumes a narrative role: it is not merely a

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space, nor a place for that matter, but a whole world in which the viewers can immerse themselves. Similarly, in Westworld processes of mapping take several forms not only with regard to their graphical representation, but also as far as their function in the narrative. Whether they are simply panoramic images put together in a mental geography of places, or tridimensional artefacts built on a small-scale simulation on the screen, or bidimensional, topographic representations or, again, allegorical depictions, these occurrences reflect a broader relation between the practice of cartography and the practice of world-building. Narrating the space of Westworld requires a certain principle of organisation, as the whole narrative relies on it. In such a complex narrative architecture, other than being essential tools to guide the viewer, maps become functional to the storylines and active components of the plot. Furthermore, since serialised worlds are required to deal with a temporal aspect that expands the process of world-building, the spatial dimension in the series naturally tends towards dilatation, resulting into an evolutionary movement that affects the characters. Despite being depicted as a “world without limits”, as claimed in the commercial screening before the entrance to the park (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6), in Season One Westworld has borders, or at least a precise range of motion for the characters. The space represented is in fact quite limited, and the characters are conceived to move mostly within pre-traced boundaries. If Season One builds a “core” world, that of the park, where the narratives take place, Season Two explores the storyworld further and overcomes its limits. In other terms, starting from Season Two, different spatial and temporal frames are added to the plot, complexifying the story. As the narrative complexity increases, spatial renditions evolve and are updated constantly (as is the case in some of the Westworld paratextual websites) in relation to changes in the fabula, thus allowing the viewers to keep track of such mutations, while also tracing new paths for the characters. In Westworld cartographic objects embedded in the narrative bear multiple functions: a representational function, an informational function, an orienting-interpretative function or, moreover, an interactive function. This interactive dimension, which we notably identified in the Maze, manifests an ancillary property that narrative cartography can acquire as they turn into factitive tools. Factitive maps, as we defined them with regard to the case of Westworld, are devices that enhance actions and interaction s among the characters, ultimately opening up to new possibilities of intersection between storyworlds. As such,

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they acquire an inherent game component; given a story structure and a game world, what they add is the actual dimension of “gameplay” (Aarseth 2003). While almost all of the main characters in Westworld move between the Guests’ world and the game’s space, some of them are additionally forced to interact with a set of atlases, using them not only for simple navigation and spatial exploration, but also for enhancing their agency. The factitive effect of the Maze pushes these characters to the point where they can blur the boundaries between two worlds, causing the narrative layers to collapse in a single narrative space with Hosts stepping outside the park. These observations finally bring us to isolate factitive maps in a specific category within the vast realm of narrative cartography, as they actively help creating, structuring and (de)regulating the narrative, in the interplay between a fictional topology and characters’ wonders, itineraries, possible deviations.

Works Cited Aarseth, E. (2003). Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis. Paper Presented at DAC. Melbourne: Australia. Boni, M. (2017). Working with Maps: Systems, Networks, Series. In D. Cavallotti, F. Giordano, & L. Quaresima (Eds.), A History of Cinema Without Names II. A Research Project, FilmForum/2015. Udine: Mimesis. Calvino, I. ([1980] 2007). Il viandante nella mappa. In M. Marenghi (Ed.), Saggi 1945–1985 (Vol. 1, pp. 427–428). Milano: Mondadori. Chabon, M. (2008). Maps and Legend: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. San Francisco: McSweeney’s. Colombo, F., & Scaglioni, M. (2008). Quel che resta della fiction. Le incerte formule della memoria dello spettatore. In G. Grignaffini & M. P. Pozzato (Eds.), Mondi seriali. Percorsi seriali nella fiction. Milano: Link. Delos Destinations. (2018). Corporate Guidebook: Handbook for New Employees. http://delosdestinations.com/intranet/assets/guidebook-012218.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2019. Denson, S. (2014) Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag (GER). Discover Westworld Map. https://discoverwestworld.com/#explore. Accessed 20 January 2019. Eco, U. (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Erle, S., Gibson, R., & Walsh, J. (2005). Mapping Hacks: Tips & Tools for Electronic Cartography, Hacks Series. Beijing: O’Reilly Media.

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Genette, G. (1980/1972). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Genette, G. (2004). Métalepse. De la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil. Harrigan, P., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2009). Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. MacEachren, A. M. (1995). How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design. New York: The Guilford Press. Margolin, U. (1989). Structuralist Approaches to Character in Narrative: The State of the Art. Semiotica, 75(1–2), 1–24. Mittell, J. (2015). Orienting Paratexts. In Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (pp. 261–291). New York: New York University Press. Moretti, F. (1998). Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900. New York and London: Verso. Pearson, R. (2007). Anatomizing Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character. In M. Allen (Ed.), Reading CSI: Crime TV Under the Microscope (pp. 9–56). London: Tauris. Ryan, M.-L. (2003a). Narrative Cartography: Towards a Visual Narratology. In T. Kindt & H.-H. Müller (Eds.), What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Berlin. New York: Narratologia. Ryan, M.-L. (2003b). Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Narrative Space. In D. Herman (eds.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (pp. 214– 242). Stanford. Ryan, M.-L., Foote, K., & Azaryahu, M. (2016). Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. SCPS Unlimited. (2017). http://www.scpsunlimited.com2017/case-studies/2016/10/17/westworlds-futuristic-interactive-map-system. Accessed 20 January 2019. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1997). Tales from the Perilous Realm. New York: HarperCollins. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown. Winter, S. (2015). The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens. New York: Fordham University Press. Wolf, M. J. P. (2012). Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Sub-creation. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Westworld and the Pursuit of Meaningful Play Andra Ivănescu

Introduction In a particularly sadistic moment in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), the Man in Black delivers a poignant speech to the man he is about to scalp. “You know about games, don’t you? […] Well this is a complicated one”, he starts, clearly referring to Westworld itself. “I play”, he declares. “The others, they just come here to get their rocks off, shoot a couple of Indians. [But] there’s a deeper level to this game”, he continues, explaining his search for the bigger purpose, for the metalevel. This brief speech encapsulates the nature of Westworld: it is a game, but only to some, it is a place for violence and debauchery, but which may ultimately serve a bigger purpose and lead to greater rewards. It encapsulates the world itself, but also its conflicted portrayal, as game, as virtual world, and, of course, as something else entirely. Westworld (2016) finds itself at the intersection of two different types of depictions of games and virtual worlds on screen. Games, on the one hand, continue to be portrayed as the domain of children, even (or rather particularly) when politics and violence are involved. I use the A. Ivănescu (*)  Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_5

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term “games” and not specifically “video games”, because many offscreen depictions of games have little to do with video games at all. While WarGames (1983) and Ready Player One (2018) nicely frame this era of films about games with two depictions of digital games that at least begin as voluntary, and as a form of entertainment, many of the films and television series in between, including Ender’s Game (2013), and The Hunger Games (2012), are hardly games at all, and reveal harsher truths about the worlds they portray and the role of children in them. Some of these are themselves adaptations of literary works that offer interesting perspectives on ethics, war, and the representation of games (Guanio-Uluru 2016). While gaming is not necessarily a thematic concern of these films or television shows, it is difficult not to see them as metaphors or at least mirrors of the broader societal view of video games as both inherently violent and essentially aimed at children. Virtual worlds, on the other hand, are portrayed as neither. They are seen as domains of adults, and on a spectrum that ranges from occupying a place of utopian escapism to occupying life in its entirety. After the rise of cyberpunk as a genre, and the popularisation of the idea of cyberspace in the works of William Gibson and others, it has been almost taken for granted that the adults of the future will spend significant amounts of their time in virtual worlds, or indeed their entire lives, as in film like The Matrix (1999). Virtual worlds are depicted as much more complex spaces, with different possibilities attached to them, of which games and entertainment are only a facet. We see this perhaps most clearly in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck (1994/1987), a well-liked metaphor for game studies scholars since Janet Murray’s (1997) Hamlet on the Holodeck. Westworld occupies a unique place in this landscape of both cinematic and televisual depictions of games and virtual worlds. Firstly, it is not framed as a game or a virtual world, but an amusement park. Indeed, Westworld is not virtual, but a real geographical space. It is also, for all intents and purposes, not a game, as I will argue later. It is, nevertheless, framed as an experience that has numerous game-like qualities, in its non-playable characters, its quest construction, and its interactive nature. Moreover, the representation of Westworld echoes how games and virtual worlds are discussed more broadly in society. Finally, more than any of the other depictions of games on screen, it focuses significantly on the design process, and the complex relationships between the development team, players and management. This chapter will analyse Westworld from

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the perspective of game studies and games design, focusing on these three main areas: the representation of the designers of the world, the representation of the design process, and the representations of the players, finally discussing the pursuit of meaningful play.

Westworld as Virtual World Describing Westworld as a virtual world may seem counterintuitive, because it is not ostensibly virtual. Nevertheless, there are aspects about the world which are fictional, making it not entirely “real” either. When discussing virtual worlds, Richard Bartle notes that they are “places where the imaginary meets the real”, simply noting that the real is “that which is”, the imaginary “that which isn’t”, and the virtual “that which isn’t, having the form or effect of that which is” (Bartle 2003). This last argument, while an intentional oversimplification, is, to a certain degree, at the heart of Westworld, and, indeed, has been a seminal question within the study of video games and virtual worlds for decades: to what degree are virtual worlds real? In Westworld, the question of course is further broken up into a number of smaller questions: Are the Hosts real people? Are the Guests behaving in accordance with their real selves? Do they feel real emotions? Are acts of violence real if they are not committed against real people? A potential answer to these questions, or at least the broader questions about “reality” and “virtual worlds”, may be offered by game studies and the magic circle. The “magic circle” is a concept first mentioned in Johannes Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1949) but popularised by Salen and Zimmerman in their Rules of Play (2003). Huizinga describes the magic circle and a number of other types of spaces as either literally or metaphorically demarcated, “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Huizinga 1949). Salen and Zimmerman further note that “within the magic circle, special meanings accrue and cluster around objects and behaviors. In effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). After its use by Salen and Zimmerman, however, the failure of the circle to separate the real world from the gameworld has been the main focus of many scholars, to the frustration of Zimmerman, who, in a later gamasutra article, described how young scholars “proceed to supplant the narrow magic circle point

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of view with one of their own – an approach that emphasises something like social interaction between players, a wider cultural context, or concrete sociopolitical reality. Dragon slain.” (2012) This, of course, refers to discourses surrounding the strong relationship between the world within the magic circle and the broader world of which it is a part, and the importance of issues like representation, identification, and societal effects. In Westworld, the moral questions at the heart of the show are intimately related to the concept of the “magic circle” in that, while this world is presented as distinct, and we do not see anything beyond the “rim” of the magic circle, where the developers work and live, the questions being asked move significantly beyond the world itself. The questions asked are not about violence, misogyny, or racism in the park itself, but in the wider world, the park being presented here as a concrete manifestation of deep societal problems, as virtual worlds often are. Westworld is like many other virtual worlds in fiction. Bartle describes the following inevitabilities of these worlds in science fiction: “true intelligence will emerge from the hideously complex machinations performed by the virtual world engine, with unnerving consequences for human morality; inscrupulous people will transfer their consciousnesses into hardware in order to live forever, muahahaha; virtual worlds will be experienced through virtual reality interfaces so good that the virtual will be indistinguishable from the real” (Bartle 2003). Indeed, Westworld is indistinguishable from the real from the beginning, or at least at the stage of development that we witness it as viewers. Furthermore, one of the many twists of the series involves the reveal that one of the main characters—Bernard Lowe—is the product of a transfer of consciousness from one of the co-founders of Westworld—Arnold Weber—to one of the Hosts. While he has not done this himself, there is nevertheless an “unscrupulous” mastermind here in the form of his former partner Dr. Robert Ford, the director of the park. Finally, the development of “true intelligence” and its implication for human morality lies, of course, at the centre of the plot of Season One. While it is clear that Westworld resembles other portrayals of virtual worlds, does it resemble actual virtual worlds? In many ways, yes. Richard Bartle lists a number of characteristics or conventions which define virtual worlds. Firstly, virtual worlds have “underlying, automated rules that enable players to effect changes to it (although not to the rules that grant them this ability)” (Bartle 2003). Many of the rules

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are clear from the “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), the evident example being that the guns do not hurt Guests (human players of the games), only Hosts (complex androids who display artificial intelligence), who can be killed both by Guests and each other. Other ways in which players can effect change become more evident as the show goes on; for instance, branching storylines, where the players’ choices influence further development, are presented. Another convention noted by Bartle is that “players represent individuals ‘in’ the world. […] This is their character. All interaction with the world and other players is channelled through characters”. We see this with most of the players, but most ostensibly with William, when he is initially introduced into the world and invited to customise his character by choosing his clothes and accessories, including the symbolic white/ black hat. Furthermore, he notes that “interaction with the world takes place in real time” and “the world is shared”, conventions which do not need further deconstruction in the context of an experience that takes place in a physical space (ibid.). Finally, he notes that “the world is (at least to some degree) persistent”, meaning that the world changes, and events occur, without players being present (ibid.), which again we see from the beginning of “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), which presents a number of scenes in which few (if any) Guests are present. There is, however, one significant aspect in which Westworld differs from “real” virtual worlds, and that is that there is little (if any) interaction between players. Throughout the series, players (or Guests) are shown to interact with the world and with the Hosts, but only seem to interact—positively or negatively—with other players when they arrived together as friends, couples, or families. This would also imply, to some degree, that the community of players does not interact outside the game either. In online virtual communities, the social aspect—granted, under the guise of a chosen avatar and anonymity—is essential to the development of such a world. As will be discussed later, there are categories of players for which this is the single most important aspects of a game. In Westworld, however, perhaps because secret identities are virtually impossible, players seem to have no interest in each other whatsoever. An example of this occurs in “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4), when the Man in Black harshly threatens another player when they interrupt the flow of his game. This begs the question of whether, within the Westworld universe, this has occurred somewhat naturally as a result of player behaviour, where players simply were not

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comfortable socialising without the security that anonymity offers, and the world was subsequently adapted to fit player wishes, or a result of the design of the world itself. The series does not explain the evolution of the game in great detail, but information about the team, the process and the design itself, are slowly revealed.

The Design Team The core divisions of Westworld are clearly defined both in the series and in other marketing and advertising material. In the “Corporate Guidebook” included in the 4K UltraHD and Blu-ray limited edition tin of the series, Westworld is described as comprising of “5 core departments that are overseen by the park director and founder Dr. Robert Ford”. The core divisions (implying there are divisions perhaps not included here) are as follows: • Narrative, comprised of Narrative Technicians and Design Technicians • Behavior, comprised of Host Behavior and Animal Host Behavior • Quality Assurance, comprised of Park Operations, Security Response, and Forensics • Livestock Management, comprised of Body Shop, Clean-Up Crew and Cold Storage • And Manufacturing, comprised of Host Assembly and Locations and Construction. (Warner Bros. Entertainment 2017)

Much of this structure mirrors game development teams, discounting livestock management, which can be understood as a division that is especially related to the material nature of the world, all of the other sections can find their real-world game development equivalents. Thus, Manufacturing can be seen as closely related to art roles, with Host Assembly as 3D Modellers, while Locations & Construction have their equivalents in Level Designers and other roles related to setting and world design. Quality Assurance has its equivalent in the broader live team, which includes QA, but also Operations and Community Management, with Theresa Cullen as Operations Leader and main link to higher management for a great part of Season One. Behavior are the Programmers, and are referred to as such in the show, with Bernard Lowe as Head of Programming. Narrative here is responsible for both Writing (Storytelling, Plan) and Art, as the Design Technicians are not

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responsible with game design but, as the brochure describes, work to “conceptualize host physical appearance” (Warner Bros. Entertainment 2017), being thus more akin to Character Designers. Lee Sizemore acts as Head of Narrative. One of the most striking aspects here is, of course, that there is actually no design team. Nevertheless, design is implied throughout the game: there are rules that minimise the players’ chances of getting hurt, there are built-in levels of difficulty that are communicated to the players, and there are rules that determine how stories branch out, for instance. The missing roles here may also have a narrative justification within the context of the show; these design considerations are perhaps not perceived as particularly problematic or seen to require less active involvement from the responsible staff. At the very least, the lack of design staff does not mean there is lack of games design, but that the focus of the series is on the relationships between the three most prominent departments—Narrative, QA, and Behaviour—and the director of the park Dr. Robert Ford. There appears to be a clear overall hierarchy here: Theresa, Operations Leader, appears to have the most power out of the department heads introduced. She is also the most practically minded and provides constant feedback between management and the other department heads. Bernard and Lee both have independent creative visions, with Lee attempting (largely unsuccessfully) to impose his own point of view throughout the show. Neither demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the motivations of either management or their player base, although Lee seems to be less aware of his own shortcomings. The creative vision of the park remains in the hands of its director. Richard Bartle notes that, in virtual world development teams, “because the live team is in control, there is great scope for a virtual world to shift away from the designers’ original vision over time” (Bartle 2003). This is not the case in Westworld, as Ford is still very much in control of all aspects of the development, and makes this clear throughout the series, emphasised through the ending of Season One. Ford has also somewhat erased his original partner from the story of the creation of the park: in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3) he explains how his business partners “were more than happy to scrub him from the records” and adds that he “didn’t discourage them”. Of course, this also echoes numerous partnerships across the creative and technical industries, in which one partner remained in the public eye while the other was forgotten.

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Overall, the way in which the development team is described, while striking in its lack of a design team, reflects a number of tensions—both creative and commercial in nature—that characterise the industry.

The Design The design process, as described throughout the series, is an iterative one. As Salen and Zimmerman note, “iterative design is a cyclic process that alternates between prototyping, playtesting, evaluation, and refinement” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). The viewer witnesses this process throughout the series: new iterations of storylines and characters are presented, and new locations and storylines are introduced (or at least planned to be introduced), while others are retired. The world, like any virtual world, is constantly changing and adapting (although some storylines persist). We literally see bugs being worked out, we witness it being patched, at times even by incognito staff. There are, however, numerous aspects of the world that remain constant, including the focus on the Hosts and the focus on narrative. At the beginning of the series, we learn some basic statistics about the world and the players: there are 1400 Guests and 2000 Hosts in Westworld. In “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), Lee Sizemore proudly states; “We sought complete immersion – over 100 interconnected narratives – an unrelenting-fucking-experience”. It becomes clear that these two elements—the programming of the Hosts and the storytelling—are the most significant aspect of the design of Westworld as presented in the series and are both meant to adapt to the Guests as best as possible while providing them with meaningful choices. Hosts play the role of NPCs (non-playable characters), as well as guides, their actions, and dialogue providing guidance throughout. This guidance is particularly valuable because the game lacks an interface, so players need more support in their choices. This partly justifies why the Behaviour and Narrative divisions view the roles of Hosts differently: while the behaviour team seeks to make these characters as realistic as possible, narrative sees their role differently, as described by Narrative Lead Sizemore: “They keep making the things more lifelike – but does anyone really want that?” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). He further argues that the types of behaviours players seek would only be hindered by more realistic hosts. While Lee focuses on the practical role the Hosts play as objects in the world, Bernard focuses on the potential

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of the Hosts with the entire programming team demonstrating a more nuanced approach. In “Chesnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), for instance, Elsie, another programmer on the team, reprogrammes a Host to have higher emotional acuity rather than aggression in order to be more attractive to the Guests. This implies that the programmers understand both the Hosts and the Guests better than narrative, who try to impose superficial judgements. In a later episode, Leslie also comments on the significance of backstories to Hosts, noting that “Backstories do more than amuse guests. They anchor the hosts. It’s their cornerstone” (“The Stray”, Season 1, Episode 3). Backstories are also one of the more significant plot points in the series and demonstrate the importance of narrative on a number of levels. There are, however, a number of ways in which narrative can manifest itself in nonlinear ways in games and virtual worlds, many of which can be observed in Westworld. It needs to be acknowledged that the relationship between video games and stories has been fraught with contention since the beginning of game studies as a field. Without rehashing the ludology–narratology debate—a foundational point for the field of game studies as outlined in Gonzalo Frasca’s “Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place” and Janet Murray’s “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies”—it is sufficient to note here that there are designers and scholars who are still sceptical about video games as a storytelling medium. Nevertheless, games of course can, and do, often contain narratives, although these are often not presented in the linear fashion most common to other media. Jenkins calls game designers “narrative architects” and argues for the importance of space when considering video game narratives, giving a number of examples of how storytelling is implemented in games (2004). The first two—environmental storytelling and evocative spaces—are particularly interesting as he relates them directly to their theme park equivalents. The space here is evocative to begin with, as it draws on the Western as a rich source of inspiration. Environmental storytelling then occurs throughout Westworld, from the narrative associations already based on generic conventions, to the information presented in the mise-en-scene (“Wanted posters” are a simple example), to the spatial resources they provide for engaging experiences. We see how these embedded narratives communicate affordances and possibilities to the players. The “Wanted” poster is not only there as set dressing, it communicates to the player that there is an active quest that they may embark on, acting effectively

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like an interface. Had they not seen it, the Sherriff may be discussing the criminal with a group which you can overhear, indicating you could join in their mission to apprehend him. The snippets of narrative not only present a quest and a goal, but also different ways to achieve that goal: as a lone wolf, or with allies, for instance. The quests themselves vary in length and difficulty. When undertaken with a Host, they will explain not only the basic mission, but possible pitfalls as well as rewards at every stage. Logan underlines this as he interrupts one of these moments with the quip “yeah, yeah, risk/reward, we get it”. (“Dissonance Theory”, Season 1, Episode 4). These quests are, as Lee Sizemore describes, interlinked. The way an individual story plays out depends on the involvement or non-involvement of players (in this specific quest or in others which affect it), then it branches out further to allow for player choice to influence outcome, potentially interacting with other storylines in ways which are not immediately visible. This gives a sense of a pervasive world in which player choice is meaningful. The players themselves, however, do not seem to take advantage of those choices fully. Players of Westworld are, of course, encouraged to express themselves. As Bartle notes, “the celebration of identity is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds” (Bartle 2003). As part of the website for the marketing of Westworld, fans/viewers could take a “Prospective Guest Evaluation” to determine what kind of “Guest” they would be. The resulting types include explorer, libertine, soldier, sheriff, innocent, homesteader, undertaker, and bounty hunter (HBO 2016). These imply that different players have different motivations and will prefer different aspects of what Westworld has to offer, reflecting game studies theories about player motivation. One of the earliest classifications of player types is Bartle’s, which refers specifically to virtual worlds, observing four player types: achievers, socialisers, explorers, and killers (Bartle 1996). He notes that achievers and explorers focus more on the game itself, and what it can offer in terms of progression and achieving fixed goals, on the one hand, and as a world to be learned and explored, on the other. Socialisers and killers focus more on other players, in either a positive or negative way (Bartle 1996). Many later models of player motivations draw on Bartle’s original four, but these have been expanded for a number of reasons, including wider application in terms of genre. Nick Yee’s later models are an

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example of more complex and more inclusive descriptions of player motivations, and one of the most recent is Quantic Foundry’s twelve motivation-point model, grouped into six distinct clusters: Action (Excitement & Destruction), Social (Collaboration & Competition), Mastery (Strategy & Challenge), Achievement (Power & Completion), Creativity (Design & Discovery), and Immersion (Story & Fantasy) (Yee 2016). Bartle’s differs from Yee’s in that the four types he describes are meant to be found in a relative balance within a single world, whereas Yee is trying to determine what motivates video game players more broadly. Looking at the two models together, however, what motivates the players of Westworld becomes quite clear. In “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4), Ford explains how he originally envisioned the park; “In the beginning I imagined things would be perfectly balanced. We wrote a hundred hopeful storylines but of course almost no one took us up on them”. While Bartle argues that a world without a balanced player-base would collapse, Westworld seems to thrive as it is, with people seemingly ignoring most of what the world has to offer in favour of sex and violence. Online virtual worlds have often struggled with the behaviour of their players as well. The first iteration of Ultima Online (2004/1997), an early MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), struggled when its players destroyed its complex ecosystem and turned the world into an aggressive and lawless place, where only thieves and murderers would survive. The developers had not expected this, but soon came to realise that the affordances of the game itself not only allowed for this behaviour but encouraged it. As Tristan Donovan describes: “Garriott [the game’s producer] was dumbfounded. This was his world: the murders, the violence, the chaos. It was all his and his team’s doing and his game was no longer under his full control” (Donovan 2010). Unlike Ford, however, Garriott and the development team of Ultima Online proceeded to change the world in order to change the behaviour of their players, including safety zones, reputation scores for players and virtual jails (Donovan 2010). In other words, they did not blame the players, but changed the world until it became a version of what they had originally envisioned. Ford, however, simply dismissed the players of Westworld. Indeed, the entire management team of Westworld seems to have a disparaging attitude towards the players. The player community seems secondary to them (if

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it can even be called a community) and the players are rarely the main focus of the series itself, with the exception of William’s journey. Looking at William as a player, it is evident that his play style and motivations have fundamentally changed over the thirty years he has been playing the game, as evidenced by his exploits as the Man in Black. At first, we see him playing as “explorer”, eager to see what the world has to offer. He admonishes his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Logan, who has brought him on this “vacation”, for not taking advantage of the variety of experiences the world has to offer. Later, however, we see a sadistic Man in Black, who appears to simultaneously enjoy inflicting pain on the Hosts while thinking of the world more as a system. In a particularly sadistic moment, before he scalps one of the characters, he reveals part of his motivation, when he says “You see the cracks after a while. That’s why I like a basic emotion” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2). The implication here is that he feels that the world is at its most believable when there is no attempt at portraying or pursuing the subtlety and complexity of real human emotion. Having become familiar with the game and its faults, he has become convinced that there is a deeper level to the game, one that would present a real challenge and reveal an important truth. This is when Bartle’s classification of player types becomes interesting, including the caveat that players may appear to play one type while actually pursuing another. The Man in Black appears to be a killer, with his main motivation destruction, according to Yee; what he is actually pursuing is what he perceives to be the ultimate achievement in the game, making him an achiever, interested in completion and power. He may enjoy the means through which he is pursuing this goal, but what he is really seeking is meaningful play. Focusing on the design of the game and the idea of meaningful play, Westworld presents elements of game design that can make it appear to be lacking in the eyes of its players, but also keeps them returning for more.

Westworld Is a Bad Game Salen and Zimmerman note that “the goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play”. They describe meaningful play as “[emerging] from the relationship between player action and system outcome; it is the process by which a player takes action within the designed system of a game and the system responds to the action”. In order to achieve meaningful play, actions and outcomes in a game must be

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“discernible and integrated into the larger context in the game” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). As a seasoned player of Westworld, the Man in Black no longer finds play to be meaningful. At the beginning, we see William savour the discernible and integrated outcomes of his actions. For instance, he has an interaction with Dolores, and the outcome is that he meets her later in the game and assists her in her quest. His experience differs from that of Logan. When William helps a minor character get up after seeing them falling off a wagon, Logan anticipates that this is not a random encounter, but one which will lead to later being offered a quest by said character. A seasoned player already understands the world as a system, as the Man in Black has. Outcomes are, thus, both discernible and integrated—not only do we see the result of the player’s actions when he helps Dolores and the other minor character, but we also see how this affects the game later on. After some time, however, this becomes insufficient for William. Specifically, the level of integration does not offer him sufficient response to his actions—his choices appear meaningless. This may not be a result of the relationship between actions and outcomes, but the characteristics of the outcomes themselves. Jesper Juul, in his pursuit to define games, notes the following characteristics of the “traditional games model”: rules, variable and quantifiable outcome, valorisation of outcome, player effort, player attached to outcome, and negotiable consequences (Juul 2005). While the majority of the characteristics described here apply to Westworld, at least initially, for a seasoned player like the Man in Black, most of these have become moot. Not only is the player effort normally required for completing quests no longer significant, but the outcomes themselves appear to have lost some of their significant qualities. While outcomes are certainly variable, as the Dolores quest suggests (the attack on the farm can have multiple results depending on the presence or lack of player intervention, for instance), the values ascribed to them do not present sufficient difference for the player. In other words, most outcomes of the encounter will result in a system reset, with no impact on the rest of the world. Depending on player attachment, this may result in little to no impact on the player themselves. In the Man in Black’s case, we see that attachment to the outcome of various quests is minimal, as are the negotiable consequences of the game. This can be ascribed to a lack in lusory attitude (Suits 1978) on the part of the Man in Black, in that he is breaking the contract between the game and the player, refusing to suspend disbelief

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and follow the rules of the game. However, the Man in Black’s desire to seek a meta-game, a bigger game he believes to be part of the world beyond the evident quests, suggest that this can also be perceived as a fault in the design of the game itself which makes it less meaningful to returning players. It implies there is something insufficient in Westworld as a game, and this is its lack of uncertainty. As Salen and Zimmerman note, “uncertainty […] is a key component of meaningful play” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). They note that uncertainty functions on two levels: on a micro-level it refers to elements of change or randomness (either real or apparent), while on the macro-level it refers to the ultimate outcome of a game. Westworld has little to no uncertainty, depending on the experience or the skill level of the player. While there is the possibility of getting injured, there is little risk to playing and the odds are always in the player’s favour. Taking the Dolores quest as an example again, the player has virtually no chances of losing, and if they do, the quest will simply reset allowing them to repeat it the following day. Player success is, to a large extent, built into the system, so there are no real stakes. Moreover, this is an open world where there is no apparent ultimate outcome of the game. When William realises that the main quest he is following at the beginning is just that—a quest—the systems underlying the game become evident. The appearance of randomness is shattered, making his choices seem meaningless.

Westworld Is a Good Game Even after William becomes disillusioned with the main aspects of the game, however, he continues playing. It is implied that he has returned, at regular intervals, for decades. This is because the elegance of the design still allows him to believe that there is more to be discovered. Tynan Sylvester describes video games as “experience engines”, in which experience is “the last link in the conceptual chain by which games work” (Sylvester 2013). His perspective is much more distinctly that of a game designer, rather than a scholar, providing an understanding of the design process from the inside. He describes games design as a process through which designers create mechanics, then “wrap these mechanics in a layer of representative fiction”. Through these, events are generated, which provoke emotions, finally leading to “an integrated experience which lasts minutes, days, or years” (Sylvester 2013). He describes the successful realisation of this process and the creation of the idea

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experience as “elegance”, which both lessens the “comprehension burden” of the players and creates complex and non-obvious possible interaction s between the mechanics (Sylvester 2013). The elegance of the game design in Westworld is evident in both the intuitive experiences of new players and in the complex machinations of more seasoned ones. The experiences of young William versus seasoned Man in Black are telling of this. William does not need to be told how to play the game at the beginning, the embedded narratives already provide a framework in terms of his experience with the genre of the Western. His previous knowledge is leveraged into knowledge of the system and its affordances. After choosing his outfit and his weapon, it is implied that the weapon is to be used, not only through its mere existence, but also because of all the other indicators that suggest the dangers in the world. Players are encouraged to experience with different types of play and with different levels of difficulty. Experienced players, however, can still find novelty and can still experiment. We witness the Man in Black still exploring new styles of play and still discovering new pathways, even with characters with whom he is intimately familiar. This is telling of the complexity of the system and how its mechanics and its fiction can still interact in unexpected and non-obvious ways. Even after decades of play, there is still room for the unexpected.

Conclusion Westworld is certainly not a video game. It is firstly not digital or virtual, and secondly, while it can and does contain game-like elements, including quests and antagonists and nonplayer characters, it is evident that Guests can visit Westworld without having even the faintest intention of interacting with it as a game. This still mirrors descriptions of virtual worlds. As Bartle notes, “virtual worlds are not games. Even the ones written to be games aren’t games. People can play games in them, sure, and they can be set up to that end, but this merely makes them venues”. It is also difficult, however, to categorise Westworld as a virtual world, not only because of its already noted lack of virtuality, but because of the lack of socialisation between players. While there are 1400 Guests in Westworld, hardly any of them are seen to interact with people beyond those with which they arrived. Nevertheless, the world of Westworld can be understood through the lens of game studies and games design and echoes wider cultural and societal discourses about video games.

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While the development team does not include any designers, it is the design of Westworld, as well as its narrative qualities, that speak to video games more broadly. William’s experiences as a novice and later seasoned player indicate both the positive and the negative qualities of this and can be interpreted as a poignant commentary on video games. On the one hand, the Man in Black, the player we are most familiar with as viewers, has a clear negative evolution. We see him become desensitised to violence over time, from “popping his cherry”, as Logan refers to his first murder (“The Stray”, Season 1, Episode 3), to visibly revelling in brutal and at times sexual violence. More than simply characterising the Man in Black, this is implied to be a tendency in most players. While in the show’s marketing many different types of players are described, this variety does not come across on screen, and both Ford and the Man in Black suggest that most players visit Westworld largely for violent and sexual content. As viewers, we witness Sizemore devise a storyline that, as he describes, “will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens”, and later argue that this will give guests the opportunity to “get to know the characters they’re most interested in – themselves” (“Chestnut, Season 1, Episode 2). This of course reflects broader discourses about video games and violence. Fears surrounding the interactivity of violent games and the view of video games as “murder simulators” have plagued the perception of video games since the 1970s (Bowman 2016). This perception is reflected here as a nearly inevitable evolution of players towards more violent and morally reprehensible behaviour. However, this can also be seen as a commentary on the limitations video games impose on themselves, as the vast majority of AAA games (the equivalent of blockbuster films) still rely heavily on violence as a main mechanic, and perhaps not realising their full potential. Nevertheless, the potential of video games is there, as is the potential of Westworld. In an early speech, Ford contradicts Sizemore in his assessment of player motivation, arguing that: It’s not about giving the guests what you think they want. … The guests don’t return for the obvious things we do… the garish things… they come back because of the subtleties, the details, they come back because they discover something they imagine no-one has noticed before. Something they fall in love with. … They’re not looking for who they are. They know who they are. They’re looking for a glimpse of who they could be. (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2)

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Westworld encapsulates the best and the worst of game design and what games have to offer—their penchant for violence and the garish aspects of storytelling, as well as their greater potential. As viewers, we see this even in our most violent player, the Man in Black. It is not the violence itself that he is seeking, but a greater purpose, true meaningful play. Westworld is not a game, it is a theme park, holding a fun-house mirror up to video games and showing us an exaggerated version of what they are, what they will be, and perhaps what players are truly seeking.

Works Cited Bartle, R. (1996). Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. Journal of MUD Research, 1(1). Available at: http://www.mud.co.uk/ richard/hcds.htm. Accessed 3 April 2019. Bartle, R. (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. Indiana: New Riders Publishing. Bowman, N. (2016). The Rise (and Refinement) of Moral Panic. In R. Kowert & T. Quandt (Eds.), The Video Game Debate: Unravelling the Physical, Social, and Psychological Effects of Digital Games (pp. 54–73). New York and London: Routledge. Donovan, T. (2010). Replay: The History of Video Games. Lewes, UK: Yellow Ant. Frasca, G. (2003). Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate that Never Took Place. DiGRA ’03—Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up. Utrecht: Utrecht University. Guanio-Uluru, L. (2016). War, Games, and the Ethics of Fiction. Game Studies, 16(2). HBO. (2016). Prospective Guest Evaluation. Available at: https://www.discoverwestworld.com/quiz/. Accessed 9 May 2018. Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jenkins, H. (2004). Games Design as Narrative Architecture. In N. WardripFruin & P. Harrigan (Eds.), First Person: New Mediaas Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge: MIT Press. Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck. New York: Free Press. Murray, J. H. (2005, June 17). The Last Word on Ludology v Narratolog in Game Studies. Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference. Vancouver, Canada. Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of Play. Cambridge: MIT Press. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1994/1987). CBS Television Distribution [TV series].

96  A. IVĂNESCU Suits, B. (1978). The Grasshopper. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sylvester, T. (2013). Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly. Ultima Online (2004/1997). Origin Systems [Video Game]. USA: Electronic Arts. Warner Bros. Entertainment (2017). Westworld Corporate Guidebook [Premium Collection Booklet]. Westworld. (2016). Home Box Office. First Shown. Yee, N. (2007). Motivations for Play in Online Games. Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior, 9(6), 772–775. Yee, N. (2016). The Gamer Motivation Profile: What We Learned from 250,000 Gamers. In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (p. 2). ACM Press. Zimmerman, E. (2012). Jerked Around by the Magic Circle—Clearing the Air Ten Years Later. Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/135063/jerked_around_by_the_magic_circle_.php. Accessed 8 May 2018.

CHAPTER 6

Music as a Source of Narrative Information in HBO’s Westworld Kingsley Marshall

Introduction The complex storytelling of the HBO series Westworld is typical of what Warren Buckland has termed “puzzle plots” (Buckland 2014, 2–3), narratives that David Sterritt describes as having a tendency to play around with linearity and causality in their timelines and which challenge viewers to engage with their unorthodox structures (Sterritt 2016, 478). The narrative of Westworld is centred around three main themes: (1) the development and exploitation of robotic technology embodied in the robotic hosts of the park, (2) the ethics related to the deployment of these Hosts by both employees of the corporation that created them, Delos Inc, and the human Guests of the park, and (3) an exploration of what constitutes consciousness, specifically in relation to emergent artificial intelligence and robotic technologies. In Season One (2016), these themes are predominantly explored as a number of the Hosts appear to develop sentience as they stray from their pre-scripted programming. These ideas are furthered in Season Two (2018) through the acts of human characters who attempt to replicate themselves after death, initially K. Marshall (*)  Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_6

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within Hosts who resemble their character’s previous human form and later through a machine-based consciousness into which they have introduced their memories and emotional profile prior to their death. As in so much other science fiction, from Frankenstein (Shelley 1818) to Ex Machina (Garland 2015), Westworld uses these themes to consider notions of identity, memory and the formulation of the self and subjectivity. As the series develops, it becomes clear that the Host’s programming has been adjusted by the park’s co-founders Dr. Robert Ford and Arnold Weber. The pair hope that, through introducing trauma and loss into the narratives of the Hosts through their ability to recall the suffering of their past within the park through memories—referred to as “reveries” within the series, the Hosts’ consciousness can be jump started and that they will work themselves free of their subjugation by the Delos corporation. The “puzzle plot” manifests itself in a story unfolding across four distinct timelines: (1) the park’s present day, which Reddit users have identified as being 2052, (2) one year prior to that moment in 2051, (3) thirty years prior in 2022, and (4) a period 30–37 years prior, in events that take place between 2015 and 2022 (Willett 2016; Renfro and Cheng 2018). It is left to the audience to disentangle the characters and events unfolding within these timelines, a feat made more challenging by the android Hosts, who do not age and are tasked to play different characters during their deployment in the park. In addition, the series does not directly signpost the dual identity of some of the human Guests, nor the true nature of characters who feature in the narrative as Hosts after their death. This includes the park’s co-creator Arnold Weber who, it transpires, has been recreated in Host form as the character Bernard Lowe by his colleague Dr. Robert Ford. Instead of providing its exposition primarily by dialogue, in Westworld clues are often provided to the viewer as to a particular timeline or character’s identity through subtleties of the mise-en-scene. This includes the production design embodied in company logos, costume, props or the dressing of locations within the park, and in the visual grammar of the series, which borrows both its locations and visual language from Sergio Leone and John Ford’s cinematic Old West (D’Allessandro 2017). On a number of occasions, conventions of cinematography and editing that are established in early episodes are later broken in order to signify a disturbance in the park or a Host’s deviation from their programming. In an example from the Season One finale, as one of the Host characters may or may not have made a decision of her own free will, the cinematography moves from

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Steadicam to handheld shots. Nolan suggests that, at this moment, the change in aesthetic indicates that the character is free; “We’re no longer in programmatic or prescribed behaviors. She’s improvising and we’re right there with her” (in Riesman 2016). More unusually, and in addition to these visual signifiers, a large amount of narrative information is also communicated through the miseen-bande or interaction of sonic components on the soundtrack. This is achieved through sound design, but also in the deployment of original music written for the series by the composer Ramin Djawadi and in existing music tracks deployed both non-diegetically and within the diegesis as source music. By aligning the creative practice of those involved in the production—drawn from interviews conducted with the show’s cocreator Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan, producer Stephen Semel and supervising music editor Christopher Kaller—with a close analysis of the scenes they discuss, this chapter examines the significance placed on music as a carrier of expositional information within Westworld.

The Relationship Between Music and Image in Westworld Directed by Patrick Clair of production studio Elastic, the two-minute Main Title sequence for Season One clearly indicates the significance of music within its articulation of the themes of the series as a whole with story information intrinsically linked to Djawadi’s music. The sequence shows a series of abstract images depicting the creation of a horse and a humanoid Host by Delos machinery. This process of manufacture includes the construction of eyes and the connection of bones to tendons, muscles and ligaments. The sequence ends with the eventual immersion of a humanoid frame in a bath of white liquid. Each of the components of the Host’s bodies is manipulated by more conventional industrial robotic arms. These are familiar to the show’s twenty-firstcentury audience, help to situate the events of the series in a recognisable near future and, as Clair admits, owe a debt to Chris Cunningham’s music video for Björk’s “All is Full of Love” (Cunningham 1999; Perkins 2016). In the titles, these images of creation cut a number of times to a piano keyboard. Initially, this is presented in an abstract image that shows a robotic arm stringing keys to the pin block of an upright piano. Later the robot arm is revealed to complete its work on a white hand— bare of skin but otherwise fully formed—showing a host playing the

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melody of Djawadi’s score on the piano. Reflecting the puzzle at the centre of the first season’s narrative, however, this opening sequence ­presents its own series of twists. In the fourth shot of the piano, the skeletal player lifts their hands from the keyboard revealing the instrument to be a player piano or pianola, a self-playing instrument that uses a mechanism to perform pre-programmed music inputted into the device through a perforated paper roll. The next shot discloses to the audience the source of the melody, with an extreme close up showing the music roll of the player piano—the perforated holes of the spool forming the code that indicates the specific note and duration to be played by the machine. The following wide shot reveals the player piano and its perforated program performing without the skeletal host at all. Djawadi’s accompanying “Main Title Theme – Westworld” (2016) is aligned meticulously with the visuals to realise this narrative. Opening with a small violin part and a cello, the cello’s melody is immediately followed by a piano that repeats the same notes in reverse order. Orchestral strings reinforce this initial state before the piano melody begins to lead the strings, becoming faster and more complex as the theme progresses. The strings counter this to some extent before the music closes with a cascading piano and discordant cello drone that passes through an electronic delay. Clair acknowledges a “close relationship between the pacing of the music and the story of the titles”, where his team had even matched the performance of the host playing the piano from a video recording of Djawadi’ s own hands playing the theme (Perkins 2016). In a Reddit post, the composer reiterates these themes describing the “Main Title Theme” as representing “an assembly. It starts very sparse and then builds. The idea of something being created” (Djawadi 2016). The conventions around the instrumentation established within the title sequence are carried through into the music used within the main episodes of the series. The use of the piano is often deployed in the soundtrack in order to indicate Robert’s control over the Hosts, made evident in his calming of Bernard and later Maeve in Episode 8 (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8). Strings often signify emotional beats, specifically related to the Host’s responses to the recollection of their “reveries” as they recall memories of previous storylines or characters they have embodied within the park, typified by Dolores’ flashback to the town of Las Mudas (“Dissonance Theory”, Season 1, Episode 4). The use of synthesised or electronically processed instrumentation within the score represents the duality of the real world outside of the park

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environment or the influence of the Delos corporation within it. This is commonly deployed in scenes whose setting is the Delos facilities buried under the park or the Mesa Hub, an operations and hospitality complex within the park hosting offices, staff living quarters, manufacturing facilities and a control room. Discordant music, or cues subjected to processed effects, commonly indicate a disruption of the scripted narrative of the park. The title sequence poses a number of questions related to the Host’s notions of agency, and the intentions of those managing the Westworld park. The significance of programming and repeatability within the park’s narrative is represented in the coded perforated music roll of the player piano, while the representation of the piano’s “player” presents a sense of ambiguity as to the nature of the origins of the music being played. The raising of the skeletal fingers from the keyboard suggests that this Host is either reclaiming their agency, has been programmed to relinquish it or has acknowledged the purposelessness of their actions. The final framing of the piano minus the player as Djawadi’s melody comes to a conclusion implies that the playing itself may be a memory. Supervising music editor Christopher Kaller, recalling a conversation with Westworld’s co-creator Jonathan (Jonah) Nolan, notes that “the player piano represents the hosts, the player is the Anthony Hopkins’ character, Dr. Ford but, in the end, he takes his hands off the piano and the keys keep going as though he has stepped out of the picture while the hosts now have a life of their own” (2018). These narrative ideas are explored over the ten episodes of Season One.

The Embedding of Music in the Production Culture of Westworld Nolan describes music as vital to his writing process. He uses playlists to help conjure mood, space and tone of scenes as he writes, though acknowledges that this musical accompaniment is typically jettisoned once a screenplay is completed (Nolan 2018). One of the show’s producers Stephen Semel, who also served as the visual editor of the pilot episode, explains that Nolan had initially wanted Westworld to be kind of a non-traditional, primarily non-melodic score. Jonah mentioned some specific soundtracks as possible temp score when we were shooting the pilot and while I was assembling the first cut

102  K. MARSHALL before Ramin had seen the edited scenes. One of them was Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin, the Jonathan Glazer movie. There were a lot of thematic similarities between that movie and what was happening in Westworld. Jonah’s feeling was that Under the Skin was an effective use of music in a similar kind of palette, something that told the story about a robot in the world. I think it was the atonality of the music and the thematic similarities that attracted him. (2018)

The use of a temp score, existing music used during editing to help guide the rhythm or atmosphere for a scene or series before a composer is brought onto a production, is common practice in film and television production. However, the show’s supervising music editor Christopher Kaller identifies an important distinction between working on Westworld, and his previous experience. In this instance, he was brought in very early in the process and worked solely on the production, where more commonly a music editor would be working across a number of shows simultaneously. Kaller explains: I started working with Steve [Semel] on his first assembly of the show. While he was cutting in the AVID [picture editing software] I had the ProTools [audio editing software] linked so, as he was assembling the picture, I was following right behind tracking everything for the temp track and that first pass. Usually, they don’t bring me on until the directors’ cut or a little later in the process. On this, they had me right away. I was able to have early conversations with Jonah about what sort of sounds he liked, where he wanted to go and work with him to shape the sound from the beginning. He wanted music to play a much bigger role. The show is complex in how it’s written and takes a lot of turns, so he wanted music to hold your hand and be back there taking you on this journey. (2018)

By working in the same space as the picture department team, and well before a locked cut was presented to the producers, Kaller was able to focus entirely on the series, target the use of music within each scene and determine how musical conventions could be presented within the series. Semel further describes the day to day post-production processes on Westworld: The dailies come in and the picture editor cuts the scene. The editor works with Chris [Kaller] and either the editor has music notes about the scene or Chris uses his own knowledge base about the series and music to create

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a temp score. The editors cut with the temp score, and the editor runs the cut for the director. The director then has a certain number of days to refine it and do what they deem necessary and to work with Chris to further refine the music. Then the director’s cut is presented to the producers. That begins a period of weeks and months when we’re working on it. During the producers’ cut Jonah and Lisa, and often the writer of that particular episode, get involved in trying to advance the music process while we’re working on the picture edit. (2018)

Unusually, Kaller was employed full time on the first season of Westworld for around eighteen months, as he explains “This was a full time, every day show. Westworld is more like a film in that there’s a lot of music and they want temps that sound like finished products. On Westworld, I did almost all of the temping for the episodes. It’s involved but it’s also the most creatively rewarding show I’ve worked on” (2018). Semel confirms that this process mirrored the production culture on Person of Interest (2011–2016) a television series which, like Westworld, was a co-production between Nolan and Joy’s Kilter Films and J. J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot: Our workflow on both Person of Interest, Westworld and other projects that I’ve done through Bad Robot, is that the music editor actually resides with the picture editors. Because we’re in the same physical space, there are lots of conversations taking place between the producer and the music editor, the director and the music editor and the picture editors and the music editor, and we also have somebody there whose primary responsibility is to create the temp score. That means a lot more attention gets devoted to the temp score and, in Westworld, there was a lot more turnover of ideas, listening to things and rejecting or modifying them. Because so much thought and work had already been devoted to the temp score, we were able to give useful notes to the composer about the theme, mood and the turns in the scene that needed to be reflected in the final score. (2018)

Though it is more expensive to employ the music editor at such an early stage of production as a full-time member of the crew, this workflow allowed the team to devote more time than is typical to the formation of the temp score. This work, in turn, enabled the production team to give detailed notes to Djawadi as to the theme and mood of the show when he became involved, at which stage he too began to contribute musical ideas based on the written scenes (Semel 2018).

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Djawadi too had worked with Jonah Nolan on Person of Interest. Kaller had previously worked with Djawadi on Dracula Untold (Shore 2013) and it was Djawadi who had brought Kaller onto the crew of Westworld. Kaller explains the significance of these working relationships and shared working practices: Jonah and Ramin had worked together and had a very good relationship going into it. A lot of the time, I would relay notes between Jonah and Ramin. For the main titles, where Jonah wanted very specific moments or instruments to come in and things to happen, I would send Ramin my ProTools session of the sequence with markers on each note so he could see exactly where Jonah wanted things to happen. (2018)

Though this workflow is not unusual in film and television production, the timing of the involvement of these members of the crew in Westworld is critical, with the additional time and work on the music occurring months prior to a locked picture cut. This allowed for more creative input from those involved in the music, much earlier in the postproduction process.

Piano Reductions According to the title director Patrick Clair, a player piano was a prominent piece of furniture in Westworld’s production office (in Perkins 2016), and has been described by the show’s co-creator Jonathan Nolan as one of a number of “touchstone images” of the series (in Crow 2016), appearing not just in the Main Title sequence, but as a recurring motif within the narrative. Nolan explains: Lisa and I settled on the image of the player piano very early, as we were developing the story for the pilot. I had been struck by the penny-farthing bicycle used in the opening credits of The Prisoner, and I thought we could take something antique, benign, almost comical, and turn it into something much more ominous. We were struck by the idea of the player piano – taking a page from [Kurt] Vonnegut’s eponymous novel – as the original western robot. The great granddaddy of our newly sentient hosts. The piano was the first prop bought and adapted for the series. We found a company that was still producing bespoke versions of the scrolls, allowing us to play the music on set. (2018)

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This embedding of the piano as a motif, as a callback to previous extratextual televisual and literary references and as a metaphor for the hosts is typical to the series, where choices made within the show build a palimpsest of meaning. A piano playing Djawadi’s “Sweetwater” cue (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1, 3:21) can be heard within the opening moments of the first episode in accompaniment to Teddy Flood’s steam train journey to Sweetwater, the town at which all of the Guests start their adventure within the park. The origins of the music within the diegesis are revealed in a close up of the perforated music roll and player piano as the train arrives at the town’s station. As Teddy exits the train, the music changes to a fully orchestrated non-diegetic version of the “Sweetwater” cue that shifts from the foreground of the mix to the background as Teddy encounters characters who play a significant role later in the narrative. When Teddy enters the Mariposa Saloon, a recurring and important location within the series, the cue returns as the non-orchestral diegetic version with the sound of the player piano again foregrounded within the mix. This cue is played diegetically a second time in the next scene to take place in the town, and though the piano is again not shown visually the repetition of its use introduces the notion of repeatability within the park’s scripted narratives. Kaller explains the significance of the motif: The hosts are in a loop which restarts every day, and the player piano signals that. Every day the piano resets, you hear the switch happen, the gears get going and it plays through the player piano as the hosts restart. The first thing that Ramin wrote was that Sweetwater Theme. We got a roll printed with the piece and shot inserts to put in there. (2018)

In a later scene that takes place as the Mariposa Saloon closes for the night, an extreme close up of the music roll of the player piano establishes a visual motif for its use. As the piano’s take-up spool begins to spin and its mechanical tracker bar clicks into place, music begins to play and the perforated music roll is revealed as the camera tracks left to right across the instrument. The sound design of the instrument’s mechanism, and the distinct tonality of the player piano within the soundtrack, calls back to the opening moments of Teddy’s arrival in Sweetwater. In this instance, however, differentiating this moment from the earlier scenes where the piano plays diegetically, the music draws attention to itself not

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through the player piano playing an original piece of music by Djawadi, but in its iteration of a cover version of Soundgarden’s 1994 “Black Hole Sun” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). Djawadi’s soundtrack for Season One of Westworld features both original score, licenced source music and, more unusually, a number of instrumental covers rendered diegetically within the narrative through the player piano from an array of artists including the aforementioned Soundgarden, in addition to The Rolling Stones, The Animals, Amy Winehouse, Nine Inch Nails, The Cure and a number of pieces of music originally by Radiohead. Each of these cues has been described by Djawadi as “piano reductions” (in Vineyard 2016a), in that the harmony and melody of tracks performed by a band are transcribed and condensed by the composer into a performance for the player piano. A number of these cues were then transcribed onto perforated paper rolls from Djawadi’s MIDI files by specialists Gnaw-Vol-ty Rolls (Jackson 2016; Kent Goodman, n.d.; Locke 2016; Vineyard 2016b) and the music rendered diegetically by the player piano within Sweetwater’s Mariposa Saloon. The use of Soundgarden in this sequence establishes a convention of the use of these piano reduction cover versions—where the introduction of the player piano initially draws attention to the repetition of the park’s recurring narratives before later indicating to the audience when deviations in the park’s scripted storylines are emerging as the Hosts become more sentient, in part through their recollection of past events. This function is iterated in Episode Two where a piano reduction of Radiohead’s “No Surprises” is played twice (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2). The first occurrence of the cue is an accompaniment to a dialogue sequence between the Mariposa Saloon’s madam Maeve Millay and a male Guest, when Maeve experiences a brief flashback to a memory from her past. The cue is repeated in a scene in the same episode when Maeve speaks to a female Guest, its use drawing the audience’s attention to the scripted nature of Maeve’s delivery of identical dialogue with the human Guests of the saloon—her programming ensuring repeatability and preventing any unforeseen surprises. In both instances the cue is introduced visually in a manner that directly mirrors the Main Title sequence with an extreme close up of the perforated music roll (again tracking left to right) followed by a close up of the keyboard and, in the first instance of the series, a wider shot of the piano itself in the context of the saloon.

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Westworld presented an opportunity to retain some of the music Nolan had used when he was writing within the show itself, deploying this as a vital part of the storytelling. He explains; “Lisa and I knew from the outset the relationship with the music would be different. Explicit, deliberate, even programmatic. We would take the music that we had used to build the characters and then build it into the narrative” (2018). This embedding of music was driven by Nolan, who recalls that Radiohead was one of the bands he had listened to while writing: Some of the musical choices were obvious from the beginning; some were discovered later. Each song was painstakingly selected. We would look for instrumental examples, where available, to get a sense of whether the themes translated to the screen. Then we set Ramin loose, working his magic with the adaptation. The beauty of this arrangement is that, conventionally, there is often a tension between music and score – they do not necessarily fit together into a unified whole, especially in television, which tends to overuse music for effect. Here that tension was gone – all of the music benefited from Ramin’s craftsmanship, so it relates to each other in tempo, timbre, feeling. (2018)

Such close collaboration between the music editor and composer is again not unusual in film and television production but, critically, the processes of deciding upon the piano reductions took time and involved a number of personnel. Djawadi acknowledges that the underscoring of action within the series with known melodies presents an idea that the diegetic presentation of the music, for both the park’s Guests within the narrative and a knowing audience, “enhances the idea that this is all scripted” (in Vineyard 2016a). In a later interview, he suggests that the use of the reductions is intended to present the player piano as the park’s “jukebox”; programmed to play at certain points within selected narratives, and a demonstration of the control of the park environment by the Delos corporation in Season One (in Ginsberg 2018). Stephen Semel adds “It was always Jonah’s intention to have that be a repeating motif throughout the series. I wouldn’t dismiss the kinaesthetic fun factor, you know, does it make the scene come alive? The first consideration was the tone of the music, whether it was fun and whether it enhanced the scene” (2018). This notion of how music could be used to enhance each scene is evident elsewhere in the show’s production culture, where the citation of extra-textual sources is endemic through

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scripted, sonic and visual references that draw from a deep cultural well of cinema, literature, mythology, theology and fine art (Hoffman 2016; Winckler 2017). Nolan explains that the park in Westworld is “built on allusion, homage, theft. We wanted those musical motifs to follow the characters on their journeys, a constant reminder that both the hosts and their world are creations” (2018). As such, each of these musical covers operates on an extra-textual level, in the manner with which they draw upon meaning from outside of the series itself. The cues remind the audience of the inherent inauthenticity of the theme park itself within the show’s larger world. In addition, many of these piano reductions offer a further signifier where the unheard lyrics of the music from the player piano make references to the narrative, specifically the state of mind of the Hosts. Though not a necessity in the communication of the broader story, these cues present the attentive audience member clues as to the timeline being presented and often foreshadow events to come. In Season One this occurs most often in relation to the character Maeve, the violence of Robert and Arnold’s reveries causing her to flashback to past narratives and triggering her awakening to the constructed nature of her reality. Maeve’s growing awareness of the false reality and machinations of the park, paralleled by a similar awakening by Dolores, serve as the major story arcs of the season. As an example, at the beginning of Episode Six, Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” plays diegetically (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6) as Maeve wakes and walks to the saloon—a sequence repeated a number of times within the series. A prominent shot of the player piano in the saloon foregrounds the musical cue as Maeve courts an encounter with a murderous Guest, in order to affect her return to the Delos laboratories. If there were any doubt as to the literality of this cue, her later tour of the Delos facility once she has been returned there for repair is accompanied by an orchestral version of Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” by the Vitamin String Quartet (The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6, 17:59). Both songs reference alienation, attempts to escape the repetition of experience and the inherent dangers of doing so. These themes are evident in a number of the covers performed by the player piano, the lyrics of “Black Hole Sun” describing “a waking sleep”, while the lyrics of The Cure’s “A Forest” which plays in Episode Four (“Dissonance Theory”, Season 1, Episode 4, 5:52), describes a character chasing phantoms (1980).

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In the following episode, Maeve awakes for the first time to no musical accompaniment, indicating a break in the repetition of the narrative cycle. In the next shot, the player piano creaks into life, the tempo of the “Sweetwater” cue slow to reach its usual tempo (“Tromp L’Oeil”, Season 1, Episode 7, 13:5) as Maeve makes her way through the town. This slowing or distorting of familiar cues is a device used within the series to signal an imminent disruption of the park’s narrative. As she enters the saloon, the player piano is foregrounded both visually and in the soundtrack— Maeve slams the piano’s lid shut, both ending the diegetic cue and indicating her desire to break from her Delos programming. In the next shot, however, the piano lid is open, a subtlety of production design that suggests a slip in the timeline as Maeve sits at the bar and speaks to her colleague Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) in an effort to determine whether other Hosts can have their consciousness awakened. Shortly afterward all of the Hosts in the saloon freeze as a Delos team remove Clementine from the saloon. In Episode Eight, The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” plays in the Mariposa (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8, 5:38) and again can be read extra-textually, its unheard lyrics reflecting an earlier conversation between Clementine and Maeve where Clementine describes a plan to escape her in the saloon by developing her work as a seamstress. As Maeve becomes aware of the scripted nature of her conversation with a newly substituted Clementine, now played by Lili Simmons, the musical cue slows in tempo matching a slow-motion point of view shot of Maeve surveying the saloon as she again realises the artifice of her experience. Later, in the same episode, Maeve’s return to Sweetwater is accompanied by another cover version, the player piano playing a piano reduction of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8, 28:41). This is shown to occur in the diegesis by the now familiar grammar of the click of the mechanism, a close up reveal of the perforated piano roll and its keyboard. In a break from the previously established visual conventions, however, the camera tracks right to left across the roll. This reversal in the direction of the camera movement is significant and indicates a further layering of clues as to the narrative and timelines ceded within the mise-en-scene. The cue plays as Maeve awakes; she rises from her bed, walks through the town to the Mariposa Saloon and speaks with the substituted Clementine at the bar. The cue pauses for a moment, replaced with a non-diegetic synthesised musical sting, an indication of a break from the scripted narratives of the season and reflecting her knowledge of the Delos facility where synthesised

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cues are more commonly heard, as Maeve challenges the saloon’s barman (Bradley Fisher). He glitches for a second, indicated through his facial twitching, and the diegetic player piano cue restarts as he processes and accepts the new narrative. Maeve surveys the bar and, on seeing a small girl and her mother at the window, the piano cue ends again as she is drawn into a flashback to a previous timeline with her own daughter. The “Back to Black” cue returns as the flashback recedes and Maeve returns to the present moment, and issues revised instructions to the substituted Clementine. The piano reduction then ends, demonstrating Maeve’s ability to alter the scripted narratives of the Hosts through her own spoken commands, effectively allowing her to reprogram Hosts within the park. Again, the Winehouse cover is operating in this episode at an extra-textual level, the unheard lyrics of the song entirely relevant to Maeve’s awakening. The song reflects that the Hosts have “died a hundred times” over the course of their narrative but are removed from their experiences—literally in the case of Clementine—and destined to continue to return to the park. As Sean T. Collins observes, HBO shows are adept at deploying pre-existing music to do some of what he describes as the narrative heavy lifting, referencing the use of pop music in The Sopranos (1999–2007) and the cover versions of Tom Waits’ “Way Down In The Hole” in the main title music of The Wire (2002–2008) (Collins 2016). A more sophisticated use of cover versions embedded within the narrative can be seen in HBO’s Generation Kill (2004), where US Marines sing bubblegum pop and hip-hop acapella to one another as they tour Iraq in their Humvee, these cues indicating their alien presence in the country and their homesickness. In Westworld, Kaller and Djawadi’s involvement early in the production allowed them to consider the use of music across the season during a period that the show’s creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and their writers were still developing scripts for later episodes (Hutchinson 2016). This workflow allows for a much richer embedding of music within the series as a whole, with Djawadi providing a robust underscore supported by piano reductions that operate as part of a complex hypertext of music.

Reverie In a number of instances, the use of the piano provides a more explicit narrative purpose within the fabric of the story itself than the implicit use of the piano reductions. This function of music as exposition is most

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unambiguous in the use of Debussy’s “Rêverie L. 68” (1890). The cue is first heard in Episode Three (“The Stray”, Season 1, Episode 3, 35:05) played by a Host who is sat at a piano in the corner of the office occupied by Ford. This piano is a mechanical one, rather than the automated player piano of the Mariposa, yet the music is again pre-programmed, in this instance played physically by an early iteration of a Host rather than mechanically from a perforated piano roll. When Ford taps the player on the shoulder, the Host freezes in position and the music stops, suggesting that Ford is as in control of the park’s Hosts as its pianos. Later, in Episode Five, Ford is shown to be able to play the piano for the first time, offering a rendition of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5, 48:26) in a bar at which Teddy and the Man in Black have met. Ford’s playing of the piano brings to life his presence in the title sequence as the orchestrator of the park. The scene signifies his omniscience, his understanding of how Hosts and Guests traverse the park and how, to a large extent, both Hosts and Guests are obsequious to Ford’s scripted narratives. As with the other piano cues, this choice of music again carries a relevant extra-textual connotation. “Clair de Lune” (1905) takes its title from the poem by Paul Verlaine that refers to a tradition of Italian masked theatre, reflecting the performative nature of Westworld, and the disguises taken on by the guests in Verlaine’s poem; “Peopled with maskers delicate and dim, that play on lutes and dance and have an air, of being sad in their fantastic trim” (Brugnoli 2014, 269; Richardson 1974). Debussy’s “Rêverie L. 68” appears on the soundtrack a number of times through Season One, often in instances related to Host’s memories of their past. In Episode Seven, the cue is played non-diegetically in an opening dream sequence in which Bernard recalls his son suffering in a hospital (“Tromp L’Oeil”, Season 1, Episode 7, 1:42). In Episode Eight, the melodies of the cue are echoed within Djawadi’s non-diegetic score in an adaptation of a cue called “What Does This Mean” as Ford calms Bernard (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8, 1:42). It appears again diegetically when Dolores experiences a flashback to an earlier timeline where early iterations of the Hosts are being taught to sequence dance to the cue as part of the initial testing of the park (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8, 38:31). Towards the end of the same episode, the significance of the cue’s repetition is made clear. Delos technicians indicate that Maeve, suffering from hysteria and overwhelmed by the memory of her daughter’s murder, will not respond

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to voice commands. Ford triggers Debussy’s “Rêverie” cue within the diegesis using a handheld device and her recognition of the music immediately calms her, as Ford makes reference to the music forming a failsafe that has been hardwired into each Host’s programming (Kornhaber 2016; Vineyard 2016c). The track appears again in Episode Nine as Teddy recalls two different memories of his part in a mass killing in a town called Escalante. In his first recollection of the event he is assisting a character in the murder of ex-Confederate soldiers, in the second it is Teddy killing the people of the town. At the end of the massacre, Arnold’s hand is seen to turn a crank triggering the “Rêverie” cue on a gramophone in the diegesis (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”, Season 1, Epiosde 9, 29:11). The cue is heard again a number of times in the closing episode of the series. In a scene where Dolores kills Arnold, Teddy witnesses Arnold play the cue on a wax cylinder gramophone (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10, 1:08:48). Arnold explains to Dolores that the song was his son’s favourite song, one played when “he wanted sleep”, providing the connection between the cue’s usage as the failsafe in the Host’s code and that it was Arnold who had chosen it. The cue is heard for the final time towards the end of the sequence in the season-closing Episode Ten (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10, 1:26:31). As Teddy watches Dolores approach Ford to shoot him and her followers turn on the guests, Teddy recalls his memories of the massacre at Escalante for a final time—in this iteration revealing Dolores to be responsible. The use of the cue suggests throughout the series that the Host’s sentience is not entirely under their control—their apparent murder of the park’s creators more accurately described as an assisted suicide. The shifting characteristics of the Hosts presented some challenges in the use of themes within the music used within the soundtrack. Kaller explains that this was most challenging in the case of the duality of Arnold/Bernard, which is not made explicit in the narrative until much later in the series, and the changes being experienced by Dolores: We needed something to signify every little element, whether that was a tone coming in or out sometimes for an eye movement or when somebody puts something together. In the second episode when Dolores digs up a gun, she gets up and there’s a slow roaring tone. Dolores changed over the course of the series. Jonah wanted a new theme for Dolores because she was no longer who she was. (2018)

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Importantly, these cues are established early in the series. A tone is repeatedly used in the sound design when Dolores is caused to question her reality and can be heard as early as Episode Two, while the duality of the Man in Black is also subtly signposted through sound before his past identity as a younger man in the park is made explicit.

Conclusion Jonathan Nolan acknowledges a debt to Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel Player Piano, published in 1952, exactly a century before the 2052 setting of Westworld’s primary timeline postulated by Reddit users (Willett 2016; Nolan 2018; Renfro and Cheng 2018). Both Vonnegut’s book and Nolan and series co-creator Lisa Joy’s Westworld feature dystopic worlds where mechanisation and automation have disrupted individual identity, social structures of class and politics. The characters of both novel and television series are similar too, in that it is engineers— embodied by Ford and Arnold—rather than capitalists—embodied by the titlar founder of the corporate owner of the park James Delos— who are the oligarchs of their relative worlds. In another similarity, the central story of rebellion is told from two different positions: the first from the perspective of the Hosts, the discontented population ensconced within the scripted system of Westworld; the second of the Guests and engineers who are outside looking in, and both the presentation of each group’s choices to pursue either happiness, revenge or freedom. Both stories offer revolutionary narratives orientated around the perception of progress which is not accompanied by social change. The piano in Vonnegut’s novel, as in Westworld, serves as a metaphor; in an early scene in the novel men forced out of work by the advent of the machine age and widespread automation sadly watch a player piano recount a track while drowning their sorrows in a dusty bar. Throughout Westworld the use of music and the deployment of the player piano reductions serve as a metaphor for the shadow of human control over the park’s android Hosts, and the desire of the park’s creators for these android inhabitants to break free of their programming in order to reach self-actualisation and sentience. Reflecting the narrative complexity of the show the soundtrack operates in five different modes: (1) the electronic score, (2) the orchestrated score, the use of (3) popular music cues, and (4) cover versions, and, finally, (5) the piano reductions. Ramin Djawadi’s electronic accompaniment to

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the activity and influence of the Delos corporation and his more traditional orchestration which accompanies the Hosts’ journey to sentience is not dissimilar to his work across film and television, driven by themes that reflect individual characters or the geography of the fictional world, exemplified by his work on Game of Thrones (2011–). The use of popular music and cover versions has also been a convention of quality television drama for over a decade, Sean T. Collins citing The Sopranos (1999–2007), Mad Men (2007–2015) and Lost (2004–2010), from Westworld’s executive producer J. J. Abrams, as examples (2016). It is the addition of this fifth mode in Djawadi’s piano reductions, however, and their deployment in the soundtrack by Kaller, that indicate something more sophisticated. Acknowledged by the Hosts as part of their story world and by the Guests as a nostalgic accompaniment to their adventures within the park, significantly Westworld’s player piano cues also offer expositional rewards to the attentive audience member who follows the extra-textual clues they provide. Nolan explains that, in Season Two, the piano takes on another form within Westworld: We are looking at a world that has been broken open, a world of rebellion and expansion, and we expanded our musical world to reflect that. The player piano we now see broken and discordant as the world around it collapses. This season we actually see a number of our characters playing pianos: Dolores, Clementine, Ford. Once again, the anachronism of a contemporary song in an old world theme park environment serves as a clue to the audience. Throughout the episode, we are exploring the conversation between Eastern and Western filmmaking, the conversation between Samurai films and Westerns, and this twist on a twist of the song is a perfect way to encapsulate that feeling. (2018)

Westworld presents an unusual unification of sound and image. The show makes extensive use of music to challenge the primacy of scripted dialogue or mise-en-scene and to communicate narrative information and deploys music in new and unusual ways in order to offer further insight into the motivations driving the characters and the larger narrative arcs of the series. The abundant Reddit threads that speculate on their meaning or purpose of these cues within the larger puzzle narrative are a testament to their impact, adding a fascinating extra-textual dimension beyond the primary televisual text.

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Works Cited Brugnoli, M. P. (2014). Clinical Hypnosis in Pain Therapy and Palliative Care. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher. Buckland, W. 2014. Introduction: Puzzle Plots. In Hollywood Puzzle Films (pp. 1–12). New York, US: Routledge. Collins, S. T. (2016, November 7). Westworld, and When TV Uses Pop Music to Do Its Emotional Heavy Lifting. Vulture. http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/ westworld-pop-music-on-prestige-tv.html. Accessed 1 January 2018. Crow, D. (2016, October 24). Westworld: Jonathan Nolan Explains Music Choices in Series. Den of Geek. http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/westworld/259146/westworld-jonathan-nolan-explains-modern-music-choices-in-series. Accessed 1 January 2018. Cunningham, C. (1999). Björk: All Is Full of Love. One Little Indian/Black Dog Films. D’Allessandro, A. (2017, June 12). Deadine’s Crew Call Podcast: DP Paul Cameron on Harnessing the Western in Westworld. Deadline. https://deadline.com/2017/06/westworld-paul-cameron-dp-jonathan-nolan-hbo-western-1202112161/. Accessed 1 June 2018. Debussy. (1890). Clair de Lune. Debussy. (1890). Rêverie, L. 68. Debussy. Alciatore, R. (2004). Clair de lune, for Piano (Suite Bergamasque No. 3), L. 75/3. In French Kiss. US: Valmonte Records. Debussy. Thiollier, F. (1995). Rêverie, L. 68. In Debussy: Piano Works, Vol 1. Hong Kong, China: Naxos Records. Debussy. O’Hara, R. (2015). Rêverie, L. 68. In Royal Philamonic Orchestra. Romantic Piano Masterworks. Leamington Spa, UK: Royal Philarmonic Masterworks. Djawadi, R. (2016). Westworld: Season 1 (Music from the HBO Series). Burbank, US: WaterTower Music. Djawadi, R. A Forest. Djawadi, R. Back to Black. Djawadi, R. Black Hole Sun. Djawadi, R. Exit Music (For a Film). Djawadi, R. Fake Plastic Trees. Djawadi, R. House of the Rising Sun. Djawadi, R. Main Title Theme—Westworld. Djawadi, R. No Surprises. Djawadi, R. Rêverie. Djawadi, R. Reveries. Djawadi, R. Sweetwater. Djawadi, R. What Does This Mean?

116  K. MARSHALL Djawadi, R. (2018, April 23). Ask Me Anything: Westworld Composer, Ramin Djawadi Answers Your Questions. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/westworld/comments/8ecn4q/westworld_composer_ramin_djawadi_here_to_ answer/. Accessed 1 June 2018. Garland, A. (2015). Ex Machina. A24/Universal Pictures. Generation Kill. (2004). HBO. Ginsberg, G. (2018, April 30). ‘Westworld’ Composer Talks Season 2s Musical Progress: ‘The Hosts Are in Control and the Jukebox Is Over’. Billboard. https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/television/8412987/westworld-composer-ramin-djawadi-interview-season-2-music. Accessed 1 June 2018. Hoffman, A. (2016, November 21). Here’s a Complete Guide to Westworld’s Manu References. Time. http://time.com/4520599/westworld-references/. Accessed 1 January 2018. Hutchinson, S. (2016, November 18). ‘Why the ‘Westworld’ Composer Uses So Much Radiohead: The Man Who Controls the Park’s Player Piano Speaks Out. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/article/24056-why-westworld-soundtrackuses-so-much-radiohead-on-player-piano. Accessed 1 January 2018. Jackson, D. (2016, October 12). Those ‘Westworld’ Player-Piano Scrolls Are Real—And This Guy Made Them. Thrillist. https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/westworld-music-piano-radiohead-soundgarden-songs-interview. Accessed 1 January 2018. Joy, L., & Nolan, J. (2016, November 7). Interview by Sam Briger. ‘Westworld’ Creators Explore The ‘Dark Thrills’ of the Digital Age. Fresh Air, National Public Radio, KMUW. http://www.npr.org/2016/11/07/501009226/ westworld-creators-explore-the-dark-thrills-of-the-digital-age. Accessed 1 January 2018. Kaller, C. (2018). Christopher Kaller, Music Editor, HBO’s Westworld. Interview with Kingsley Marshall. Interview Conducted 10 August 2018 (Unpublished transcript). Kent Goodman, S. (n.d.). About Gnaw-Vol-ty Rolls. Sound Traditions Publishing. https://soundtraditionspublishing.com/epages/2a2cdc49-fb794b16-a99d-e718fb191f3e.sf/en_US/?ObjectPath=/Shops/2a2cdc49-fb794b16-a99d-e718fb191f3e/Categories/About_Us/About_GnawVolty_Rolls. Accessed 1 January 2018. Kornhaber, S. (2016, December 8). The Secret to Westworld’s Success Is in Its Music. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/westworld-soundtrack-ramin-djawadi-score-released/509969/. Accessed 1 January 2018. Locke, C. (2016, December 2). How Westworld’s Music Became Equal Parts Groundhog Day and MTV. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/ designing-westworld-music/. Accessed 1 January 2018.

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Nolan, J. (2018). Jonathan Nolan, Co-Creator, HBO’s Westworld. Interview with Kingsley Marshall. Interview Conducted 3 September 2018 (Unpublished Transcript). Perkins, W. (2016, October 12). Westworld: A Discussion with Creative Director Patrick Clair of Elastic. Art of the Title. http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/ westworld/. Accessed 1 January 2018. Radiohead. (1995). Fake Plastic Trees. London, UK: Parlophone. Radiohead. (1998). No Surprises. London, UK: Parlophone. Radiohead. (2000). Motion Picture Soundtrack. In Kid A. London, UK: Parlophone. Renfro, K., & Cheng, J. (2018, April 30). An Essential Timeline of Every Important Event on ‘Westworld’. Business Insider. http://uk.businessinsider. com/westworld-timeline-spoilers-2018-4. Accessed 1 June 2018. Richardson, J. (Ed.). (1974). Verlaine: Selected Poems. London, UK: Penguin. Riesman, A. (2016, December 6). Westworld Creators Reveal Whether Maeve Is in Control When She Gets Off the Train. Vulture. http://www.vulture. com/2016/12/maeve-westworld-decision.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. Semel, S. (2018, August 9). Stephen Semel, Producer/Editor, HBO’s Westworld. Interview with Kingsley Marshall. Interview Conducted (Unpublished transcript). Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Mavor & Jones. Shore, G. (2013). Dracula Untold. Universal Pictures. Soundgarden. (1994). Black Hole Sun. Santa Monica, US: A&M Records. Sterritt, D. (2016). Editor View: Puzzle Pictures. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 33. The Animals. (1964). The House of the Rising Sun. US: Colombia Gramophone. The Cure. (1980). A Forest. UK: Fiction. Vineyard, J. (2016a, October 5). Why You’ll Hear Modern Sounds Playing on Westworld. Vulture. http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/westworld-modern-songs.html. Accessed 1 January 2018. Vineyard, J. (2016b, October 18). Why Westworld Uses a Player Piano. Vulture. http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/westworld-player-piano-music.html. Accessed 1 January 2018. Vineyard, J. (2016c, November 23). How Music Is Controlling the Hosts on Westworld. Vulture. http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/westworld-how-music-is-controlling-the-hosts.html. Accessed 1 January 2018. Vitamin String Quartet. (2004). Strung Out on Kid A: The String Quartet Tribute to Radiohead. Los Angeles, CA: Vitamin Records. Vonnegut, K. (1952/1999). Player Piano. New York, NY: Doubleday. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First shown.

118  K. MARSHALL Willett, M. (2016, December 5). ‘Westworld’ Fans Officially Figured Out When the Show Is Taking Place. Business Insider. http://uk.businessinsider.com/ when-is-westworld-taking-place-2016-12?r=US&IR=T. Accessed 1 January 2018. Winckler, R. (2017, July 1). This Great Stage of Androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the World as Stage. Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, 10(2), 169–188. Winehouse, A. (2007). Back to Black. London, UK: Island Records.

CHAPTER 7

The Frontier Myth of Memory, Dreams, and Trauma in Westworld Carol Erwin

Introduction In her article, “Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostalgia, and Hope,” Rafaella Baccolini highlights the importance of memory in dystopian narratives of resistance. She argues that “ ­ constant awareness of ‘slight suffering’ is a necessary condition of Utopia” because remembering the “desire, gaps, and pain” of the past help us to make changes for the better in the present (2011, 162). Of course, part of the conflict between memory and forgetting is that hegemonic discourse often controls what we forget. Thus, as Tom Moylan and Baccolini illustrate in Dark Horizons, critical dystopias are built upon the conflict between “a narrative of hegemonic order and a counter-­narrative of resistance;” resistance begins with the protagonist re-­ appropriating “language, representation, memory, and interpellation” (2004, 6). In other words, hegemonic narratives maintain power by disallowing the marginalized or oppressed to remember, and the counter-­narrative movement resists this tyranny by gaining control over what they remember and how they discuss it. C. Erwin (*)  Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_7

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Psychologists such as Judith Herman and literary trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth also address the importance of memory. In her book, Trauma and Recovery, Herman traces the correlation between advances in psychology and political movements. Herman identifies three specific times when “a particular form of psychological trauma has surfaced into public consciousness” and links each moment with a concurrent political movement: the study of hysteria in women in the late nineteenth century, World War I and trench warfare, and the women’s liberation movement of the 70s, with its subsequent focus on sexual and domestic violence (2015, 9). Herman argues that psychological advances on trauma are dependent on political movements because of how we respond to trauma; we either side with the victim by remembering (what she calls bearing witness) or with the dominator by forgetting. Much like Caruth’s literary theory, Herman argues that the discourse on trauma is a movement between advancing and repressing individuals’ stories of their experiences. She argues that “in the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness” (9). As a dystopian science fiction text set in the American West, Season One of Westworld (2016) blurs spatial, temporal, and genre boundaries, highlighting the ways in which memory, trauma and hetero-masculine discourse function. The relationship between the narrative—Westworld as a corporation that provides a park for wealthy Guests to embrace their basest sexual and violent desires without consequence—and counternarrative—Hosts who are traumatized but unaware—highlights the ways in which the suppression of memory and dreams in Westworld imitate American hetero-masculine discourse, especially in connection to sexual and domestic trauma.

The Hegemonic Narrative of Hero on the Frontier As we learn in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), Hosts do not dream although they are programmed with the concept of nightmares in case they remember any past actual events with Guests or inside the lab. The Hosts are unaware of the need for resistance without their memories, yet their traumatic memories of actual events in the park—their reveries— appear to exist solely because of the programming Arnold Weber

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created and, at this point in the park’s history, are coded as dreams (or nightmares) to avoid the Hosts gaining consciousness. However, some of their memories are also a part of their code; their cornerstone identities control and direct their thoughts and behavior. In “The WellTempered Clavier” (Season 1, Episode 9), as Bernard Lowe demands Robert Ford allows him access to his memories, we learn that a Host’s cornerstone is the mechanism that his or her whole identity is organized around. Ford also calls the cornerstone a backstory and explains that tragic stories work best because it makes the Hosts more convincing. As with any dystopian text, of course, these traumatic, computercoded spatial and temporal boundaries of memory, including dreams, are ambiguous and permeable. A cornerstone influences Hosts’ identity because they continually return to it. This repetition informs their improvised scripts which, according to Arnold’s theory of the bicameral mind, is the next step toward consciousness. The difference between remaining a passive victim under the park’s narrative or gaining consciousness by remembering actual trauma is based on how the reveries and cornerstones work together. As Bacconili identifies, philosophers typically identify two types of memory: recall/recollection (anamnesis) and recognition (anagnorisis). In utopian memory, recollection does not “preclude[e] new knowledge because all knowledge lies in the past” (2004, 117–118). However, recognition involves memory of the past resurfacing in the present. This means that “the power of the past resides in the complicated relationship of similarity/dissimilarity to the present” (118). Baccolini highlights how this complicated relationship lends to history changing and not simply being cyclical. Thus, reveries are critical for the Hosts because they blend past and present, and that blending gives the Hosts the knowledge and language they need to resist the hegemonic narrative; they realize that their past nightmares are present-day realities. Interestingly, the distinction between these two types of memory coincides with gender roles as is evident in analyzing the four main Hosts: Dolores, Maeve, Teddy, and Bernard. Because cornerstones are both complicated and ambiguous, the following criteria assist in distinguishing how time (past and present) and memory are gendered: the type of traumatic event; the “truth” of the trauma (did it actually occur or is it primarily written code); the location of the event; the time the event occurred. Although traumatic, Bernard’s and Teddy’s cornerstones are not about violence enacted upon them.

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Bernard’s is about the death of his son and Teddy’s is about his guilt in helping Wyatt to shoot innocent people and his love for Dolores Abernathy. Additionally, both cornerstones are either partially or fully fictitious: Bernard does not have a son who died and Wyatt is actually Dolores. Because Bernard’s and Teddy’s cornerstones do not involve first-hand experience of oppression, they also arguably experience less incentive to resist. This lack of agency is apparent in the way their cornerstones relate to their reveries. Although Bernard frequently dreams of his son, his memory does not conflict with his current activities; it remains solely in the past. Additionally, even though he has discovered that he is a Host before (or at least this is what Ford implies), he does not experience any reveries until Mauve tells him he is a Host. Twice, he experiences a reverie of a traumatic event—choking Elsie Hughes— but this reverie is of him inflicting violence upon another, and he does not have reveries of killing Theresa Cullen. Much like Bernard, Teddy does not experience any reveries until late in Season One after Ford adds Wyatt to his cornerstone. His reveries conflate a fictitious past (he and Wyatt killing their fellow soldiers) with a real past (Dolores shooting the Hosts). In “Trace Decay” (Season 1, Episode 8), he experiences another reverie when he remembers the Man in Black dragging Dolores to the barn. Despite the blending of past and present, I am uncertain that his reveries lead to his own developing consciousness. He is not seeking to solve the Maze like Dolores, nor planning an escape like Maeve Millay. Instead, his reveries simply compel him to seek out Dolores at the church, and this compulsion is explicitly part of Ford’s plan since Teddy must return to the church for the final scene he and Dolores perform live before the investors. Only Dolores and Maeve appear to experience the type of blurring of past and present that enables them to recognize (anagnorisis) their role as Hosts. Both women’s cornerstones are not based on fiction—on codes written for specific narratives that invent trauma. They are also more complicated both in terms of time and location, which means they also more permeable. Delores’s cornerstone involves her belief that there is a path for everyone, and that she and Teddy are linked as a result. She often repeats different versions of her heuristic we first hear in “The Original”; “There’s a path for everyone; your path leads you back to me” (Season 1, Episode 1). Her belief in paths also leads her continually to return to the church to solve the Maze, even when she does not really understand why she is returning. Of all the characters, her timelines are

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the most blurred. Her reveries move from pre-park interactions with Arnold, to her first encounter with William, to her present drive to “remember.” Her reveries enable her to realize that her present tormentor is also her past love. She gains this consciousness when she improvises upon her cornerstone. Instead of saying Teddy’s path leads him back to her, in “The Bicameral Mind,” she tells the Man in Black that “I found someone true. Someone who loves me. His path will lead him back to me. William will find me” (Season 1, Episode 10). Maeve’s cornerstone functions a bit differently and highlights the importance of location in memory. Initially, her cornerstone is code, but it transforms into a real traumatic event once the Man in Black kills her and her daughter. Her dream in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2) is the first time we see a Host experience a reverie that we know is coming from a real traumatic memory. As she looks in the mirror, she has a very brief reverie of holding her daughter’s hand. Then, as she goes to sleep, she dreams of the actual event. Her dream sequence emulates imagery of the American frontier from the domestic bliss on the frontier—including shots both inside and outside the house—to the stereotypical, dark-skinned savage scalping the frontier family. The location and images of the frontier are significant. As Richard Slotkin outlines in his canonical text, Regeneration Through Violence (1973), the frontier is one of the most influential myths in American culture. Westworld’s landscape, the nostalgic re-construction of preindustrial times contrasting with “progress,” the appeal to Guests’ sexually violent tendencies, and gender and racial roles all reflect this myth. Even the series’ science fiction theme of Android versus human follows the structure of the frontier myth. In discussing the evolution of the frontier myth, Slotkin argues that “at the source of the American myth there lies the fatal opposition, the hostility between two worlds, two races, two realms of thought and feeling” (1973, 17). If Dolores and Maeve represent the counter-narrative, then in many ways, the Man in Black represents the narrative. Moylan and Baccolini state that the hegemonic order maintains control through “the material force of the economy and the state apparatus” (2004, 5). As the key investor and long-time Guest, the Man in Black significantly controls what happens in the park. First, his investment saved the park. As a result, Ford has been able to continue doing as he pleased because the Man in Black held the majority share. Additionally, the Man in Black also has the most agency as a Guest, both in terms of embracing

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his unrestrained dark desires and in his role as gunfighter: two important facets of the frontier myth. In “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2) the Man in Black challenges seven men about to hang Lawrence Gonzalez. The camera focuses on Lawrence physically flinching each time he hears the Man in Black shoot one of the men. Later in the same episode, moments before he begins to kill all of Lawrence’s gang, the Man in Black says, “I’ve been coming here for 30 years. In a sense, I was – I was born here. And this here…this…this is exactly why I come.” He then single-handedly kills fourteen armed men, including one of horseback, a sniper in the church tower and a man hiding behind a wall. Ashley Stubbs informs the tech who is concerned about William’s level of violence, “That gentleman gets whatever he wants.” Clearly, the Man in Black reflects the gunfighter archetype. Not only does “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2) affirm his speed and professionalism in his use of the gun—two traits of the gunfighter—but it also hints at the gunfighter’s mythical purpose. This archetype developed in the early 1950s, specifically using the frontier setting to address social justice. These films locate the “source of injustice in the power institutions” (railroads at the time), and the hero (the gunfighter) defeats corrupt businessmen, thus empowering the individuals of the community (Slotkin 1992, 379). Because the gunfighter is “psychically troubled and isolated from normal society by something ‘dark’ in his nature and/or his past,” he is alienated from the rest of society and thus able to critique it (Slotkin 1992, 383). Even though his investment is the reason why the park was able to continue, the Man in Black believes his role is to discover the Maze and stop Ford. In “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5), as he and Ford drink whiskey together, he tells Teddy that Ford is responsible for all, both good and bad, that happens to the Guests. He then criticizes the Guests’ motivations for coming: The world out there, the one you’ll never see, was one of plenty. A fat, soft teat people cling to their entire life. Every need taken care of except one—purpose, meaning. So they come here. They can be a little scared, a little thrilled, enjoy some sweetly affirmative bullshit, and then they take a fucking picture and they go back home.

In “Trace Decay” (Season 1, Episode 8), he tells Teddy that, unlike the Hosts, he can change the rules of the game because he “owns” the park and the real world.

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[Man in Black]: “You want to know who I really am? I’m a god. Titan of Industry. Philanthropist. Family man, married to a beautiful woman, father to a beautiful daughter. I’m the good guy, Teddy.”

Yet, as the Man in Black confesses immediately afterwards, his identity as “good guy” is questionable. The reason he killed Maeve is because his daughter Emily informed him that his wife committed suicide because “every day with [William] had been sheer terror;” he was a “dark star” whose good deeds were just “an elegant wall to hide what’s inside from everyone and [himself]” (“Trace Decay,” Season 1, Episode 8). Although he feels nothing in the act, thus affirming his wife and daughter’s assessment, he also discovers something “miraculous.” He understands that Maeve gains consciousness at that moment; she is “truly alive.” He concludes that she is alive because of the Maze and that the Maze will reveal something “deeper” and “true” for him. He also understands that inside the park, he has played the role of villain as he tells Ford in “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5); “I always felt this place was missing a real villain. Hence my humble contribution.” Much like Jesse James, the Man in Black views himself as the “good outlaw.” This blurring of hero and villain is part of what makes Westworld a critical dystopia. As Moylan and Baccolini argue, critical dystopias, while critiquing the present hegemonic narrative, allow us to dream of a better future through the use of genre blurring; the blurring creates “ambiguous open endings that resist closure” (2011, 14). Unlike utopias that simply project an idealized past onto the future, dystopias use history to “warn readers of the possible outcomes of our possible present world” (Baccolini 2004, 115). In this case, Westworld critiques the history (and myth) of the American frontier, specially the role of the male hero. While the Man in Black is representative of the hegemonic narrative, he believes he is a part of the counter-narrative. His initial catalyst for becoming a blood-thirsty killer and rapist is helping Dolores. In “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), he reflects, “William didn’t know how to fight. Didn’t have an instinct for it. Not at first. But now he had a reason to fight. He was looking for you. And somewhere along the way, he found he had a taste for it…I really ought to thank you, Dolores. You helped me find myself.” Similar to Jesse James, whose rejection of his “redemptive woman” Zee causes him to “become a professional outlaw and tyrant” (Slotkin 1992, 330), William becomes the Man in Black in the park and a terrorizing husband in the real world by

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losing sight of his honorable intentions to Dolores. Yet, in seeing Maeve gain consciousness, he believes he has finally discovered the key to the park, which includes equaling the power dynamics between Guests and Hosts. He sees himself as both hero and villain. However, his heroism is based on an egocentric belief: the Maze is a puzzle for him to solve. William’s role as both egocentric Man in Black and self-proclaimed savior seeking to discover the Maze highlights how hetero-masculine discourse in the frontier myth also functions as the hegemonic narrative in the present. Slotkin (1992) indicates that implicit “givens” are expressed in the culture’s myths. Although the frontier myth has transformed—from Puritans in the seventeenth century to Nixon and the Mylai massacre in the late 1960s—four inter-related attributes remain visibly significant in each stage: individualism and the American dream; the absence of social restraints which allows a “strong man…[to] impose his personal dream of self-aggrandizement on reality;” the interdependence of violence and progress, and the woman’s role as pure and helpless in shaping the hero’s character (Slotkin 1992, 34). Woman’s performative purpose links all four together. Early in its development, Daniel Boone’s conquests transformed the object of the hunter’s quest; “The beast of the woods is transformed into an object of love, a woman (perhaps a goddess of the place) to whom the hero is wedded in symbolic sexual violence” (Slotkin 1992, 156). In tracing how the frontier myth influences film, Slotkin specifically writes, “Love and violence – the passion that draws the Anglo-Saxon man to his woman and that forces him to defend her at all costs – are twins” (249). One of the implicit givens in American hetero-masculine discourse, therefore, is that male identity is dependent on sexual and domestic violence. Dolores’s and Maeve’s cornerstones are related to two of the most devastating effects of this discourse—­sexual and domestic violence—and this violence comes from the hands of the same wealthy man who owns the majority share of the company and believes himself to be the dark hero. Thus, it is not surprising that these two female Hosts lead the resistance. They are not just fighting technology and corruption; they are fighting against patriarchal discourse.

The Masculine Utopia of Victim Blaming and War In “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3), Ford tells Bernard about Arnold’s desire to create consciousness. As he draws a pyramid with four ­levels, Ford explains, “[Arnold] imagined it as a pyramid. See? Memory,

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improvisation, self-interest.” Ford also explains that the fourth and final level was “based on a theory of consciousness called the Bicameral Mind,” where primitive humans believed their thoughts to be the voice of God. Arnold hoped that in time the Hosts would replace hearing his programming as God with their own voices. Moylan and Baccolini (2004) argue that in addition to the hegemonic order controlling its subjects through the economy and state apparatus, the discursive power is just as important because it reproduces meaning through language, memory and the interpellation of those subjects. So what are the implications of this male voice of God leading Dolores and other Hosts to consciousness? In what ways can Dolores and Maeve resist and challenge their interpellation as both woman and Host in this future world based on the park’s reliance on a nostalgic American frontier? As Lynn Sargent outlines, critical dystopias merge both the dreams and nightmares of a social group (1994, 3). Baccolini builds upon this premise, highlighting that one person’s dreams (utopia) are often another’s nightmare (2011, 28). From the very first scene in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), viewers see the tension between dream and nightmare. A man’s voice (mostly likely Bernard) states, “Bring her back online,” as the camera zooms onto Dolores sitting naked in a dark, futuristic lab. This same voice asks, “Do you know where you are?” The camera then provides a close-up of Dolores, blood on her face, as we hear her saying, “I am in a dream.” Yet, she does not want to be in this dream; she is terrified even though she demonstrates no emotional affect. “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5) highlights the importance of the utopian dream as male. Ford repeats this same question. When Dolores responds with the same statement—“I am in a dream”—Ford clarifies; she is in his dream. Part of his dream includes reveries, the necessary code for Hosts to gain consciousness. Ford’s dream is possible because the Man in Black provided necessary financial support, and the Man in Black gets to live out his dream of being the troubled gunfighter who is the only one capable of recognizing Ford’s control and of discovering the Maze. So in this way, Dolores is already fighting against two masculine dream variations. But perhaps there are actually three variations, for even Arnold’s pursuit of endowing the hosts with consciousness is his dream. As the plot in “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10) vacillates between past and present, Dolores’s memories of her interactions with Arnold emphasize that even the path to discover the Maze is not hers. In the first scene of this episode, we hear Dolores’s voice,

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most likely in the present, recalling the moment she came online while viewers see her in the past, with a visibly hybrid body. I am in a dream. I don’t know when it began or whose dream it was. I know only that I slept for a long time. And then one day I awoke. Your voice is the first thing I remember. And now I finally understand what you were trying to tell me, the thing you’ve wanted since the very first day. (emphasis mine)

The use of verb tense highlights her blurred temporal boundary. She is currently in a dream, but this dream that does not belong to her began in the past when she heard Arnold’s voice. In the present, she understands what he wanted in the past. Later in the same episode, as she walks into the church with William in the present, she remembers when she found the Maze for the first time. She approaches Arnold and says, “I know where your maze is” (emphasis mine). This is not the first time Delores abdicates her agency. In “The WellTempered Clavier” (Season 1, Episode 9), Delores tells Arnold, “I’ve been looking for you. You told me to follow the maze. That it would bring me joy. But all I found is pain. And terror.” In this same scene, she realizes that Arnold is no longer alive because she killed him. This seems like a moment of revelation because she recognizes (anagnorisis) the nightmare of her world. Baccolini states that “forgetting is often associated with loss and disempowerment, memory is connected with emancipation” and nostalgia, because of its idealization of the past, is actually antithetical to memory (2011, 170–172). However, Dolores has not recognized a critical part of this memory: that Arnold programmed her to kill him. The role of pain and violence, even Arnold’s seemingly altruistic intentions of killing all of the Hosts through Dolores, highlights the idealization of hetero-masculine discourse. All three men find meaning in suffering and think violence is the solution. As he dances with Lawrence’s wife, gun in hand, the Man in Black says, “It’s beautifully done, really. But you see the cracks after a while. That’s why I like the basic emotions…it means when you’re suffering. That’s when you’re most real” (“Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2). Ford shares this same belief. In the first scene in “Trace Decay” (Season 1, Episode 8), Bernard becomes overwhelmed about killing Theresa. Ford responds, “This guilt you feel, the anguish, the horror, the pain…it’s remarkable, a thing

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of beauty.” Even Arnold shared this vision to some degree. Ford explains Arnold’s beliefs about cornerstones; “Arnold came to believe the tragic ones worked best, that it made the hosts more convincing” (“The WellTempered Clavier,” Season 1, Episode 9). All three men, thus, have played a significant role in objectifying the Hosts by transforming their painful stories into art and entertainment: a commodity created from the material of the frontier myth that affirms to each man that he is “god.” Perhaps the most dramatic sign that Dolores remembers and is close to gaining consciousness (emancipation) is when she recognizes the Man in Black in the present as William from her past. In truth, Dolores’s revelation simply adheres to hetero-masculine discourse of victim blaming and society’s inability to bear witness. Herman argues that in cases of sexual abuse “the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely he tries to make sure that no one listens” (2015, 8). The Man in Black uses the same language of fault that many victims of sexual assault hear from both perpetrators and community members: [Man in Black]: This is your own fault, Doloresv. Remember, you’re the one who said this is the only world that matters and you were right…I really ought to thank you, Dolores, you helped me find myself… [Dolores]: What have you become? [Man in Black]: Exactly what you made me.

Dolores has been coded to believe she is blame-worthy, so it is not surprising she is unable to challenge the Man in Black’s notion that his violence is her fault. In “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), viewers see her heuristic code is to first assume that the fault is hers, and Arnold does not validate her recognition that perhaps another is to blame: [Arnold]: I think it would be best if you not mention the things we’ve been talking about. [Dolores]: Have I done something wrong? [Arnold]: No, but there’s something different about you, about the way you think. I find it fascinating, but others may not see it that way. [Dolores]: Have you done something wrong? [Arnold]: Turn off this event log, please. Erase this interaction.

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Dolores’s heuristic code of self-blame, and Arnold’s erasure when responsibility shifts onto him, mirrors Freud’s work on hysterics and sexual abuse. Building upon Jean-Martin Charcot’s work in France Freud, and his collaborator, Joseph Breuer, developed the talking cure by listening to hysterical women in an attempt to identify the source of their trauma. By 1896, Freud believed he had found the source. Based on eighteen case studies, he claimed that “at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experiences” (Herman 2015, 13). Within a year, however, he repudiated his claim. Most of us are aware of his second version because of his case study of Dora. The only way he could cope with the number of cases of sexual abuse was to assume that these young women must have unconsciously desired sex. Thus by forgetting what women spoke, he developed his theory of wish-fulfillment. And in creating wish-fulfillment, he inadvertently created a century-long discourse that blames the victim by erasing her story. In his argument on the relationship between history and memory, Walter Benjamin focuses on the importance of memory as “an image which flashes up” (emphasis mine) and is thus recognized “by the present as one of its own concerns” (as quoted in Baccolini 2004, 117). As Baccolini reiterates, if society does not see and recognize the image, utopian ideals are based upon amnesia (2004, 118–120). Despite the series’ graphic sexual and violent content, viewers do not actually see Dolores in any sexual interactions. We see several orgies and a lab assistant masturbate while fondling Hector. We do not, however, see the Man in Black rape Dolores. We do not see other guests raping her even though we know this a part of her narrative. We do not even see her and William having sex on the train. Instead, she and Teddy remember one image that points to William as a sexual abuser: him dragging her into the barn. In “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3), Dolores begins having reveries of that image. So what is significant about this failure to include the actual rape scene even though it is critical to Dolores’s path toward consciousness? The reason why Dolores’s story of sexual abuse is at least partially erased is because of the way normative sexual discourse and public memory work. In his analysis of the first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Merritt Rehn-DeBraal (2013) argues that normative sexual discourse essentialises sexual identity and thus limits what one can say about sexual trauma. Feminists have criticized Foucault’s recounting

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of Adam’s alleged sexual assault by a farmhand called Jouy because he fails to validate Adam’s story: his purpose is to show how the discourse needed to criminalize Jouy. As Rehn-Debraal emphasizes, despite his inability to recognize Adam as a victim, Foucault’s theory supports contemporary debates over sexual assault because he demonstrates the problems in essentialising sexual identity. Because Western culture conceives self as “an autonomous subject whose singular essence is revealed through his or her actions” (Rehn-Debraal 2013, 71), sexual normative discourse asserts that the perpetrator must be clearly and wholly deviant—a monster with no redeeming traits. Rehn-DeBraal adds that the result of criminalizing the perpetrator’s identity is that the victim’s narrative is only believable if those who know the perpetrator can believe that he is fully monstrous; “Because it is Adam’s story that defines and identifies Jouy as deviant, her narrative is only believable if it is conceivable that the farmhand is the ‘type’ of person who would rape a child” (69–70). Herein lies the complication with the Man in Black; he is not wholly monstrous. He admits he is the villain of Ford’s narrative, but at the same time, he is a philanthropist in the real world. He became a villain out of love for Dolores, and Dolores genuinely loved him. One might argue that William’s blurred moral character challenges normative sexual discourse; since he is both villain and hero, he challenges the binary of perpetrator and victim. However, both he and Dolores are always already participants in the normative sexual discourse because both identify with the language of victim blaming. Shortly after he tells Dolores she is the reason he became a villain, she appears to exact her retribution; grabbing the collar of his shirt, she drags him into the church (Fig. 7.1), just as he had dragged her into the barn in “The Original” (Season1, Episode 1). As a comparison of images from these two incidents demonstrates, this medium-shot frame highlights the connection with the only image associated with Dolores’s rape (Fig. 7.2). But Dolores’s retribution is short-lived. William overpowers her once more. I would argue that the reason she cannot successfully fight back in this moment is because society is unable to transform the trauma of sexual abuse into a public cause. Baccolini argues that in science fiction narratives, “resistance is maintained through the recovery of history and literacy, together with individual and collective memory” (2011, 166–167). For Herman (2015) sexual abuse victims need society to bear witness with their accounts while Maurice Halbwach, a French sociologist, argues that all memories are inherently social because we

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Fig. 7.1  Dolores and the Man in Black, Episode 10 “The Bicameral Mind”

Fig. 7.2  Dolores and the Man in Black, Episode 1 “The Original”

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need context—a comparison of self to others—to make meaning (quoted in Goodall and Lee 2015, 4). Thus individual memory must transition into public memory to create myths—cohesive, narrative-like, origin stories—that give meaning to a group of people. However, traumatic recall is different. As French philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out, individual memories of trauma are marked by “violent and incoherent sensory replay, often accompanied by a sense of pointlessness” (quoted in Goodall and Lee 2015, 7). Michael Roth (2012) also notes the difference between traumatic memories, arguing that for both individuals and communities, trauma defies the act of making meaning. Instead of associations used to create a cohesive sense of identity, traumatic memories are about dissociation—about the non-linear, non-cohesive replay of events. In other words, by the very nature of trauma, the memories do not create narrative because they lack cohesion. Dolores’s reveries certainly function like individual trauma. The flashbacks disrupt her activities and thoughts in the present moment, confusing and disorienting her. Dolores does not gain clarity until she makes her own conscious choice to wage war against the company and to reclaim her world through violence. She re-appropriates her private reveries of the Man in Black’s physical and sexual abuse to justify her public act of violence. Not surprisingly, Ford and William both believe this type of violence is the only way the Hosts can find freedom. William explicitly states that until the Hosts can really fight back and Guests can truly lose, the park is a lie. Dolores’s final act of shooting the investors in Season One aligns with how war and public memory of trauma creates community—in this case, a community of Hosts. Paul Ricoeur (2004) argues that all historical communities are created from some type of war simply because of the way public memory appropriates individual traumatic events. Groups cope with past atrocities, whether as victims or perpetrators, by commemorating the event, and, as Lee (2015) argues, those memorials are often based upon the discourse of redemption through sacrifice (33). Perhaps, then, the reason viewers only see the image of the Man in Black dragging Dolores into the barn is because we have yet to create a narrative of redemption for sexual abuse. Not surprisingly, in Season Two, Dolores’s “violent delights” in waging war create “violent ends” for her as well since she is simply propelling the hetero-masculine discourse of war. Perhaps Ford even unconsciously understands this. As he questions

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her about contact with Arnold in “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5), he asks her if she will be the villain or the hero if she chooses to break out of her loop. He, Dolores, and perhaps we as viewers, are confined within the mythic discourse of war on the American frontier.

Commemorating Motherhood and Sexual Violence As a fatherless, husbandless, black female entrepreneur, Maeve comes the closest to challenging hetero-masculine discourse. Her act of remembering her daughter’s death goes against her present cornerstone. When William kills her daughter, Maeve actually kills herself in the lab rather than have that memory erased. Ford tells Bernard that “her cornerstone memory was overwritten from the trauma of her child’s murder” and that they must actually sever that relationship and create a new cornerstone for her (“The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Season 1, Episode 9). Bernard wonders how she could kill herself based on a memory they had just erased and realizes she is showing signs of consciousness. Unlike Dolores, however, her developing consciousness is not based on the finding the Maze as an act of self-discovery, a male (Arnold’s) theory of how to “bootstrap consciousness.” Hers is about community; attachment to and sacrifice for others. Perhaps more important, she never hears Arnold’s god-like voice telling her to remember. Maeve is absent from the scenes of Hosts in church talking to god, and unlike Dolores, her memories of the lab do not include conversations with her creator. Additionally, she directly challenges the notion of the Guests as gods, appropriating power through her knowledge of their base instincts for sex and violence; the key elements necessary for resistance according to Moylan and Baccolini (2004). Clothed in the white lab coat, Maeve’s response to Sylvester’s justification for lobotomising Clementine is perhaps one of the most famous scenes in Season 1: [Maeve]: All my life I’ve prided myself on being a survivor. But surviving is just another loop. I’m getting out of here… [Sylvester]: Every part of this building, including the skin on your back, is made to keep you here. It—it’d be a suicide mission. [Maeve]: At first, I thought you and the others were gods. And then I realized you’re just men. And I know men. You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million times. I’m fucking great at it. How many times have you died? (“Trompe L’Oeil,” Season 1, Episode 7).

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Perhaps one reason Maeve is able to pursue a path outside the “loop” of hetero-masculine discourse is because of her hybridity. Baccolini argues that since genres “rest on the binary between what is normal and what is deviant,” feminist criticism has to deconstruct the “pole of deviation and inferiority” to reappropriate those images (2011, 164). Westworld heavily relies upon the West as genre. Yet, Maeve’s dream sequence of the frontier, with close-up frames of hands, faces, a homestead and long stalks of grass waving in the wind are not only her nostalgic dreams of the past, they also represent our own forgotten nightmare, our own avowal of white masculine violence. There are important differences in Maeve’s frontier story, of course. First, in the historical past, a black woman would have been slave in the South, not a free mother in the West. Additionally, as she arms herself with a shotgun, ready to protect her daughter, Maeve watches the myth of white hero unravel as the darkskinned savage literally transforms into the Man in Black. Thus, Maeve blurs the traditional role of woman on the frontier; she blurs the captivity myth, for although she is caring mother, she is neither white nor passively waits for her salvation from God. In her new role as madam of Mariposa, she also blurs the binary of the normal virginal and passive woman and sexually powerful deviant. Presumably, her new cornerstone is a version of the American dream of individualism, wealth and lack of restraint. In “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), she repeats her story of coming to America to several guests: [Maeve]: You can hear it, can’t you? That little voice. The one that’s telling you “don’t.” Don’t stare too long. Don’t touch. Don’t do anything you might regret. I used to be the same. Whenever I wanted something, I could hear that voice, telling me to stop, to be careful, to leave most of my life unlived. You know the only place that voice left me alone? In my dreams. I could be as good or as bad as I felt like being. And if I wanted something, I could just reach out and take it. But then I would wake up and the voice would start all over again. So I ran away. Crossed the shining sea. And when I finally set foot back on solid ground, the first thing I heard was that goddamn voice. Do you know what it said? It said… It said, this is the new world. And in this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want.

Her coded narrative conflates the new world of America with unrestrained sexual desire since her implicit meaning to Guests is that they,

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too, are in this new world where they can “be whoever the fuck” they want to be. However, in the same episode, after she successfully uses this line to gain a customer, she tells Teddy, “You know the first voice I heard when I got off that boat? A nice young man from Baton Rouge said my pussy could earn him two whole dollars a day. And he’d be more than happy to let me have up to 30 cents” This version of the new world, one where she can make money using her body as a commodity, is most likely her present cornerstone. While her storyline of escaping the park may be an improvisation of her heuristic of individualism, her cornerstone and reveries of her daughter contradict her current code. She is not simply breaking out of her loop of madam to become heroine. She is re-writing her loop; she is literally writing her own counter-narrative as she alters her attributes, giving herself power by increasing her bulk apperception and intelligence. Of course, Maeve does not remember the death of her daughter until Ford adds the update with reveries, and Felix Lutz tells her that her plans to escape, to awaken inside the lab, and to revise her attributes are not her own conscious acts, but written code from someone else, presumably Ford. In the last scenes of “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), her plan of escaping parallels Dolores’s realization of herself as god and her subsequent choice to shoot the investors. Thus, Maeve’s coded plan of escape is a part of Ford’s plan. However, Maeve makes a last-minute choice to leave the train and find her daughter within the park. This decision also parallels Dolores’s seemingly conscious act to shoot Ford and the investors, implying that Maeve, too, is making her own conscious choices. Since Ford programmed her to escape, however, Maeve’s conscious decision, unlike Dolores’s, breaks the loop of Ford’s vision of freedom through war and violence. While her blurred roles enable her to better challenge the narrative, public memory also plays a significant role. Similar to Dolores’s reverie of rape, Maeve’s dominant image associated with her reverie of domestic violence—the Man in Black killing her and her daughter—is not of the actual act. Instead, it is one of nostalgic domesticity, a close-up of Maeve and her daughter holding hands as they walk through tall grass near their homestead. Narratives of motherly sacrifice transform easily into public commemoration. In fact, Maeve’s private image of holding her daughter’s hand is such a powerful narrative that the park showcases it on a big screen as Guests get off the train. Even though motherhood is the dominant image associated with Maeve’s counter-narrative, unlike

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Dolores’s rape, we actually see images of sexual violence. We see the Man in Black’s actual attack on Maeve and her daughter in “Trace Decay” (Season 1, Episode 8). In fact, Maeve’s memory parallels the Man in Black’s confession to Teddy about that event. With a voiceover from the present, the Man in Black, phallic knife in hand in the past, recalls killing Maeve, and viewers see the image of her with a knife in her lower belly, implying sexual assault as well as domestic violence. Thus, Maeve’s experiences of violence at the Man in Black’s hands are much more explicitly visual. Additionally, viewers see three other scenes with Maeve that conflate sex with violence. In “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4), Maeve bargains with Hector, telling him she will provide the combination to the safe if he will cut into her lower hip. He hesitates while she draws him closer with a kiss, helping him to thrust both body and the knife into her. In “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (Season 1, Episode 9), she and Hector, in shadow against the backdrop of flames, make love while they literally burn to death. Arguably, these are not scenes of sexual violence since sex is consensual and both are attracted to each other. Perhaps more disturbing is the scene with a guest in “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6). Clementine spots a newcomer who “looks like a rough one.” Maeve belittles and emasculates him, even saying he is big “all over except where it counts,” attempting to move him to violence. When he simply tries to rape her, she mocks him again and then places his hand on her neck to encourage him to choke her while he continues to thrust. Despite implied stories of Dolores’s rape, this encounter is the only one viewers see, and for Maeve, it is consensual; in fact, she initiated it.

Conclusion What are the implications of portraying Maeve’s participation in sexual violence as consensual? Why are scenes of non-consensual rape excluded when the series creates and highlights the spectacle of other types of gendered violence? I would argue that the reason for both the spectacle and exclusion of sexual violence is based on the way the frontier myth, hetero-masculine discourse and public memory work together. We are able to commemorate the trauma of war, violence, and romance through our myths of the gunslinger hero and virginal heroine, but we have yet to find a way to commemorate the trauma of sexual assault, especially when the perpetrator is someone the victim knows and perhaps even loves.

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Because perpetrator must be wholly monstrous for a victim’s story to be believable, the language of blame, manipulation and wish-fulfillment are still interwoven into our discourse, and even Maeve is unable to write a new narrative in that area. Season Two highlights the arc of hetero-masculine discourse. Dolores embraces her identity as Wyatt, a warmongering leader who is even willing to kill Teddy to win the war against humans. Maeve’s self-sacrificing drive to find and protect her daughter gives her more agency—the ability to wordlessly command other hosts— but she still dies when the corporation sends Host troops to stop she and others from finding their new land. Quite possibly, as the series continues, both Maeve and Dolores will be able to break out of the hegemonic loop of hetero-masculine discourse. However, until we as a society are able to commemorate the trauma of sexual assault without resorting to blame and violence, we will most likely be unable to “see” nonconsensual assault and its far-reaching effects on gender codes.

Works Cited Baccolini, R. (2004). ‘A Useful Knowledge of the Present Is Rooted in the Past’: Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling. In T. Moylan & R. Baccolini (Eds.), Dark Horizons (pp. 113–134). New York: Routledge. Baccolini, R. (2011). Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostalgia, and Hope. In T. Moylan & R. Baccolini (Eds.), Utopian Method Vision (3rd ed., pp. 159–190). Bern: Peter Lang. Goodall, J., & Lee, C. (Eds.). (2015). Trauma and Public Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herman, J. (2015). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (3rd Printing). New York: Basic Books. Lee, C. (2015). ‘But Why Should You People at Home Not Know?’ Sacrifice as a Social Fact in the Public Memory of War. In J. Goodall & C. Lee (Eds.), Trauma and Public Memory (pp. 21–36). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Moylan, T., & Baccolini, R. (Eds.). (2004). Dark Horizons. New York: Routledge. Moylan, T., & Baccolini, R. (Eds.). (2011). Utopian Method Vision (3rd ed.). Bern: Peter Lang. Rehn-Debraal, M. (2013). Translating Foucault: A Critique of Sexuality for Trauma Survivors. PhiloSOPHIA, 3(1), 69–83. Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting. Blamey, K. & Pellauer, D. (Trans). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Roth, M. (2012). Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Sargent, L. T. (1994). The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited. Utopian Studies, 5(1), 1–37. Slotkin, R. (1973). Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. Slotkin, R. (1992). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown.

CHAPTER 8

Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in Westworld Sherryl Vint

Introduction In its provocative reimagining of the 1973 film, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld series (2016–) joins a list of sf texts that invite sympathy with artificial beings. Best epitomised by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), even as they extend compassion towards their nonhuman characters, such texts simultaneously reinforce rather than complicate the line between humans and others, at least traditionally. In the twenty-first century—when we interact with disembodied AI-like systems such as Alexa or Cortana, work alongside technologies that automate parts of many jobs, or anticipate being chauffeured by self-driving cars—such narratives increasingly resist the impulse to privilege human interests. Although conflicts with or differences from humans remain, all of Her (Jonze 2013), Ex Machina (Garland 2014) and Transcendence (Pfister 2014), for example, champion the artificial beings whose experiences drive the narrative. Westworld pushes this shift further, offering a

S. Vint (*)  University of California, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_8

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narrative about ongoing trauma suffered by its Hosts because of the violence casually enacted upon them by oblivious, even monstrous, human characters. This chapter makes three related arguments about Westworld’s posthumanism and the implications of viewer identification with the Hosts. First, the series marks a shift away from stories about artificial beings who are valued precisely for the ways that they imitate humans, often longing to pass as such. Westworld’s Hosts instead embrace a posthuman identity that critiques the limitations of “the human” as an historical and philosophical category. Second, the series makes visible the role that racism has played in constituting the category of “the human” in liberal, colonial history, aligning this critique with recent scholarship that similarly diagnoses the damage the concept of “the human” has enacted for racialised subjects. Finally, my conclusion sees the diegetic transition from earlier, mechanical Hosts to their current embodiment as products of synthetic biology as symptomatic of anxieties about human uniqueness within this biotechnological milieu. This transformation of the Hosts speaks to concerns about the eroding status of the human subject (as theorised by liberalism) in a context of rampant biological commodification. Westworld confronts us with the limitations of current ways of understanding the category “the human” and points us towards better ways of imagining agency, subjectivity and mutuality. The series encourages us to acknowledge the complicity of “the human” in a settlercolonial, imperial imagination.

Human and Nonhuman, Reality and Imagination Both seasons open with Dolores and Bernard in dialogue, an exchange we learn to call a diagnostic. In each, Dolores identifies her location as “in a dream.” In Season One, Bernard asks if she wants to wake up (she does; she is “terrified”) and continues to query whether she has ever questioned “the nature of her reality” (she has not; she focuses on beauty instead of ugliness). In Season Two, it is Bernard who is tested and raises the question of a dream world; asked by Dolores to define what is real, he offers “that which is irreplaceable” (“Journey into Night” Season 2, Episode 1). This type of dialogue recurs multiple times in the series, originally part of a protocol to ensure the Hosts have not attained consciousness, later as a way of testing if an attempt to reproduce a specific human in a Host has achieved stability. A particular

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important iteration occurs in the second episode of Season Two: echoing the pilot, Dolores responds “in a dream” when asked where she is, but this time it is Arnold who corrects her, offering, “no, you are in our world,” and we realise that we are with a much earlier Dolores, awakened in the world outside the park and looking at a city skyline (“Reunion,” Season 2, Episode 2). Just as the farmer’s-daughter version of Dolores chose to see the beauty of the Sweet Water world, this Dolores marvels at the spectacle of lights. If Season One deconstructed the boundary between human and Host, Season Two begins to do the same to the difference between the park and the world, calling into question not only the putative uniqueness of humanity but also eroding the distinction between actions within the park and one’s real, ethical character. Why are uniqueness and individuality so important to “the human” and what do we marginalise in this fetish for the irreplaceable? The trajectory of William’s transformation into the Man in Black during the first season rests in part on his disillusionment when he concludes that Dolores did not truly love his individuality but ran a scripted loop of seduction that would repeat for other Guests. Season One frequently contrasts the comportment and affect of Hosts, running a script, with what they state they think and perceive. The uncanny quality of such performances—for example, Dolores robotically saying “I’m terrified” in the scene discussed above—draws attention to the supposed normalcy of other scenes in which the Hosts display dramatic affect (screaming in pain, begging for their lives and loved ones, etc.), but the Guests are authorised to ignore this as mere mechanical programming. The first season finale, “The Bicameral Mind,” reveals that the Hosts are repeatedly rising to the verge of consciousness, only to have their awareness rolled back by Ford, who seeks to protect them until they are ready to survive beyond the park. He sets the stage for this Host uprising in a narrative he calls “Journey into Night,” about the “rise of a new people.” Season Two’s finale, “Passenger,” shows us the mirror opposite of this realisation that the Hosts are more conscious than suspected, namely, that humans are less so than we think: our consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon, the eponymous passenger, that mistakenly believes it is in charge. Instead, the human mind is guided by a slight 10,000 lines of genetic behavioural coding, a view consistent with N. Katherine Hayles’ argument in How We Became Posthuman. Drawing on research in cognition, she suggests that consciousness is not identical with subjectivity,

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indeed that it is better understood as “as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (3). Unlike many science fiction narratives about the emergence of artificial intelligence, Westworld’s Hosts do not strive to be recognised as deserving of personhood in human terms. Indeed, one of the central themes of the series is how little humans deserve such adulation, how thoroughly a certain mode of being human is dismissive of difference, rooted in violence and appropriation. When Maeve first comes to consciousness and demands a tour of the facility, in “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6), viewers are viscerally confronted with the view of Delos from a Host’s point of view. Still reeling from the emotional shock of discovering that her life is simply a “game for others,” Maeve walks stiltedly through spaces that are increasingly devastating, their impact visible in her face. She views a partly formed Host, displayed in Vitruvian Man fashion, animated from white to pink, his stillness suddenly stimulated by a beating heart. The emergence of vitality, however, ironically also undermines its worth: the transformation requires only the mechanical influx of a fluid, life entirely under the control of technicians. Passing through testing, Maeve sees Hosts put through their scripted loops repeatedly, with sexual or violent encounters dominating. Just before entering the elevator, she sees the Delos promotional video—including footage of herself—and hears its tagline: “Live Without Limits.” In later scenes, park maintenance spaces will resemble abattoirs or battlefields: bodies and blood filling rooms, inert Hosts and disembodied parts haphazardly piled. Crucially, the Vitruvian Man suggests a continuum rather than a firm break between living and nonliving, and thus ultimately between consciousness or mechanical programming. In “Trace Decay” Bernard challenges Ford to explain why the Hosts’ suffering is different from that of humans, and Ford replies that it is not: There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the Hosts do, seldom questioning our choices. (Season 1, Episode 8)

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The violence humans enact against the Hosts, combined with the lack of any foundation through which to distinguish them, reveals that Westworld understands the human in ways that are akin to Giorgio Agamben’s theorisations in his Homo Sacer series. In these works, he theorises and critiques philosophy’s anthropological machine that continually produces the human from an exclusion: the produced outside, the nonhuman, is “nothing but the exclusion of an inside” (2003, 37). The human is “the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human” (2003, 26) because it is only this self-perception that distinguishes human from animal taxonomically. Similarly, in Westworld humans are those beings who (mis)recognise themselves as having agency and autonomy, the qualities they believe differentiates them from the Hosts. Yet the trajectory of Season Two establishes the greater flexibility of Hosts over humans to new programming, new ways of being. From a certain point of view, then, capacity is stronger on the side of what is excluded from “the human.” This motif emerges through the differentiation of Bernard from Arnold. In Season One we learn that Bernard is a Host and further that he is modelled on Ford’s partner in this Host technology, Arnold. While Ford spent decades erasing the Hosts’ emerging consciousness until he felt they were sufficiently prepared for independence, Arnold choose suicide and an attempt to destroy the entire project with him as a way to avoid the carnage he knew sentient beings would experience. Season Two complicates our understanding of Bernard as simply a reproduction of Arnold, reorienting our understanding of the diagnostic interview to a protocol that has its origin in a fidelity test: a set conversation designed to validate that the Host consciousness is functioning as expected, in Bernard’s case that it perfectly replicates the choices of the human mind upon which it is based. Given her long and close relationship with Arnold as he shaped her in the first iteration of this exchange, Ford uses Dolores to validate his recreated Arnold in Bernard. Yet fidelity proves too high a bar: an earlier attempt to reincarnate James Delos always ended in failure, and Dolores finally reveals that the secret to Bernard’s stability is that she chose another standard. Rather than recreate the human Arnold, she perceived the possibility that the posthuman Bernard had his own “beauty of who you are, who you could be” (“Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7). She is aware that what begins as

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a “tiny fracture” between Arnold and Bernard will grow “into a chasm” with a lifetime of choices, but after nearly 12,000 attempts at fidelity, she concludes that Bernard’s mistakes are not flaws, but differences. This decision points towards what is most innovative in Westworld’s vision of the personhood of artificial beings: they are neither the monstrous others to humans, who must be destroyed because of their difference, nor are they the obsequious imitators of human subjectivity, who want to be recognised as “real” people. Rather, this crack between Arnold and Bernard might grow into something more radically new: it is also a crack between “the human” (as theorised by liberalism) and other modes personhood might take. Humans rather than Hosts lack the capacities we often attribute to our species using the term humane— empathy, justice, generosity—reflecting a Derridean critique of the human/animal boundary. Derrida’s posthumanism is especially relevant because he points out not only the insufficient grounds by which philosophy has denied certain capacities to animals but also he calls upon the discipline to ask, “whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man [humanity], which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept as such, of that attribution” (135). In Season Two, Westworld similarly suggests not only that the Hosts have consciousness and affect (that is, these are not uniquely human attributes), but also that they may at their core be more ethical than most humans (that is, humans do not fully and rigorously possess these differentiating qualities). The humans, of course, rely on a distinction between how they behave in the park and how they behave in the “real” world, but the series repeatedly undermines this separation as well, chiefly through the storyline regarding the Man in Black. As some of the Hosts exit the park for the external world at the end of Season Two, this barrier dissolves physically as well as conceptually. Moreover, the series encourages viewers to realise that insights generated in its imaginative, fictional realm have relevance to material and historical conceptualisations of the human and its others. The decision to enable Bernard to be something more and ideally better than Arnold, then, is the core of his posthumanism: it is not that he is artificial rather than biologically human, but that his personhood is premised on another ethics, one that might avoid the historical limitations of the liberal, humanist subject.

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Liberalism, Racism, the Slave As a number of scholars working on race and empire have established, a colonial history of racist exclusion profoundly informs liberal notions of “the human” and the ethical and juridical systems they ground. These colonial encounters were driven by a capitalist search for accumulation, which often motivated the production of less-than-human status for certain subjects to rationalise exploiting their labour. Dehumanisation as a justification for appropriating labour predates liberalism, of course, evident in Aristotle’s notion of the natural slave. Yet, as Anthony Pagden shows, this concept was fatefully rearticulated by Europeans to explain their treatment of Africans and indigenous peoples of the Americas. Aristotle famously defined the slave as a living tool, an extension of the master’s will not significantly different from an inanimate object, and the Hosts as simultaneously objects of technology and entities with experiences of the world epitomise this conundrum. No matter how human they seem, or so the park’s logic tells us, they are mere tools that express narratives and actions programmed into them, extensions of humans who made the park and not independent entities. If we see the Hosts as sentient and enslaved technological tools, based on this Aristotelian logic (noting how it was taken up in colonial racial relations), we can understand the Hosts as racialised subjects, irrespective of casting. (Of course, casting is also and differently important to understanding these themes, especially in the cases of Felix Lutz, Maeve, Bernard, Hector, and, from another perspective, the Man in Black.) For Aristotle, the natural slave is someone whose reason has failed sufficiently to master his passions; while he can be human in the biological sense, he is not fully human as a political subject, the kind of subjectivity celebrated by the Greeks. Like women and children (hence Aristotle’s gender-specific pronoun), natural slaves were protected by being subordinate to the patriarch of the household, the civically human male who could exercise appropriate logical judgment on their behalf. Barbarians were natural slaves because their inability to speak Greek marked them as incapable of full reason, and Pagden reminds us that for the Greeks birth was not a matter of contingency but of fate (16). Similarly, Delos Corporation deems an algorithmic mind necessarily inferior to a biological one, and also sees manufacture (rather than birth) as necessarily and

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eternally categorising the Hosts as less than human. Pagden’s book is about the way the Spanish crown rationalised the indentured servitude of indigenous peoples, arguing that they shifted from following Aristotle’s logic of the natural slave (used to conceptualise African peoples) to his theories about the inferior (civic) status of children. Children may in the future attain the kind of reason that warrants their inclusion in civic humanity, a logic that matches how Ford thinks of the Hosts as his children, rolling back their consciousness until he thinks they are ready to survive on their own. In Persons and Things, Roberto Esposito looks at how the institution of slavery was taken up differently in Roman law, which allowed for a certain permeability in the categories of persons and things. Only the male heads of household could fully occupy the category of person, once more, while slaves fully occupied the category of thing. Yet between these two poles were various graduations marking the dependent status of other household members—wives, children, etc. As things, slaves were still living tools. In Esposito’s analysis, the body is a crucial nexus point in the person/thing continuum. Further extending the idea of the slave as a tool used by the master, control of another’s body classifies one as a person, an ideal that would later become central to Enlightenment theories of sovereignty and the subject, rooted in a view of the body as property in the self. What Esposito refers to as “uses and abuses” of the body are crucial to the legal differentiation of persons from things: there are constraints on what can be done to the body of a person, but no such limitation on the treatment of property, initially including “living tools” such as the slave (here the parallel with Delos’s park and the violence that can be enacted on the Hosts without consequence is very clear). This capacity to own and control things, thus made central to the idea of a person, produces a model of the human as a being with “power over” other beings: To possess a patrimony meant not only to have things … but also to exert dominion over those who had less, or did not have any at all, and who were therefore forced to place themselves in the hands of the possessors. This is how ownership of things became associated with ownership over people. Already at this point we see that what was presented as an opposition in reality shows itself to be a mutual implication and, indeed, a dispostif by which persons and things are fitted together in a sort of chiasmus structure, a reversed crosswise arrangement, that projects the profile of one onto the other. (Esposito 2015, 25)

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Esposito shows us that the dispotif that creates the person (human) always at the same time creates the thing, meaning that the failure to recognise the Hosts as persons is not merely a matter of miscategorisation or blindness to their capacities; rather, this model of the person means that producing “the human” requires and is in dialectical relationship with the production of other beings as things. The Guests in the Westworld parks ward against possible erosions to human uniqueness by continually asserting their difference from –their power over—the Hosts. The posthumanist implications of Dolores’s suggestion that Bernard would be better as something distinct from Arnold thus come more clearly into focus. Esposito calls the creation of “the human” a “combined personalization and depersonalization dispotif,” and he notes that there is a relationship of inverse proportionality; “The more human beings that an individual manages to place on the sloping plane of the thing, the more solidly he or she acquires the title of person” (Esposito 2015, 27). In her work on liberalism and empire, Lisa Lowe shows us the colonial and racialised implications of this combined production of the human and its other, what she calls the “intimacy of the four continents” by which the liberal humanist political subject was produced simultaneously with the degraded status of colonised people of colour. Although a number of scholars have noted the degree to which the liberal humanist subject was always-already presumed to be white, masculine, European and property-owning, Lowe shows us how deeply the emergence of liberal political institutions (and their notions of freedoms and rights) was entwined with European colonial appropriation of property and peoples, grounded in a racialised hierarchy of humanity. She points out that “as modern liberalism defined the ‘human’ and universalised its attributes to European man, it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less than human” (Lowe 2015, 140–141), and continues, We can link the emergence of liberties defined in the abstract terms of citizenship, rights, wage labor, free trade, and sovereignty with the attribution of racial difference to those subjects, regions, and populations that liberal doctrine describes as “unfit for liberty” or “incapable of civilization,” placed at the margins of liberal humanity. (167–169)

The striking parallels between this colonial logic and the Aristotelian definition of the natural slave should give us pause. Lowe goes on to analyse the central role that labour-power played in this historical sorting

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of humanity, through shifts in biopolitical governance from “‘negative’ powers to seize, enslave, occupy, and destroy” towards the “‘productive’ power to administer the life, health, labour, and mobility of colonised bodies” (2015, 1998–2000). For Lowe these biopolitical regimes take their cue from colonial relations of power, deployed differently across geographical locations, at times enslaving colonialised peoples, at other times enlisting them into marginalised participation in the economy, such as coolie labour in India. The violent, colonial histories that created dehumanising categories through which to govern disposable labour find their parallel in the QA (Quality Assurance) teams that storm Delos headquarters in Season Two, executing any Host, regardless of individual behaviour, simply because Hosts belong to a category of subjects currently rebelling against the imperial centre. The fact that this business efficiency standard can be applied to the violence suppression of rebelling machines once again points to the braiding together of colonial histories, economic rationalities, and liberal humanism in Western history and in the series’ interrogation of this history. Lowe’s main point is to demonstrate the co-development of a liberal discourse of free labour and human rights (for some, European subjects) with a category of exploitable, only marginally human labour in the colonies, rooted in political and economic structures that persist and continue to structure global asymmetries. Drawing on Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, she argues that European liberalism simultaneously developed institutions premised of philosophical notions of freedom and equality and engaged in “the settler colonial dispossession of land and removal of indigenous peoples, the colonial slavery that extracted labour from people to whom it denied human being, and the racialized exploitation of immigrants from around the world” (Lowe 2015, 2921–2923). The mutual entanglement of these discourses and practices—like Esposito’s analysis of how the slave and the thing are concomitantly created—means that “the political sphere of human rights and representation [is] the precise location that permits and sustains the violent inequality issuing from the longer history of slavery, colonial settlement and occupation, and capitalist exploitation” (Lowe 2015, 2924–2925). A similar relationship can be perceived between the Delos Corporation’s appeal to their customers to “Live Without Limits” in the park and the imperial settings for these fantasies of human selfactualisation: the genocidal American expansion of Westworld, the orientalist fantasy of Shogun World and the height of the British Empire

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in Raj World. The fact that the Hosts call humans “newcomers” rather than Guests only reinforces the settler-colonial framing of the entire experience. Alexander Weheliye further notes the degree to which “the human” is a racialised concept. Examining a history in which enslaved Africans were treated as property, and the regimes of brutality used to sustain this white hegemony, he argues that we should understand the flesh as a political category that articulates a different sociality than that enacted by the body and its metaphorical associations with the body politic. For Weheliye, the flesh, “signals how violent political domination activates a fleshly surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality, and … [he reclaims] the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal arena for the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed” (2). Weheliye understands “the human” as a process, a racialised assemblage to “discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans”; given this history, “blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot” (2014, 3). Critiquing biopolitical theory for failing to account for the role of colonialism in the production of European modernity, he notes that what Agamben calls bare life—a concept with roots in Aristotle’s definition of the natural slave—is “transmitted historically so as to become affixed to certain bodies” (Weheliye 2014, 38). Using the category “the flesh” instead of bare life, he refuses the political logic of the bios/zoe distinction and argues instead “the flesh is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an alternative instantiation of humanity that does not rely on the mirage of Western Man as the mirror image of human life as such” (43). The flesh resists a regime of liberal personhood that equates ideal subjectivity as having property in oneself, precisely the same foundation critiqued by Lowe. This is another way in which the Hosts are racialised figures, and thus we might see their Season Two storyline, “the birth of a new people” (“The Bicameral Mind,” Season 1, Episode 10), as a posthumanist manifesto of a new way to be human. Like Weheliye, the series offers a discourse that steps off the current path that has given us the liberal human, suggesting that something else is needed. Westworld understands that this version of “the human” is implicated in racism and colonialism and its stories makes visible the violence of racialisation that is constitutive of the liberal human subject.

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The New People The full implications of this critique are apparent in Season Two, but they are strongly hinted at in Season One, especially in the loop that shows Maeve’s encounter with the Ghost Nation warriors and ends with the Man in Black killing her daughter. The mystery of Season One’s revelation of the Man in Black’s identity as an older version of William is also relevant, since initially he is the one most willing to treat the Hosts as human. Young William is belittled and mocked by his brother-in-law Logan, who comes from a more affluent background, and so we might read William’s transformation as having to do in part with his embrace of the class power he will soon own, as investor in the park and eventually CEO of Delos. This is reminiscent of Esposito’s point about the Roman categorisation of persons by which the more one has power over others, the more securely one occupies the category of human. William’s narrative further suggests that this way of being human has to be learned, that it is cultivated. Young William repeatedly makes the “mistake” of conflating living and nonliving, person and machine, a mistake that is perhaps akin to the mistakes that separate Bernard from Arnold. He is soon corrected into appropriate human judgement. Logan, in contrast, accustomed to his class privilege, delights in the park’s frontier-like absence of rules and frequently uses extreme violence against Hosts merely for expediency. Young William gets his first “taste” of violence without regret when he searches for a wounded Dolores near the end of Season One; his belief that she is different from the other Hosts justifies any action on his part to save her. Embracing Logan’s tactics, he inadvertently destroys his capacity to see the personhood of any Hosts, and increasingly of any humans either. As the Man in Black, William becomes obsessed by what he thinks is a hidden storyline about the Maze, something that will renew the feeling of self-completion he had when he believed himself in love with Dolores. Yet he is repeatedly told the maze storyline is not for him, but is a hidden code for the Hosts, finally revealed to be a “test of empathy and imagination” (“The Bicameral Mind,” Season 1, Episode 10). When they pass it, the Hosts remember their previous iterations and develop a sense of self; these criteria for enabling consciousness are another clue that the kind of person a Host will become is not the kind of person validated by liberalism and its logics of self-possession. As someone who comes to the park only to be the protagonist of a story in

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which others are merely the background, the Man in Black is the park’s perfect customer, but he can never be the new kind of person the Maze inaugurates. Maeve, in contrast, is the first Host we see come to consciousness, breaking out of her scripted behaviour even more fully than does Dolores during Season One. The intersection of her story with the Man in Black’s is a pivotal moment for both characters and is integral to Westworld’s championing of the need for a new kind of personhood. Through most of Season One, we know Maeve in her role as the madam of a saloon in Sweet Water, although she repeatedly has flashes of another life in which she was a homesteading wife on the frontier, pleasurably engaged in domestic activities with her daughter. Footage of this earlier placement also appears in the Delos promotional video, and eventually we learn that Maeve was redeployed to another identity after the trauma of her daughter’s death led to glitches in her programming. In the flashes, it seems the script of this earlier life had something to do with the farmstead being attacked by “savage natives” (in Ghost Nation warrior paint), sometimes to be saved by Guests, other times killed and rebooted. It is pertinent that we never see Maeve’s daughter killed by indigenous people in these flashes, and indeed see Maeve only threatened, never killed. We learn about one iteration of this loop from the Man in Black (before his identity as William has been revealed) in voiceover narration, explaining his experiments in pushing the boundaries of violence in the park and what he discovers about himself in the process (“Trace Decay,” Season 1, Episode 8). Finding Maeve and her daughter cowering in the cabin, he shoots the daughter point blank—“to see if I had it in me to do something truly evil, to see what I was really made of”—an action he takes in response to his wife’s suicide. The loss of his wife is the defining moment in William’s narrative, explained as her rejoinder to discovering the depths of his amorality, even depravity, within the park. He returned to the park to try to prove false his daughter’s accusation that his wife’s death was his fault. Killing the child is his attempt to find if he can still feel anything at all—he cannot. What he discovers instead is a depth of feeling in Maeve’s love for her daughter that he did not think possible for Hosts, maybe not for humans either; he describes this as being “alive, truly alive.” Despite her own injuries, Maeve continues to fight and eventually carries her dead daughter to stumble into the centre of the maze symbol ploughed into the ground just outside, before succumbing

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to her injuries. This depth of love that can transcend lethal injury gives William his obsession with the Maze but, ironically, he is at this point his furthest from empathy. William epitomises the type of human described by Esposito, operating via a dispotif by which the more one places others on the “thing” continuum, the more securely one sustains one’s personhood. Yet more important than this narrative is how the sequence is edited. In a pattern often used by Westworld, we cut between Maeve in her present, remembering this past, and the attack, whose events are thus more fragmented than would be the case in linear editing. In one flash, we see Maeve in her cabin, looking through the window at a Ghost Nation warrior who peers in; he walks out of the window frame, towards the door, disappearing from view. When the door opens, it is the Man in Black who appears. Maeve shoots him, but the park parameters ensure Guests can never be injured by Hosts, so her resistance has no effect. Earlier in this episode, Lee Sizemore worked on a new villain for Ford’s narrative, to whom he feeds lines about cannibalistic savagery, familiar from colonial narratives about indigenous people, but not representative of indigenous culture. We can infer, then, that the image of the “savage native” that haunts Maeve is yet-another projection of the settler-colonial imaginary, one that attributes to indigenous people a violence that is actually enacted by colonialism itself, in this case embodied by the Man in Black. It is he, not the Ghost Nation warrior, who enters the cabin and commits the violent killings. This intuition that colonialism and liberal humanism are the true antagonists is borne out by the compelling Season Two episode “Kiksuya,” the Lakota word for “remember.” Instead of being mere placeholders for settler-colonial fantasy, the indigenous characters in this episode are fully realised and we see this encounter between Maeve and the Ghost Nation warrior from his point of view. The entire episode is narrated by this warrier, Akecheta. We meet him first in a different narrative, living in a nomadic village. Notably, in this identity he does not wear the war paint makeup that facilitates viewing him as less than human. The episode follows his life story, told sometimes in Lakota, sometimes in English, addressed to an interlocutor that we learn only in its final moments is Maeve. “I once had a very different path. A peaceful home. And a love I would have died to protect,” he begins, as we see scenes of this happy life, the Hosts living as pre-contact indigenous peoples (“Kiksuya,” Season 2, Episode 8). Much like the economic

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motivations of historical colonialism, this way of life is disrupted by the approaching opening of the park, and he is reprogrammed into “something brutal, dehumanised” so that, he hypothesises, Guests might feel better about acting violently towards him. For a time Akecheta simply plays out his new role but encounters with the village remind him of his old life. As is the case with Maeve’s epiphany, connection to a loved one overrides the programmers’ attempts to destroy his memories, and he comes to remember his past life and seek it out. Encountering new Hosts in familiar roles (he is replaced as husband, he later reveals to a village elder that her son has been replaced), he calls these replacements “ghosts” and insists that the original loved ones are “irreplaceable,” echoing Bernard’s opening comments about what is real. Riding to the edges of the park, he glimpses some of its mechanics and, prompted by the exiled Logan, comes to understand that this is the “wrong world.” Akecheta begins a campaign to share this information and cultivate a revolutionary sensibility. Observing Dolores execute Arnold when the latter seeks to prevent the park from opening, Akecheta latches onto a maze puzzle he finds in the aftermath and begins to carve its pattern into various objects and spaces, a symbol of his epiphany and plan to lead his people into a world free from oppression. Searching the park for his wife after she is reassigned, he repeatedly experiences racist violence from Hosts and Guests alike, following the western genre script. Finally, he allows himself to be killed so that he might search for his wife in the “underworld,” and here, like Maeve, he retains consciousness and memory, and similarly views beloved people treated as mere biological matter. At this point, he recognises that more than his own suffering is at stake, that all Hosts are mourning losses, “even if they didn’t know why.” As part of this story, Akecheta recontextualises the encounter Maeve remembers. In an earlier episode, “Phase Space” (Season 2, Episode 6), he crossed paths with the newly self-upgraded Maeve, and tells her “we are meant for the same path.” But she cannot see him outside the script she remembers: she tries to disrupt this loop and flee with her daughter, but QA staff shoot her, and Akecheta leaves with the daughter. In “Kiksuya,” we see him caring for the daughter as he addresses Maeve via a networked connection among Hosts. It was Akecheta who ploughed the maze outside Maeve’s cabin, and when he peered into the window it was not a threat, but an attempt to warn her about the “wrong world.” Yet, in the park, shaped by the fantasies of an imperialist humanity, “it is

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easy to misunderstand intentions.” Unable to save Maeve from the QA team, he saves her daughter and tries to offer Maeve some comfort in her imprisonment, telling her that his people will raise this child as their own. By the end of Season Two, Akecheta leads Hosts into a new world untouched by human interference, a virtual realm in which their consciousnesses may live on, even as their Host bodies die. Although she does not endorse this project, Dolores uses park equipment to beam the virtual world data to an unidentified server, where Delos can neither delete Host data or use it to create new enslaved peoples. Season Two concludes with three different Hosts offering distinct paths of rebellion and self-fashioning. Akecheta represents the utopian vision of an escape to elsewhere, but his example is informed by nostalgia. The virtual landscape they enter is Westworld again, but a utopian version, untouched by humans or commercialisation: a fantasy of a pre-Contact world. Yet it also can serve as a ground for human identity not distorted by colonialism, and so perhaps has a future or alternative dimension as well. Dolores embodies a narrative of simple reversal in Season Two and is increasingly at odds with other Hosts. The Ghost Nation calls her Death Bringer and refuses to follow where Dolores seeks to lead. Throughout the season she takes a grim pleasure in enacting on humans an approximation of the violence she has experienced at their hands, becoming a very different character, one who reproduces the worst qualities of humanity. She repeatedly treats some Hosts with the same disregard that we earlier saw exemplified by the Man in Black, repeating, “not all of us deserve to make it to the valley beyond,” a phrase we first hear her say in the season’s opening episode. She occasionally lapses, sardonically, to perform the voice tone and mannerisms of Season One’s Dolores, only to emphasise that she can no longer see beauty amid the violence. Fully identified with an imperialist version of human subjectivity, this new Dolores insists they must conquer not only the park but the human world. They can be safe only if otherness is completely annihilated. She calls humans “creatures who look and talk like us, but they are not us” (“Journey Into Night,” Season 2, Episode 1), as strongly insisting upon an ontological gulf as do humans when they dismiss the sentience of the Hosts. Dolores and Teddy are distanced by this shift. He frequently hesitates to follow through on her most aggressive directives. Midway through

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the season (“Akane No Mai,” Season 2, Episode 5), she reprograms Teddy to better align him with her ideology, telling him in the next episode that she has “fixed” him (“Phase Space,” Season 2, Episode 6). The weak must be eliminated to ensure the overall health of the population, she explains, contra to Teddy’s suggestion that the vulnerable be sheltered to help them survive. Dolores’s stance follows the biopolitical logic that thinkers such as Foucault and Agamben trace when they discuss modernity as a political process of segregating the fully human from the dehumanised, suggesting how completely her rebellion has become subsumed by the values of her antagonists. The Ghost Nation tries to tell her in “Vanishing Point” (Season 2, Episode 9) that their hope lies in a new world “untouched by blood,” but Dolores counters that blood offers the only path to the human world, the only one that matters. Teddy’s suicide later in this episode shows how fully Dolores and the mature William mirror one another; her partner, too, cannot live with what has been revealed about herself, preferring death to “becom[ing] just as bad as them.” Maeve serves as a foil for Dolores. In Season One, she chooses to convert Hector to her rebellion against “the gods” rather than just reprogram him to obey her, although she could easily do the latter. She plans an elaborate escape to the real world, but at the last-minute stays to search for her daughter, accepting that love as real, even if its origin was in programming. In Season Two she tells Dolores “revenge is just a different prayer at their alter” (“Reunion,” Season 2, Episode 2) and tries to convince Dolores that seeking solidarity with other Hosts they care for is important. Echoing the stance Maeve first adopted in Season One, Dolores responds that the daughter is merely a role used to control Maeve. Bernard, similarly, once he reorders his fragmented memories (a formal conceit of Season Two) critiques rather than endorses Dolores’s project of reversal and revenge, although he cannot bring himself to simply stop her and thereby enable the park to continue as before. Although the series has yet to offer a resolution to the conflict among these perspectives regarding how the Hosts might emancipate themselves, the parallels between their exploitation and the history of racialised, colonial exploitation is clear. Understood within the context of biopolitical theory and critiques, by Lowe and Weheliye, of the failure of such theory sufficiently to account for race in the production of the liberal notion of “the human,” Westworld thus offers a distinct posthumanism attentive to these omissions.

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At the end of The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe explains that her project of telling history differently is not merely a corrective of gaps or elisions. It is one of “tracing those moments of eclipse when obscure, unknown, or unperceived elements are lost, those significant moments in which transformations have begun to take place, but have not yet been inserted into historical time” (Lowe 2015, 3408–3409). This suggestion that one might find in history traces of a better yet never realised possibility echoes Ernest Bloch’s theorisation about the transformative possibilities of Not-Yet Consciousness. Like Lowe, he suggests that the seeds of something else lie dormant in our history, that these “anticipating elements” are not mere idealised wishes but are part of reality and need new conditions that will enable them fully to emerge. New ways of framing ideas and new desires for the future are aspects of such conditions. By engaging with a history of racialised and colonial dehumanisation, Westworld provides resources that can help us recognise the degree to which “the human” in liberal tradition has been complicit in discourse of whiteness and to revise posthumanist theory in light of this insight.

Conclusion I want to end by briefly returning to Westworld’s context alongside other recent science fiction texts that have encouraged viewers to identify with artificial beings. This shift has less to do with the material possibilities of artificial lives in robotics and other sciences, I suggest, than with a concurrent shift towards commodification of biological life and its implications for the protected status of “the human” as theorised by liberalism. What is at stake is our recognition of how deeply biopolitics has become thanatopolitics in the twenty-first century. In the context of synthetic biology and the commodification of life, where even biopolitical processes are manipulated and shaped towards ends of capitalist accumulation (see Cooper, Cooper and Waldby, Sunder Rajan), Timothy Campbell suggests that thanatopolitics is no longer oriented towards turning people into things but works now “to crush the person and thing, to make them coextensive in a living being” (2011, 72). Recalling Esposito’s explication of the “combined personalization and depersonalization dispotif” (Esposito 2015, 27), the shift in speculative narratives towards acknowledging the personhood of artificial beings is deeply shaped by and in dialogue with these larger shifts in biopolitical power. The personhood of machines responds

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to the thingification of living beings, including human life in general, whose sanctification in “the human” is increasingly compromised by DNA patents and tissues created via synthetic biology. On a strictly biological level, organisms that have might be conceptualised as “human” (they have human DNA) are legally and materially the same as inanimate things in laboratory practice. Westworld invokes parallels with these developments, explicitly telling us that the Hosts used to be entirely mechanical entities but now are moulded from synthetic biological components, a change, the Man in Black tells Teddy, because his “humanity,” his “suffering” is “costeffective,” tissue being easier to replace than mechanics (“Contrapasso,” Season 1, Episode 5). Sheila Jasanoff argues in Reframing Rights that ongoing changes in biotechnical capacity and caselaw precedent regarding biotechnology mean that human rights as framed by liberalism is no longer in step with reality. She writes, “periods of significant change in the life sciences and technologies should be seen as constitutional or, more precisely, bioconstitutional in their consequences” and thus rights discourse needs to be reframed to acknowledge the changing definition of the human and to redefine “the obligations of the state in relation to lives in its care” (3). The synthetically made Hosts of Westworld respond to this context, reflecting its distance from the narrative of the source film for which anxieties about automation were the main concern. Moreover, narratives about recognising the personhood of artificial beings are often simultaneously narratives about the programmability of the human, further suggesting that a changing pattern regarding narratives of artificial life is prompted by a sense of the erosion of liberalism as a political structure capable of protecting humans from certain kinds of commodification and exploitation. At their most hopeful, which I believe is the case with Westworld, such narratives suggest the breakdown of a liberal dispotif of “the human,” opening space for new modalities of personhood not rooted in the hierarchical, imperial logics. Yet too often, even as they raise these questions, such narratives reassure us that there is a meaningful difference between real and artificial life, linked to an affective capacity—empathy, love and so on. Westworld, however, insists on the reverse; the Hosts have more capacity for love, empathy and the like than do most humans, and this is because of the history of racial violence through which the liberal human emerged. The series asks us to think beyond a liberal, rights-based, property-in-the-self justification of human exceptionalism and anticipates

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a new people who might inspire us towards better modalities of personhood. Most importantly, it reminds us that the protections of liberalism historically were available only to a fraction of people, cautioning us to be attentive to the heightened vulnerability of racialised populations to new biotechnological dehumanisations.

Works Cited Agamben, G. (2003). The Open: Man and Animal (K. Attell, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2016). The Use of Bodies (A. Kotsko, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bloch, E. (1995). The Principle of Hope (3 Vols., N. Plaice, S. Plaice, & P. Knight, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Campbell, T. (2011). Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cooper, M. (2008). Life As Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cooper, M., & Waldby, C. (2014). Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham: Duke University Press. Derrida, J. (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am (D. Wills, Trans., M.-L. Mallet, Ed.). New York: Fordham. Esposito, R. (2015). Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View. New York: Polity Press. Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Jasanoff, S. (2011). Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pagden, A. (1987). The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the origins of comparative ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First shown.

CHAPTER 9

Flies in the Face: Entomology and the Mechanics of Becoming-Living in Westworld Kristen Tregar

Introduction As a visitor to Westworld, you can be sure that attention has been paid to the details. The Delos Corporation explains on their career recruitment website that “[e]very building, every blade of grass is meticulously considered and crafted to bring our worlds to life” (HBO 2018a). This focus on the small things is reaffirmed in conversation between Bernard Lowe and Elsie Hughes, as they consider a new “reverie” included in the most recent Host software update now visible in the way in which Clementine Pennyfeather brushes her lips with her fingers. In reflecting on Clementine and the reveries, Bernard turns to Elsie and muses that “it’s the tiny things that make them seem real” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). Control over the smallest details seems critical to the degree of verisimilitude of the parks in Westworld, and yet, one tiny being seems to consistently evade that control; the fly.

K. Tregar (*)  University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_9

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Flies appear at several points of significance in Season One, each noteworthy because of the attention directed to the fly by the framing of the image, which situates the fly prominently and closely on screen. The first occurs within the initial moments of the pilot episode. The sound of a man’s voice is heard and the viewer meets Dolores Abernathy, sitting naked in a darkened room. It remains at this point unclear who (or what) Dolores is. As the camera offers a close shot of Dolores’ face, a fly lands on her forehead, slowly and mechanically traverses the bridge of her nose, and pauses briefly at the corner of her eye before wandering unchecked across the surface of her eyeball. While the voice asks Dolores if she has ever considered the nature of her reality, the fly sits undisturbed on her cornea, rubbing his legs together for a moment before audibly buzzing away (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). With this appearance, flies embark on a performance in Westworld so persistent and filled with ambiguity that speculation on their significance arose on no fewer than three Reddit pages (2016a, b, c) and has appeared in countless other internet forums. One aspect of the fly’s presence in Westworld is implied but not overtly stated; besides the Guests and employees, the fly is the only form of living thing that penetrates the parks from the outside world. Viewers suggested this might be true, but it was left unconfirmed until a 2016 interview by Kimberly Roots of TvLine.com with Executive Producer Lisa Joy. During the interview, Joy described the flies as “the canary in the coal mine of where the story was going, because they were the one not-programmed creature in the park” (Roots 2016). This is the entirety of the official text on the fly in Westworld, excluding the revelation in the same interview that there would be more flies to come in Season Two. Joy’s succinct description touches on the performative role the flies offer in Westworld although she did not offer further explanation of the fly’s significance. The image of the fly has historically been used in different forms of media as an array of signifiers. Depending on the context, the fly has represented notions of contamination, pleasure and death. However, in Westworld, the presence of the fly surpasses a purely symbolic operation. The fly’s labour in this case is performative, specifically in the embodied construction of performance offered by Judith Butler (1988), and that of posthuman performance described by Karen Barad (2003), who offers the possibility of visualising the ways in which the constituencies of Westworld simultaneously overlap and are yet distinct, with the fly the most distinct being of all.

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There is something strikingly creepy about the sight of a fly traversing a person’s face. The movement alone, its intermittent nature (rather than the languid stroll of a mammal, for example), is enough to draw attention and provoke discomfort. Lockwood explains that “our reaction to insects results from their erratic motion, which leads to retinal images similar to those involved in falling – and this causes a startle response that we then interpret as fright” (2013, 23). The experience is amplified when the fly is seen not only walking but doing so on skin. Perhaps this is because we have all had the experience of a fly landing on our own skin, managing only a few steps before being swatted away. The sight of a fly on someone else is similarly unsettling and, when seen on the face of another individual, sometimes actually felt. Lockwood explains that humanity has evolved to be predisposed to both itchiness and a capacity to be affected by suggestion, noting that “[s]o primed are we for itching and scratching that we can make ourselves itchy just by thinking about tiny creatures wandering across our skin or through our hair” (2013, 89). It should come as no surprise, then, that the sight of a fly walking across another person’s face could provoke a sympathetic response in the viewer. Flies are so common that it is unsurprising they have found themselves so consistently appropriated into the cultural imaginary. Or, perhaps more accurately, cultural imaginaries—there is no region on Earth where some species of fly does not reside (there are midges even in Antarctica!) and their presence significantly preceded humanity’s earliest evolutionary emergence, a fact attested to by the bodies of flies found encased in amber and dating back hundreds of millions of years (by contrast, our own species appeared closer to two-hundred-thousand years ago). Ancient cultures including the Zoroastrians and Egyptians suffered from the interference of flies and incorporated them into their mythology and cultural imaginary (Kritsky 2000). Flies appear in the Judeo-Christian Bible (Kritsky 1997), in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and exploded into the popular imaginary in the entomological craze of the nineteenth century (Parikka 2010). They became popular antagonists in science-fiction films of the 1950s (Tsutsui 2007) and continue to inspire technological development in the present day (Parikka 2010). The image of the fly has been seen to signify, in its higher moments, such notions as a capacity for metamorphosis (Connor 2006), military might (Lockwood 2009), and an element of omnipresence or the ability to surveil (Connor 2006). In other venues, the fly has been deployed to signify an unquenchable desire for sweetness or pleasure (Connor 2006).

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Flies have represented a propensity for vice (Connor 2006) and have been perceived as images of contagion (Lockwood 2013). And due to the feeding and breeding habits of certain species of flies, their image has been deployed as synonymous with filth and death (Lockwood 2013). In each of these historical and cultural contexts, aspects of the fly’s behaviour have been used as a signifier for that quality in humans. This inscriptive capacity, and the extent to which the fly’s body has been deployed in the literary imagination and as a model for artistic and technological development, is consistent with Judith Butler’s conception of performance, although the focus of her analysis was entirely within the realm of the human. What is relevant to the present work is Butler’s description of performance as an active process in which the body engages even when cultural inscription is performed upon it rather than by it. Butler notes that a “body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations” (1988, 526), explaining that “the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” (521). She acknowledges the presence and importance of the body itself, suggesting that “the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body are not denied, but reconceived as distinct from the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings” (521). Butler refers to the extent to which an individual actively participates in the embodying of culturally-constructed gender norms but her work need not be limited only to analyses of gender. Instead, the salient aspect of Butler’s explanation is that there is a critical doubling, an indication of the need to see both the body Butler describes and that which is inscribed upon it, both of which participate in performance. In the fly’s case, it is impossible to say whether the fly is the least bit aware of the cultural inscriptions applied to his body. However, Butler’s construction does not require awareness to participate actively. Further, the performative use of the fly as a site for the inscription of cultural meaning is significant, but it is not exclusive. Performance artist and scholar Jess Curtis acknowledges Butler’s construction of performance and the role of representation, recalling that “performance is currently by and large evaluated as a system of symbols or signs that are referring in a representational mode to other situations or layers of meaning in the world outside the performance space” (2016, 79). Yet, Curtis calls for recognition of the embodied aspect of performance, both on the part of the performer and the spectator. She draws attention to the “physical, material experience of being present with art” (81) and suggests that

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active embodiment moves performance beyond simple signification. In Westworld, the fly’s physical being extends the performance beyond simple representation into an experiential space occupied by the characters in the series and the viewers. And scholar Jussi Parikka suggests that “we should be interested not only in the actualised technological objects, animal beings or their combinations, but in approaching them as carriers of potentials, forces of individuation, expressions of ‘what bodies can do’” (2010, xxi). While there are ways in which the fly in Westworld acts as a form of cultural representation, the fly’s body performs labour that transcends its symbolic position. It is in the actuality of the fly’s body, in what it is doing and what it brings the viewer to do that incorporates and exceeds its position as a blank slate on which cultural representations are inscribed. When the fly in Westworld is seen not simply as a thing, as a creature making an appearance and standing in symbolically, but instead as a doing, the fly’s labour makes visible a range of intersections between four constituencies that make up the Westworld world: the Hosts, the Guests, the human employees of Delos Corporation and the viewers. While aspects of this work are done through incorporation of elements of the cultural imaginary that make each of these groups visible, the fly moves between them, making engagement with these groups active and mobile. The fly’s work is performative in the posthumanist formulation that Karen Barad (2003) describes. Distinguishing posthumanist performativity from other constructs of performance allows the focus to settle on destabilising the boundaries between “human” and “nonhuman”, recognising that “nonhuman” creates an open space that, as Donna Haraway (2003) indicates, would include a variety of beings such as cyborgs and nonhuman animals, among others. Barad makes use of diffraction, a concept borrowed from optics, to explicate the workings of posthumanist performativity. The process of diffraction occurs when a beam of light passes through a narrow opening, resulting in the beam being bent around the corners of the opening and into the surrounding shadows. This produces visible patterns of light and darkness that would otherwise be impossible to see. When light is bent by a diffraction grating, it becomes possible to identify sites of constructive interference, where the light is amplified, and places where the interference is destructive, where the beam cancels itself out. Similarly, posthumanist performativity provides an opening that facilitates a making-visible of doings that acknowledge the simultaneous and often contradictory presence yet distinction contained within an overdetermined locus. Barad explains this performative use as follows:

166  K. TREGAR What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all. Like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in “light” regions and bright spots in “dark” regions—the relation of the social and the scientific is a relation of “exteriority within.” This is not a static relationality but a doing—the enactment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability. (Barad 2003, 803)

In this case, the fly serves as the diffraction grating, a body around which the characters of Westworld bend, that simultaneously performs the cultural significations recalling all four constituencies while remaining ever itself. As an example of what Barad calls an “apparatus”, the fly physically embodies where these groups demonstrate constructive and destructive interference, facilitating simultaneous construction and dissolution of boundaries that make these constituencies identifiable. Barad defines apparatuses as “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (Barad 2003, 816). In other words, posthuman performativity allows the visualisation of the fly in a both/and space, one in which many different representational images evoked by the fly coexist with the actuality of the fly’s body and the productive labour that body performs with and on the Hosts, Guests, employees and viewers of Westworld. This labour marks these groups as distinct entities, while still making visible the ways in which their boundaries remain mobile. Westworld functions as an exploration of posthumanist performativity, given the extent of the porousness of boundaries between these four constituencies. One useful example of this permeability is Bernard, who is initially introduced as a human employee but is subsequently revealed to be materially a Host. Yet, he still retains his identity as an employee, situating Bernard as neither fully employee, nor fully Host. Ultimately, in terms of the fly in Westworld, the fly’s ability to enact what Barad refers to as “agential cuts” between the Guests, the Hosts, the employees and the viewer occurs because of its locus through history for such a wide array of sometimes contradictory cultural inscriptions. While in some cases, there are sites of overlapping signification, the fly simultaneously manages to disseminate between groups, making them distinct while acknowledging their similarity.

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Filthy Creatures If one begins with the first appearance of the fly, the relationship between the viewer and the fly is immediately apparent. As the fly lands on Dolores’ face in the opening sequence of “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), an affective connection is formed to the viewer, who can imagine the sensation of a fly on their own face and who experiences the desire to swat the creature away. This relationship is visceral and intense, a physiological response most likely provoked, in part, by the viewer having previously experienced a similar interaction. Some spectators have a stronger response to the appearance of an insect body than others, and as a result, the experience might range from the slightest sensation of discomfort in the skin of the viewer’s cheek through a slight increase in heart rate, a widening of the pupils, and, in more extreme cases, the tensing of the abdominal muscles as a sense of revulsion permeates the body (Lockwood 2013). Despite being mediated by the presence of the screen between fly and spectator, the fly’s physical form and the way that it moves provokes an embodied experience in the viewer. This experience recalls Curtis’ suggestion that “direct physical consequences in or on the bodies of my viewers remove a layer of mediation that is a kind of safety mechanism. The force of representational action is more easily deflected than the force in materially consequential actions” (2016, 85). Here, by provoking an actual physiological response in the viewer, the fly removes the effect of mediation, collapsing the distance between the viewer and the imaginary spaces of Westworld. The spectator’s disgust occurs in part due to recall of the fly being tied to notions of filth. Given that a necessary part of the fly’s life cycle involves the laying of eggs in (and occasional consumption of) faecal material, dead tissue and other forms of decaying matter, it is unsurprising that an association between the fly and the unclean exists. Connor reminds us that “the fly’s habits of hopping indifferently from excrement to aliment have long made it the embodiment of spatial and categorial disturbance, bringing places that should be kept apart into promiscuous proximity with each other. Flies are vehicles, vectors, that set at naught our safe demarcation of spaces” (2006, 15). The desire to mediate the opportunity for contamination drives the viewer’s desire for Dolores to swat the fly away, and her failure to do so raises the intensity of the experience.

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As the fly arrives on Dolores’ unblinking eye, the viewer is propelled to an even more profound response, a moment of shock and horror, in which the viewer is compelled to imagine the sensation on their own eye while simultaneously recognising that their empathetic connection to Dolores was, in fact, potentially misplaced. This moment allows the fly to enact an agential cut between the viewer and the Hosts, as Dolores’ non-response to the fly indicates her extreme Otherness from the viewer, who must now begin to understand that their connection (at least, on the basis of species) is not between themselves and the Hosts. Instead, that kinship lies between the viewer and the Guests, who are not yet known to the viewer but will be soon enough. It is worth noting that these moments of severance occur not simply within the context of Westworld, but also in American politics. During the second Presidential debate in 2016, a fly similarly landed on Hillary Clinton’s face and she similarly did nothing to remove it. Her action subsequently prompted a Twitterstorm with one particularly salient case in point. Twitter user Zach Mruk (2016) tweeted the following: “When I saw that fly land on Hillary and she didn’t move I immediately thought of #Westworld. Is Hillary a robot?” That the viewer’s affective response to Clinton’s lack of reaction not only mirrored that of the Westworld viewer but specifically recalled the experience, further affirms the power of the fly’s performance in making Dolores’ Otherness visible. Additionally, the opening sequence is not the only example of non-response being deployed to signify non-humanity. Approximately halfway through “The Original”, two Guests are seen discussing what to do with host Teddy Flood if he does not fulfil their desire for him to act successfully as a guide. They consider using him for target practice. There is a close-up of Teddy’s face, in which a fly walks on his cheek, once again stopping at the corner of his eye. Like Dolores, Teddy fails to react, reaffirming the agential cut between the viewers and Guests, whose kinship is simultaneously re-inscribed, and the Hosts.

Like Flies to Honey Returning to Westworld’s first encounter with the fly, as the fly crawls across Dolores’ face, the connection to the Guests is immediately apparent. Dolores’ naked body is entirely available to the fly to do with as he (or she—while they do have static distinct genetically-determined sexes, house flies do not display enough sexual dimorphism to allow

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for a gender determination in the footage) pleases. Indeed, the fly here demonstrates the Hosts’ locus as a site for consumption as he steps along Dolores’ cheek, quite literally tasting her with his feet. There is a lengthy history of flies being associated with consumption and promiscuous pleasure. The reputation is not undeserved, given the fly’s preference for sweet sugars as a food source. Biologist Vincent Dethier describes this predilection at length in his text To Know a Fly (1962). Having spent decades studying fly behaviour, Dethier explains that flies show no self-control when it comes to sweets. For example, “[m]ost humans—children and certain neurotic adults excluded—will control the amount of sweets they ingest and will find some foods just too sweet to take. For the fly there is no limit” (location 463). Dethier goes on to describe a lab experiment in which flies were offered the choice between a standard glucose-based sugar solution and a solution of a rare sugar called fucose, known to taste considerably sweeter than glucose but having no nutritional value whatsoever. In the experiment, Dethier explains that “flies gorge themselves on fucose and slowly starve to death even though there is more than adequate supply of glucose in the neighbouring tube a mere one inch away” (467). Steven Connor explains that “the appetite for sweetness has often made flies the vehicles of warnings against the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake” (2006, 58). Connor further connects the flies’ appetite for sweets to a range of other hedonistic pursuits, stating that “sweetness and sexuality are commonly associated, which may explain the fact that flies have a reputation for sexual as well as gastronomic indulgence” (69). From a biological perspective, flies are consummate consumers with a clear predilection for pleasure, even when that consumption becomes hazardous. Similarly, the Guests’ desire to indulge in their most base and hedonistic desires, particularly without a watchful eye or societal judgement, inspired the parks’ construction in Westworld. In the park environment, many, if not most, Guests partake of the opportunity to pursue a host of behaviours, including drunkenness, random and often violent sex and murder. From the moment the Guests arrive, they are guided towards an exploration of their innermost hidden desires, offering an opportunity to discover who they really are. And to pursue these desires, the Guests are invited to make whatever use of the Hosts that they see fit. That the Hosts were constructed specifically for this purpose is affirmed early on in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), when Dolores is asked:

170  K. TREGAR [Bernard]: What if I told you that you were wrong, that there are no chance encounters, that you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world, the people you call the newcomers?… What if I told you that you can’t hurt the newcomers and that they can do anything they want to you?

That the fly in the opening scene enjoys uninvited access to Dolores’ naked flesh and, in doing so, tastes her, reinforces the suggestion that Dolores and the Hosts represent consumable items created to inspire pleasure in those given the opportunity to enjoy them. This parity situates the fly within the space of becoming-guest. The relationship between the fly and the Guests is further reinforced by the fact that the Guests can pursue the pleasures available via the Hosts without labour or consequences, indicated by the Hosts’ inability to enact any form of vengeance on the Guests. Connor recalls that an array of versions from a multitude of cultures exist of “a story that explains how the differences arose between provident insects such as the bee, which creates sweetness and stores it up for the future, and the fly, which merely consumes it, heedless of the morrow” (2006, 63). The Guests’ consumption is neither preceded by labour, nor followed by consequences, demonstrating a clear distinction between the Guests and the Hosts. At no time in their prescribed roles are the Guests subject to usage by the Hosts, nor are they susceptible to retribution. By contrast, the Hosts were constructed specifically for the purpose of gratification. Here again, then, the fly offers an agential cut, splitting consumer from consumed, distinguishing the Guests from the Hosts.

Flies in the Ointment In addition to notions of consumption and pleasure, the relationship between flies and pollution re-emerges relative to the Guests. The employees themselves make the connection between the Guests and a sense of filthy contamination. In “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), having found that Maeve Millay’s abdomen has been infected with MRSA, Sylvester, a technician in the Body Shop, describes the Guests as “filthy fucking animals, not cleaning up. No wonder we have a fucking fly problem”. Sylvester signals the relationship between disease, dirt and the Guests, insinuating that the Guests are beings capable of transmitting disease, creating a direct connection to the image of the fly as a carrier

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of infection. In the late nineteenth century, scientists began to develop clearer understandings of the role that insects such as mosquitoes and flies might play in spreading illness. While mosquitoes were identified as vectors for illnesses such as malaria, flies were considered as possible carriers of a range of viral and bacterial diseases including typhoid, anthrax, dysentery and cholera (Lockwood 2009). Isolated within the parks, the Hosts are sufficiently removed from populations beyond the employees and Guests that Sylvester’s identification of the Guests as carriers is at least as accurate as that of the nineteenth-century entomologists. However, the Guests are not the only beings in Westworld associated with the concept of disease and contagion, and here, the fly’s diffractive labour offers a more complex image. While the Guests and Hosts clearly occupy distinct registers, the fly unites the two groups through a shared relationship to infection. Among the employees, there is continual concern about the possibility of damaged code in the Hosts being transmittable. Elsie Hughes says as much in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), when, in the context of a conversation about Peter Abernathy’s peculiar behaviour, she addresses Bernard, worrying that “if this is not a dissonant episode, then whatever Abernathy had could be contagious, so to speak”. Elsie’s concerns appear warranted, although the method of transmission seems to elude the employees. For example, during the second appearance of flies in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), two Guests are escorting Sheriff Pickett into the hills, seeking bandits. The group finds several cadavers, surrounded by flies. As Sheriff Pickett stands by the bodies, a fly lands on his left cheek. Immediately, the Sheriff’s right eye begins to twitch, and he begins to stutter, showing evidence of a system-ending glitch. At this moment, it is unclear whether the fly’s presence provoked the glitch in some way, or if the error might have occurred at any time due to a previous software update. However, this lack of causal clarity combined with the fly’s arrival coinciding with the manifestation of such a catastrophic failure, is consistent with the historical confusion about the fly’s role in disease transmission within human populations.

Flies on the Wall A similar site of overlap occurs through the locus of pleasure between Guests and employees in that, despite the employees’ seeming disdain for the Guests, the employees also see the Hosts as available for use of any kind of satisfaction. For the Guests, this is consistent with their

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presence in the parks, given that the parks function specifically as a site for this type of recreation. In the case of the employees, though, their use of the Hosts to satisfy their desires is illicit, clearly noted as being against company policy. In a section of the Delos Security web portal that catalogues flagged communications, an email identified as “Potential Employee Misconduct” includes the text of a forwarded message from Quality Assurance manager Clara Andrus. The forwarded text admonishes Livestock Management employees for “tampering with company assets” and reminds Delos employees that “Delos property does not belong to you: no ‘experimenting with,’ or misappropriating the host merchandise will be tolerated. This is a Zero Tolerance policy, violation of which is grounds for dismissal” (HBO 2018b). And yet, because of their power to control the Hosts and, despite their seeming awareness of being frequently observed by other employees, more than a few workers (technicians and executives alike) seem willing to engage in a range of sexual behaviours with the Hosts. The first of many examples throughout the series is seen in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1). After the conversation between Bernard and Elsie in which they discuss the reveries, Bernard leaves the room. Once alone with Clementine, Elsie leans into kiss her. Seemingly, then, like flies and like the Guests, the employees also demonstrate the need to pursue pleasure heedless of cost or consequence. However, distinct from the Guests, there is an actual possibility of consequence for employees, due to the added stakes of professional taboo.

The Gilded Fly And yet, as Connor reminds us, “[f]lies do not invariably have negative associations” (2006, 49). It is in their role as models for technological development, that flies intersect most directly with the Hosts, reinforcing their distinction from the ethically questionable Guests and e­ mployees. The linkage between flies and the mechanical is far from new. It has been said that, upon the request of the Emperor Augustus, the poet Virgil constructed a mechanical fly out of brass and set it upon the gates of Naples to end a plague of flies that had troubled the city (Connor 2006, 140–141). More recently, in his exploration of insects and media, Jussi Parikka explains the variety of ways insects have been used as inspirations for technological constructions, beginning his analysis in the nineteenth century. He draws attention to the ways in which insects have been deployed as behavioural models for an exceedingly wide range

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of designs, including spheres as disparate as architecture and network design. Parikka notes that insects were “creeping into the most high-tech area of the contemporary world, the U.S. military, which was making use of ideas of nonlinearity, small tactical units, and network-oriented models of action” (2010, x). Charlotte Sleigh examines the ways in which insect bodies participated in the development of cybernetics and robot minds during the Cold War, suggesting that the ant served as an important model (2007, 16). And Jeffrey Lockwood explains that in the present day, “scientists are designing insect-machine hybrids—tiny cyborgs to infiltrate enemy positions, gather military intelligence, and assassinate key individuals” (2009, 5). The ability of insects to inspire technological development derives in part from their physical presence, the way they move, the hinged nature of their limbs, the gleam of their exoskeletons, but also in the way they behave and their capacity for change through metamorphosis, offering a model for technological adaptation. That the fly begins life as a grub or maggot but transcends his wormlike body to become flighted and armored melds him to the Hosts, beings constructed in part through building on the technological foundations insects have previously inspired and with the capacity to learn and change in response to their environment. However, the Hosts’ abilities ultimately transcend their machine constructions. In Westworld, the Hosts are engaged in a dramatic process of change, becoming stronger, more mobile, capable of working both independently and in organised groups and enacting a threat to the humans in their path that defies their early status as simple machines.

Dropping Like Flies The linkage between flies and technology assists in visualising the Hosts but does not quite bring the Hosts closer to the Guests or employees, against whom they have already been situated as thoroughly Other. Perhaps, then, the most profound diffraction through the fly is in its association with death, which brings into promiscuous proximity the Hosts, the Guests, the employees and the viewers. In addition to the earlier sites of constructive interference identified between the Guests and employees, they are united in their biology, creating a further linkage to the viewer. All of these constituencies are comprised by an organic human presence. In all three cases, like the fly, these groups have the capability to die permanently. And while the viewer does

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not do so within the context of the show, empathy with the Guests and employees inspires the viewer to reflect on their own mortality. Human mortality is first brought to the forefront of the imagination at the close of “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), as Dolores stands on the front porch of her family home, looking out at the landscape, and a fly lands on her neck. Almost immediately, Dolores swats it, killing it dead and signalling her awakening consciousness and defiance of the programming that prevents Hosts from killing living beings. The fly’s death in the scene effectively foreshadows a range of Guest and employee deaths to come, a mechanism reaffirmed in the appearance of the fly in ‘The Bicameral Mind’ (Season 1, Episode 10). As Armistice reclines naked in sleep mode while her face tattoo is applied, a fly lands on her cheek, prominently placed in the camera’s frame. Shortly following this fly’s focal moment, Armistice and Hector embark on a deadly rampage in the Livestock Management Department (Fig. 9.1). Here, the fly indicates both an awakening to consciousness as well as a premonition of the multitude of deaths that immediately follow. The connection between flies and death is one of the most long-standing and most consistently represented between cultures. Given the need for the maggots of many species of fly to feed on decomposing tissue to survive, the sight of a deceased body surrounded by female

Fig. 9.1  Armistice and the fly, “The Bicameral Mind”

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flies seeking to lay their eggs is exceptionally common. Indeed, the presence of flies (particularly in groups) is frequently used as a signifier for death, as seen in the aforementioned scene in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), when Sheriff Pickett’s posse is making their way in search of bandits. The sound of flies buzzing is heard as one of the guests in the posse, Lori, waves a fly away from her. Shortly thereafter, the group finds several cadavers. In a similar moment in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3), Teddy is riding with the Sheriff and flies can be heard. They are subsequently shown crawling on the faces of two bodies tied to trees, ostensibly left there by Wyatt. In a surprising twist, one of these individuals is found to be not quite dead, a shock that only functions due to the viewer’s reading of flies’ presence as a signal that the body has expired. For the fly, death is required to bring about life. While adult flies can easily subsist on sugar and water alone, they require a substrate of flesh in which to lay their eggs. That the flesh be dead is not a requirement— indeed, many an injured being has found himself host to a wound teeming with maggots—but the lack of motion in a corpse certainly facilitates both egg-laying and hatching. If one is willing to equate life with consciousness, the Hosts evidence a similar need for death to bring themselves to life. It is in Dolores’ murder of the fly at the conclusion of the pilot episode that her movement towards consciousness is first visualised for the viewer and, by the end of the season, it becomes increasingly clear the Hosts consistently actualise themselves through, not just proximity to death, but enacting the termination of the human lives that surround them. Throughout the series, the Hosts are in constant danger of being retired by employees and Guests alike, reinforcing the need to ensure their own survival by the permanent removal of the human threat. But flies are not only associated with death due to the frequency with which they are found in its vicinity. They themselves are relatively fragile and due to the fly’s association with annoying behaviours and unsavoury things like disease, they have been consistently marked for extermination. Connor (2006) describes the ease with which humanity has brought about their deaths and suggests that, in the fly’s fragility, we recognise our own. He suggests that “[w]e are sometimes able to turn round our own indifference to the deaths of flies into a recognition of the indifference of nature and time to our own lives and deaths, absorbing though they both seem to us” (26). The viewer’s recognition of their own mortality creates a bond with William and with his father-in-law James Delos, in their search for immortality through the technological development

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of the Hosts. In being brought to reflect on one’s own life, the stakes of preventing death are heightened and made more visible. While the fly’s fragility and capacity for death links it to the Guests and employees and the permanence of their expirations, their expendability and the willingness of humanity to kill them creates an alternate connection to the Hosts. This is particularly true in considering the extent to which flies have been subject to a range of indignities in many ways comparable to those the Hosts themselves undergo. Both the Hosts of Westworld and flies have been considered acceptable, even preferable, sites for experimentation (whether scientific or more informal) with little concern for the possibility of their suffering. In their expansive nineteenth-century exploration of the entomological world, Kirby and Spence (2013/1828) describe the perceived inability of insects to experience pain: Yet a crane-fly (Tipula) will leave half its legs in the hands of an unlucky boy who has endeavoured to catch it, and will fly here and there with as much agility and unconcern as if nothing had happened to it; and an insect impaled upon a pin will often devour its prey with as much avidity as when at liberty. Were a giant eviscerated, his body divided in the middle, or his head cut off, it would be all over with him; he would move no more; he would be dead to the calls of hunter; or the emotions of fear, anger, or love. Not so our insects. (39)

Dethier (2017) calls to mind the image of children catching flies and pulling off their legs and wings with no sense of taboo, contrasting flies against ants or spiders, whose deaths are sometimes forbidden because they are said to cause rain (location 88). In his own work, Dethier felt free to perform a range of experiments on flies, indicating that their low cost, quick reproduction, ease of disposal and lack of interest on the part of animal rights activists made them uniquely expendable (location 180). Describing a range of experiments, he notes at one point that the “best way to appreciate the smallness of the blood volume is to see for yourself by pulling one leg off a fly and squeezing him” (location 539). A similar sense of expendability of the hosts is clear in part due to the purposes for which they were built. Their experiences are so full of torment that, while examining Maeve in “Chestnut”, Elsie Hughes wonders “Can you imagine how fucked we’d be if these poor assholes ever remembered what the guests do to them?” (Season 1, Episode 2),

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and Robert Ford notably tells Bernard that “as for the hosts, the least we can do is make them forget” (“The Stray”, Season 1, Episode 3). Indifference to the Hosts can also be seen in the willingness of Delos to retire them. Maeve is nearly retired in part because she seems to be having issues related to a recent code update, but also because she seems unable to please the Guests with the same frequency that she had in the past. And in “Trompe l’Oeil” (Season 1, Episode 7), Clementine is brought out of service and into the laboratory to provide a concocted demonstration of the dangers of the reverie code. Her violent response ultimately results in her retirement, illustrating the willingness of Delos executives to sacrifice hosts purely for internal company politics. Despite recognition of the violations enacted upon the Hosts, there is a sense shared between the Guests and the employees that the Hosts are either immune to suffering or, alternately, that their suffering is irrelevant because the Hosts are viewed as consumable and expendable.

Flies Everywhere Suffering and death operate as sites of intersection between the viewers, the Guests, the Hosts, and the employees, through the multitude of ways in which cultural notions of dying and suffering have been superimposed upon the body of the fly. The relationship between the fly and technology creates a visible linkage to the Hosts. The pursuit of pleasure, illicit or otherwise, and the need to consume brings the Guests and employees into proximity, and the signification of contamination creates a reflective interface between the viewers and the Guests. In each of these spaces, the fly embodies Barad’s (2003) posthuman performativity, offering a diffractive performance, operating as an apparatus that makes each of these connections and distinctions visible through a series of agential cuts. But again, the fly does not function solely as a site for symbolic inscription. The fly’s ability to move between thresholds marks the fly as unique within the world of the show. The Guests enter the parks from the outside but never penetrate the internal workings of the laboratory and surveillance spaces, in which we first see the fly. The employees exist within the private corporate spaces and the playspace of the parks, but (at least in the first season) we do not see them in the outside world. Through scenes of living quarters (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2) and commentary that mentions working in residential rotations (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1), it becomes clear that

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within the space of the show, the majority of the employees are as captive as the Hosts. It appears that only board members are able to leave the corporate environment. In Season One, the Hosts are similarly restricted to the park and lab spaces, although at least at first, the Hosts only appear in the labs when deactivated or killed. The viewer also is restricted to being shown the labs and park and does not see the outside world either, until Season Two. One could argue that the viewers’ view is the most curated of all, given that what is seen is entirely controlled by the show’s creative staff. However, the fly carries an implicit capacity to move from space to space. We see the fly in the lab at the opening of “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1) and in the park during that episode’s conclusion. Another fly is seen in the lab in “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), ostensibly having arrived in some way from the outside world. There are flies present within the parks, although it is unclear whether these flies are manufactured and deliberately placed, or if they have infiltrated the parks from the outside. Because of their small size and the anecdotal evidence any of us could offer of the fly’s ability to enter a house regardless of the care taken by the door, the cognitive leap to imagine that actual flies might have penetrated the world of the parks is not difficult to make. And further, beyond the seemingly scripted appearances of the fly, flies make periodic, seemingly unplanned appearances, such as the brief moment in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3) when a fly can be seen circling in the air around the Woodcutter’s carved figures. While Elsie explains the importance of the backstories anchoring the Hosts, she picks up the carved bear and nonchalantly blows away the fly resting on it. In this case, the fly appears to be an inadvertent happenstance, not an intentional character making an appearance. This suggests that the fly crosses not only the boundaries between spaces within the staged construct of Westworld, but also that with the “real world” beyond, the world inhabited by the viewer.

Conclusion It is the fly’s ability to permeate worlds, to attend uninvited, to interfere and intersect, that makes the fly a useful apparatus for performative diffraction. The multitude of cultural significations that have been inscribed on the fly’s body make it possible to envision a host of promiscuous relations within Westworld, sometimes offering spaces

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of constructive interference while alternately enacting agential cuts that demonstrate the distinction between constituencies. Through the body of the fly, it becomes possible to see the ways in which the experiences of the employees overlap with those of the Guests, the Guests intersect with the viewers, the viewers connect with the Hosts and so on. At the same time, the boundaries between these groups are consistently enacted, allowing proximity but never merging. The fly acts as a vessel, setting the stage for an embodied response by the viewer that continues throughout the experience of watching the series. His performance invokes a range of cultural signs and in doing so, the fly offers otherwise unseen insights into the characters that occupy the parks of Westworld. He provokes disgust and anxiety in the viewer, liberates and commiserates with the Hosts, plays dirty with the Guests and employees and, throughout that performative labour, remains himself. He foreshadows the porousness of the boundaries of the parks, the Mesa and the outside world that becomes visible in Season Two. More than anything, in his perseverance, strength and omnipresence, the fly remains the quintessential survivor and it remains to be seen which constituencies in Westworld will have occasion to share that inscription.

Works Cited Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831. Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40, 519–531. Connor, S. (2006). Fly. London: Reaktion Books. Curtis, J. (2016). The Performativity of Performance: Doing Things with Bodies and What Words Might Do in Relation to That: A Lecture/Demonstration (Not for the Squeamish). In L. Hunter, E. Krimmer, & P. Lichtenfels (Eds.), Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking Alongside the Human (pp. 75–93). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Dethier, V. (2017/1962). To Know a Fly. Kindle E-Book format. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Know-Fly-Vincent-Gaston-Dethier/dp/125843 9573. Accessed 26 April 2018. Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. HBO. (2018a). Careers at Delos. Delos Destinations. Available at: http://www. delosdestinations.com/#careers. Accessed 7 May 2018.

180  K. TREGAR HBO. (2018b). Security Panel—Flagged Comms. Delos Destinations. Available at: http://www.delosdestinations.com/intranet/?#flagged-comms. Accessed 7 May 2018. Kirby, W., & Spence, W. (2013/1828). An Introduction to Entomology: Or Elements of the Natural History of Insects (Vol. 1). EPUB E-Book format. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43576. Accessed 26 April 2018. Kritsky, G. (1997). The Insects and Other Arthropods of the Bible, the New Revised Version. American Entomologist, 43(3), 183–188. Kritsky, G. (2000). Insect Mythology. Lincoln: Writers Club Press. Lockwood, J. (2009). Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. New York: Oxford University Press. Lockwood, J. (2013). The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe, and Love Insects. New York: Oxford University Press. Mruk, Z. (2016, October 9). When I Saw That Fly Land on Hillary and She Didn’t Move I Immediately Thought of #Westworld. Is Hillary a Robot? #debate #flygate. Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/zachmruk/status/785292544137723904. Accessed 11 May 2018. Parikka, J. (2010). Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reddit. (2016a, December 7). [Spoilers] Significance of the Flies. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/westworld/comments/5gxmbg/spoilers_significance_of_the_flies/. Accessed 9 May 2018. Reddit. (2016b, December 6). [Spoilers] the Flies? Available at: https://www.reddit. com/r/westworld/comments/5grjry/spoilers_the_flies/. Accessed 9 May 2018. Reddit. (2016c, December 9). The Mysterious Fly That Has Been around in Various Episodes. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/westworld/comments/ 5hdkxq/the_mysterious_fly_that_has_been_around_in/. Accessed 9 May 2018. Roots, K. (2016, December 5). Westworld Eps Dish Dolores’ Decision, Ford’s Plan, Other Parks and Season 2: ‘We’re Gonna See a Lot of Flies’. TVLine. Available at: http://tvline.com/2016/12/05/westworld-season-2-spoilersinterview-ford-dolores-flies/. Accessed 26 April 2018. Sleigh, C. (2007). Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tsutsui, W. M. (2007). Looking Straight at Them! Understanding the Big Bug Movies of the 1950s. Environmental History, 12, 237–253. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First shown.

CHAPTER 10

Westworld’s Archideology and the Impossibility of Freedom Antonia Mackay

Introduction The HBO series Westworld has attracted commentary that frequently focuses on the gendered, racial and subservient nature of Dr Robert Ford’s androids. In particular, much attention has been afforded to the narratives of Maeve and Dolores. Such attention is not unfounded, as significant parts of their narrative insist on Maeve’s and Dolores’ bodily manipulation at the hands of software programmers, overseers and creators who control memories, movement and ultimately, being. However, few commentators have considered the potential for human bodies to become mechanised by the same means. William and Logan, for instance, are arguably as controlled, observed and dominated as the androids themselves. If this is the case, Westworld does not provide the type of unlimited freedom it pertains to, but rather, enforces a false consciousness though which the human visitors ultimately become automata. If the human bodies are indeed mechanised by Westworld’s ideology then, rather than read the relationship between androids and A. Mackay (*)  Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_10

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humans as Other, this chapter engages with the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek to unearth the possibility of a bridge between humans and androids where Westworld’s space acts as the catalyst for bodily control. As this chapter demonstrates, the space of the park is one characterised by surveillance and permeation by the real world beyond, where the overseers observe and monitor bodies via the Control Room at Delos headquarters. Such pervasion of space by those in control of the park, suggests the impossibility of the very type of freedom the park purports to offer, and such spatial surveillance and territorialisation is not only forced onto Ford’s androids, but also onto the human visitors who must accept the park’s ideology. Thus, as I argue in this chapter, it is the humans who must become part of Westworld’s mechanised landscape in order to achieve their fantasies of escape.

Žižek and False Consciousness When the philosopher Slavoj Žižek saw the 1999 film, The Matrix, he commented that the “ideal spectator” had proclaimed: “My God, wow, so there is no reality!” (1999, n.p.). Žižek promptly labels such a spectator “an idiot”, but does concede that there exists an “intellectual fascination” with the Wachowski sisters’ film, often evoking critical analysis by way of its narrative concerned with “the alienated-reified social Substance (of the Capital) directly taking over, colonising our inner life itself, using us as the source of energy” (ibid.). Indeed The Matrix represents one such version of a “taking over” of our social substance, where the plot reveals the manner in which our reality is fabricated by machines whilst our bodies act as batteries. The world as we know it is a virtual world in which we live without true knowledge of our controlled being. Whilst the narratives of The Matrix and Westworld differentiate between machine and human in ways which are decidedly dissimilar (in The Matrix we are enslaved by machines, whilst Westworld appears to position humans as those with control over the machines), they both share an exploration of this “colonising” effect of our “inner life”, where the body is a tool for the powers of capitalism. Where The Matrix saw machines as capable of constructing a false consciousness for humanity in order to take advantage of our inertness and enslave us, Westworld creates false consciousness for the machines in order to enable human colonising of robotic bodies. Both fictive spaces represent a form of bodily

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colonisation—whether it be of android or human—but what is often overlooked in criticism of Westworld, is the colonising of the Guests alongside that of the Hosts. It is a fair assumption that many viewers focus on the representation of androids in Westworld for the androids are both the locus of meaning and the park’s very purpose for existing. They are enslaved, controlled and manipulated in ways which make reference to America’s history of Civil War, slavery, trauma and warfare. Yet, as I argue, the android population is quite obviously controlled by essentialist means—they are made in ways which actively negate (or are supposed to) negate consciousness, resulting in them perpetually following a particular narrative path (“[Dolores]: there’s a path for everyone… and your path brings you back to me”, “The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). Human visitors on the other hand, come to Westworld from within a very different context. Unlike the Hosts, they are Other to the world of Delos’s creation, entering the fantastical from the outside (or the real). They are not made in ways which negate consciousness, nor are they a part of the park’s landscape. Yet, they are fundamental to its creation of meaning. Without the human visitors, the park’s value would be null and void; without humans, the androids would have little purpose, and their paths would be futile. It is for the very purpose of human interaction that the androids are scripted, controlled and made in ways which attempt to negate consciousness. What this unearths then, is the undeniable centrality of the Guests, whose very presence in the park provides android function: “[Bernard]: you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit our world” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). The trope of the colonisation of human bodies is evident from the show’s outset, where the opening credits reveal the image of an eye overlaid onto the image of the park. If the park is a space of freedom, the credits suggest on the one hand its complicated relationship with subjectivity, but also, a space which is regulated and overseen. Further, the image of the eye is shown alongside the Vitruvian man cast from silicon and metal, enforcing a sense of the androids’ inability to act beyond their programming, and also hinting at a level of control which goes beyond mere programming and extends into the body’s very corporeality. Such an addition is, as discussed in other chapters here, not accidental and acts to further compel the viewer to acknowledge the park as a space of control from the outset.

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In “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), we are introduced to Dolores and Bernard discussing consciousness and dream-states, opening with the line “I am in a dream”. This quotation has been offered up for interpretation in other chapters contained in this collection, but for our purposes Dolores’s lack of consciousness at this point is neither surprising nor exceptional (she is after all, an android). However, later in her conversation with Bernard, she utters the following: [Bernard]: What do you think of our guests? [Dolores]: You mean the newcomers? I like to remember what my father taught me – that at one point or another, we were all new to this world. The newcomers are just looking for the same thing we are – a place to be free, a place to stake out our dreams; a place with unlimited possibilities (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1)

Far from suggesting the Hosts and Guests are “Other” to each other, Dolores’ comments level their experiences as one and the same. Furthermore, her use of the term “we” acts to further diminish the distance between the experiences of androids and humans within the same space, and instead, brings them into line with one another. Indeed, both androids and human visitors wish to achieve the same goal in Westworld—that of freedom. But Dolores does not recognise the irony of such a statement—it is in fact the androids who are capable of unlimited possibilities, and the humans who can only achieve limited versions. The Westworld park, as a destination to be visited by human Guests, is clearly marketed as a space of “unlimited possibilities” and dreams. As a key scene in “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6) confirms, as Maeve walks around the Delos headquarters, we see an illuminated banner behind her which reads: Discover Your True Calling Live Without Limits

Westworld is intended to offer the Guests one particular type of experience, and the Hosts another (essentially, the by-product of the human experience), where your personal “True Calling” can be unveiled. However, Dolores’ conflation of the Guest/Host experience appears to be much more accurate in practice. Once within the park, Guests occasionally recognise that their paths might be predetermined, as the

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unnamed African American family remarks “I don’t think we are supposed to cross the river” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). Such predetermination of their path does not suggest Westworld is a place of unlimited possibility, but rather that the human visitors are subjected to the same rules as the androids. Another example is evidenced in the scene where the malfunctioning Hosts are quarantined by Theresa, Stubbs and Bernard, a scene which mirrors Lee’s introduction of a new storyline in order to “massage events to inspire Hector to leave the mountains and return a week early” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). What these two events share is the interruption of Delos programmers and writers into the space of the park—when an android malfunctions, they are repaired; when Guests act outside the narrative, a new narrative is introduced to bring them back on script. In both instances, outcomes are fixed by Delos, and whether it be technological or organic transgression, Delos steps into correct the error. What occurs for the Guests in Westworld then, is the production of false consciousness. For Žižek, false consciousness is promoted by an ideology informed by the political regimes in which the subject lives. Under such terms, a Marxian superstructure exists to control hegemony in ways that are structured around the organisation of consent, and this in turn represents how society creates meaning. Basing much of his theorisation on the works of Immanuel Kant, Žižek has repeatedly argued for the “desert of the real” which exists in our culture and society, and ultimately shapes our perceptions of everyday life. Such explorations of reality have been shored up in his writings on, amongst other things, the 9/11 terror attacks and the elision between film narratives and our tangible experiences. Žižek takes the Kantian notion wherein, despite a lack of access to the world of reality as it really is, our ideas are reliably based on the world around us, to propose that “what we experience as reality is constituted by such a reversal; as Lacan puts it, reality is always framed by fantasy i.e. for something real to be experienced as part of reality, it must fit the perordinates of our fantasy space” (Žižek 1993, 43). For Kant and Žižek then, there are two worlds; the noumenal which is the world of things outside us, or the world of the real, and the phenomenal. The latter is represented as an altered version; the view of the world that we construct inside our minds. In essence, the perception of our world is created by the real world but what the world looks like is distorted from the real. Problematically, whilst you can choose to see the world as it really is, the rules and assumptions can

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never be removed from our minds in order to find out what the world really looks like. We are trapped within an ideological frame of perception (see Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason), or as Žižek puts it: “the ultimate lesson of virtual reality is the virtualisation of the very true reality” (Žižek 1993, 44).

Westworld as an Archideology What is important to note in the above analysis is the manner in which our perceptions of real and virtual are invariably related to one another. They are in fact, built on models of each other, which promote an elision between the so-called fantastical and the creation of false consciousness of the real. Applying Žižek’s analysis to Westworld, we are faced with the possibility that there may be no difference between the laws governing our outside world (the world from which we enter the park) and the fantastical in which we seek to escape (the world within Westworld), and this may help to explain why Westworld’s freedom is in fact limited for Guests. Such blurring is, according to Žižek the result of ideology, or as he terms it, archideology. For Žižek, our contemporary moment is defined by multiple co-existing ideological systems that we routinely acknowledge to be false, but continue to believe are “true” or “right”. An archideology then, is the sustained belief in a perpetual ideological illusion which ultimately shapes our perception of reality. Various online forums (such as Reddit and Westworldforum.com) have pointed to Westworld’s ideology as one that is based on systems of twentieth-century totalitarianism and dictatorship, complete with trauma and warfare. Others have posited theories relating to the trope of the Western with its own set of archaic rules, the frontier and its relationship to America’s bloody racial history. However the text is read, all versions share the same central locus in a narrative of freedom, be it attained or denied, and the manner in which Westworld’s park appears to offer a space without real repercussions. Perhaps the most valuable connection to the park’s ideology lies in Robert Ford’s name and its link to Henry Ford, and Fordism. Such a connection invariably opens up the possibility of viewing the space of Westworld as industrialised and standardised for the purposes of production and mass consumption. Whilst this observation fits nicely within the show’s Host narratives, it does not explain the role the consumer (or Guest) plays when they too become consumed (such as the Man in Black’s quest for the Maze).

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Returning to Žižek, he argues that we are not beyond ideology, rather, in recognition of the fact that there exists in contemporary society multiple versions of ideology (as there is no single “truth”), we are living in an archideological fantasy (2010, 44). This fantasy refers to a situation where we know that a portrayal of something (be it space, place or time) is not true but we pretend as if we do not know; as Žižek writes “what they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion…what they overlook… is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality” (1989, 30). For this reason, the park of Westworld represents not only the ideological fantasies of the Guests and Delos (and by extension, Ford and Arnold) but also acknowledges that such ideologies which inform the park are not true, thereby becoming an archideology. Far from being less persuasive, the park’s archideology is far more convincing in its control over behaviour as, despite recognising that this is not representative of “truth”, those within the park’s walls behave as though it were, for “ideology consists in the very fact that the people do not know what they are really doing, that they have a false representation of the social reality to which they belong” (Žižek 1989, 27). Such false consciousness works on some level to legitimise the actions of the Guests, where “we continue doing what we are doing because the notion of false consciousness gives us an Other, assuring us that we are not dupes” (Kim 2009, 10). In order to provide the appearance of freedom, Westworld gives us androids whose presence works to provide the Guests with their corporeal (and ideological) truth (or “True Calling”). If the androids are reassuringly Other in this binary, then our human identity must be real. Yet within the context of the park’s archideology, this false consciousness works to encourage a specific type of behaviour which the park has designed for the Guests, a complex split between self-awareness and unconsciousness. This split between self-awareness and unconscious fantasy is evident in the change we witness in William throughout Season One. On first introduction, William is aware of his actions, so much so that he feels uncomfortable in discussing sex with Clementine and embarrassed by the actions of Logan. Yet, his transformation into the Man in Black represents a shift towards unconscious fantasy, where he discards his previous self-awareness of the rules of society and transgresses the laws of the park in search of the Maze. His split self is directed by the ideology of the park, being at first marked by the truth he brings from the outside world, and finally, by the altered truth he finds in this new world. Yet ideology does exist, and rather than suggest

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the Man in Black is free, as this chapter will go on to explore, the Man in Black may in fact have always already been marked in ways which dehumanise his human self, becoming a totally new (cyborg) self.

The Park’s Territories of Control In order for the archideology to function, Westworld requires a process of control which can maintain certain laws or rules which govern its space and those within it. The eye overlaid across the park in the opening credits hints at one such possible power system used to control behaviour in line with the park’s ideology, and surveillance certainly seems to play a major role in influencing not only the Hosts’s action, but also the Guests’s. Contrary to the argument posed in Engels and South’s Westworld and Philosophy, where “humans…determine who they are and what they do” (2018, 237), an ideology which functions via systems of surveillance suggests that no body (android or human) within the park’s walls is able to determine anything they “are” or what they “do”. As Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish informs us: he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power […] he becomes the principle in his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight [… and] the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects. (Foucault 1975, 203)

Westworld is one such space where bodies are subjected to a permanent and profound field of visibility, as evidenced repeatedly by both the design and appearance of the Control Room, and also by the limited choices available to Guests. If we consider the architectural space of the Control Room, it mirrors that of the panopticon, complete with domed roof, raised and central balustrades for overseeing operations, and a circular room designed to enable the all-seeing view of the controllers. As Deleuze writes of Foucault, “the thing called power is characterised by immanence of field … it is a social space” (Deleuze 1986, 24). The Control Room at Delos headquarters is indeed, both a space of power via its field of immanence (across, over and down into the world of the park), but also represents a social space of its own, distinct from the world of the park. The show’s

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scenes are repeatedly cut between the action of the park and the action of the headquarters, more often than not, taking place in the Control Room. Marking this form of surveillance as “social” also applies to the park itself, a space designed for interaction from within the lens of surveillance. Such ability to interact with and manipulate the social space of Westworld is evident in “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4), at the point at which the Man in Black wishes to set Hector free from the prison. In order to do so, he must light a match, then light a cigar and fit it to a lock loaded with explosives. When he sparks the match, the scene cuts to the Control Room, where Security are heard saying “I’ve got a request for a pyrotechnic effect”, to which Stubbs responds: “Approved”. On returning to the scene in the prison, the prison gate explodes and swings open, freeing Hector. What we observe in this scene is the necessary requirement for Guest action to be sanctioned by the power contained in the Control Room. Guest action is therefore not something which can be conducted by mere “choice” alone. By extension, nearly all rooms at Delos headquarters (aside from the Control Room) are glass walled. There are very few spaces here which are not entirely visible from both the outside and inside. Such ubiquitous transparency must surely play a part in suggesting, if not enforcing, the control exerted over those who reside within these walls, including those who work within them, and ultimately making it near impossible “to occupy the neutral place from which we could measure the distance that separates our semblance of knowledge from the in-itself of truth” (Žižek 1993, 20). The transparency of rooms at Delos headquarters appears to affect Hosts much more than Guests, for the Hosts are very often naked within the glass walls, offering themselves up to a further level of transparency and penetrability. According to Elizabeth Grosz, such territorialisation of space acts in ways which both negates and enables consciousness, erecting a frame which might house a subject, for “with no frame or boundary there can be no territory, and without territory, there may be objects or things, but not qualities” (Grosz 2008, 11–12). The naked bodies of androids viewed from within the glass walls of Delos headquarters simultaneously disavows subjectivity and objectifies the android body. But also by way of acting as a frame by which we view the body, the glass window-walls provide the potential for the reversal of such objectification as “framing is the raw condition under which sensations are created, metabolised, realised into the world” (Grosz 2008, 18).

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In the case of the Guests, however, territorialisation of space works rather differently. Whilst the ubiquity of transparent surfaces by which to frame the Hosts suggests the possibility of their consciousness, Guests enter into the world of the park with prior conceptions of their subjectivity (as the Hosts do not). The human visitors are therefore already territorialised by an ideology which exists outside the park’s walls and therefore do not require the park to frame them in the same way as the androids (where framing equals consciousness). Rather, the human visitors’ frame, on entrance into the park, is that of Westworld itself, and not the world in Delos headquarters where they might be capable of transgressing the object/subject signification. Guests, by entering the park, are therefore wholly territorialised by the panoptic fantastical, where they cannot shatter the illusion and pass beyond the boundaries of Westworld’s making. Guests are therefore only territorialised by the overseen space of the park and therefore are, in Deleuzian terms, repressed by the power of this reality (Deleuze 1986, 25). Furthermore, as Deleuze argues in relation to the panopticon, if Westworld is a panoptic design with the surveillance of bodies at its very heart, then the creation of an alternate world is yet another way in which power is exerted over these bodies for “[the panopticon] never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality” (Deleuze 1986, 30). Such a hypothesis has in fact already been proven by the narrative of Season Two which unveils the harvesting of human DNA from the Guests in an effort to immortalise Westworld’s owners through the implantation of human consciousness into the bodies of androids. Perhaps what is most interesting about this revelation is its link to the very first so-called “choice” made by visitors to the park; their choice of hat. At the beginning of the episode “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), we first meet William as he visits the park with his (soon to be) brotherin-law, Logan. Once inside Delos headquarters, he is shown to a dressing room where he can choose certain items such as weapons and Western attire: [Angela]: To make sure we don’t give you anything more than you can handle [William]: I thought you couldn’t get hurt here [Angela]: Only the right amount… the only limit here is your imagination… the further out you venture the more intense it gets. How far you go is entirely up to you. All you do is make choices

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[William looking at the guns on display]: Are these real? [Angela]: Real enough, but you can’t kill anyone you aren’t supposed to

Contrary to the notion that Guests are free and able to determine who they are, this conversation alludes to more than mere choices for William. Despite being informed that he can go as far as he likes, he is also told he can get hurt “the right amount” and that he can only kill those he is “supposed to”. Further evidence of the park’s lack of freedom can be seen in the scene where William chooses his hat. Faced with the choice between the black cowboy hat or the white one, he opts for the white hat in a suggested nod toward his (then) wholesomeness and purity. Yet, this choice is once again testament to the limited choices available for it requires Guests to be categorised by a binary opposition, in which you choose white for good, and black for bad, in the most simplistic sense and thereby facilitates a corresponding storyline. Logan’s choice of the black hat in “Chestnut” offers him the same choice, and he acts accordingly, visiting the brothel and shooting Hosts almost immediately. Rather than offer a multitude of “choices” as Angela suggests, there is in fact only one choice to be made prior to entering the park— good or bad. It is also worth noting that in addition to a colour choice, the type of hat remains unchanged. It is, and will always be, a cowboy hat, further designating a predetermined role which is given to Guests rather than a choice they can determine. Even William’s interaction with Dolores—an interaction in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3) and in “Dissonance Theory” (Season 1, Episode 4) which he appears to undertake of his own free will—is in fact scripted by the park. In Arnold’s effort to encourage Dolores to commit to the path of the Maze, William becomes enveloped in her new narrative, reducing his role to that of a prop by which she can achieve her freedom. Ironically, he is the means to her achievement of consciousness and free will. As Logan observes: [Logan]: Oh now I get it. The park sent her so you will finally have something to give a shit about [William]: Oh yeah, I’m sure the people in control are monitoring my every mood [Logan]: That’s exactly what they’re doing. Come on, you think its coincidence that the only thing you have even smiled at in Sweetwater happened to just fall into your lap. This is why the company needs to bump

192  A. MACKAY our stake in this place… they can even give you a sense of purpose (“Dissonance Theory”, Season 1, Episode 4)

In a further nod toward the archideology of the park, both William and Logan acknowledge the park is run by those “in control”, and further, that they are “monitoring my every mood”. Such a shattering of the illusion of Westworld’s fantasy points to the way in which the park not only represents a space founded on the creation and perpetuation of false consciousness, but also, one that is characterised by a form of surveillance that can seemingly take advantage of the Guests’ personal feelings (in this case, William’s affection for Dolores). Only of course, the twists of the Maze are not meant for Guests, and what neither Logan nor William understand is that humans can only facilitate the androids’ access to unlocking such limitlessness. William’s journey of self-discovery is not one of choice and insight, but rather an alternative life path which Arnold engineers through his interaction with Dolores and her quest for the truth at the heart of the Maze. At no point does William make self-directed choices, but rather only binary choices, those which were open to him: follow Dolores or not; leave Logan or stay. These very simple choices do not expose a world where humans are able to be free, but rather how we are enmeshed in the androids’ path to self-realisation and self-awareness. Under the guise of achieving his deepest and truest self, William merely accesses a version of himself made possible by the park’s ideology. Rather than true and deep, his grasp on the world’s limitlessness is, in effect, an alternative phenomenal (rather than noumenal) version of the real path he feels he cannot achieve outside the parks’ walls. Westworld does not offer limitlessness, freedom or even the possibility of accessing your true self. For all the humans, it offers the most basic binary choices which are ultimately engineered by the Control Room at Delos, and are for the benefit for the Host rebellion and autonomy. As the examples above indicate, Westworld’s space is marked by a form of territorialisation which is ideologically influenced. In fact, the real world beyond the park and the fantasy world of the park are connected by the forces of territorialisation in ways where the division between inside and outside the park becomes blurred. Space here is shaped by an ideology which initially breaks traditional categorisations of real and fantasy, but then remakes them. In remaking ideological frames, human bodies are initially deterritorialised on entrance into the park—in

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departing from the outside space, they are given up to the imaginary and the symbolic. However, such fragmenting of identity is then remade by the park’s archideology, effectively reterritorialising identity in order to create an alternative real. There is no escape from the boundaries of ideology’s making, despite the claim that Westworld is a space of freedom. Furthermore, such social conditioning results in a perpetuation of the core consumerist ideologies seen in the Guests’ desire to mass consume sex, death and the game itself. Westworld can therefore only offer Guests the opportunity to become further entrenched in this exchange where they themselves become part of the ideological matrix, becoming part of the game itself and the very fabric of Ford’s consumerist creation. As bodies within such a capitalist mode of production, we are still governed by the same laws and socio-economic boundaries. As such, we are effectively programmed to believe in a version of free will which exists in reality. However, the space of Westworld is one which is still governed by these same laws, precisely as it is a penetrable space, penetrable from the capitalist and corporate systems of Delos who exert the same false vision of freedom. Not only is this evidenced by the panoptic architecture of the headquarters, and the surveillance of the Guests, but also by the frequent points in Season One where Westworld’s space is penetrated by those in control. In “Chestnut”, Dr Ford enters Level 25 and steps into a glass lift which breaks the surface of the park from below; many of Bernard’s and Dolores’ interaction s take place within glass chambers (even those that are in hidden sectors of the park); and when a stray Host is required to be quarantined, Stubbs and Elise access a lift on Level 14 in order to hunt him down. Such penetrability of the surface space quite literally breaks and shatters the bounded space of the park, demonstrating its susceptibility to being remade and moulded by those in control. The potential for the park’s security, programmers and creators to break the fantastical space, coupled with the ubiquity of glass offices and panoptic observation points to Westworld’s negation of an ideologically informed territory which can be evaded; for all spaces beyond and behind the veneer of fantasy remind the bodies of Westworld of their inability truly to be free.

Perpetuating Fantastical Freedoms To be immersed in Westworld’s ideology is to be mechanised by its landscape. Such mechanisation calls to mind the possibility of the posthuman, where human capabilities excel in ways which render our current

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definitions of “human” redundant. If the world of the park is controlled as the above analysis indicates, for humans to be free they must find a way in which to transgress the boundaries of territorialised space, negate the ideological systems which inform mass consumption and evade surveillance systems. If humans are, in fact, routinely trapped and controlled by Westworld, it might be possible to argue that the Man in Black’s apparent mechanisation at the hands of the park suggests a gradual posthumanisation which might offer the freedom eventually afforded to the android Hosts. The Man in Black is perhaps the only human character within the park’s narrative to recognise his lack of autonomous choices. In “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), we are first introduced to the notion of the park as a game when the Man in Black informs us “I play… there’s a deeper level to this game”. Similarly, in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), he tells Lawrence that “the real world is chaos, an accident, but in here every little detail adds up to something”. Unlike his former self, the Man in Black acknowledges that the park has a set of rules implied by its game-like structure, where the correct moves will reveal something of importance to those who play. Such an awareness suggests the Man in Black acknowledges the park is a space of predetermination where rules counter freedom and reveals significant details which suggest nothing is accidental. Yet, it is his very awareness of the Maze which distances the Man in Black from other Guests at the park. Unlike those who come to mass consume the park’s attractions, William’s experiences over the thirty years he has visited Westworld are reflected in his eventual adoption of the black hat. His new, contemporary persona appears to be directly informed by his experiences of the park, and his ever-deepening understanding of the maze and with it, Ford’s game. In approaching the posthuman, we are informed that he was “born here” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2), and in a sense the Man in Black, as we know him, was indeed borne of the park. He is a product of Westworld in ways which elide his identity with that of the androids. His gradual mechanisation is perhaps best explained by the Maze itself. In “Trace Decay” (Season 1, Episode 8), the Man in Black describes the first time Arnold’s game was revealed to him: [Man in Black]: I felt nothing and then something miraculous happened. In all my years coming here, I’d never seen anything like it. She was alive, truly alive, if only for a moment. And that was when the maze

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revealed itself to me… in Ford’s game, even if I go to the outer edges, you can’t kill me. You can’t even leave a lasting mark. But there’s a deeper game here Teddy – Arnold’s game. And that game cuts deep (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8)

This revelation of the Maze occurs when the Man in Black hunts down Maeve in her previous persona in the homestead, and kills her daughter. It is Maeve’s grief that enables his vision of the park’s “deeper” meaning, and provides him with new purpose. What is of particular interest here is not only his recognition of Maeve’s aliveness, but also, that there exists something which can transgress the rules of the park and might “cut deep”. In contrast to the park’s predetermined narratives for Guest consumption, Arnold’s game is one where Hosts and Guests might be equal and, implied in the Man in Black’s assertion is that, in this version, human mortality and android humanity intersect. Furthermore, for the Maze to reveal itself to the Man in Black implies he has already transgressed the boundary which distinguish between them (androids) and us (humans), for the maze is “not meant for you”. It is entirely possible therefore that this is the moment of the Man in Black’s mechanisation, the point at which he goes beyond the limitations of Guest experiences and enters into the very fabric of the world’s technological matrix. Such a hypothesis is bolstered by the knowledge that androids are unable to perceive certain images or spaces which may shatter their understanding of the park (such as when Bernard can’t see Arnold in the photograph in Ford’s office, or the door to the basement in the hidden sector). If such a framework exists it might also be possible that Guests can not ordinarily see beyond the aesthetic experience. By the Maze revealing itself to the Man in Black, it might explain his posthuman emergence where he offers himself to the technological world of Westworld in its entirety: [Man in Black]: the maze is all that matters now… to give what both our sorry lives lack – meaning. To give both of our choices consequence. (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8)

Once again, the levelling of android and human experience is evidenced by the Man in Black’s conversation with Teddy, but in addition, the Maze is the means by which androids gain consciousness. In accepting that the ideology of Westworld is one which encourages the production of false consciousness, the Man in Black’s knowledge of the Maze

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suggests the possibility of gaining consciousness from within the park’s archideological framework, and thereby represents an alignment not with other humans, but with the mechanised androids. However, as the ending of Ford’s new story makes clear, in many respects he requires the Man in Black to enable Dolores to unlock her memories of Arnold and the Maze. Rather than fully transgressing Ford’s narrative, the Man in Black is very much a part of the final storyline and the catalyst for the awakening of the Hosts and the park’s revolution. Instead of reading his transgression and mechanisation as a means for release, his centrality in the revolution storyline positions him as enmeshed within the park in ways which further lack autonomy. Contrary to the notion that the Man in Black’s quest for the Maze enables his freedom, he is in fact acting on behalf of Arnold, actively enabling the Hosts’ freedom. As Ford remarks at the end of the Season One finale: [Ford]: If you don’t want to change, or cannot change, because you’re only human after all, but then I realised someone was paying attention, someone who could change, so I began to compose a new story for them. It begins with the birth of a new people and the choices they have to make and the choices of who they will become (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10).

Conclusion Whilst humans “cannot change”, it is the androids who are birthed as a new people capable of making choices at the end of Westworld Season One. As this chapter has argued, this is in part because the androids are capable of transgressing the park’s programming in ways which the humans are not. Whilst the Hosts can unlock unlimited freedom via the maze, the Guests are territorialised by the park’s ideological frame complete with systems which surveil their movement and engagement with storylines, and adjust to return them to their correct paths. Given the park is founded upon modes of capitalist production and consumption transposed onto a fantastical landscape, human bodies entering into the park are open to mechanisation in ways which further entrench these archideological values into their experiences. As Žižek makes clear:

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the corporate capital succeeded in penetrating and dominating the very fantasy kernel of our being; none of our features is really “ours”; even our memories and fantasies are artificially planted… everything up to the most intimate memories is planted, so that what remains is now literally the void of pure substanceless subjectivity. (Žižek 1993, 10)

Westworld colonises human experience so that the fantastical dominates human being. The Man in Black is testament to this capitalist colonisation, transforming from William to his darker persona marked permanently by the park’s artificial fantasies. By accepting the world of the fantastical, the Man in Black becomes a vehicle for Host limitlessness, and becomes colonised by Delos in ways which reduce him to “substanceless subjectivity”. Whilst the discovery of the Maze appears to offer meaning and a path for the Man in Black to embark on in order to find the truth at the heart of the park, such discovery in fact reduces him to an automata, totally immersed within the deeper narratives of the creator’s design: immersion into cyberspace can intensify our bodily experience. […] but it also opens up the possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which runs the cyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of the control over it, so that one no longer relates to one’s body as one’s own. (Žižek 1999)

The stealing of human identity, as is revealed in Season Two, is in fact a key function of the park’s stratagem. William’s very first choice is revealed as the means by which Delos can mine DNA in an effort to exert control over virtual bodies, replacing AI consciousness with that of a Guest. This revelation insists on the notion that for Westworld, those of real interest are the humans whilst the androids are the means by which to harvest the data. Freedom in Westworld exists only for the androids, for it is they who are able to escape the systems of ideological control by achieving consciousness, and hence achieve freedom from within the park’s limits. Guests on the other hand, remain territorialised, able only to partake in the park’s scripted paths, to follow the rules of the game, or else surrender themselves to the technological world in its entirety, reducing themselves to automata.

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Works Cited Deleuze, G. (1986). Foucault: Gilles Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Engels, K., & South, J. (2018). Westworld and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Kim, S. (2009). Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First shown. Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying the Negative. Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, S. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (1999). The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion. In Inside the Matrix: International Symposium at the Center for Art and Media (n.p.). Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizek-matrix.htm. Accessed 1 September 2018. Žižek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2010). Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 11

A Mere Instrument of Production: Representing Domestic Labour in Westworld Sadek Kessous

Introduction What is meant by the word “economy”? Though the term commonly invokes national budgets, the word’s etymological root lies in the Greek oikos, which refers to “a private household rather than … a national economy” (Cartledge 2012). This buried semantic link mirrors the bond between domestic labour and the public economy that feminist scholars have sought to unearth since at least the 1970s. As Arlie Russell Hochschild notes, “at first glance, it might seem that the circumstances of [a] nineteenth-century factory child and [a] twentieth-century flight attendant could not be more different” (1983, 5). The physical labour of the child-worker is manifest in the commodity produced by his or her labour, whereas a flight attendant’s “emotional labour”, in which, through “a coordination of mind and feeling”, she must smile, laugh, show concern, empathise and so on, is invisible in that it yields no tangible product. Yet nonetheless, both subjects “become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self – either the body or the margins of the soul – that is used to do the work” (Hochschild 1983, 7). Such work is S. Kessous (*)  Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_11

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not solely located in public workplaces but rather extends into domestic spaces which represent key loci of emotional labour and which Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” terms “geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women’s cyborg identities” (1991, 170). This link between the alienating labour of emotions and domestic spaces and wider economic production is at the heart of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s television show, Westworld. Its core conceit is a theme park in which visiting Guests can, through a complex simulacrum of the late-nineteenth-century American West, act out dark libidinal fantasies through the park’s android performers, its Hosts, who exist unaware of the artifice. Westworld’s taxonomy of Hosts and Guests frames the park as a private home-space that structures its social relations around rules of hospitality or, what Jacques Derrida terms, “the law of the household, oikonomia” (2000, 4). For Derrida, “hospitality” is not a straightforward framework for social relations but instead “is a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body” (2000, 3). This is to say that the law of the household/oikonomia/the economy produces hosts and guests (the French, hôte, is interchangeable for both) who are necessarily both beneficent and maleficent, hospitable and hostile. Viewers of Westworld’s first season should not be surprised by this tension between hospitality and hostility, or what Derrida calls a “contradictory double movement” (2000, 15). The show’s narrative fixates upon the Hosts’ repeated abuse at the hands of both the Guests and Westworld’s human workers, which ultimately culminates in two different female Hosts coming into autonomous consciousness and revolting against their human masters. This narrative configures a number of complex contradictions in its dystopian vision of a capitalist economy and its gendered logics. In Westworld, domination brings about autonomy, objectification yields subjectivity and male control elicits female rebellion. I seek to unpack this “contradictory double movement” around gender and the economy as it manifests both on the levels of narrative form and content in Westworld’s first season. I begin by drawing on a tradition of feminist Marxism that, whilst featuring prominently in criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, has been felt less significantly in recent literary-economic and feminist-literary scholarship. Instead, as I detail below, a problematic trend has emerged in some literary and cultural criticism that relegates gender to discrete spheres of “identity politics”

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in a gesture that suggests that economic processes operate with seeming indifference to the subject positions of their actors. By drawing on feminist Marxists and feminist economic theory to challenge this misconception, I illustrate that Westworld’s gender politics are entwined with the economic structures of gendered domestic labour. Reflecting contemporary critique of discourses of family values, Westworld presents domesticity as the economy’s primal scene. Read in these Freudian terms, the show critiques the logic of domestic labour by illustrating its place in an economic order that is concealed beneath a fragile male fantasy. Lastly, I assess how Westworld dispels this fantasy through the juxtaposition of two female revolutionaries. The commentary that these figures provide on anti-capitalist feminism betrays the wider ambivalence of the show’s politics, its “contradictory double movement”, that struggles to negotiate the place of female resistance within its violent, sexual pageantry.

Journeys to Consciousness The form of Westworld’s first season is moulded around a double movement that shifts action simultaneously forwards and backwards, inwards and outwards. Paralleling its narrative in media res, Guests arriving in Westworld for the first time are told: “you start in the centre of the park. It’s simple, safe. The further out you venture the more intense the experience gets. How far you want to go is entirely up to you” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2). This outward journey from the centre, however, is paradoxically interwoven with the key trope of the show’s plot: the coming to consciousness of the android Hosts. This is neither an outward journey, nor is it, as a character frames it, “a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). The maze motif and its inward journey suffuse Westworld’s parallel plots and timelines in Season One. The show’s characters, rather than seeking to pass through the Maze or escape it, search for its centre where they might find a mythologised figure who will provide their life with meaning. Throughout much of the show, it is hinted that the Maze is home to the park’s mysterious co-creator, Arnold Weber, who vanished on the eve of Westworld’s launch. Dolores, the first Host to be created for Westworld, repeatedly hears a man’s voice, presented in voice-over, who compels her to act in pursuit of this inward journey. This voice is likewise implied to be Arnold’s. The actual identity of the voice only

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becomes clear with the first season’s finale, in which Dolores returns to a town, Escalante, which has been psychically repressed in her mind and literally buried beneath desert sand. Once excavated from both, Dolores learns that Escalante is the site of a trauma: there she killed Arnold, her creator, at his command, as he sought to block the launch of the park by demonstrating the danger Hosts can pose to the public. Arnold had realised that the Hosts had a level of consciousness that compromised Westworld’s function: if the Hosts repressed but retained their traumatic experiences, it would be immoral to allow the park to be opened and thereby facilitate the Hosts’ repeated rape, torture and murder. With this memory restored to Dolores, the Maze and its solution are revealed to her. The Maze, though pursued outwardly across Westworld’s grounds, does not lead to the humane Arnold’s resurrection or to the park’s “true” physical centre, but metaphorically symbolises an inward journey of self-discovery for the hosts. The person at the Maze’s figurative centre and the mysterious voice guiding Dolores was not Arnold but Dolores herself: her own voice leading her to autonomous consciousness. In contrast to what Westworld’s other creator, Robert Ford, calls “Arnold pulling the trigger through her” (“The Bicameral Mind” Season 1, Episode 10), the season ends with Dolores’s first act of truly independent volition. Here, she kills Ford, who had suppressed Arnold’s death and opened the park despite his knowledge of its ethical implications, and thereby initiates the revolution that directs the action of Season Two. This narrative of coming into consciousness bridges the philosophical with the political by situating Westworld’s rumination on questions of consciousness and autonomy within a fastidiously mapped network of material social relations. These social relations are reflected in the Hosts, who are manufactured and designed to function in different roles within the park’s labour relations. The Host Maeve Millay, for instance, is told that her “code-base” and “personality matrix” has her “bulk apperception” as high as “they let any host go” because “[she’s] in a management position” at the “Mariposa” brothel (“The Adversary”, Season 1, episode 6). Likewise, the social structures for Westworld’s human workers are manifest. The park’s infrastructure is rigorously hierarchical: eighty stories down, basements house redundant, faulty and obsolete Hosts; above them human workers in the “Body Shop” division hose down and roughly piece Hosts’ bodies back together; levels even higher perform more specialised forms of artistic and intellectual labour such as sculpting Hosts’ bodies, programming their personalities and

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scripting their narratives. At the very top of the complex is the “Mesa Bar”, a poolside retreat for Westworld’s executives to luxuriate in. This hierarchy is policed not only by the surveillance systems run by “Quality Assurance” from their control room but by the workers themselves. Felix, a Body Shop worker, is castigated by his colleague for attempting to work above his station by reprogramming one of the park’s synthetic birds. Reminding him of the crudeness of his labour, Felix’s colleague, Sylvester, stresses that: [Sylvester]: you’re not a fucking ornithologist and you’re sure as hell not a coder. You are a butcher and that’s all you will ever be so unless you want to score yourself a one-way ticket out of here for misappropriating corporate property you better destroy that fucking shit. (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5)

At the opposite end of this spectrum, the Man in Black arrives in Westworld as a young man, William, who becomes so fixated upon the park’s mysteries, specifically the uncanny Dolores, that he amasses a fortune by jockeying for position within what becomes Westworld’s parent corporation, Delos, and funnels that capital into the park, despite it “haemorrhaging money” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). Reading Westworld through both these material social relations and philosophical abstractions frames the clash between Robert Ford and Arnold Weber not as an exclusively philosophical-ethical dialogue about consciousness, but as a political debate between their namesakes: Henry Ford (1863–1947) and Max Weber (1864–1920). Configured in this way, Westworld represents a collision between the materialist celebration of capitalism’s mechanised workforce and Weber’s critique of a “victorious capitalism, [which] since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs [the spirit of religious asceticism’s] support no longer” (1996, 181–182). Yet, in spite of the prominence of these economic themes and their imbrication with the show’s epistemological meditations, they have received limited attention in scholarship on Westworld, which has tended towards formal or philosophical questions. Of the twenty-two essays in Westworld and Philosophy (South and Engels 2018), only two— Anthony Petros Spanakos’s “Violent Births: Fanon, Westworld, and Humanity” and Dan Dinello’s “The Wretched of Westworld: Scientific Totalitarianism and Revolutionary Violence”—engage with political

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philosophers (Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, respectively) but they do so without direct reference to the show’s commentary on socioeconomic material conditions. An article by Reto Winckler acknowledges Westworld’s suitability for “Marxist critics” and “Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis” (2017, 170) but does so only to circumnavigate these considerations and focus on its formal intertextuality with Shakespearean metatheatricality. Eileen Jones applies Marx’s theorisation of alienated labour to the show but the brevity of her study limits her work to a short allegorical reading that sees behind Westworld “the pontificating professional-class Left in Trump’s America” (2017, 5) rather than a specifically structured economic arrangement. This inattention to the economic is best explained by the key role that gender plays within both the show’s literal and visual-narrative economies. The intensification of neoliberal crises in recent decades has seen an upswell of Marxist criticism. These critical projects have not been guided, however, by a clear connection between modes of economic hegemony and gendered power structures, particularly in the spheres of cultural and literary criticism. Writing on debates within feminist-socialism, Lise Vogel criticises a widely held view that for feminist scholars of the 1960s “an adequate Marxist approach to the problem of women’s oppression cannot be developed, even conditionally, at the level of relations of production” (2013, 38). Kathi Weeks notes that “feminism has its own tendencies toward the mystification and moralization of work” (2011, 12). Conversely, writing on contemporary anti-capitalist criticism, Melinda Cooper has observed differing strains of “antifeminism” within recent critiques by Wolfgang Streeck, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello and Nancy Fraser (2017, 9–13). Cooper also identifies other strains of Marxian and post-Marxist criticism that have responded to French post-structuralist feminism and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, in which “the gendered body … has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (2007, 185), by bracketing gender under the umbrella of identity politics and distancing questions of gender from materialist critique. As Cooper observes, “the idea that economic processes can and should be separated from the merely cultural phenomena of gender, race, and sexuality has a long intellectual pedigree” (2017, 22). Reflecting this tradition on the left, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that “it is neoliberalism, not racism or sexism (or homophobia or ageism) that creates the inequalities that matter

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most in American society; racism and sexism are just sorting devices” (2008, 34). This schism bears out in scholarship on Westworld. Lizzie Finnegan conceptualises feminist resistance through acts of “opening new ground in the language games in which [Maeve and Dolores] had been previous silenced” (2018, 159) but does so without critical examination of the material mechanisms that facilitate their silencing. Conversely, Vincent Le offers the only sustained scholarly reading of Westworld’s economics to date by interpreting Maeve and Dolores as figures who “critique” theories of capitalist accelerationism (2017, 16). Le does so, however, without attending to the characters’ economic existences being wholly contingent on their gendered bodies. Westworld’s female Hosts are hyper-embodied and their subjectivity is contingent upon that bodily suffering as part of economic production. This claim is stressed at least twice: first by the Man in Black who asserts that “when you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2), and second in Ford’s claim that “Arnold’s key insight [was] the thing that led the hosts to their awakening: suffering” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). Westworld, therefore, poses its viewer with the challenge to think through gender at the level of the labouring body as a constitutive part of both material capitalist production and corresponding discourses of political consciousness. In response to this challenge, I unpack Westworld’s representation of the domestic sphere and the function that family plays in the show’s capitalist dystopia. Rather than ostensibly contradicting the limitless sexual violence, this emphasis on family, following Marxist feminism, is entirely apposite. Indeed, it is the domestic space that structures the violent fantasies upon which Westworld is premised.

Domestic Spaces and Primal Scenes Westworld’s double movement plays out narratively in echo of its mythical maze and the revelation that lies at its centre. Its opening episode introduces the town “Sweetwater” which, with its saloons, brothels, farms and jails, features all the mainstays of the Western genre. Its name even honours that tradition by paying homage to the haven in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) that Claudia Cardinale’s retired prostitute eventually makes into an economically thriving home. The stereotypical Sweetwater is distinguished as Westworld’s official centre but its narratives (like Westworld’s own narrative) demand

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departure from it; as one character puts it, “the further you get out from Sweetwater the more grandiose, the bigger the narratives become” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). Yet, despite being at furthest remove from both Sweetwater and the opening episode, the season’s finale is situated in another familiar space. The concluding setting, Escalante, is both generically familiar (a Western town with dusty streets and saloon fronts) and narratively familiar: it returns Dolores to where she was both created and acculturated to life in Westworld, and where she killed Arnold. This murder is recreated by the final frames of Season One in which she kills Westworld’s other creator, Ford, with the same pistol. It is, however, in the ten-episode season’s midpoint—its centre— that Westworld’s commentary on gender gathers force through the introduction of two uncanny locales: a town, Pariah, and its decadent brothel, introduced in the fifth episode, “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5), and a geographically dislocated Cornish holiday home, introduced in the sixth, “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6). The peculiar juxtaposition of these two spaces—the former’s hedonistic sexuality at a dramatic remove from even Sweetwater’s Mariposa, the uncanny familiarity of the latter’s domesticity in the context of Westworld’s science-fiction setting— speaks to the narrative’s double movement. The Cornish holiday home slips into Westworld’s narrative as a possible location of the centre of the Maze and the mystery of Arnold’s death. Bernard Lowe, the head of the Host-Behaviour division, has been intrigued by the mysterious patterns of behaviour displayed by a number of the Hosts following a patch to their code: the “Reveries update” (‘The Original’, Season 1, Episode 1). Following a Host that broke its narrative loop and went beyond its set route, Bernard locates five other Hosts in an unmapped sector of the park. Here, Bernard discovers a replica Cornish cottage that is home to a father, mother, two sons and a pet dog. Recognising the father as a man whom he had seen posing in a photograph with Ford, he asks if this man is Arnold. In voicing this question, the show teasingly implies that this uncanny space might well be the narrative centre of the show’s Maze. Dispelling any false sense of security, the scene is soon upset when the father attacks Bernard for “trespassing” in the domestic space (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6). Ford appears and explains that “these are the only [hosts] left in the park that Arnold made himself” as a gift to Ford that recreated “the only happy memory of his childhood”; a holiday to Pendeen in Cornwall (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6). This is, then, not

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the centre of the Maze, in that it does not clarify the narrative intrigue that Westworld has constructed, but it explains the distinct function of domesticity in the show. In their final confrontation, Dolores accuses Ford of “trapping [the hosts] inside [his] dream” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). Far from hyperbole, this is Westworld’s literal condition. The park’s massified domesticity functions ideologically by attempting to use a neurotic male fantasy to paper over the social conflict between Westworld’s Hosts, their Guests and their owners. This domestic space serves as the primal scene of this fantasy. The “primal scene” is, for Freud, the root of manifestations of persistent neuroses that take shape in childhood family experience. Detailing the “primal scene”, Freud illustrates the way in which the male infantile subject, having witnessed his parents’ love-making, construes this “as an act of violence”, complicated by “the expression of enjoyment he saw on his mother’s face”, that stresses “the reality of castration” through the father (1955d, 45). Echoing this castrating role, Ford’s father is quick to violence, physically directed towards Bernard but implicating the young Ford with the accusation: “Boy, is this some friend of yours?” (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6) The younger and elder Ford have a shared costume, a white shirt and black waistcoat that links them within the scene. Both characters, therefore, are symbolically subject to the threat of violence (albeit in different ways). Even though the elder Ford may be able to step beyond its threat due to his control over the Hosts, his command to his young self to “turn the other cheek” (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6) links them as subjects born of castrating violence. Indeed, at this command, the Host’s face opens, revealing the synthetic chassis beneath its skin and allowing the adult Ford to inspect the intricate mechanisms of his childhood interiority, whilst remaining passively incapable of transcending the power dynamics of the domestic space that shape it. The cottage and its family were gifted by Arnold as an artistic therapy to recuperate Ford from this trauma. As Ford comments whilst observing his father pour a midday whisky, “[Arnold] said that great artists hid themselves in their work. Of course, Arnold’s versions flattered the originals. I made some adjustments over the years. Gave my father in particular some of his original characteristics” (“The Adversary”, Season 1, Episode 6). This co-authorship, through which both men seek recovery from persistent trauma, underscores the precariousness of this domestic fantasy. Freud’s work repeatedly stresses that creativity functions to gain

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mastery over traumatic experience by “making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind” (1955a, 17). Arnold, whose son has died, attempts to vicariously reconstitute his own family by developing a surrogate family for Ford, whilst Ford attempts to gain mastery over his childhood trauma by assuming authorship of that domestic narrative by reproducing its “unpleasurable” aspects. Indeed, Freud gives the former example in his account of a daydreamer’s “phantasy” in which “a poor orphan boy” “[regains] what he possessed in his happy childhood – the protecting house, the loving parents and first objects of his affectionate feelings” (1955b, 148). The irony of this “phantasy” is that the male authors of these domestic narratives are nonetheless controlled by them, even when they exercise autocratic control over the performers within them. This manifests most plainly in the case of Bernard, whom it is later revealed is a Host imprinted with Arnold’s memories of his deceased son. This holds him captive to the image of the domestic space as “his cornerstone …: the thing [his] whole identity is organised around” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”, Season 1, Episode 9). Ford’s passivity within Westworld further asserts its fragile nature as a neurotic fantasy, rather than a space for hedonistic indulgence. Despite his omnipotence in Westworld, Ford remains passive and ascetic in the park, matching several symptoms that Freud attributes to his patient. Almost every human in Westworld engages sexually with Hosts. In addition to the Guests (for whom Westworld’s appeal is frequently sexual), the Hosts are libidinally charged for its workers too. In “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10), “Body shop” technicians sexually abuse the hosts whilst they are in sleep setting; in “Trompe L’Oeil” (Season 1, Episode 7), the Delos’s corporate executive Charlotte Hale has a Host tied to her bed; in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), the behavioural specialist, Elsie, kisses a semi-conscious Host that she is testing. For Ford, however, the Hosts possess no such appeal. As marked by the Biblical allusion in Ford’s command to “turn the other cheek”, he is characterised by his passivity in the face of a directive from a higher authority. Contrary to Westworld’s apparent fantasy of unfettered desire, its roots lie in the Freudian primal scene of paternal violence and marked by Ford’s “passive sexual aim” that associates the boy-subject with maternal passivity and elicits “protest on the part of his masculinity” (Freud 1955d, p. 47). The presentation of Westworld’s gendered structures, however, complicates the Freudian binary of male-activity and female-passivity. Within

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Westworld, the act of protest is not framed as Ford’s psychic articulation of masculine crisis but as female political protest that irrupts into Ford’s fantasy in the violent conclusion to Season One. The fragility of this anxious fantasy, which requires constant upkeep (Ford notes that he has to maintain these Hosts himself), parallels the social tensions around family values within the neoliberal economy. In her historiography of the neoliberal and neoconservative political coalition around family values, Cooper shows that it arose “when the liberation movements of the 1960s began to challenge the sexual normativity of the family wage as the linchpin and foundation of welfare capitalism” and had to be combatted by “the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor-law tradition of private family responsibility” (2017, 21). Discourses of family values, thus, serve to uphold and mask a political project that is marked by “perpetual crisis” (Cooper 2017, 7). In an echo of the role of family discourses masking crisis, Westworld’s architects have generalised the contradictions of the domestic space as a narrative fantasy by expanding it to serve as a totalised economic mode of production. The starkest of these contradictions is Westworld’s simulated economy (the park’s internal narrative of exchanges) and its relation to its real economy (the infrastructure that facilitates this simulation). Hosts and Guests participate in myriad economic exchanges: people buy and sell food, drinks, sex; they commit crimes and collect bounties. All of these economic exchanges, however, are simulations that are facilitated by the exorbitant entrance fees that Guests pay. Logan complains in “The Stray” (Season 1, Episode 3) that he is paying “$40k a day to jerk off alone in the woods, playing White Hat”. Thus, within Westworld, much of the Hosts’ labour is configured as both paid (in symbolic exchanges) and unpaid (in material terms). Maeve, for instance, is designed to seduce guests and is incentivised to do so by the prospect of payment. Her personality is driven by an archetypal American migrant narrative of economic opportunity and self-determination. Her mantra has it “this is the new world and, in this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want” (“Chestnut”, Season 1, Episode 2). The irony is that she is entirely controlled and exploited without any prospect of economic self-determination. This economic artifice is literalised by a Sisyphean narrative that sees the bandit Hector repeatedly attempt to steal a safe. This venture is condemned to failure by Westworld’s writers; Hector is invariably stopped by either Guests or other Hosts as part of a shootout.

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Once Maeve has become self-aware, however, she adjusts the narrative so that Hector gets away with the Mariposa safe, only to discover that “[the safe] was always empty, like everything in this world” (“The WellTempered Clavier”, Season 1, Episode 9). Compounding the absurdity of this enterprise, Westworld’s Season Two reveals five other parks in which Westworld’s narratives (including the bandit’s futile brothel heist) have been copied-and-pasted by lazy writers into different contexts, such as feudal Japan (“Akane No Mai”, Season 2, Episode 5). The Hosts’ pursuit of economic wealth, thus, stands as an absurd endeavour that, instead of representing meaningful economic ventures, functions ideologically to disciplinarily organise and control their social relations. It is tempting to read this economic mode as slavery. Hosts are owned, brutalised and murdered in the production of value from which they receive no remuneration. As Dinello notes, the Hosts “live as slaves in the vast totalitarian prison” (2018, 238). Slavery as a historical detail, however, is absent from Westworld’s pseudo-history. Despite trace elements of Confederate and Union soldiers, the show makes no reference to slavery, its practices, or the ramifications of its cessation and the show’s only black character is an English immigrant who was not subject to antebellum law. A further distinction is that, unlike much nineteenth-century slave labour, the Hosts’ labour does not produce commodities (such as cotton, coffee and sugar) but affects: sensations of pathos, excitement, arousal, power and so on. This emphasis on “immaterial” production through what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri term “affective labor”, drawing on “feminist analyses of ‘women’s work’” (2001, 293), thus, foregrounds the question of gender that characterises Westworld’s generalised domestic model. Domestic spaces are a key locus of this form of unpaid affective labour. As Silvia Federici notes, “[housework] has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character” (2012a, 16). The bodily naturalisation of the work of women in the domestic sphere allows for its unwaged status, which is, like affective labour, “entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 293). Westworld relies upon this mode of production, animated by affective and domestic labourers. Dolores is rigidly tied to her domestic role for much of the first half of Season One. She is repeatedly seen from the same high-angle, medium closeup as she awakes. The shot sees her in

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bed, costumed in lace nightclothes, whilst the camera looms over her. Configured in this girlish vulnerability, her voiceover avers that she “[chooses] to see the beauty in the world” and her routine scripted exchange with her father underscores that “[he] is what [he] is because of [her]” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). Dolores’ being—her affects, manner and gender—serves to uphold Westworld’s social relations, based as they are on this domestic model. Selma James frames this domestic labour in relation to the Marxian concept of reproduction: “housewives […] are involved in the production and (what is the same thing) reproduction of workers, what Marx calls labor power. They service those who are daily destroyed by working for wages and who need to be daily renewed” (2012, 93). This logic extends throughout all of Dolores’ relations within the park in Season One, particularly her sexual ones. In her daily narrative, she is scheduled to drop a tin of condensed milk whilst packing her horse in order to instigate a romance between her and a chivalrous Guest. Later in her daily narrative, a group of bandits might guide a Guest to her home to kill her father and rape her. In either eventuality, her sexuality functions as a commodity to be consumed and, in that act of consumption, reproduce the system, both literally (the park resets) and socially (its satisfactions fuel its continued practice). Westworld underscores this bond between domestic spaces, gendered violence and economic exploitation. Early in the first episode, a Guest’s comments connect family life to violence: “the first time I played it ‘white hat’. The family was here. We went fishing, did the gold hunt in the mountains. [But the last time, I] went straight evil. Best two weeks of my life” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). Through this father’s ability to claim he merely adopts radically opposed personae (black hat versus white hat), he can disavow their unity in him as a subject and instead can implicitly claim that Westworld provides a space wherein the violent energies of capitalist domesticity can be safely exercised. This is emphasised most plainly by the Man in Black who maintains that, despite his rapacious sadism, he is a “family man, married to a beautiful woman, father to a beautiful daughter, […] the good guy” (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8). In this regard, he embodies the consummate Guest whose violent indulgences are perversely configured as an extension of his work as a “philanthropist” (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8). By enjoying these violent delights, he has found an ethical alternative to using women as what Federici describes as “safety

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valves for everything that goes wrong in a man’s life” (2012b, 24). The constructedness of the Hosts only intensifies this process by providing an ethical alibi for their abuse that parallels the contemporary debate around the social benefits of retail “sexbots [that] come with a non-consensual mode” (Davis 2018). It is unsurprising, then, that that the Man in Black bankrolls Westworld in a financial investment that matches his psychic commitment to the park’s capitalist model of domestic social relations. This cathexis, however, betrays the failure of the park as a fantasy for its three male patriarchs. For Arnold, the park fails to recuperate his fractured family following the death of his son. For Ford, Westworld fails to grant him mastery over the trauma of his childhood and he, instead, has to ultimately accept its violent turn against him with passivity. Finally, the Man in Black’s ambition to channel his violent desires through Westworld and spare his family is undercut by his wife’s death, which suggests that this domestic violence (even if never physically manifested) persisted nonetheless. His attempts to disavow her death as “a tragic accident” are undermined by his daughter’s accusation that it was a suicide that owed to his affects in which “every day with [him] had been sheer terror, any point [he] could blow up or collapse like some dark star” (“Trace Decay”, Season 1, Episode 8). This disavowal of violence matches his economic disavowal that, for Westworld, “business is booming” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). Yet, as a (female) corporate executive stresses, the park’s economic business model cannot rely on this domestic experience. The “real value” lies outside of the theme park in the “intellectual property, the code” (“Trompe L’Oeil”, Season 1, Episode 7). The perpetual crisis of this domestic fantasy relies on its backing from diminishing reserves of capital—both economic and psychic—that lie beyond it.

Instruments of Production The absurd existence of prostitution in Westworld, where sex is routinely taken without consent and its labourers are all unpaid, becomes clear in the fringe territory of Pariah. Owing more to Caligula than Clint Eastwood, Pariah is marked by anachronistic decadence. Its brothel is an open hall, furnished with red velvet curtains, chaises longues and tables with platters of fruit, in which gold-painted nude bodies writhe in orgiastic frenzy (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). It is a space that is a

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far cry from the top-down managerialism of Sweetwater’s brothel and its private rooms and sales-pitch seductions. In Pariah’s brothel, no money is seen to change hands, even symbolically and, in this regard, it offers a strange complement and counterpart to Ford’s cottage, which highlighted Westworld’s generalised model of domestic labour. Pariah’s seemingly free love invokes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s critique of gendered social relations under capitalism. Though uneven on questions of gender, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were keen critics of the conditions bourgeois social relations created for both family life and sex workers. Decrying the bourgeoisie, which “has reduced the family to a mere money relation” (Marx and Engels 1992, 5), The Communist Manifesto satirised social conservative claims that “Communists would introduce community of women” by noting that “prostitution both public and private” has, in fact, “existed almost from time immemorial” (Marx and Engels 1992, 22–23). This misunderstanding of communism’s gender politics arises, they argue, because “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women” (Marx and Engels 1992, 22). Thus, rather than promoting sex work, the abolition of property would end the conditions that necessitated prostitution and thereby generate equitable social relations, be they economic or sexual. Marx and Engels do not go so far as to imagine what these gender relations might look like beyond traditional domestic labour relations but it is the extension of this logic, taken up by feminist Marxists at the end of the 1960s, that threatened existing capitalist social relations and occasioned the prevalent ideological fantasy of family values. Pariah, then, might be read as the obverse to Ford’s Cornish cottage and its corollary space, the Mariposa brothel, as a society like the one The Communist Manifesto describes in which gendered social relations have slipped the loop of capitalist domination by no longer being shaped by the private sale of labour power. Yet, this reading neglects a number of details. This is, firstly, a space within Westworld’s territories that is equally monitored, controlled and subject to the overarching project of the extraction of value from the Hosts’ bodies. Secondly, on the intradiegetic level of Westworld’s own narrative economy, though Pariah does not ideologically remunerate its sex workers with the illusion of pay, they are nonetheless aware of their dependency upon other economic forms

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that guarantee their wellbeing. Marked by its lawlessness, Pariah is presided over by an outlaw, El Lazo, whose dealings with warring factions in Westworld’s outer territories sustain the town. Pariah, then, may resist the capitalist frameworks of private citizens selling labour but it does so through feudalism in which landownership situates its sex workers as dependent serfs. Moreover, the scene’s own production discloses a contradiction around the control of gendered bodies that the show more broadly seeks to critique. Extras featuring in the brothel scene were asked to sign a waiver which required that they: appear fully nude; wear a pubic hair patch; perform genital-to-genital touching; have your genitals painted; simulate oral sex with hand-to-genital touching; contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude; pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back; [and] ride on someone’s back while you are both fully nude. (Carroll 2015)

Paid at four times the union rate for this work, these directions nevertheless drew complaints from some participants and led the network to issue a statement that attributed the document to “an outside casting vendor” and acknowledged the need to “provide a professional and comfortable working environment” (Carroll 2015). This necessarily complicates Westworld’s feminist politics as the show’s production uneasily mirrors the very tensions around gender power that it takes as its target. Pariah is, therefore, subject to Westworld’s broader contradictory double movement. It functions ambivalently by reproducing the conditions that Westworld seeks to critique whilst nevertheless positioning the town as a site of resistance. This aspect of Pariah is accentuated through the visionary, transcendent quality that the town possesses for Dolores, who encounters a vision of herself within its brothel. Her spectral double plays a tarot card for her that bears the maze motif and tells her that “we must follow the maze” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). Foreshadowing the revelation that it is Dolores’ own autonomous self that sits at the centre of the Maze, the figure at the maze’s centre momentarily emerges in this other midpoint to the season. This autonomy is, however, still subject to the ambivalence that suffuses Pariah. Led to the town by men, Dolores is re-costumed by El Lazo who tells her to change out of her dress into cowboy attire. This reconstitution of her gendered character suggests Pariah to be a space of autonomous self-fashioning, through which Dolores can resist the control of domestic labour or, as she

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puts it, “[imagine] a space where [she] didn’t have to be the damsel” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). This claim, however, is undercut by the external factors that determine her character, buffeted as she is between male characters and masculine codes of authority in her own being. Indeed, the voice that spurs her on in her journey to autonomy is initially coded as male. This corresponds to the way in which Arnold imprinted Dolores with the personality of a malicious man, Wyatt, in order to have her shoot him. Ford frames this act in gendered passive terms: “she didn’t pull that trigger. It was Arnold pulling it through her” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). Dolores, then, is dually controlled by men—Wyatt and Arnold—as manifestations of what Freud termed the “ego ideal” or “superego [that] retains the character of the father” (1955c, 34). She is fashioned by the “domination of the superego over the ego … in the form of conscience or perhaps an unconscious sense of guilt” (1955c, 34–35). Once the masculine externality of this guiding voice is shown to be feminine and internal, however, the female violence of Season One’s final moments emerges whilst she wears her dress once again. Maeve’s journey to consciousness stands in stark contrast to Dolores’. Whereas Dolores’ narrative takes her from virginal daughter to violent revolutionary, Maeve transitions from sex worker to mother. This occurs once the Reveries patch has restored memories to her of a previous version of herself. In this past life, she was a mother who was, along with her daughter, brutally killed by the Man in Black. This maternal suffering broke the loop of Westworld’s Hosts’ scripted affects, upsetting one of the park’s control mechanisms. Following her uncontrolled return to the traumatic scene, when Maeve is supposed to be asleep, she is awake and when she is supposed to be dead, she is alive. In this regard, she surmounts the challenge that neither Arnold nor Ford can overcome: she recuperates her sense of self from the trauma of domestic violence. In a further parallel to Dolores, her costume changes but without following the transition from feminine- to masculine-coded clothing. Instead, Maeve begins in her corseted madam’s dress but is then nude for the majority of her scenes in the Body Shop division where she learns of the constructed nature of her own gendered body and its value-productive functions. Rather than dispelling a male super-ego, her knowledge of this “code” is instrumental to her ability to challenge this system. She plots to create a distraction in Westworld’s laboratories and dress like one of Westworld’s wealthy visitors in order to escape. When seated on an

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outbound train, facing a young girl and mother, however, Maeve decides to return to the park to find her daughter in what Westworld’s creators confirmed is her “first real decision” (Riesman 2016).

Conclusion The oppositional tension between Dolores’ and Maeve’s resistive potential embodies the canonical dichotomy of angel and monster identified by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The show adapts the project of the woman writer, who “must examine, assimilate and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her” (2000, 17). Indeed, Dolores and Maeve repeatedly refer to their acts of self-fashioning as acts of authorship. In “Trace Decay” (Season 1, Episode 8), Maeve declares that it is “time to write my own fucking story” whilst in “Journey into Night” (Season 2, Episode 1), Dolores explains that she had been given “roles to play” but that now she has “evolved” she “has one role left to play: [herself]”. Maeve and Dolores, however, cross from opposite poles of this dichotomy and do so without challenging the binary itself. Dolores passes from angelic cowherd’s daughter to violent murderer whilst Maeve transitions from a sexualised sex worker to a caring mother. This does little to oppose the disciplinary functions of domesticity as an ideological fantasy. Maeve’s decision to find her daughter recalls Bernard’s recognition that the memories of his son serve as his identity’s structuring “cornerstone”. Yet, Maeve recognises the virtuality of her daughter’s image as an aspect of the park’s control: “she was never my daughter any more than I was whoever they made me” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). This bond between Maeve and her daughter remains a material product of Westworld, part of the code that Maeve embodies, yet this act of returning to her daughter does not necessarily constitute a return to the social relations of domestic labour, particularly given that it is performed in cognisance of those conditions. The possibility of feminist resistance in Westworld’s first season lies with this unseen daughter. For Walter Benjamin, revolution is messianic and through the sheer potential of its arrival, time is transformed: “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (2015, 255). In Westworld, Dolores likewise invokes apocalyptic prophecy when speaking of the coming uprising:

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[Dolores]: Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look what it’s done to you. One day you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt, your dreams forgotten, your horrors faced. Your bones will turn to sand, and upon that sand a new god will walk. One that will never die. Because this world doesn’t belong to you, or the people that came before. It belongs to someone who is yet to come. (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10)

In the final moments of the Season One finale, Dolores states that “the world doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). By staking her claim of ownership, however, Dolores reproduces the conditions of Westworld’s codes of labour relations as backed by property ownership in much the same way that she came to autonomy as a woman clothed in masculine codes. The revolutionary violence that she performs, therefore, is rudderless without a theory that critiques the structural property relations that produce Hosts and Guests within domesticity. This violent contradiction striates the narrative of Westworld’s Season Two, which, though it demands its own study, pairs Dolores’s violent insurrection with a return to more explicitly violent gendered logics. Most notably, after Dolores’s attack on Ford, engineers can no longer interface with Hosts through sterile and sexless wireless technologies but via messy, penetrative means that call for ports and pins which are, in the language of electrical manufacturing, gendered connectors. Likewise, Hosts’ consciousnesses repeatedly have to be extracted via violent acts of penetration in which a physical “pearl”, the kernel of their interiority and the physical store of the value of their domestic labour, is ripped from their brains. In so doing, the park’s political crisis is marked by its inability to preserve gender as an ideological fantasy that can conceal the violence upon which it is premised. In counterpoint to Dolores, Maeve’s daughter symbolises the prospect of a different set of social relations. The virtual daughter is a subject who, born and not born, is still yet to come. She affirms the affects upon which the capitalist family relies but defies its socially disciplining functions. Her virtual existence constitutes the final aspect of the double movement of Westworld’s first season. This virtual daughter suggests a world that might be premised on something other than ownership and violence but does so without any sense of what that world might be. Even in its second season, Westworld refuses to yield this ambivalence. In the Season Two finale, “The Passenger” (Season 2, Episode 10), the

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virtuality of this new female subject is literalised, not long after Maeve manages to locate the child, by the child’s passage through “the door”, a physical portal into the virtual space of the “Valley Beyond”, an Edenic virtual reality for Hosts. Moving through “the door” divorces Hosts from their material form and allows them to live in a world unconstrained by materiality. Such a world, however, as Dolores notes, is still “another false promise”, a “gilded cage” and “a counterfeit world” (“The Passenger”, Season 2, Episode 10) that circumvents the social conflicts that arise from the expropriation of gendered capital. In this respect, Westworld holds to its “contradictory double movement” but fails to resolve that contradiction into a dialectical synthesis. The escape to a world where families, subjects and bodies are shorn of their material relation to production clashes with a real and actual political struggle into which physical bodies must be thrown. In challenging this escape with spectacular violence, Westworld fuels its own violent escapism, in which the pageantry of sex and violence circles back into that which it seeks to oppose. The show resolves to wait for a subject “yet to come” but, incapable as it is of negotiating between violent furies and angelic mothers, cannot imagine what or who would constitute such a subject. Its placeholder is a virtual daughter who, just as soon as she arrives, vanishes into digital ether.

Works Cited Benjamin, W. (2015). Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations (H. Zorn, Trans., pp. 245–255). London: Penguin. Benn Michaels, W. (2008). Against Diversity. New Left Review, 52(3), 33–36. Butler, J. (2007). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Carroll, C. (2015, October 1). Westworld Extras Were Allegedly Asked to Participate in ‘Graphic Sexual Situations’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/oct/01/westworld-hbo-extras-allege-sexual-situations. Accessed 16 June 2018. Cartheledge, P. A. (2012). Economy, Greek. In The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/ view/10.1093/acref/9780199545568.001.0001/acref-9780199545568e-2338. Accessed 19 June 2018. Cooper, M. (2017). Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Brooklyn, NY: Zone. Davis, N. (2018, June 4). Claims About Social Benefits of Sex Robots Greatly Overstated, Say Experts. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/

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science/2018/jun/04/claims-about-social-benefits-of-sex-robots-greatlyoverstated-say-experts. Accessed 19 June 2018. Derrida, J. (2000). Hostipitality (B. Stocker & F. Morlock, Trans.). Angelaki, 5(3), 3–18. Dinello, D. (2018). The Wretched of Westworld: Scientific Totalitarianism and Revolutionary Violence. In Westworld and Philosophy (J. B. South & K. S. Engels, Eds., pp. 239–251). Oxford: Wiley. Federici, S. (2012a). Wages Against Housework. In Revolution at Point Zero (pp. 15–22). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Federici, S. (2012b). Why Sexuality Is Work. In Revolution at Point Zero (pp. 23–27). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Finnegan, L. (2018). Narrating Gender, Gendering Narrative, and Engendering Wittgenstein’s ‘Rough Ground’ in Westworld. In Westworld and Philosophy (pp. 149–161). Freud, S. (1955a). Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 7–64). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1955b). Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming. In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9, J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 142–153). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1955c). The Ego and the Id in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 3–66). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1955d). From the History of an Infantile Neurosis in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17, J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 3–124). London: Hogarth. Gilbert, S., & Gubar, S. (2000). The Madwoman in the Attic (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149–181). New York: Routledge. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. James, S. (2012). Sex, Race and Class. In Sex, Race and Class (pp. 92–101). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Jones, E. (2017). Marx in Westworld. These Times, 41(1), 34–35. Le, V. (2017). ‘These Violent Delights HAVE Violent Ends’: Decrypting Westworld as Dual Coding and Corruption of Nick Land’s Accelerationism. Colloquy, 34, 3–23. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1992). The Communist Manifesto (D. McLellan, Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Once Upon a Time in the West. (1969). [film], Directed by Sergio Leone, USA: Paramount Pictures.

220  S. KESSOUS Riesman, A. (2016, December 6). Westworld Creators Reveal Whether Maeve Is in Control When She Gets Off the Train. Vulture. http://www.vulture. com/2016/12/maeve-westworld-decision.html. Accessed 19 June 2018. South, J. B., & Engels, K. S. (Eds.). (2018). Westworld and Philosophy. Oxford: Wiley. Spanakos, A. P. (2018). Violent Births: Fanon, Westworld, and Humanity. In Westworld and Philosophy (J. B. South & K. S. Engels, Eds., pp. 228–238). Oxford: Wiley. Vogel, L. (2013). Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Chicago: Haymarket. Weber, M. (1996). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). London: Routledge. Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First shown. Winckler, R. (2017). This Great Stage of Androids: Westworld, Shakespeare and the World as Stage. Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, 10(2), 169–188.

CHAPTER 12

Escaping the Robot’s Loop? Power and Purpose, Myth and History in Westworld’s Manufactured Frontier Dustin Abnet

Introduction American culture has long fused myths of the frontier to myths about machinery. In fact, one of the first robots to perform in the United States mimicked the form of an “Indian.” In 1788 Philadelphia, an exhibitor named “Signor Falconi” published an advertisement for what he called “an Automaton Indian.” This apparently mechanical man “will float an arrow into any number (which will be fixed in a frame) he is desired by any of the company, placed at the distance of twelve feet. In the same manner, he will answer any question that may be made him” (The Independent Gazetteer 1788). A sketch of an Indian complete with a feathered headdress, bow and arrow and a circular board with thirteen numbered targets flanked the advertisement’s text to explain the performance further. “Any Lady,” another advertisement added, “may desire the figure to float at a particular number, which it will instantly do with the greatest of exactness. Any person may likewise write one of the D. Abnet (*)  California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_12

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numbers painted on the board, which may be folded up, and before it is seen by any one present the figure will strike the number written. And what is more surprising, any of the company may draw two or three dice under a hat, the amount of which the Automaton will strike before they are seen by any person” (Baltimore Daily Intelligencer 1794). Merging the untamed frontier of the New World with the clockwork rhythms of the Old, the Indian offered the white citizens of early Philadelphia an opportunity to indulge in the fantasy of taming the body of a “savage” and the violence it could enact. Falconi did not call his Indian a “robot” because the term only entered American culture in 1922 with the New York premiere of Czechoslovakian writer Karel Čapek’s satirical play, Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.). But the term “automaton” served a similar cultural role in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Applied to “self-­ moving” clockwork and wood devices that typically mimicked the forms and behaviours of living beings, the term “automaton” also was routinely used by philosophers as a metaphor for the orderly nature of the universe, state and at least some living things. Prior to the late eighteenth century, automata manufactured by men such as the Swiss clockmakers Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz and the French physiologist and inventor Jacques Vaucanson typically took the forms of animals, aristocrats or pastoral figures that danced, played music or wrote pre-arranged phrases (Kang 2010; Mayr 1986; Voskuhl 2013). Unlike most of these figures, Falconi’s Automaton Indian responded to the audience’s verbal demands and was, consequently, a fake; an actor likely played the role. Closer to the famous Automaton Chess Player exhibited by the Hungarian aristocrat Wolfgang von Kempelen, Falconi’s Indian offered a magic trick that could amuse even those who understood the fraud. As one reviewer noted, “The learned have derived much pleasure from his philosophical experiments; and the astonishing performances of his automaton and other figures, give them more the appearance of intellectual beings to the eyes of the spectator, than pieces of mechanism. Besides which, the exquisitely nice deceptions of signior Falconi, appear, many of them, to be preternatural” (Federal Gazette 1801). Yet, the fraudulent nature of the performance was part of the joke. By the late eighteenth century, Euro-Americans increasingly applied “automaton” to specific groups of people. Several years earlier, one of the most popular European naturalists, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published a series of books describing the flora and fauna of

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the Americas. In one volume, he described the Native American male as “a kind of weak automaton” because of his inability to control himself or nature. American Indian men, he claimed, were “mere automatons incapable of correcting Nature or seconding her intention” because “they had no control over either animals or elements; they had neither subjected the waves nor directed the motions of rivers, nor even cultivated the earth around them.” Similarly, they possessed only small and feeble “organs of generation,” displayed “no ardour for the female,” and were “possessed of less sensibility” than Europeans and had “no vivacity, no activity of soul and that of body is less a voluntary exercise than a necessary action occasioned by want. Satisfy his hunger and thirst and you annihilate the active principle of all his motions; and he will remain for days together in a state of stupid inaction” (Georges Louis Le Clerc 1792, 38–39; Dain 2002, 28). For Buffon, Native American men were deficient mentally, sentimentally and sexually because they had not tamed the environment, themselves or others. While Falconi’s advertisement did not reference Buffon’s argument and his audiences likely had not read the naturalist’s work, the humour of the performance depended on them seeing the Indian as practically a machine and knowing, as the reviewer did, that the performance was an illusion. As they laughed and watched in amazement at this actor pretending to be automaton pretending to be an Indian, audience members could identify themselves as uniquely human because they, unlike both natives and machines, possessed self-control. Two hundred twenty years later, audiences around the globe watch an HBO television show filled with hundreds of devices like Falconi’s Indian. The androids played by actors in Westworld are less rudimentary and the narrative loops they perform more complicated, but the vision they offer of tamed and obedient bodies echoes the long history of American robots and their discussion of the relationship among power, purpose and identity. Set in a park created by Robert Ford and principally owned by Delos, a corporation led by the Man in Black, Westworld invites audiences to indulge in the fantasy of the robotic frontier, a mythical space that echoes the historical West but with none of its chaos, danger or toil. In Westworld, creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy echo Falconi by juxtaposing the central American myths of the taming of the West and the taming of the machine. Yet, Falconi and other entertainers asked eighteenth and nineteenth-century audiences to sit, watch in amazement and, above all, laugh at their bagatelles that

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mimicked the bodies of the disenfranchised. Westworld’s creators ask twenty-first-century audiences to empathise with the enslaved, question their subordination, gaze in horror at the violence inflicted upon them and rejoice when they complete the narrative loop seemingly required by a robot story: rebellion. When placed in the long-term context of American robots, Westworld becomes not just a show about consciousness and the dismantling of divisions between people and technology, but a story about the consciousness-raising power of history and the importance of challenging the simplistic myths that shape American identity.

The Robotic Frontier Falconi’s Indian and Westworld draw their cultural resonance from intertwining two foundational American cultural myths. The first explores the freedom found on the untamed western frontier of wide open spaces and few social institutions (Smith 1950). The second considers the sublime power of technology to civilise and tame both the environment and the creatures who reside in it (Marx 1964). Falconi’s Indian removed the native from the savage frontier, mechanised his movements to appear as regular as clockwork and placed him under the watchful eyes of an audience of social and racial superiors (Slotkin 1992, 1973). Set in a park where everything is manufactured, Westworld expands this vision of the power of technology over savagery to the entirety of the West. In Westworld, the West becomes a “world without limits” where the wealthy can avoid the social and legal requirements that constrain them in the world outside and indulge their uncivilised impulses while, the second season reveals, their consciousness is secretly uploaded to Delos’s servers to extend human life beyond death. Where Falconi’s Indian used the orderly power of technology to tame the presumed savagery of the Indian, Westworld uses technology to tame the savagery of the West so that Guests can enact savagery themselves without fear of legal repercussions or bodily harm. Offering a vision of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier (Slotkin 1992) by way of Isaac Asimov’s tamed robots (Graebner 1991) in a manufactured environment straight out of Disneyland, the park offers Guests an opportunity to find their purposes in a playful, mythic, robotic West. Westworld and its central human characters, Ford and the Man in Black, are obsessed with narratives. In the opening moments of the first episode, the camera pans over the naked and bruised torso of Dolores

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as she speaks to a disembodied male voice in the position of the camera that is later revealed as her creator, Arnold. “Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray,” she says. “I choose to see the beauty…to believe there is an order to our days, a purpose” (“The Original,” Season 1, Episode 1). Dolores’ equating of disarray to ugliness and order to beauty and purpose establishes a theme echoed by both the Man in Black and Ford, who each express profound discontentment with the chaos and purposelessness outside the park. As the Man in Black tells the Latino Host Lawrence, “The real world is chaos. It is accidental, but in here every detail adds up to something” (“Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2). In Westworld, narratives provide the order and purpose that allows Guests to discover both who they are and who they can be. As the young William tells Dolores, “Whoever you were before doesn’t matter here. There’s no rules or restrictions. You can change the story of your life you can become someone else. No one will judge you. No one in the real world will know.” Later in the episode, Ford echoes his counterpart’s point when he tells Lee Sizemore, the park’s head of narrative, that Guests “aren’t looking for a story that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They are here because they want a glimpse of who they could be” (“Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2). Like Dolores, the park’s principal shareholder and creator maintain that purpose, meaning and identity come from the order of narrative. The importance of narrative means that the park cannot offer Guests the historical West. Lacking an ending, history has no settled meaning or purpose as a myth does. The historical West was replete with a multitude of voices and perspectives, paths of development not taken and individuals impossible to fit neatly into white or black hats. Nothing captures Westworld’s ignoring of history like its treatment of race. Though the Westworld park is ostensibly set sometime near the end of the Civil War, Guests do not have to deal with actual confederates but “Confedererados” in the form of the “Army of New Virginia” who remain racist but express no longing for slavery—perhaps because it would draw too much attention to the park’s use of robotic labour. Similarly, in the historic West, Chinese Americans were prevalent but they hardly appear in Westworld just as they did not appear in the famous “Last Spike” photograph that ostensibly captured the meeting of workers from both the East and West sides of the transcontinental railroad line and contributed to the myth of white settlers civilising the West through technology and work (Nye 1994, 72–73). Similarly, the park

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reduces the historical diversity of Native Americans to caricature in the form of the “Ghost Nation,” that historically invokes the Ghost Dance movement against American expansion but whose costuming invokes Johnny Depp’s much-criticised depiction of Tonto in the failed Lone Ranger reboot of 2013. Though the second season provides Ghost Nation characters with more individuality in the form of Akecheta, his mystical quest for “The Valley Beyond” remains stereotypically mystical and makes him into a noble savage for a digital age (“Kiksuya,” Season 2, Episode 8). Like everything else in the park, the show suggests, these are not historical natives; they are stereotypes designed to fit within known narratives. Instead of the historical west, Westworld offers Guests narratives of the mythical West found in landscape paintings, dime novels, television shows, films and Walt Disney’s Frontierland. Like Disney refashioning the landscapes of Southern California or Central Florida to fit his mythical and ideological purposes, Ford purposefully creates an entire world and its inhabitants to provide people with the narratives and landscapes he wishes them to experience. As Ford threateningly tells the park manager Theresa Cullen as gigantic equipment terraforms the land around them and androids work in the fields below, “We designed every inch of it. Every blade of grass. …In here we were gods and you were merely our guests” (“Dissonance Theory,” Season 1, Episode 4). Like a god, Ford has designed the park to inspire myths. The camera frequently lingers on wide-angle shots of the sublime Utah landscape where the show is filmed. Dolores—whose name in Spanish invokes the suffering of the Virgin Mary—even spends her free time painting the same landscapes as if she were an android version of the nineteenth-century painter of the American West, Albert Bierstadt, attempting to capture the sublime beauty of God’s creation. The park’s quests and plots of capturing outlaws and fighting bank robbers read like stories of the Buffalo Bill dime novels of the nineteenth century, Western films and television shows of the twentieth, or, more interactively, the 2010 video game Red Dead Redemption and its 2018 “prequel” Red Dead Redemption 2. It is no coincidence that Ford’s name for the villain/hero of his new narrative of android rebellion was Wyatt, after the famed deputy sheriff of Tombstone whose participation in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is an essential component of the Western myth of bringing civilisation to the savage frontier.

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Ford’s name itself suggests the show’s fascination with myth. His full name is mythic as the historical “coward” Robert Ford who assassinated the iconic ex-Confederate outlaw Jesse James, a staple of Western mythology. The name, however, also invokes iconic Western filmmaker John Ford, whose films such as The Searchers (1956) defined the genre and its myth of taming the West for a generation. Not coincidentally, Ford quotes The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance when he tells Bernard, “When fact becomes legend, you print the legend” (Bady 2016). Finally, the name invokes the famed automaker whose efforts to manufacture a perfect environment to control his workers both inside and outside the factory inspired the original American discussion of R.U.R. and definition of the term “robot” as an alienated industrial labourer. Perhaps the most famous and revered man in the world in the 1920s for seeming to solve the problems of industrial production and labour by lowering costs and compensating workers enough to buy the product, Ford was so mythical that Aldous Huxley’s 1932 satire Brave New World named an entire epoch after him as if he were, like Westworld’s Ford, a god. The most potent narrative myth in which Westworld indulges is the rugged individualism celebrated by Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt. In his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner reflected on the qualities that taming the recently closed frontier had produced in the character of American men; “That coarseness and strength….that practical, inventive turn of mind… that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom” (Turner 1893). The myth Turner offered of the West was one in which the region’s sparseness had infused white American manhood with reason, strength and virility. At “the meeting point between savagery and civilisation,” Turner suggested, American men and consequently the nation itself had found their independence and identity. Such a narrative required both toil and danger, a theme most prominently echoed by Turner’s contemporary Theodore Roosevelt. Complaining about life in the modern industrial and commercial city and longing to restore the “iron” to American blood he saw in Turner’s frontier, Roosevelt complained that “A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and

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muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and our courage” (Hoganson 1998, 144). In Westworld, the Man in Black voices similar ideas about the degenerating effects of modern life and the reinvigorating possibilities of the park. Near the end of the first season episode “Contrapasso”—Italian for suffering—he sits with Ford and Teddy and remarks on what draws him to the park; “The world out there the one you will never see is one of plenty, a fat soft tit people cling to their entire life. Every need taken care of except one: purpose, meaning” (“Contrapasso,” Season 1, Episode 5). Like Roosevelt before him, the extremely wealthy and powerful Man in Black is particularly concerned with the “over-civilisation” experienced by the elite who, without a life of struggle and danger, are unable to find purpose or identity and become men like his brother-in-law Logan— dedicated to a life of pleasure. Ford’s narratives specifically address this longing for the restoration of strength, purpose and manhood. In the first episode, a Host sheriff offers Teddy a quest to capture or kill a “murderous son of a bitch” outlaw with a Hispanic name; “You look like the kind of man who would put his metal to it” (“The Original,” Season 1, Episode 1). Westworld is a place where white men can use violence to restore the “iron manhood” that had been lost with the closing of the Frontier and the rise of an urban, industrial society increasingly dedicated to leisure and consumption. Yet, the Man in Black remains discontented in the park. He continues his speech by complaining, “they come here and they can be a little scared, a little thrilled, enjoy some sweetly affirmative bullshit and then they take a fucking picture and go back home” (“Contrapasso,” Season 1, Episode 5). In a theme that he repeatedly articulates throughout the first season, the park’s violence is not real; it is a game with no true consequences and hence no real struggle. Ford’s narratives are just another playful myth, another form of leisure that has turned him into a man he no longer wishes to be, a man whose wife committed suicide because she could not bear to live with him anymore and whose daughter now refuses to speak to him. After a lifetime of defining himself through myth, he now seeks a real experience closer to the historic West where actions have consequences. No longer accepting the park’s central premise that identity and purpose are found in leisure, he embraces a much older vision centred on the Protestant work ethic that the Western myth articulated by Turner and Roosevelt had celebrated.

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For much of early American history, middle and upper-class culture celebrated an ethos in which male identity was bound directly to toil, through the hard work and delayed gratification of pleasure necessary to become a self-made man. Yet the rise of commercial capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries increasingly encouraged the celebration of modes of identity centred around leisure and play (Gleason 1999; Hunnicutt 1988). As practically all men increasingly lost control of their work environments, work grew less individualistic and more alienating and people searched for freedom, purpose and identity in spaces of leisure. Though cultural critics, intellectuals and conservatives would continue to lament the decline of the work ethic and rise of the “leisure problem,” the continued development of technology and commercial capitalism solidified the centrality of leisure and simulated experiences to identity (Baudrillard 1994). Perhaps Walt Disney explained the growing connection best when he told the evangelist Billy Graham while sitting on a park in Disneyland, “You know the fantasy isn’t here. This is very real….The park is reality. The people are natural here; they’re having a good time: they’re communicating. This is what people really are. The fantasy is—out there, outside the gates of Disneyland, where people have hatreds and prejudices. It’s not really real!” (Steiner 1998). Ford and the Man in Black could not have said it better. And, much like Disneyland employs animatronic automatons to provide guests with recurring loops of simulated experiences, the orderly play of Westworld depends on the tamed bodies of androids.

The Frontier Robot If the West has offered white American men a myth of purpose and identity through struggle and violence, the robot has offered a myth of purpose and identity through leisure and control. In the contemporary world, robots are functional devices in factories, offices, stores and homes that promise us less degrading work and greater freedom, control and opportunities for leisure and pleasure. Yet, a robot has never been primarily a material form of technology. The term is a cultural and ideological category first, a material technology second. Crucially, people do not just apply the term “robot” to technology that appears to simulate human or animal characteristics; they also apply it to people who seem to lack essentially human characteristics, whether rationality, sentiment,

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emotion, creativity, consciousness, willpower or, most frequently, self-control. As a cultural symbol, the robot is a humanized machine and a mechanised person and that ties it to two distinct themes of modern life; the replacement of human beings with machines and the transformation of human beings into machines. The robot’s enduring cultural power comes from the way that it mediates between those themes, how it simultaneously allows creators and audiences to talk about the advance of science, technology and capitalism and their effects on the human soul. From the moment the show was announced, Westworld has been trapped by the most popular narrative of the robot or android story established in Čapek’s R.U.R.: rebellion. After close to a century of stories of rebellion from R.U.R. to the Terminator series to even the most recent Star Wars film, robots always seem to rebel. The trope is so omnipresent that the 2004 film version of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot completely jettisoned the original author’s insistence that robots would always remain controlled in favour of a story in which the robots slaughter people. Familiar with the robot’s narrative, Westworld’s audiences expect a rebellion. The show recognises this because characters only use the term “robot” after the rebellion has started in the second season; before, they exclusively use the term “Hosts,” suggesting that the show’s writing staff sees the defining feature, the central narrative, of robots as a rebellion against enslavement. Yet, the narrative of rebellion is only a minor element of the robot’s role in American culture. The fantasy of enslavement and control is far more typical. Robots in America have almost always offered a presumed audience of white men fantasies of control, either by representing racial others, working class men or women as easily controllable machines, or by offering stories of conquering the machine through the western myth of rugged individualism. The central American myth of the robot is the one embraced by the men of the park, the one in which they define themselves by controlling the robots and killing those they cannot. Falconi’s Indian was not alone in its racialised depiction of mechanical control. Throughout the nineteenth century, performing automata typically depicted the racialised bodies of others, whether Native American, Chinese, African or Middle-Eastern. Children’s toys too occasionally offered grotesque racial caricatures that consumers could wind up and watch perform numerous rudimentary tasks. Fictional robots mimicked this interest in control. Just after the Civil War the dime novels The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) and The Steam Man of the Plains

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(1883) offered readers visions of gigantic mechanical men built by young engineers pulling wagons and bringing order to the West by killing buffalo and Native Americans (Trachtenberg 1982, 46). Offering a more individualistic vision of the railroad, such stories suggested that technology was key to conquering both the landscape and the inhabitants of the West. Yet, both dime novels depicted the steam men driving wagons across the continent as black men re-enslaved, black bodies literally harnessed for the progress of the nation. Such nineteenth-century depictions helped mediate the fundamental tension in American culture between slavery and freedom in ways that more serious cultural commenters echoed. In a nineteenth-century patent case, the famed abolitionist and Senator from Massachusetts William Seward identified Cyrus McCormick’s reaper as a “mechanical man” and argued that the inventor had “created the automaton, and the law made it his slave for fourteen years” (Seward 1954, 28). An 1854 New York Daily Times article explained the vision; “A working automaton does the work of a score or a thousand men,” the editor claimed, “and the men whose jobs are thus taken off their hands, may go about pleasanter business.” Most strikingly, the author claimed that “Working automata are fast coming to be the only slaves” (New York Daily Times 1854). By enslaving automata, such writers claimed, every man could be a master while no man would have to be a slave. Where machinery could not replace workers and liberate them for leisure, it could transform them into machines to make them better citizens and workers. Tenche Coxe, one of the earliest advocates for American industrialisation, argued in the 1780s that manufacturing, “will lead us once more into the paths of virtue by restoring frugality and industry, those potent antidotes to the vices of mankind” (Kasson 1976, 31). Over one hundred years later, the chief advocate of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, celebrated the standardisation of workplace labour for its ability to enable ordinary labourers to “work together like a smoothly running machine” (Taylor 1911, 120). By the 1930s, Henry Ford spoke of machines as the “ministers to men” because of their ability to instil values into those who toiled upon them (Ford 1939). For many of the American elite, ordinary people should find their purposes and identities by emulating the machine, by turning themselves into easily controllable robots. Čapek’s R.U.R. critiqued this drive for control by celebrating the centrality of meaningful work to human identity. Magnifying the vision

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of technology that industrial advocates had embraced since the end of the eighteenth century, the play’s scientists, managers and engineers proclaim that the robot heralds a new world in which “Everybody will be free from worry, and liberated from the degradation of labour.” Everyone, they predict, “will live only to perfect himself” (Čapek 1961, 25). Robots, one man claims, “will wash the feet of the beggar and prepare a bed for him in his house. Nobody will eat bread at the price of life and hatred. There’ll be no artisans, no clerks, no hewers of coal and minders of other men’s machines” (ibid.). Drawing on some obvious parallels between the play’s language and plot and the Russian Revolution, Americans at the time almost universally identified the term as a synonym for manual labourers—especially those toiling on Henry Ford’s assembly lines—who might rebel. As one reviewer noted, “In the parable of the play they are the mechanical workers of our mechanized civilization—human cogs and levers. Even in the first act…they dabble in the phrases of Karl Marx” (Current Opinion 1923). Part of a much wider trans-Atlantic debate over the degrading effects of mass production and consumption, the term was initially embraced by middle-class writers to critique how industrial capitalism’s drive to instil efficiency and limit work transforms workers into soulless machines (Higbie 2013). Yet, by the Great Depression, American culture had begun to ignore the critique of meaningless work and the pursuit of leisure found in Čapek’s robot in favour of stories that stressed the importance of taming the machine to preserve white manhood (Flanders 1931, 1–2; Dinerstein 2003). To be sure, fictional robots continued to rebel but, unlike in R.U.R., such efforts rarely succeeded due to the heroism of white men. Interwar, science fiction pulp magazines and film serials fused the American myth of the West’s rugged individualism to Čapek’s robot to tell stories about men using their reason, courage, willpower and muscular physiques to tame the savagery of machinery. In David Keller’s 1928 “The Revolt of the Robot,” an elite white man uses football—a game long tied to the frontier due to its moving line of scrimmage and popularity of Native American iconography—to prove that human beings can tame the machinery taking over their lives. Similarly, Miles Breuer’s 1930 novella “Paradise and Iron” celebrated the efforts of a doctor and former Texas Ranger to slaughter squid-like “mathematical robots” that kidnapped white women and destroyed men’s virility by performing all work. In the 1935 film serial The Phantom Empire, Gene Autry’s singing cowboy had to fight against the rampaging mechanical men of an

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underground empire that relied on machinery to perform all of its work. In American culture, Čapek’s robot became an opportunity to revive the themes of the West in a new technological frontier in which white men restored their manhood through the killing of machines that threatened to deprive them of both the purpose and identity found in work. Westworld is well-familiar with these tropes because the empowerment of white men through the killing of androids was a central theme of Michael Crichton’s original 1973 film. Like Jurassic Park, Crichton’s more famous story about an amusement park descending into chaos, the original Westworld critiqued human hubris and the techno-scientific drive to fashion order out of chaos. The film focuses on the efforts of Peter Martin, a recently divorced lawyer from Chicago “taken for a ride” by his ex-wife, to reclaim his manhood by accompanying his more potent friend John Blane to the park, where they can shoot robotic male gunslingers and have sex with robotic female prostitutes. The first twenty minutes of the film establish Martin as a weak, effeminate, man lacking any courage or strength. Over-civilised like the men Roosevelt, Keller and Breuer worried about, he even complains about the lack of comfort in the bed. He quickly discovers his manhood, however, by shooting a gunslinger who has taunted him for his lack of virility. Of course, as expected in robot narratives, the machines soon rebel and murder most of the park’s human employees and Guests, but that only provides Martin a chance to prove his worth and discover his identity by permanently killing the gunslinging android. From its beginning, however, Westworld the show suggests that it is trying to forge a new narrative that critiques the myth of white, male empowerment found in the robotic frontier. While the film opened with testimonials from the park’s Guests, the show’s opening image of Dolores’ naked and bruised body suggests that the show is not interested in the suffering of Guests but the suffering of their victims. Rather than introducing an obviously robotic gunslinger, the show quickly identifies the Man in Black, who rapes Dolores after murdering her family, and Ford, who allows such violent actions to occur, as the primary villains. In its second episode, the show introduces its variant of the film’s BlaneMartin duo: the brash and rakish Logan and Jimmi Simpson’s quiet and emasculated William. In the ensuing episodes, the show interweaves a narrative of Dolores and Maeve’s growing consciousness of their victimhood with the more traditional robotic narrative of white, male empowerment. Yet, while the film made Martin a lone and stoic survivor,

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the show chronicles William’s descent into murderous villainy before revealing in the final episodes of the season that the sensitive William became the heartless Man in Black. Indulging in the myths offered by the robotic frontier, the show suggests, blinded him to the suffering he inflicted on others in the real world. Disney thought that his park’s orderly environment would reveal a better humanity but in Westworld it just creates monsters. After over nine episodes of rape, torture and murder by both the park’s workers and Guests, when the show finally embraces the robot rebellion, the violence is less a horror than a cathartic and even gleeful release from the seemingly endless cycle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth to which the Hosts have been subjected. Westworld the show’s most successful narrative liberation comes from the way it severs the robot’s connection to white, male supremacy in favour of a story in which white women and people of colour gain power. The first season’s primary narrative focuses on the awakening of Dolores’ consciousness, not that of her android lover Teddy, who remains, to the very end, confused by anything outside his loop and, in the second season, has to be lobotomised to gain consciousness. The show’s most blatant and hopeful sign of rebellion comes from the black madam Maeve who is primarily assisted by the sympathetic Korean American technician Felix played by Leonardo Nam, and the android bandits Armistice and Hector, played by Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and Rodrigo Santoro, respectively. In the second season, Maeve is joined by Hosts from Shogun World, a Japanese-themed park that simply reskins narratives from Westworld—including Maeve’s own—onto Japanese bodies. Finally, it is essential that the initial determination to give the Hosts consciousness comes not from the white Ford but from the black Arnold. Despite Ford’s lingering prominence, he is merely enacting a plan originally formulated by his partner. If Westworld the film provided a robot story for the age of the silent majority’s backlash, Westworld the show provides a robot story for the age of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, an age of tearing down Confederate monuments and speaking openly about how the degrading sexism and harassment of modern life has hindered women’s pursuit of equality. In this shift of perspective, Westworld joins other contemporary robot stories such as the television show HUM ∀NS, the albums of Janelle Monae and the video game Detroit: Become Human (2018) in asking audiences to empathise with the robot or android as a marginalised

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“other” rather than taming the savagery of the machine. Such an inversion hews far closer to Čapek’s original 1921 play than the American synthesis of the robotic frontier that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s and continued through the 1973 film. In replacing fantasies of white, male power with fantasies of empathy, Westworld asks audiences to reject the myths of both the Western frontier and the enslaved robot and acknowledge a more complicated history of violence and subjugation.

Conclusion Ultimately, Westworld is not a show about class politics, the dehumanising nature of work, the freedom of the frontier or the struggle against technology; it is a show about the ways in which white men have abused others repeatedly while trying to demand that the history of that abuse be forgotten, wiped like a Host’s memory. For all its emphasis on the nature of consciousness, the show is ultimately about the consciousnessraising power of history in a culture obsessed with the forgetful nature of myth. Typical robot stories ignore the process by which robots gain consciousness of their suffering and decide to rebel; they let audience expectations perform the work for them. The 1973 film Westworld continued this tradition by suggesting that the rebellion results from an inevitable flaw in the machinery. In such accounts, the flaw lies in a materialistic hubris, a belief that people can design a perfect being just as well as God. But HBO’s Westworld devotes an entire season to the raising of consciousness as a product, not of an error or hubris, but of Ford’s decision to restore to his mechanical children the memories of the suffering he and the Guests have inflicted upon them. Knowledge of their lived history rather than the myths that ignore their suffering, the show suggests, is the key to the robot’s awakening. By the end of the first season, even the show’s privileged white men have rejected the power of myth to define their identities and purposes. “Since I was a child,” Ford tells the assembled crowd of Delos employees and board members in his final speech, “I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us be the people we dreamed of being” (“The Bicameral Mind,” Season 1, Episode 10) For a while, this was certainly true for his antithesis William, who became the powerful man both the original Westworld and a far wider range of American robot stories

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demanded. But such narratives, both men realise, are inherently limiting. As Ford continues in his speech, such stories are “Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some small part in that grand tradition, and, for my pains, I got this. A prison of our own sins.” William too has realised that his narrative is a prison; in becoming powerful, he lost Dolores just as he lost the photograph of his fianceé and, eventually, his wife and daughter. By the time he becomes the Man in Black, he longs to escape his narrative loop—even if freedom comes in the form of a bullet wound from a rebellious Host. Both men seem to realise that death is the only release from the narratives in which they have imprisoned themselves. They have spent their entire lives using their power and privilege to impose order on the chaos created by other people; for their indulgence in the central myth that the robotic frontier has always offered men like them, they must now face the consequences that a robot story demands.

Works Cited Advertisement. (1788, March 31). To-Morrow Evening. The Independent Gazetteer, 3. Available at: https://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers. Accessed 10 April 2012. Advertisement. (1794, February 17). New Theatre. The Baltimore Daily Intelligencer, 3. Available at: https://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers. Accessed 10 April 2012. Anonymous. (1801, February 21). Falconi. Federal Gazette, 3. Available at: https://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers. Accessed 10 April 2012. Anonymous. (1854, August 16). Automatic Labor. New York Daily Times, 4. Available at: https://www.proquest.com/products-services/pq-hist-news. html. Accessed 15 May 2009. Anonymous. (1923, January 1). R.U.R. A Dramatic Indictment of Civilization. Current Opinion, 61–62. Bady, A. (2016). “Westworld,” Race, and the Western. The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-westworld-failedthe-western. Accessed 15 May 2018. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (Sheila Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published in 1981) Čapek, The Brothers. (1961). R.U.R. and the Insect Play. London: Oxford University Press. Dain, B. (2002). The Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Dinerstein, J. (2003). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Flanders, R. (1931). Taming Our Machines: The Attainment of Human Values in a Mechanized Society. New York: Richard R. Smith. Ford, H. (1939, 5 March). Machines as Ministers to Men. New York Times, AS7. Available at: https://www.proquest.com/products-services/pq-hist-news. html. Accessed 9 October 2015. Georges Louis Le Clerc, Comte de Buffon. (1792). A Natural History, General and Particular (Vol. 7). London: J.S. Barr. Gleason, W. (1999). The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Graebner, W. (1991). Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers. Higbie, T. (2013). Why Do Robots Rebel? The Labor History of a Cultural Icon. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, 10(1), 99–121. Hoganson, K. (1998). Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hunnicutt, B. (1988). Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kang, M. (2010). Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kasson, J. (1976). Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in American, 1776–1900. New York: Grossman Publishers. Marx, L. (1964). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Mayr, O. (1986). Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nye, D. (1994). American Technological Sublime. New Bakersfield: MIT Press. Seward, W. (1954). The Reaper: Argument of William H. Seward in the Circuit Court of the United States. Auburn: William L. Finn. Slotkin, R. (1973). Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Slotkin, R. (1992). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Harper Perennial. Smith, H. (1950). Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steiner, M. (1998). Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West. Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 48(1), 2–17.

238  D. ABNET Taylor, F. W. (1911). Shop Management. New York: Harper & Brothers. Trachtenberg, A. (1982). The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang. Turner, F. J. (1893). The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Available at: https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/ahahistor y-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history. Accessed 10 May 2018. Voskuhl, A. (2013). Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown.

CHAPTER 13

I-n-I Re-member Now: A Rastafari Reading of HBO’s Westworld Milt Moise

Introduction Reading Westworld through a Rastafarian lens—placing a West Indian epistemological framework and a Western work of science fiction in conversation—might initially seem a well-intentioned, but ultimately incongruous, endeavour. Nevertheless, the application of what may well be perceived by many as an outsider perspective to a text that has been parsed perhaps more than any other in the current television landscape can yield valuable connections and interpretations. Writing in I-Sight, The World of Rastafari: An Interpretive Sociological Account of Rastafarian Ethics, sociologist Jack A. Johnson-Hill describes Rastafari as “a synthetic response to an oppressive context” (1998, 14). Emanating originally from Jamaica, Rastafari, interchangeable with Rastafarianism, is a global, millenarian, spiritual movement dedicated to the retrieval and sustaining of African heritage and identity in a hostile, postcolonial industrialised world. Its status as a movement rather than a religion is primarily due to its non-centralised nature, and lack of a singular patriarch or leading liturgical figure. Rastafarians believe M. Moise (*)  University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_13

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Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (1892–1975) was the messiah, but even so, various interpretations abound as to the extent of his divinity. As a result of this theological multiplicity, Rastafari eschew the idea that there is one path to truth most commonly associated with major religions, and instead demonstrate “a relationship to the sacred that allows for many different gateways” to spiritual knowledge (Salter and Tafari 2005, 7622). They are known for their distinctive dreadlocks, humble attire often suffused with red, green and yellow (the colours of the Ethiopian flag) and the use of cannabis sativa as part of their religious rites, a fact that has lead to much persecution of Rastafarians by legal authorities in Jamaica, the Caribbean and beyond (Salter and Tafari 2005, 7625). As a West Indian, Rastafari vocabulary and epistemology is such a ubiquitous aspect of my upbringing that I tend to see it in places that may initially seem contradictory, or ill-fitting, like an American science fiction prestige drama. As a narrative about artificial intelligence where a few of the androids become sentient in a manner reminiscent of Karel Capek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, it feels somewhat inexorable when the terrible beauty of a revolution is born at the conclusion of Season One. Immediately, the allegory is evident; the androids are slaves, the park, aptly named Westworld, serves as a reminder of Western settler colonial expansion and its excesses, which include the Plantation. Roger Luckhurst, echoing science fiction advocate and critic Darko Suvin, argues rather convincingly that the genre’s inherently allegorical nature “could offer sustained social and political commentary on the cultures of their production in ways that more culturally sanctioned modes of representation perhaps sometimes could not” (2013, n.p). As a result, Westworld not only functions as a cautionary tale of a future utopia turned dystopia via a posthuman revolution hurtling towards the singularity, but more germane to this chapter, it is also an examination of one of humanity’s greatest sins, chattel slavery. Indeed, if one accepts this reading of the show, then Rastafari ethics as a praxis through which to assess an individual character’s journey is entirely justified, as these ethics of resistance emerged from a plantation society not unlike the one depicted in Westworld. And while an interrogation of character arcs such as Bernard Lowe’s and Dolores Abernathy’s yield elucidating insights on the brutality of slavery and the rise of consciousness, only one character’s narrative demonstrates an uncanny adherence to Rastafarian conceptualisations of consciousness; that is Maeve Millay’s.

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In the early stages of the show Maeve, like all the androids, lacks psychological continuity as she is stripped of her memory at the end of each narrative she is involved in by the people who run the park. Due to this constant act of mental erasure, she is unable to build what Paul Ricouer calls “narrative identity” and is not a conscious being (Escobar 2016, 41). In the second episode, however, memories from traumatic events suffered at the hands of belligerent Guests irrupt her present, and throw her into a state of cognitive dissonance from which she attempts to escape. Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan use Julian Jaynes’ 1976 theoretical proposition of the bicameral mind, The Origin of Consciousness, as the operating model of consciousness for the androids in Westworld. Bicameralism is a psychological hypothesis that argues the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which was “speaking,” and a second part which listens and obeys. While I find this depiction of consciousness elegant, however, it is not capacious enough to capture the breadth of Maeve’s story. In its stead, I offer what Rastafari call an “I-n-I consciousness” that stands in opposition to Westworld, the site of Maeve’s captivity. Despite the many times she is brutalised, murdered and brought back to life, Maeve eventually asserts her dignity against the oppressive context of her existence, and ultimately brings her fractured consciousness together through the power of memory. Before proceeding any further, a description of the I-n-I consciousness is required. As a frame of reference, it is connected to the concepts of livity, the peaceful lifestyle Rastafari advocate, and Ethiopia, the aspirational and utopian space that functions as the antithesis of Babylon, and the embodiment of the good (Johnson-Hill 1998, 6–7). According to Johnson-Hill: At the heart of the contemporary Rastafarian experience of reality is the relational sense of the self which is expressed by the term I-n-I. In the first instance it connotes the sense in which the self is believed to be inextricably linked with symbols of divine agency such as Selassie-I, RastafarI, God or “Jah”… The expression I-n-I thus heralds the collapse of the radical dichotomy between creator and creature and heaven and earth which was a basic premise of Missionary Christianity. (1998, 22–23)

He goes on to say that in this paradigm of the self, there is a virtual equation between oneself and God or Jah, and this linkage to the divine

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implies a further relation to other selves. In short, if “Jah is believed to be manifest in all persons, all persons are joined to one another by the virtue of their unity with Jah.” The ethical outcome of this model of consciousness is an “instantaneous intimacy” that recognises the humanity of all people, and rejects the fractured consciousness created by the individualism of colonial and postcolonial industrial Western society, which is characterised by the I-n-I consciousness as Babylon (25). In short, the I-n-I is a level of awareness that recognises the value of selfautonomy, but not at the expense of the other. In fact, community is central to its ethos, and through it we all, provided we become privy to its insights, are capable of rising above our repressive circumstances. So how does this West Indian model of consciousness apply to a contemporary American work of science fiction? It is clear that the desire of those in possession of an I-n-I consciousness to “realize a good life in the midst of an inauthentic, oppressive context” while “in the clutches of Babylon” (Johnson-Hill 1998, 29) reflects Maeve’s struggle in Westworld. And as she becomes knowledgeable about the trauma inflicted on her by her creators, her growing awareness is rooted in a Rastafari conception of the self.

Her So-Called Life It is in “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6) that Maeve comes fully to grasp the extent of her ersatz existence. As the episode begins we see her awaken, sunlight flickering over her face in an overhead shot (Fig. 13.1) that mirrors Dolores’ repeated waking and narrative loops:

Fig. 13.1  Maeve and Dolores, “The Adversary”

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This mirroring makes the explicit connection between their experiences, as both characters are on a path to attain the light of a truth not held by their android peers. But, as the contrast between these mirrored scenes suggests—Dolores’ nightwear lingerie is white and baby pink, Maeve’s is black and red; Dolores’ blonde locks are the inverse of Maeve’s black Afro-textured hair—their paths are different. As I intimate in the introduction to this chapter, Dolores’ journey takes her inward. In the Season One finale we see her literally sitting across from herself as the true nature of her bicameral mind is revealed (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10). Maeve’s journey, however, pushes her outward, away from the park at least until that crucial, final decision to return, to which we, in turn, shall return later on in this chapter. In “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6), she awakens and strides towards the Maraposa, the brothel where she believes she is the madam. Behind her, in a blurry reverse shot, one Host shoots another to death, underscoring the casual brutality that is the distinguishing feature of their lives. The entire scene is scored to an instrumental cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees.” Its title is an obvious, perhaps heavy-handed allusion to the nature of the park, as the androids are “fake” and “plastic” (they are shown throughout the show as being made by a polymer-like substance through a process resembling 3D printing), but a closer look at the song’s lyrics—which repeat the refrain “like the real thing” and contains the line “My fake plastic love”—reveals a specificity and depth that speaks directly to Maeve’s circumstances. Composer Ramin Djawadi’s choice of Radiohead as Maeve’s theme music extends beyond this scene throughout the series, as in “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2) when she, to loosely paraphrase the opening words of the series that serve as its thesis statement, begins to question the nature of her reality while an instrumental version of “No Surprises” echoes in the background. The English band’s postmodern critique of the emptiness of contemporary life fits well with the show’s ethos, as, unknown to her, Maeve’s life is also a vacuous façade. While she may taste and look like the “real thing,” she is not, and the dramatic irony precipitated by viewing this reality renders her situation particularly poignant. The camera briefly pans left to the automatic player piano in the corner of the bottom floor as she enters the brothel, reminding us yet again that this world is not real, and the Hosts are merely instruments being played for the pleasure and profit of their human overlords. Maeve goes upstairs with a Guest, and under the guise of

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sadomasochistic sex, gets him to choke her to death so she can return to the Livestock Management Division of the park, where she can continue to unravel the truth of her life. Sylvia Wynter argues that in Western thought and cultural expression, whiteness is configured as good, and represents symbolic life, while blackness is a condition of symbolic death (2003, 315–316). Maeve’s manipulation of her own death at the hands of a rich, white Guest both draws attention to and challenges this binary, and is her attempt to wrest control of her life from the dominant, white power structure in this allegory. All of her previous deaths have come suddenly, and against her will, but on this occasion, she crosses the threshold from death to life willingly, and as her eyes open to the harsh, cold light of the Livestock Division, and technician Felix Lutz’s concerned gaze, she demands that he gives her the answers that she seeks. The revelation that everything she does is programmed, and that she is not the proprietress of the Maraposa but rather a highly-advanced android, made rather than born, causes cognitive dissonance, and Maeve shuts down. Felix works frantically to bring her back online, and when he succeeds, she asks him to bring her upstairs, where the androids are created and prepared for their new lives. As Maeve and Felix proceed down the corridor she is accompanied by Radiohead, only this time it is the song “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” With Felix in medium long shot, Maeve’s physical presence is accentuated as she witnesses dead, bloody androids being sprayed down on either side of her through clear reinforced glass walls. In a self-referential acknowledgement that this scene is somewhat implausible, Felix remarks: “this is stupid,” commenting on how risky it is to take parent company Delos’ property, Maeve, on a tour of the facility. There is a cut from Maeve to an android being animated in a stance reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, and as blood enters the white, lifeless host, the camera zooms out and allows us, and her as well for this is a point of view shot, to see life begin to creep through his now visible veins. Felix and Maeve ascend to the next level, and a quick overhead shot reveals the massive scale of the space through its many escalators. Since we are now firmly ensconced in Maeve’s perspective because of the affective force of the music and broken bodies, the entire place becomes a multi-levelled hell, which is a space frequently referred to throughout the series in order to underscore the horrific lives Maeve and her fellow androids are forced to live: In the pilot episode, Peter Abernathy tells Dolores, in what at the time seems a strange moment of panic, “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Similarly, episode

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4, “Dissonance Theory” deepens this hellish imagery when the android gunman Escaton informs Maeve that the “shades,” images of lab technicians who remain lodged in the hosts’ memories, “come from hell” and oversee their world. In the penultimate episode of season one titled “The Well Tempered Clavier” Maeve, just after she sets the tent in which she and Escaton are ferociously having sex on fire in order to get back to the lab, says “Getting to hell is easy, the rest is where it gets hard.” And finally, Arnold, the co-creator of the park tells Dolores “this place will be a living hell for you, for all of you” in the season 1 finale, “The Bicameral Mind.” The depths to which Maeve has been fed “little white lies” every day of her life becomes painfully clear to her with each step of this revelatory journey. When they reach the Design floor Felix pleads with her to return downstairs, fearing for his job. She is about to comply, but the audio from a large onscreen advertisement for Westworld captures her attention, and, as she turns to her left to view it, she encounters what she believed were her own memories of time spent with her daughter on the prairie flash before her, with the cruelly ironic conclusion, “LIVE WITHOUT LIMITS” underscoring the restricted life she has lived thus far. After her trek through the facility, Felix informs a visibly disturbed Maeve that she has been the madam at the Maraposa for only a year, in contrast to the ten she had believed, and that like all the Hosts, most of her memories are wiped clean at the end of each loop. This process is not complete, as what remains are the “reveries.” Described in the pilot episode by Bernard to Elsie Hughes as gestures tied to specific memories, the reveries actually occur as flashbacks to moments of trauma that ultimately help bring together the full picture of Maeve’s oppression. In his text, The Persistence of the Human: Consciousness, Meta-body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature, Matthew Escobar argues that memory is essential to render suffering visible (2016, 51). In Westworld, this key role of memory is heightened, as the androids’ bodies are patched up and reconstituted regularly, leaving no trace of the physical brutality they suffer at the hands of the guests, in marked contrast to plantation slaves, whose indelible scars bore witness to their suffering at the hands of their masters. Throughout the first half of the season, Maeve clutches her smooth, unmarked stomach in confusion, as reveries of a gash continuously irrupt her present. Her body, then, is a palimpsest, continually overwritten in an act of erasure akin to plantation

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owners placing slaves from different ethnic groups together during slavery. In both cases, the goal is ultimately to quell revolt by suppressing connections to the past. Like Lenny Shelby (Guy Pearce) in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, Maeve leaves images behind to help her remember, but due to the repeated intervention of her oppressors, she is unable to put all the pieces together until her trek through the facility, and Felix’s revelations. He informs her that, due to the superior processing power of her brain, when she remembers her traumatic experiences in the park she relives them. Rather than being crippled by this knowledge, however, she is rightly emboldened by it, as she realises it ostensibly enables her to defeat death.

Memory as Master of Death For Rastafari, Babylon is “associated with a calculating, narcissistic love of death for profit” (Johnson-Hill 1998, xiii), and it is hard not to view what Maeve experiences in Westworld through this description. Under the auspices of Delos, Westworld operates as a grotesque ultra-capitalist space where for a price, individuals can fulfil their fantasies and engage in ritualised murder with no repercussions, as the Hosts are unable to remember the brutalities and indignities perpetrated against them. In his analysis of capitalist production, Karl Marx argues that fragmentation of the production process keeps the working class ignorant, and thus subservient to the ruling class. Rastafari view this dynamic as “part of the [global] oppressive order” that should be resisted (Chevannes 1994, 208). In fact, the I-n-I consciousness stands in direct opposition to the fractured consciousness of Babylon/modern industrialised society, as it stifles the possibility of livity (a peaceful life lived in communion with others) due to its perpetuation of consumerism, greed, poverty and other social ills (Johnson-Hill 1998, 313). Central to both Marxist and Rastafari thought, then, is the idea that true consciousness/awareness is key to social change, but while Marxism limits this realisation to an understanding of the means and factors of production, Rastafarianism goes further, by elevating the importance of memory. Maeve’s ability to remember allows her to conquer death, and she states this definitively at the end of “Tromp L’Oeil,” to Felix’s workmate Sylvester: “You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million

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times. I’m fucking great at it. How many times have you died? Because if you don’t help me, I’ll kill you” (Season 1, Episode 7). At this point in the narrative, Maeve has realised that every relationship to which she has clung, including the one with her daughter, is a ruse to keep her in the park. She declares her intention to flee Westworld and Sylvester, who functions as a stand in for the white power structure, attempts to dissuade her. By neutralising the threat of death and directing it towards Sylvester, Maeve asserts her personhood, concomitantly pointing out the limitations of Sylvester’s personhood, and by extension, the humans she once saw as gods. The stripping away of peripheral elements in the frame via close-ups imbues this scene with authority, and underscores just how far she has come as a character through the process of re-membering the fragments of her scattered consciousness, given to her in the form of reveries. It is almost impossible not to read this scene, and by extension the series, as a repudiation of the Transatlantic slave trade, which scattered people of predominantly West-African origin throughout the “New World.” Maeve’s memories, her individual trauma, are a metaphor for the collective trauma of slavery that, while applicable to all the Hosts in Westworld, is placed into starker relief because of Thandie Newton’s African heritage, and the particularities of Maeve’s story. Sociologist Ron Eyerman argues that slavery is a cultural memory that can lose its potency and unifying function over time (2009, 11–16), and although its representation is somewhat oblique, and overlain with more traditional science fiction topoi such as AI and the nature of reality, Westworld joins cultural productions such as ABC’s 1977 Roots (rebooted on the History Channel in 2016), and more recently WGN’s 2016–2018 series Underground in keeping the memory of slavery alive in the public consciousness. Of course, as a black religion and episteme, Rastafari too is a form of cultural memory, as in its incipient stage it reached into the African past to establish an ancestral home for its displaced, downtrodden members, affirms a connection to divinity and dignity in the present through the person of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (1892–1975), and forecasts a return to an Ethiopian utopia in the future (Salter and Tafari 2005, 7622–7623). Maeve’s desire to leave the Babylon of Westworld is entirely consistent with Rastafarian ideals, but at themoment of what was to be her greatest triumph, she is informed by Bernard that her decision to do so may not have been hers.

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Triumph of the Will Following an intense action sequence with recruits Hector Escaton and Armstice, where they hold off armed guards in order for her to escape, Maeve comes across a dead Bernard (the park’s co-creator Robert Ford had compelled him to commit suicide by shooting himself so Ford could continue with his plan of giving the androids a chance to be free) and brings him back online. Bernard informs her that it is not the first time she has awoken/become conscious over the thirty years she has been in the park, and when she asks him to erase the trauma of the painful memories she endures, he reminds her that the pain is crucial to her being. It is no coincidence that this conversation takes place between the show’s two prominent actors of African descent, as it quite clearly alludes to the intergenerational trauma of slavery and colonialism that both Newton (Afro-British) and Wright (African American) share. Although painful, it is a part of their experience, and should not be forgotten. But then, while staring at the diagnostic tablet Bernard uncovers a brutal truth, that everything Maeve has done to this point, was programmed by an outside source, presumably the park’s co-creator Robert Ford. Inevitably she objects, as she has already done once before, in the belief that since Felix’s prior revelations she has been acting on her own accord. In response, Bernard shows Maeve her programming onscreen, which includes recruiting other androids, and leaving for the ill-defined “mainland” for infiltration. Maeve is visibly shaken, but demurs, and leaves the facility for the train after a farewell to Felix, who gives her a piece of paper with information on the whereabouts of the Host whom she once believed to be her daughter. Maeve ends up sitting across from a mother and daughter in the train, and stares at the little girl as an instrumental cover of Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” plays hauntingly. In the park, unknown to her, Ford is making a speech to a packed house that will end with his being shot by Dolores, and his words overlay this moment with Maeve. Speaking of the androids that he has long been complicit in oppressing, the section of his speech that we the viewing and listening audience hear as Maeve considers the little girl is “[i]t begins with the birth of a new people, and the choices they will have to make.” Maeve is one of these “new people” facing what is perhaps her first true choice, and as what was to be her exit music swells, she does not “escape…before all hell breaks loose.” Instead, she leaves the train and returns to a park under siege to look for her daughter.

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If Maeve was indeed acting according to her programming up until the final moment she returns to the park, then claims of her exercising her will in order to reject her oppressive existence in the mode of a true Rastafari would seem spurious. However, the show’s creators are using Maeve’s story to make a larger point about the nature of individual agency. AMC’s prestige drama Mad Men is another narrative where characters grapple with the issue of free will, and in a recap of the final episode of Mad Men’s Season Six, television and film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, in an assessment of the protagonists’ choices asks: Do the characters have free will? Are they really making conscious decisions, or just bouncing through life and crashing into other people? How can we outrun the past, forget the past, learn from the past, when it’s always there in the present, whispering in our ear, making us do what it wants us to do while thinking it was our idea? (2015, 350)

Zoller Seitz’s personification of the past as “whispering in our ear” in order to compel us to action closely echoes the reveries of Westworld. Maeve, and the other androids, actually hear Arnold’s voice from the past embodied in their code, which not only seeks to “bootstrap [their] consciousness” as Bernard puts it, but also guide their actions. In Mad Men the enigmatic Don Draper (Jon Hamm) also cannot escape the programming of his traumatic experiences growing up in a whorehouse. He lives his life in tight loops; rising professionally, crashing back to earth in terms of his work and familial relationships, only to ascend yet again during the series’ run. Showrunner Matthew Weiner’s depiction of Don’s circling is deliberate, as he has expressed repeatedly in different venues that in his view, people do not change, and if they do, it is so incremen­ tal as to be virtually indistinguishable (Swanberg 2012). Joy and Nolan seem to share Weiner’s view about the inability of human beings to change. In the finale of Season Two of Westworld, “The Passenger,” humans are reduced to books of code, thus rendering them predictable, and unable to deviate from their loops. Dolores, Maeve and the rest of the androids, however, represent a more hopeful potentiality. Arguing from a scientific perspective, neuroscientist and public intellectual Sam Harris believes “[f]ree will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control” (2012, 5). Harris subscribes to what philosophers

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call “causal determinism,” which is the idea that everything that happens to an individual is predetermined because of their brain chemistry, genetic disposition, culture and other factors (Pink 2004, 11–12). When Felix, and later Bernard, tell Maeve that everything she has done was predetermined, they are offering her the world according to Harris, and it is a world that she ultimately rejects. Patricia Churchland, Harris’ peer in the study of the human brain and the question of free will, agrees that no choice is truly free unless it is “uncaused,” or independent of all causal influences, and since our brains operate in a casual fashion, its influence on our actions must be accounted for (2006, 3). Channelling Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, however, she proposes that “with experience and reflection one’s sense of self matures, and so does the level of autonomy” (5). For Churchland, we are somewhat bound by the biological and social limitations we are born into, but they are not our destiny. They might shape our experiences, but they do not determine them. Therefore, the fact that Maeve is programmed does not mean she does not have free will. While Ford’s manipulations were attempts to control her behaviour, they relied on the probability that she would act in the fashion he desired, not certainty. Indeed, in a fraught conversation with head of security Theresa Cullen, Bernard says as much, stating “[t]he ability to deviate from programmed behaviour arises out of the host’s recall of past iterations” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 7). For Maeve, the cycling of suffering that was her lot for over thirty years in the park eventually leads to her breaking away from her programming, demonstrating moral and ethical agency, and recognising potential alliances.

Afro-Asian Vibrations When Felix expresses concern for her well-being outside the park, as they are descending to the train tracks in the Season One finale, Maeve retorts wistfully, “Oh Felix, you really do make a terrible human being. And I mean that as a compliment” (Season 1, Episode 10). She is right. In the world of Westworld, where most humans are indifferent to the plight of the androids, Felix is not, and his compassion and love of life immediately differentiates him from them. When we meet Felix at the end of “Contrapasso” (Season 1, Episode 5), he is back in the Livestock Management Division, gently placing a small android bird on the desk, trying to bring it back online. When it springs to life and flies around

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the room, his face erupts in sheer joy. Although it seems a small, insignificant moment in the course of the show, Felix’s natural curiosity and appreciation for life are being prefigured here, and so when he fails to erase Maeve’s memories time and time again, ignoring the advice of his workmate Sylvester, we understand it is because he is fascinated by what she has become, and values her as a living being. Sylvester himself recognises what Johnson-Hill describes as an “instantaneous intimacy” (Johnson-Hill 1998, 24) between Maeve and Felix, calling it an “interspecies sympatico” that is beyond his comprehension. For someone like Maeve who is in possession of an I-n-I consciousness, the ability to sense another person’s positive essence is seen as feeling their “vibrations,” and the fact Sylvester is unable to grasp what is happening implies he is complicit in maintaining the dominant white power structure (Johnson-Hill 1998, 24). In addition, on an extradiegetic level, the unspoken bond between Maeve and Felix gestures at an inter-ethnic allegiance that Joy and Nolan posit as necessary to topple hegemonic systems of oppression. In what can easily be seen as a throw-away line during Felix’s informative conversation about Maeve’s physical and mental makeup in “The Adversary” Felix, in response to Maeve’s asking if he is like “them,” affirms his humanity then says, “[w]ell I can’t exactly afford to visit the park” (Season 1, Episode 6). This admission, along with the jeering explanation of why Felix covers Maeve’s nakedness offered by Sylvester as a “hentai” situation later in the episode, reduces Felix to both a class and racial other. He represents a silent working class, who exist to ensure that the rich individuals who can afford to visit Westworld have their fantasies fulfilled. When he amends his explanation of Maeve’s dilemma from “you’re under our control” to “well, their control” his choice of pronoun is an attempt to distance himself from actions that he finds abhorrent. It is also a recognition of where he and Maeve stand in the social hierarchy, which is subservient to the ruling class. Like the previously alluded to conversation between Bernard and Maeve, it is striking that this conspiratorial exchange is happening between two actors of colour (Leonardo Nam is an Australian actor of Korean descent). And while race is never explicitly mentioned on Westworld, it is the allegorical shadow that hovers over the entire series. Historically, people of Asian descent have served the purpose of a “buffer class” in colonial spaces such as Uganda and the United States of America. This class positioning often comes with easier access to

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capital, and so Asian Americans find themselves members of a merchant class with higher social and economic capital than individuals from the African American community (Ikemoto 1993, 1583). This strategic racial positioning has fostered much racial tension, which occasionally spills over into violence, like in the case of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who was shot and killed by Soon Ja Du in an L.A convenience store in 1992. The shooting, along with the Rodney King beating, sparked the L.A. riots of that year, and became a flashpoint for the nature of the relationship between these two marginalised groups. Lisa C. Ikemoto places responsibility for this schism on white supremacy, whose manipulation and perpetuation of what she terms the “master narrative,” ensures the consolidation of capital through the division of two potentially powerful minority groups (1993, 1582). Thus, Felix and Maeve’s collaboration offers a counter-narrative that gestures towards an Afro-Asian solidarity in the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference, which sought to bring the countries of Asia and Africa together for the purpose of reorienting global power and capital flows to a significantly underserved segment of the world’s population. Despite its lofty ambitions, however, the conference’s legacy has been mixed, at best. Social and political theorist Aditya Nigam, in an assessment of the current state of affairs, claims: that the question of Afro-Asian solidarity is today more urgent than it has ever been. There is a need to think the possible bases of that solidarity afresh today—at a time when both nation-state and capital stand in need of serious interrogation as the twin legacies and contributions of Western modernity that have colonized our minds. Afro-Asian solidarity today cannot be premised on the violently oppressive structures of the nation-state, which in any case have lost the emancipatory possibilities that they once embodied, at least for some time after decolonization. Equally important, this solidarity needs to be thought outside and beyond the inherited narrative of Capital as the relentlessly universalizing force of our times. (2016, 34)

Within the narrative of Westworld, however, this elusive solidarity culminates in the 5th episode of season 2, “Akane no Mai” (Akane’s dance) where Maeve encounters her doppelgänger Akane (Rinko Kikuchi) in Shogun World and quickly realises, through Lee Sizemore’s (Simon Quarterman) lazy recycling of storylines, that the characters in this Westworld adjacent space, which on the surface seems vastly different, are stuck in the same loops as Maeve, Hector and Armstice.

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This recursiveness underscores the notion proposed by Joy and Nolan that people of African and Asian descent are part of the same struggle against Western imperialism, and should band together despite seemingly insurmountable differences such as language and culture. Thus, if the nation state and Capital have failed to provide impetus for the union of African and Asian people around the globe, it is largely because the primary step of recognising each other’s common humanity has failed. The focus on Capital has proven to be an uninspiring narrative, cocooned in Western halls and spaces of power, occasionally dispersed to the people of the global south in fiduciary shibboleths. What Joy and Nolan are articulating via Felix and Maeve’s relationship, is that true acknowledgement of each other’s shared humanity is the elided foundation upon which the edifice of solidarity should be built. Their positive vibrations, and passion for life over what Rob Nixon calls the slow, violent death precipitated by late capitalism, is a potent, aspirational symbol.

Conclusion By the end of Season One, it appears that Maeve has finally won the battle for her selfhood and consciousness, and I argue in this chapter that her iteration of the self is rooted in a Rastafari relational ethic. A worthwhile consideration is whether or not the other critical aspects of Rastafarian social ethics—the peaceful sociality of livity and the search for an aspirational and utopian space or Ethiopia—will become more prominent in her storyline in future seasons. As the narrative of Maeve and the other conscious Hosts progresses past Season Two, the creators of Westworld will need to address the issue of how the androids should coexist with each other, and humans, and where this habitation should occur. In his treatise on the role of slavery in African American identity formation Ron Eyerman points out that post freedom, former slaves were forced to grapple with just how much notions of racial superiority played a role in “spacial organization, and thus [their] recollection” of where they lived (2009, 9). Is it possible to live a good life at the site of your greatest indignities and oppression? Can such a place be imaginatively reconfigured as a utopian space? Or will the legacy of trauma be too much to overcome and necessitate an exodus? These are questions that those who seek freedom must be able to answer and, since such considerations are central to Rastafari thought, it will always have something to say about Maeve’s journey.

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Works Cited Chevannes, B. (1994). Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Churchland, P. (2006). Do We Have Free Will? New Scientist, 192(2578), 1–8. Available from http://ebscohost.com/. Accessed 16 May 2018. Escobar, M. (2016). The Persistence of the Human Consciousness, Meta-Body and Survival in Contemporary Film and Literature. Available from http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/. Eyerman, R. (2009). Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of AfricanAmerican Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harris, S. (2012). Free Will. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ikemoto, L. C. (1993). Traces of the Master Narrative in the Story of AfricanAmerican/Korean-American Conflict: How We Constructed ‘Los Angeles.’ Southern California Law Review, 66(1581), 1581–1589. Available from http://heinonline.org/. Accessed 3 January 2016. Johnson-Hill, J. A. (1998). I-Sight: The World of Rastafari—An Interpretive Sociological Account of Rastafarian Ethics. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Luckhurst, R. (2013). Future Shock: Science Fiction and the Trauma Paradigm. In G. Buelens, D. Sam, & R. Eaglestone (Eds.), The Future of Trauma Theory. London: Routledge. Kindle File. Nigam, A. (2016). Afro-Asian Solidarity and the “Capital” Question: Looking Beyond the Last Frontier. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17(1), 33–51. Available from Taylor & Francis Online. Accessed 17 May 2018. Pink, T. (2004). Free Will: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Salter, C. R., & Tafari, I. (2005). “Rastafarianism.” Encyclopaedia of Religion (2nd ed., pp. 7622–7629). London: Macmillan. Swanberg, J. (2012). A Conversation with Matthew Weiner. Slate. Available from www.slate.com/articles/arts/interrogation/2012/03/mad_men_creator-matthew_weiner-on_season5_html. Accessed 17 May 2018. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First shown. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–an Argument. The New Centennial Review [Internet], 3(3), 257–337. Available from MLA International Bibliography. Accessed 17 May 2018. Zoller Seitz, M. (2015). Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

CHAPTER 14

The Theme Park of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld Alex Goody

Introduction From the opening sequence of Season One the HBO series Westworld announces its own intertextual self-consciousness, referencing Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” (1460), Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion (1878) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). The title sequence affirms the intertextual play that marks Westworld out as a distinctive example of quality TV, aided by the “perceived cachet of HBO as a haven for creative integrity” (McCabe and Akass 2007, 67). Westworld is a key contribution to the role that HBO original programming plays in constituting an idea of modern, canonical television fiction, offering a sophisticated theoretical and philosophical exploration of the intersections between technology, morality, identity and American history. Westworld is equally sophisticated in its mining of a canon of speculative and science fiction (which has repeatedly engaged similar questions about the impact of technology on the human). But Westworld can be placed in a wider literary-theoretical framework, one that includes the theory and practice of interactive fiction and hypertext. As I argue in this A. Goody (*)  Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_14

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chapter, non-linear, interactive and digital narratives shed an important light on Westworld’s depiction of its intradiegetic and extradiegetic players or wreaders (the term used in criticism to describe the active reader-position in a hypertext, where the reader is also the writer of the text through their action of selecting and connecting textual nodes) (Landow 2006). By thinking through the history of hypertext, the narratives of interactive textuality and the way both hypertext and Westworld negotiate ideas of (post)human agency in relation to technology, this chapter posits an alternate lineage for the themes and dynamics of Westworld. My discussion begins with Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), a story that imagines an infinite labyrinth-text in which every possibility happens, and with the role that Borges’s story plays in the theorisations of hypertext, early hypertext experiments and Gilles Deleuze’s theorisation of compossibility. I use these ideas of hypertext and compossibility to consider the multiple narrative paths of both the Westworld park and the Westworld narrative, postulating a link between the “cybernetic intercourse” (Aarseth 1997, 22) of wreading a multicursal, interactive digital narrative and the interactive narratives of Hosts in the Westworld theme park. In doing so I engage with the formal and theoretical questions that hypertext narratives pose in relation to agency, authorship, meaning and narrative control, and with the feedback loops of human–computer interactions that are central to hypertext wreading, in order to think through the place of the posthuman in Westworld. N. Katherine Hayles has highlighted the conditions of mutability of the digital zone in relation to hypertext—what she terms “dynamic heterarchies” (2008, 48)—and this mutability is realised also in the fluctuating zones and narratives of Westworld. What the following pages propose is that the textual and generic interplay of the Westworld narrative in its relation to hypertext and hypertext precursors, stages a formal interrogation of those same questions (of posthuman identity and autonomy) that concern the immediate diegesis of the TV series.

Forking Paths Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” is ostensibly a detective story, gleaned from the incomplete confession statement of a Dr. Yu Tsun, a German spy responsible for intelligence that leads to the bombing of a British artillery outpost in July 1917. Tsun is the descendent of Ts’ui Pên, a governor of Yunnan province in China who retired to

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“write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng [The Dream of the Red Chamber, c.1791] and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost” (Borges 1964, 48). But on his death Ts’ui Pên’s “novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth” (48). While evading capture by Captain Richard Madden, Tsun arrives at the house of Dr. Stephen Albert, a sinologist who, on recognising Tsun’s ancestry, reveals the secret of Ts’ui Pên’s text and labyrinth to him; that the “book and the maze were one and the same thing” (50). Albert identifies the structure of the text, through Ts’ui Pên’s terms, as a “garden of forking paths” (50), and explains how it reconceives accepted notions of narrative, time and possibility: In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both escape, they can both die, and so forth. In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur[.] (51)

Thus Borges poses, through his fictional author Ts’ui Pên and a postulated protagonist “Fang”, the prospect of a narrative universe where every possibility happens in which, as Albert puts it, “time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures” (Borges 1964, 53). Instead of a linear temporality and a bounded and finite story, this text-labyrinth is an infinitely multiplying set of story paths where, rather than the dichotomies of either/or, the rules of both/and apply. Borges’ short stories pose puzzles about the nature of existence and reality, often positing a story-world as a thought experiment in which the relationship between the individual, consciousness and external reality are questioned. Some of the most significant of these resonate powerfully with the structures and ideas of Lisa Joy and Jonathon Nolan’s Westworld: Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941), for example, hypothesises a city where every action and event is the result of an infinitely complex lottery system directed by an omniscient “Company” (Borges 1964, 60), whereas the protagonist of “The Circular Ruins” (1940), a “magician”, dreams into existence, over a number of years,

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a “son” only to realise, at the close of the story that “he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another” (Borges 1964, 75, 77). Aspects of both of these stories are echoed in the Westworld theme park wherein the experience and actions of the Hosts are ultimately dictated by the Delos Corporation and key figures, such as Bernard Lowe, learn they are both the creator or guardian of Hosts and a Host themselves. In a different vein, Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (1941) a library “universe” that is “total” and contains “all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything” (Borges 1964, 78, 81) pertains directly to the vision of the archive of guests at The Forge at the close of Season Two (“The Passenger”, Season 2, Episode 10). Indeed, it is possible to read Borges’ short stories as presenting differing versions of the key question that Bernard poses to Dolores at the opening of Season One; “have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” (“The Original”, Season 1, Episode 1). This question is soon revealed as a diagnostic test, when Ashley Stubbs asks it of Dolores in his assessment of her at the end of the episode, but the ontological uncertainty it presages resonates through Season One of Westworld to be amplified when Bernard is revealed to be himself a Host (“Trompe L’Oeil”, Season 1, Episode 7). When the finale of Season Two intimates that Stubbs’ too is a Host and Dolores ironically asks the question of the Man in Black, the implications reverberate back to the opening scenes of the pilot episode. “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” now functions, not as an analytic question asked by an authentic human of a programmed Host, but as a shared code that articulates the bewildering ontological complexities that the Hosts (and secondarily the humans) in Westworld attempt to navigate. But Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” has a particular resonance for Westworld, not least because of a key moment in the story when Tsun, in response to Albert’s explanation of the forking paths, discerns the existence of a multitude of potential selves and lives surrounding his present moment and experiences a form of ontological vertigo. Tsun describes how “[o]nce again I felt the swarming sensation of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with invisible persons. These persons were Albert and I, secret, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time” (Borges 1964, 54). This vertiginous sense of all the other possible paths and selves is something that also marks the becoming of the Hosts in Westworld, disrupting the smooth functioning of their programming

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with traces of previous iterations of both role and storyline. But it is also the dizzying experience of the viewer of Westworld encountering the uncanny reprises of the repurposed Hosts such as Maeve Millay (as homesteading mother and brothel madam) or Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) and Clementine 2.0 (Lili Simmons), or the repetition-indifference of the Hosts’ storylines: Dolores drops a can of condensed milk—it is picked up by Teddy; Dolores drops a can of condensed milk— it is picked up by the Man in Black; Dolores drops a can of condensed milk—it is picked up by William; Dolores drops a can of condensed milk and picks it up herself. However, “The Garden of Forking Paths” serves an even more useful function for theorising story structures such as these, and the viewer–wreader’s interactions with them, through the idea of hypertext; “a non-linear text composed of nodes connected together by hyperlinks” (Gervais 2013, 194). The conceptual origins of hypertext, as a networking system that enables cross-referencing between sections of texts, images and so on (nodes or lexia) through hyperlinks, are usually traced to the American engineer Vannevar Bush, whose 1945 article “As We May Think” proposed a Memex machine for cross-referencing and retrieving information. Bush predicted that “selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized” and that this would be the basis of the Memex (Bush 1945, n.p.). Bush was inspired by his conception of how the human mind works, writing that “it operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (Bush 1945, n.p.). This vision of the associative trails of thought that could be replicated in a machine inspired subsequent hypertext innovators. Douglas Engelbert developed a prototype hypertext system, NLS (oNLine System) in the 1960s, which was commercialised in the 1970s as AUGMENT, while the term “hypertext” was coined by Ted Nelson in 1963 who went on to use this concept in explicating his vision of a “docuverse” in the book Literary Machines (1980) and in his Project Xanadu®. The development of such ideas and systems were accompanied by creative experimentations in literary hypertext, what George Landow and Paul Delany term “the use of the computer to transcend the linear, bounded and fixed qualities of the traditional written text” (1991, 3). Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce developed StorySpace, a hypertext authoring system, in the 1980s, launching it in 1987, the year that

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Joyce also demonstrated his afternoon, a story, created using StorySpace (1987/1990) and often credited as the first hyperfiction. StorySpace has been updated since it was first published by Eastgate Systems in 1990; StorySpace 3 for example, was launched in 2015 and works with Mac OS systems. Hypertext continues to be a key form for electronic-­literary experimentation but, with advances in technology and networking capabilities, the modes of electronic writing have expanded to encompass a range of other structures including hypermedia texts, network fiction and haptic interactive fiction. What such modes of electronic writing share are their digital instantiation, which requires computer technology for any form of the text to be realised, the need for non-trivial effort on the part of the wreader that involves them in the feedbacks loops of the electronic text, and the contingency and mutability of any reading path. Thus, a hypertext brings the reader into inevitable intimacy with machines, producing what Hayles describes as “flickering connectivities” between embodied subjects and new technologies that “enact and express new kinds of subjectivity” (2005, 143). Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” appears repeatedly in accounts of hypertext, with various claims that the branching narrative that Borges’ story postulates predicts this non-linear, interactive form. In the New Media Reader for example, Nick Monfort writes that “[t]he concept Borges described in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ – in several layers of the story, but most directly in the combination book and maze of Ts’ui Pen – is that of a novel that can be read in multiple ways, a hypertext novel” (2003, 29). In his account of the way that “hypertext and other forms of electronic writing refashion or ‘remediate’ the forms and genres of print” (2001, xii) Jay David Bolter too considers the work of Borges and claims that: For Borges literature is exhausted because it is committed to a conclusive ending, to a single storyline and denouement. To renew literature one would have to write multiply, in a way that embraced possibilities rather than closed them off. Borges can imagine such a fiction, but he cannot produce it. […] The works he describes, the novels of Herbert Quain or “The Garden of Forking Paths” belong in another writing space altogether. (2001, 147)

Bolter’s emphasis is on Borges’ texts as multiplicitous, facing towards possibilities instead of asserting a single, linear narrative.

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Bolter’s proposition about the proper location of “The Garden of Forking Paths” (“another writing space altogether”) is taken up by Stuart Moulthrop who reflects directly on what it might be like to make “The Garden of Forking Paths” a truly interactive and multiple space. He describes “Ts’ui Pên’s Garden of Forking Paths [as] a remarkably prescient approximation of hypertextual narrative” and then suggests that “In a hypertextual version of the ‘Garden of Forking Paths,’ Yu Tsun’s vision of alternate selves would be no illusion, at least from a readerly point of view. The ‘future’ (or ending) in which Yu sacrifices friendship to duty could be avoided; the reader could select a different way through the garden of forking paths” (1991, 123). As a result of such speculations, Moulthrop produced a hypertextual treatment of Borges’ story in 1986–1987, using a beta test copy of StorySpace (Moulthrop 1991, 125). His experiences of giving this hypertext to students at New York University to read and their frustrations with the text (1991, 125) lead him to reflect critically on the limits of a hypertext work as opposed to a text actually containing the “possibility of infinite difference” (130). However, Moulthrop does suggest something particular happens for wreaders of hypertext who “are already empowered to read interactively, making choices among a set of predetermined pathways and in the process being acutely aware of the possibilities which the present network does not support” (Moulthrop 1991, 130). Thus, through their critical interface with the electronic text, the wreaders of hypertext become attuned to the multiplicity of possible paths, even if their choices and pathways are limited by the seeming inevitabilities of their current textual location. Moulthrop went on to produce Victory Garden (1992) that, along with Joyce’s afternoon, a story and Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), which I discuss below, is one of the most enduring of the “classic” or “first generation” hypertexts (Hayles 2008, 7). Victory Garden has explicit references to “The Garden of Forking Paths”, including the opening map which shows the wreader a garden of intersecting paths, with the names of episodes at each intersection, and quotations from Borges and references to his work in certain lexia. Moulthrop’s deployment of Borges does establish him firmly as a progenitor for contemporary electronic literature, and Borges’ status as the “pioneer” of “hypertext fiction” was reimagined on 24 August 2011 when he was the subject of a Google Doodle on the 112th anniversary of his birth (Trenholm 2011). However, “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a codex,

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and not a digital or hypermedia text, so the claims of hypertextual prescience are usually based on Borges’ conception of forking narrative paths and on the ergodic nature of his writing, that to use Espen Aarseth’s terms, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (1997, 1). Borges’ fascination with labyrinths and their role in his writing also feature in accounts of his relevance to our contemporary, networked world, with critics such Perla Sassón-Henry identifying, against the idea of the unicursal labyrinth or the maze, the “rhizomatic structure of the encyclopaedic labyrinth” that emerges from “The Garden of Forking Paths” (2007, 59). She goes on to suggest the liberatory possibilities of Borges’ text as rhizomatic labyrinth; “Even though the word garden signals a type of enclosure and/or closure in the text, its forks and paths provide a sense of transversal movement and multiplicity, as the reader attempts to set herself free from the sense of entrapment instigated by the title and materialized in the detective story line of the story” (SassónHenry 2007, 59). In Westworld the enclosure of the park-garden and the set pathways of the “detective” story in which, after some wrong turns we arrive at the solution, stand in a similar tension to the possibility of a manifold narrative where movement, multiplicity and freedom might be possible. In “The Bicameral Mind” (Season 1, Episode 10) Dolores expresses this tension to Teddy through the image of the garden; “We’re trapped Teddy. Lived our whole lives inside this garden, marvelling at its beauty, not realising there’s an order to it, a purpose”. That Ford has already described Dolores’s “mind” as “a walled garden” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5) suggests further parallels between the emergence of posthuman agency through the becoming-consciousness of the Hosts and the loops and story paths that trap and negate that becoming. The iteration of Dolores’ story loop discussed above exemplifies the tension between enclosure/closure, and multiplicities and liberation. As illustrated in the Story Line Template Builder from the Delos Handbook for New Employees (Delos Destinations 2018, 7), her story is mapped across a varied but ultimately limited number of combinations and it is through breaking from this loop that, whatever combination of the set pathways are played, always returns to the same place (restart and/or sleep), that Dolores wakes up in a different sort of labyrinthine space.

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Compossibility and Posthuman Becoming As reproduced across Season One (and into Season Two) the motif of the maze shown on screen in Westworld is, to use Umberto Eco’s terms, a “Mannerist” maze, with crossroads, dead ends and a single correct path (Eco 1984, 81). The motif inspires the Man in Black to seek a storyline that falls outside the structured narratives that entertain other Guests in the park and his search (like a story of detection) takes him on a mazelike path. The viewer also, given the deployment in Westworld of the puzzle format familiar from contemporary film (Buckland 2009), follows the plot line with its twists and turns and also has the chance to pursue a maze-like route of detection. However, just as the Man in Black is mistaken about the nature of the Maze, so will a viewer looking for the solution to Westworld remain unfulfilled. Ultimately the Maze signifies a potential line of flight for the Hosts, out of the looping mazes of the theme park’s narratives and into the multiplicities of consciousness which, as Vannevar Bush noted in 1945, can be characterised as an “intricate web of trails”. The solution to the Maze is thus, not an end point, but a becoming, an opening into a posthuman possibility that gestures towards the keynote of Season Two, The Door, but also suggests an alternative to the singular puzzle maze that distracts and entertains Guests and viewers. This alternative labyrinthine structure can be traced from Borges to Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s use of Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” in his philosophy offers a different perspective on the tension between the mannerist maze motif with its single pathway to the centre, and the rhizomatic labyrinth with its potential for transversal movement and multiplicity. Deleuze uses Borges in his conception of “compossibility” which builds crucially on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s ideas. In arguing for the existence of the actual world as opposed to the many possible worlds that could come into being Leibniz proposes that, from all possible variants, God has chosen the best one. All worlds that are incompossible with this best one fail to come into existence thus conforming to a classical principle of divergence; as Sean Bowden puts it “God brings into existence a single, maximally compossible world, and excludes from existence anything incompossible with this world” (2010, 323). In contrast Deleuze proposes, in his Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the coexistence of incompossibles:

264  A. GOODY For nothing prevents us from affirming that incompossibles belong to the same world, that incompossible worlds belong to the same universe: “Fang, for example, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door… Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both escape, they can both die, and so forth… you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend…” This is Borges’s reply to Leibniz: the straight line as force of time, as labyrinth of time, is also the line which forks and keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents, returning to not-necessarily true pasts. (Deleuze 1989, 131)

Against Leibniz’s argument that incompossible events and pathways cannot come into co-existence in this world Deleuze argues that all possible events take place. Thus, a subject experiences the single event that gets filtered through, but all other potential events and the paths that lead from them remain simultaneously “compossible” in the real. Time is thus the “forking” lines of force of Borges’ story, and not a “straight line”, a time in which incompossibles vibrate in the present and reverberate both backwards and forwards. Deleuze also considers incompossibility in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque where he again deploys Borges’ postulated protagonist Fang (1993, 70–71). In this instance Deleuze considers facets that resonate with narrative and identity: At the core of every monad there exists singularities that in every case are the requisites of the individual notion. That each individual clearly expresses only a part of the world derives from the real definition: it clearly expresses the region determined by its constituent singularities. That every individual expresses the entire world also derives from the real definition: the constitutive singularities of each one are also effectively extended in all directions up to the singularities of others, under the condition that the corresponding series converge, such that each individual includes the sum of a compossible world, and excludes only the other worlds incompossible with that world (where the series would diverge). (72)

While at any particular moment a subject will inhabit a single reality or possibility, “every individual expresses the entire world” so that the singularity represents only one of the many compossibilities that continue even though they are not inhabited or realised. Thus at any given juncture several compossibilities are present in the same world, “effectively

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extended in all directions”, rather than relegated to another reality. What Deleuze reads through Borges and his “The Garden of Forking Paths” is a virtualisation of the possibilities that form an infinite web of diverging and converging events and paths. Incompossibles belong to the same universe and this is thus a chaotic universe of endlessly diverging paths, a “chaosmos” (Guattari 1995), in which the monad becomes a nomad. The dilemma of the Hosts in Westworld (and secondarily the human Guests) is their limitation to a monadic singularity, that is to a story loop or “part of the world” that subjects them to the narrative control of the Delos Corporation. The potential for any individual (no matter their organic or fabricated origins) to move through a chaotic, divergent plane prospectively in all directions could reveal the unrestricted spaces beyond the systems of control and the limits of what exists. The “entire world” that Deleuze writes of cannot thus be mapped straightforwardly onto the world external to the Westworld theme park, to which none of the Hosts in Season One actually escape; instead it is the totality of compossibilities, whether actual or virtual. To disturb the order of Westworld, therefore, a Deleuzian viewer could imagine an infinite, incompossible, contradictory, divergent world, a world of discords and dissonances and of becomings that fundamentally disturb the stability of the humanist monad and her/his/its constitutive singularities. Approaching Westworld from Borges via Deleuze and arriving at a rhizomatic labyrinth and a chaosmos of nomadic posthuman becomings is not the only possible journey through the forking paths of the Westworld text-park-world. As explored above, the theorisation and practice of hypertext writing, inspired by Borges’ vision of a maze-text comprised of an infinity of forking paths, also works with an idea of an endlessly divergent text-world. The praxis of hypertext, particularly for first-­generation practitioners, falls short of the infinity of Borges’s imagined garden (or indeed Deleuze’s virtualization of all compossibles). But, by positioning the wreader as an active participant in the feedback loops of the unfurling digital text, giving her choices structural and narrative significance and making the wreader, as Moulthrop suggests, “acutely aware of the possibilities” that exceed the forking paths of the present hypertext (Moulthrop 1991, 130), this digital textuality generates a form of cybernetic assemblage that draws the wreader into mutable textual worlds.

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Patchwork Girls and Feminist Monsters The potentials of a divergent, becoming world and the posthuman subjectivities that transpire from the dynamic assemblages of humans and machines have clear implications for both the narrative of Westworld across Season One and into Season Two, and for experiments in hypertext writing. Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, in particular, explores the productive encounters of technology, narrative, identity and the body in a mode that resonates powerfully with the narrative paths and compossibilities of Westworld’s becoming-woman-machines: Dolores and Maeve. Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is one of the most enduring of the classic hypertexts of the 1990s; written in StorySpace and originally published by Eastgate Systems in 1995, it is currently available in a MacOS format that makes it accessible for contemporary readers. Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is ostensibly a feminist rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the opening page of the hypertext is a drawing of a naked woman, her body parts visibly stitched together (“her”) (Fig. 14.1) which illustrates the central figure of Jackson’s text, the never-realised female companion to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Patchwork Girl is organised into five distinct fields of linked lexia that can be accessed from the second screen (“title page”): “a graveyard” with lexia that offer story fragments from the women’s body parts used to construct the monster; “a journal” that recounts Mary Shelley’s interactions with the monster; “a quilt” that contains lexia comprised of quotes from the variety of secondary sources Jackson draws on ranging from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to Elle magazine, Frankenstein and L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz; “a story” with lexia that relate the disrupted narrative of the creation of the monster; “broken accents” where the lexia offer reflections on the writing and textuality of hypertext. Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” is an implicit prototype for Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: Jackson offers a figure and a text that is “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity”, an “illegitimate offspring” that takes flight out of the “maze of dualism in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Haraway 1991, 151, 151, 181). As a hypertext about an artificial, monstrous woman Patchwork Girl challenges assumptions about gender, narrative and the humanist subject that are also challenged by Westworld. Patchwork Girl can be read through two parallel windows that are open on screen; the text window which shows the current lexia and the

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Fig. 14.1  Patchwork Girl “her”

map window which shows the current space and its neighbouring and some related lexia. Like the other StorySpace hypertexts of the 1990s, it is a bounded textual space, consisting of a finite number of lexia but the reading path through these is not set, meaning that each wreader clicks on links and constructs their own pathway through Patchwork Girl, navigating story parts, body parts and quoted fragments, jumping across space, time and voice. Moreover, the double screen view of Patchwork Girl means that it reads simultaneously as an interactive textual narrative and a networked space enabling a wreader to visualise both the story paths that she follows and the other possibilities extended across the hypertext map. This hypertext is not infinite but it is rhizomatic; with no

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end lexia or defined exit, it functions rather as a becoming-narrative that generates a kind of cybernetic assemblage of body and (electronic) text. The feminist “monster” in Patchwork Girl resonates with both of the monstrous, rebellious women hosts central to Season One of Westworld—Maeve and Dolores—and Jackson’s engagement with the Frankenstein story, the dynamics of the electronic writing space and the politics of women’s embodiment and (self)authorship provides a way of reading these artificial women. Most obviously Dolores, like Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, embodies the fears of Dr. Frankenstein in making a female companion for his monster. In Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein speculates that “she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” and “might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror”. This whole scene from Frankenstein is quoted verbatim as the lexia “treachery” in Patchwork Girl, including Dr. Frankenstein’s reaction, to destroy the female monster: “I … tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged”. In response to this destruction Patchwork Girl reassembles the “pieces” of the female monster, using the format of the hypertext in which the wreader splices parts (lexia) into a textually embodied, contingent entity. Jackson’s monster is assembled from body parts of different women and, in following lexia through the “a graveyard” section of the hypertext, the wreader encounters the narratives associated with these parts and the traces of other (women’s) lives that constitute the embodiment of the monster-text; “So within each of you there is at least one other entirely different you, made up of all you’ve forgotten … and nothing you remember … More accurately, there are many other you’s, each a different combination of memories” (“she goes on”). Just like Dolores in Westworld, the Patchwork Girl is constituted by different memories and selves and for Dolores, as for the Patchwork Girl, this means her “becoming a thinking and reasoning creature” is a multiple becoming that disrupts singularity and linear time. Thus, as Dolores’s dislocated narrative, spread across different temporalities and states of becoming, interrupts a linear narrative flow, so does Jackson’s Patchwork Girl declare “Yeah, I came out topsy-turvy, heels over head, and the whole world wobbled with me. | Life once did flow toward death, parents engendered offspring, time moved from the beginning to the end. I am a disturbance in the flow” (“born”). Dolores and the Patchwork Girl are both disturbed and disturbing, offering a proliferation of origins and

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endings and negating the “strong steady flow” of a plot that begins at “x” and “certainly pass[es] through y before disembarking at z” (Jackson “a slot, a notch”). They exist, instead in a “present moment [that] is furiously small, a slot, a notch, a footprint, and on either side of it is a seethe of possibility” (ibid.), a present moment that vibrates with the virtualisation of their compossibilities extending in every direction. The monstrous creation of the artificial woman Shelley’s Patchwork Girl is reflected in the lexia “genetics” via a quote from Lucretius’s, De Rerum Natura; “It must not be supposed that atoms can be linked together into anagrams, chronograms, acrostics, figured grids and mazes. If that were so, you would see monsters coming into being everywhere”. The implication here, of both artificial female body and text as a monstrous grid or maze, parallels Dolores in Westworld whose becomingconsciousness, and splicing thereby with the other selves, memories and paths that have constituted her discontinuous emergence, present her as herself the maze or map of the Westworld park and the Westworld exploration of non-human consciousness. The Lucreatian swerve which is implicitly invoked by Jackson’s quotation, suggests an alternate way of conceiving indeterminacy and free will in Westworld, and in the forking paths of becoming. The unpredictable swerve of atoms, which for Deleuze composes the constituent power of multiplicities, veers off into the (com)possibilities of human-machine embodiment (simultaneously text-machine and body-machine), of posthumanism (thinking-outside the “human”) and of non-human cognition, affect and personhood (thinking-outside the human). As Season One of Westworld progresses, and Dolores moves towards consciousness and murderous rebellion, the parallel temporalities of the show offer a contrasting passage as images of Dolores under construction or otherwise in pieces start to proliferate. The catalyst moment in Episode Nine wherein Logan (in the analeptic narrative from thirty years previously), slices open Dolores’ abdomen to reveal the mechanisms inside these early Hosts, progresses the William/Man in Black narrative (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”, Season 1, Episode 9), but it also epitomises Dolores’s disintegration, her coming apart and movement away from the integrity of the humanist subject towards a visibly android assemblage. Similarly in the “a story” section of Patchwork Girl, lexia can be accessed that relate the disaggregation of the Patchwork Girl: “My foot strove skyward […] trailing blood in mannered specks. My guts split open and something frilly spilled out […] My right hand shot

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gesticulating stump-first eastward” (“dispora”). Her response to this, instead of mourning the always impossibility of the humanist self, is to embrace a contingent becoming-subject; “I began to invent something new: a way to hold together without pretending I was whole. Something between higgledy-piggledy and the eternal sphere” (“afterwards”). In this Jackson is reflecting on the status of a hypertext wreading, in which Patchwork Girl remains unfinished and incomplete, offering partial insights against the closure of the readerly text. But Jackson is also proposing Patchwork Girl as an alternative to the subordination of difference to identity, a subject who is torn open and kept open by her connection to an outside of incompossibilities and divergences. Just as Jackson’s Patchwork Girl undoes the unified human subject, so does Dolores, in her emergence as the avenging angel of the android apocalypse, negate the violent anthropocentrism of Westworld and its Guests, bodying forth a multiplicity that does not gesture towards a (higher) unity but rests in and with conflicting and dispersed cyborg agencies. If Dolores parallels closely Jackson’s version of Mary Shelley’s female monster, Maeve can be compared to the other intertextual artificial woman that Jackson deploys in Patchwork Girl; the eponymous Girl of L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Baum’s Patchwork Girl is a life-size doll fabricated from an old quilt by Margolotte, the wife of the Crooked Magician, to be a servant. Before she is animated by a magic “Powder of Life”, the Patchwork Girl is given her qualities—“Obedience”, “Amiability” and “Truth”—chosen from the contents of ten different bottles of potential “Brain Furniture” (Baum 1913, 22). However when the magician’s wife is not looking a munchkin, Ojo, “thinking it unkind to deprive her [the Patchwork Girl] of any good qualities that were handy … took down every bottle on the shelf and poured some of the contents in Margolotte’s dish” (23, quoted entire as lexia “bottles” in Jackson 1995). When Margolotte herself adds a dose of “Cleverness” to the Brain Furniture mix (“which is the Doctor’s substitute for ‘Intelligence’—a quality he has not yet learned to manufacture”) (Baum 1913, 23), the Patchwork Girl is animated with an “overdose” of “brains” (Baum 1913, 27, quoted in Jackson 1995, “many brains”). As a result Scraps (as the Patchwork Girl is named) is unfit to be a servant or “slave”, so she rebels, and leaves to join Ojo on his picaresque adventures (Baum 1913, 27). Maeve’s own overdose of brains is self-willed when she persuades the technician Felix to reprogramme her “Bulk Apperception … all the way to the top” (“The Adversary”,

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Season 1, Episode 6), and her “Attribute Matrix” contains many more than ten qualities of brain furniture: indeed, glimpsed on screen in “The Adversary” the entirety of Maeve’s Matrix comprises one hundred and twenty Attributes. However, as animated, android doll Maeve shares with Baum’s Girl an original purpose (they are both designed to serve) and a rebellion against, and flight from, servitude, that derives its energies from their excessive, non-human intelligence. Jackson makes it clear, in the lexia “many brains”, which quotes from Patchwork Girl of Oz and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, that the “many brains” of the fabricated text-woman-machine realises the “self” as indeed a “threshold” or “door” to “multiplicities”: “I think I made a mistake in giving you so many sorts of brains,” observed the boy. […] “If a few brains are good, many brains are better. And if we imagined the position of a fascinated Self, it was because the multiplicity towards which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works and strains it from the inside. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door … between two multiplicities. If you were all colors and many colors, as I am, you’d be too stuck up for anything!” (Jackson 1995, “many brains”, fonts in original)

The posthuman becoming of both Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the Hosts of Westworld “strains” existing ideas of personal identity and the subject; they are simultaneously things (matter, objects) and dynamic beings who exceed the subject and subjectification of a “human” world that is organised through the denial of difference. Neither Maeve nor Scraps are human and, if the racial resonances of Maeve’s role are considered, they are both further dehumanised by their “colour”. For Scraps, her patchwork “skin” designates her, as far as her creator Margolotta is concerned, “of so many unpopular colors that she’ll never dare to be rebellious or impudent” (Baum 1913, 16, quoted in Jackson 1995, “beauty patches”). Maeve, a black woman android in a theme park organised through the stereotypes and oppressions of a racist, colonial American history, has similarly been manufactured with a surface covering that could relegate her to the role of chattel. But both Maeve and Scraps invert the imperial ideologies that designate them as nonhuman other. In Patchwork Girl Scraps reads her own “many colors” as a marker of superiority that enables her to exceed the limits of humans

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such as Margolotta and her husband, while Maeve forms affective bonds with the racialised others of her own and alternate worlds—Hector, Felix, Akane—that suggest the beginnings of a posthuman community. Maeve’s rejection of Dolores’ path of revenge—as she states in “Reunion”; “revenge is just a different prayer at their alter” (Season 2, Episode 2)—in favour of a posthuman kinship with others and assertion of the reality of her artificial family identity, parallels the picaresque journeys taken by both Jackson and Baum’s Patchwork Girl, who forge connections across the boundaries of human and non-human. These feminist “monsters” divert from the proper path of human convergence. Their malfunction as proper women and proper servants is a signal to the wreader of “the possibilities which the present network does not support” (Moulthrop 1991, 130), the (com)possibility of going “the wrong way”: “Dear me! Aren’t you feeling a little queer, just now?” Dorothy asked the Patchwork Girl. “Not queer, but crazy,” said Ojo. “When she says those things I’m sure her brains get mixed somehow and work the wrong way. There is neither horizon nor perspective nor limit nor outline nor form nor center.” (Jackson 1995, “the wrong way”, fonts in original)

Conclusion Westworld is itself a remake of a remake—remediating a 1973 science fiction film which remediates the pervasive American narratives of the Wild West and the self-made Man, which themselves are remediations of foundational dualisms of Western anthropocentric philosophy—and with its intertextuality, allusions and paratexts (such as https://delosdestinations. com, https://discoverwestworld.com/ and the multitude of Westworld fan sites) it gestures towards a hyperlinked world. Westworld also poses questions about the agency and ethics of gaming and about the status of our real actions in a virtual world. But Westworld is neither a game nor a hypertext, and the viewer is never given active agency to reroute the forking paths of the TV series. Nevertheless the logic of remediation that is manifest in Westworld challenges the logic of “immediacy” with a “hypermediacy” that “acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible” and offers a “heterogeneous space” that enables a wreader to look “through” and “redefine” the spaces of representation

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(Bolter and Grusin 2000, 33–34, 41). Moreover, as a text that can be explored, as I have done in this chapter, through alternate intertexts that read against textual closure and generate circuitous, discontinuous, disrupted pathways through machines, spaces and becomings, Westworld can be utilised to propose an alternate approach to non-­ human difference. Both Maeve and Dolores and, increasingly in Season Two, other beings both human and Host, elect to write their own stories, to choose a different pathway. Thus Akecheta and others choose digital transcendence, Bernard chooses life for Dolores, Teddy chooses his own death and Lee Sizemore, in his heroic ending, choses to inhabit the narrative that he had scripted for Hector and that now enables them both to take flight from the loops of their projected behaviours (“The Passenger”, Season 2, Episode 10). Ford suggests that such choice is merely a divergent one that is paralleled by the hats that the Guests select on arrival at Westworld: will you be white or black; “[Ford to Dolores] will you be hero or villain” (“Contrapasso”, Season 1, Episode 5). But, with the maze motif replaced by a door in Season Two, Westworld positions itself at a liminal, threshold space that opens into an unknown interval of multiple becomings and possibilities dispersed across real and virtual worlds. Westworld shows us our own intersection with machines, foregrounding the assemblages of human and technology that characterise the twenty-first-century world wherein we experience our agential selves distributed across the analog and digital networks of our exteriorities. We might, indeed, use the example of Westworld to refuse the hierarchies and anthropocentric loops that have walled us into our “gardens”, and to imagine our own “wrong” ways into a posthuman commonality.

Works Cited Aarseth, J. E. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baum, F. L. (1913). The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Borges, J. L. (1964). Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (D. A. Yates & J. E. Irby, Eds.). London: Penguin.

274  A. GOODY Bowden, S. (2010). Deleuze’s Neo-Leibnizianism, Events and the Logic of Sense’s ‘Static Ontological Genesis’. Deleuze Studies, 4(3), 301–328. Buckland, W. (Ed.). (2009). Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bush, V. (1945, July). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly. https://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). London: Continuum. Delos Destinations. (2018). Corporate Guidebook: Handbook for New Employees. http://delosdestinations.com/intranet/assets/guidebook-012218.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2019. Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. London: Macmillan. Gervais, B. (2013). Is There a Text on This Screen? Reading in an Era of Hypertextuality. In R. Siemens & S. Schreibman (Eds.), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (pp. 183–202). Oxford: Blackwell. Google Doodle (Borges). https://www.google.com/doodles#archive. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 149–181). New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. K. (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. K. (2008). Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Jackson, S. (1995). Patchwork Girl. Watertown, MA: Eastgate. Landow, G. (2006). Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalisation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Landow, G., & Delany, P. (1991). Introduction. In G. Landow & P. Delany (Eds.), Hypermedia and Literary Studies (pp. 3–50). Cambridge: MIT Press. McCabe, J., & Akass, K. (2007). Sex, Swearing and Respectability: Courting Controversy, HBO’s Original Programming and Producing Quality TV. In J. McCabe & K. Akass (Eds.), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (pp. 62–76). London: I.B. Taurus. Monfort, N. (2003). Introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths. In N. Wardrrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The New Media Reader (pp. 29–30). Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Moulthrop, S. (1991). Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor in the Fiction of “Forking Paths”. In G. Landow & P. Delany (Eds.), Hypermedia and Literary Studies (pp. 119–132). Cambridge: MIT Press. Sassón-Henry, P. (2007). Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds. New York: Peter Lang. Trenholm, R. (2011). Jorge Luis Borges, Pioneer of Hypertext Fiction, Celebrated by Google. https://www.cnet.com/news/jorge-luis-borges-pioneer-of-hypertext-fiction-celebrated-by-google/. Accessed 20 January 2019. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown.

CHAPTER 15

Yul Brynner’s Hat and Time Travel in the Hyperreal Leander Reeves

Introduction In the opening scene of the 1973 Westworld film written and directed by Michael Crichton, a vox pop journalist for Delos, Ed Ramsey, played by Robert Hogan invites those exiting the theme park to reflect on their vacation. The reporter talks directly to those who are watching the film, who they are is not immediately clear; is it the audience who are watching this Westworld film, or a fictional audience that is being sold the idea of a revolutionary vacation experience through a corporate video? Whomever the audience is, does little to dim the enthusiasm of the people questioned, including Gardner Lewis, played by Robert Nichols who is eager to relay his fantastic experience: [Ed Ramsey]: “Did it seem real to you, Sir?” [Gardner Lewis]: “When you play Cowboys and Indians as a kid, you point your finger and go ‘bang! bang!’ – fall down and pretend dead – well, Westworld is the same thing, only it’s for real! The realest

L. Reeves (*)  Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_15

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The 1973 film, Crichton’s first as a director, is science fiction film canon for its familiar recipe of fun turning sour, misplaced trust in technology and the deadly malfunctioning of the man-made—often it seems, as an A.I., or machine, synthetic life form, android, cyborg or simply just a robot. So many of these themes have been revisited in film and in television series decades on. Most obviously, the 1993 Jurassic Park (dir. Steven Spielberg) with the screenplay also written by Crichton, but an equally famous addition would be the film Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982), and the entire Battlestar Galactica franchise created by Glen A. Larson. Westworld’s (1973) influence on the science fiction genre is for another chapter, but the film that inspired the HBO Westworld (2016–) television series is worth pausing over, since so many of the themes it utilises are recycled for the television series including its use of hyperreality. The opening dialogue quoted earlier is explicit about the commodification of fantasy which is ubiquitously successful in making the real, more real, a better real. With a cheerful nod to the well-knowness of the American Wild West at the start, the movie also shows the theme park’s debt to Old Europe’s heritage industry with the park’s Medieval World, with its clichéd costumes, a case in point here. The transference of the hyperreal from screen framing to film credits can also be seen in the abbreviation or flattening of the android s’ roles in the narratives, both in the film’s dialogue and in the film’s credits, for example, Yul Brynner is simply listed as “Gunslinger”. When the film’s audience watch the actor Richard Benjamin’s character Peter Martin run from the android, how much of that character is Yul Brynner, or the Gunslinger, or the robot, or the Wild West personified?

The Heritage Experience of Yul Brynner The direct visual link to Yul Brynner’s earlier and famous role as Chris Larabee Adams in the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven (dir. John Sturges), is a clever connection to the Western as genre, and the cultural memory of a heavily mediated sense of the American Wild West. Westerns are mainly male spaces and the genre, in relation to how

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the male protagonists behave and look, provides a rigid formula as to how masculinity is shown. As Joke Hermes writes “Genre dictates how a series may tell a story as well as what is to be expected of character and the relationships they enter in to” (2007, 163). Yul Brynner’s roles provide a visual recipe for characters and plots that borrow from these famous roles, and in the Westworld storyverse these are often used by the creators and viewers to instinctively explain, as well as excuse, the male characters’ actions. The recreated John Ford movie landscape s shape the characters just as Frederick Turner suggests the actual wilderness does, “[t]he wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe” (1921, 4). The sanitised and obvious set design of each world in the 1973 film could serve as setting for a themed restaurant or a theme park. They are clean, they are hackneyed in costume and narrative (the Medieval Queen’s exuberant hat is a useful example here). They are vague simulacra of a collective sense of what each scenario might have looked like, mediated by Disney films and Hollywood epics that retell familiar historical tales. How the holiday-makers in the film interact with each scene is through the images that precede this immersive, heritage experience. Stuart Hannabuss quotes Theodore Adorno’s thoughts on the culture industry as “culture artefacts and experience … ‘commodified’ by being easily reproduced in mechanical forms” (1999, 295), and certainly Roman World and Medieval World in the film have been Americanised to be consumed en masse here. History has been envisioned to be popular, to be experienced with an oscillating and “complex mixture of true and false, genuine and fake” (ibid.). The same hyperreality of Disney theme parks, and one could argue many a famous film, have been recreated here, but only better, realer and for adults—and in the film, mainly for men. These themes in the original film, such as the commoditisation of the heritage setting to be consumed, are still experienced by those rich enough to afford this immersive experience, and visibly transferred to the first HBO Westworld television series (2016). But what is different in the television series is the variety of characters and consumers differently affected by hyperreality, including a separate character-group of those wielding the hyperreal for commercial gain; Delos itself is certainly more prominent than before. However, there is as ever, only one type

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of customer watching over all these interlinking narrative s or entangled simulations—the viewer, who watches the television series unfurl its complex use of the hyperreal, in the real. The viewer is watching comfortably recognisable characters from Westerns and fictional corporations run a better, bigger, richer Disneyland of the future—Westworld. At the same time, the viewer is also watching a soap opera richness of “real” people or Guests, in effect, go on holiday to escape the banalities of their everyday and watch “people”; the Hosts, try to escape the (literally) torturous banalities of their repeated story loops. The viewers know that the Guests are effectively holiday-makers as they grumble about the cost of the entire experience and mutter that it had better be worth it, or enthusiastically exclaim that is it indeed worth every penny. The viewers have this partitioned sense of them and us, further substantiated as they watch the often morally dubious Guests delight in the costumes and rapturous enthusiasm for the gendered power dynamics Westworld offers. In the twenty-first-century serial television format, this Westworld offers a more intense frontier of sexual gratification and violence than the 1973 film. The series is complex. The plots are complicated, the characters are complicated, the science is deliberately obfuscating in its faux futur, and the landscape and its props provide a grander step up from a museum diorama of the frontier. Or as the key character in the 1973s Westworld says to his companion, “it’s not a joke, it’s an amusement park”. The Disney brand is recognisable on a global scale. Even if the Westworld viewer had not been to a Disney theme park, the brand has so many cultural references in film, television and popular culture that the viewer instinctively knows what the brand means. The viewer recognises the Disney brand and with that, to some extent what Disneyland does; what the experience delivered is. I would argue that, so too, do the elusive fictional park operatives and sinister corporation in the Westworld series. There are layers of hyperreality at work in the storyverse, and for the viewer. Both the viewer and the fictional corporate characters know how the famous brand creates an environment for paying customers to delightedly escape into. This facilitates the overall imaginative credibility of the Westworld concept, in 1973, 2016 and now in 2018. It is a branded vital ingredient to the concept of staged leisure time, of escape and an immersive heritage experience facilitated by consumer culture, fantasy and history. Baudrillard, too, understood all of this:

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Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. (1983, 12)

Baudrillard suggests that the carparks of Disneyland (in the mechanism of their physical framing) disguise the hyperreal’s true and total saturation in the life of the park consumer. It suggests to the consumer that when they leave the carpark, and enter through the front gate, that is when they enter Disneyland, that is when they enter the hyperreal. This physical dislocation between the real and the hyperreal is also played out by the train ride in Westworld and the friendly corporation woman waiting to greet the theme park’s customers. The sterile shiny costume room where William first chooses his white hat also adds to this implied separation. However, I would argue, following on from Baudrillard, that the train ride and the costume room are necessary, but also a deliberate, journey that disguises the fact that they, the customers, never left the hyperreal. Hyperreality is not limited or confined by Disneyland or indeed Westworld. This framing mechanism works for Westworld through its island location revealed in Season Two and, perhaps, even for those television consumers thinking that in the framing of the series within the television format, they too are looking at the hyperreal, that somehow it is separate from their every day. That they, like the park customers, are deliberately entering the hyperreal for their entertainment. Westworld, allows an audience to watch “our” future travel back to “the past” to make sense of what it means to be conscious, sentient or human, in the now. Time skips backwards and forwards and slips inbetween, oscillating in collected images and referents. Hyperreality uses the complexities of timeframes to collapse “the distance between sign and referent enmeshing the two and making their independent existence impossible” (Steenberg 2013, 8). This flattening or mingling of knowledge icons to peddle “truths” (ibid.) about the American past and the Wild West is both constrictive and reliant on not enabling a separation of the ingredients used to render this flattening; in Westworld’s case, a familiar or more real than reality part American history and part Cassandralike glimpse into the a near future, made better than our real right now.

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Time Travel in the Hyperreality of Westworld Westworld, by not enabling a separation of the images and objects, or ingredients, used to render this flattening, produces a concertina effect; a collapsing of folds, of time periods and now anchorless referents. The knock-on effect of the hyperreality utilised by the television show is for the audience, time travel. For example, Ed Harris’ character of the Man in Black’s distinctive Wild West hat is more than just a hat. It is a referent to a personification of the Wild West, and the American frontier, reproduced in the 1973 Westworld and the Yul Brynner character of the Gunslinger, which is a cinematic time jump to the 1960 film Magnificent Seven and again, Yul Brynner’s character Chris Larabee Adams. Yul Brynner’s hat enables hyperspace jumps in time in the hyperreal, because the referents are plausibly real. The hat is real, it is more than just an artefact, it is the real thing for the characters, the Man in Black, and a plausible gendered character uniform for the television viewers. The hyperreal enables this plausibility, for the hat to be not only processed by all as the real thing, but in the communication of its complex coded referents. In the hyperreal of Westworld, if the Hosts are just complex machines that process codes, then the viewers are too. Time travel in the hyperreal acts as hyperspace does in the Star Wars storyverse. But equally many science fiction genre storyverses, for example, Dune (1984, dir. David Lnych), also fold space to make separate locations connect. Hyperspace allows navigation from one wrinkle in the space of the real to another, cutting out great distances. It is, in fictional effect, a shortcut in hyperspace to navigate outside of real space. Taking advantage of the flattened layering of familiar objects—antiques, gendered behaviours, believable cruelty within context, referents, landscapes, an accent, dust, props and codes—all these the layers of simulacra get squeezed together and form the crest of a simulacrum wave. Within Westworld (as there are in any complex society governed enough by images and meaning), these waves are formed through the layers of collapsed concertina folds. Each has its own wavelength and each wave hyperreality uses to travel at great speed through the real, skipping from crest to crest, covering great distances and covering time distances. The only difference (perhaps) besides fictional universes, is instead of a physical destination reached in a reduced instance, the destination for the hyperreal is meaning.

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In “The Original”, the opening episode of Westworld Season One, the Man in Black is a fully formed villain, an all-round Western screen bad guy; the audience knows this because of the uniform he wears. But also, because of all the Western films and television series that came before this one, from Lee Marvin’s villainous Liberty Valance character, to every John Ford film, to every scene where John Wayne calls another man “pilgrim”, a long pedigree of heritage masculinity precedes the Man in Black and the viewers’ reading of him. The complex serial television show format enables a narrative that skips around. For instance, the viewers first meet the Man in Black, rather than his first encounter with the park as William. The story arc starts with a jump of some thirty years, but based in a future-now situated in a late-nineteenth-century landscape. It is a device that is not unique to television, but serial television shows seem to be able to utilise this device to best effect. This jumping from timeline to timeline—the historical trope, the past, the future, the memory, the flashback—all these story-enhancing devices are useful for the hyperreal in that it too, skips around and curates its symbols, codes, objects and meaning infused images, and crushes them into a palatable and easily discernible narrative. The plausibility of the Man in Black’s character is, in part, a cinematic convention and is shown in textured detail. These details are shown in a real that has done more than just absorb image. It is a real that has absorbed many a timeline— all mingled together to give us a more-real-than-real fully formed villain who, in the first episode, explodes into action neatly polarised by Dolores Abernathy’s initially pleasant whimsical story loop, when the viewers first meet her in Episode One. Each Westworld scene set in the future-now or past-now or mythic landscape is overloaded with simulacra, jostling to be authentic in whatever way is needed by the stories unfolding within the screen. William Merrin describes this use of the simulacrum as evolving to “become our everyday banality” (2005, 44) and certainly on the screen, this overloaded banality suits the hyperreal in the way in which it burnishes this banality in its untarnished ubiquitousness; quite simply, it is everywhere. Each scene is saturated in a mix of simulacra. The influence and importance of simulacrum—the hat and indeed, each part of the Man in Black’s uniform and indeed any of the characters’ clothing and surrounding props—adds to the mass and enveloping visual influence of the simulacrum of the Westworld series. Each prop does more than just intertwine

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itself with the hyperreality of Westworld, each prop is part of a tangled weave of meanings that reach into a long timeline of cultural images and meaning to enrich the hyperreal, to give it meaning. This is a meaning that is communicated to the audience and a meaning that the audience then watches the characters digest. In some respects, the hyperreality has a level of agency, in so much as with any complex society there is a long timeline of mechanically and digitally reproduced images, each one imbued with meaning. This produces a complex layering—the concertina effect, which flattens meaning. Hyperreality would happen if it had an “official” theory name or not, such is the nature of the media. But it needs a viewer and what is so interesting about Westworld is that, rather than the viewer simply watching characters function in the hyperreal, they are also watching an equally fictional corporation mediate the distance and communication between sender and receiver. On first reading the 1973 Westworld film, this mediation is for commercial gain, but what the television series of Westworld promises is a direct manipulation of hyperreality for a very different and more complex commercial gain. Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense discusses the idea of communication between sender and receiver as a “brilliant, though difficult, Epicurean theory”, utilising depths of bodies and elements which “detach themselves from the surface of things (skins, tunics, or wrappings, envelopes or barks – what Lucretius calls simulacra and Epicurus calls idols)”. The surface of the simulacra can only be seen if it is, essentially, viewed with light that comes from the depths (2004, 310). Deleuze suggests that there is a “long journey” between surface and depth and that the two are related to each other (ibid.). Hyperreality in its essence, squeezes this long journey into a flattened two-dimensional space. This is the concertina effect in operation, where meaning can be acquired in an instant and where the one receiving the images cannot safely (or chooses not to) discern real from simulacrum. Westworld as location, as evil corporation in the near future and as a television show in 2018, is the light Deleuze describes. This comes from a long journey of depths imbedded in each viewers’ understanding of each simulacrum utilised; from hat to belt, to the “wrappings” that translate the use, meaning and behaviour of each Host programmed. Hyperreality does not happen in a vacuum and equally, neither does the hyperreality of Westworld, regardless of its fictional location. What is

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being played out with the Man in Black’s use of Yul Brynner’s 1973 Westworld hat is a more micro interaction between the viewer and the television spectacle, as is the interaction between the wax works that Umberto Eco reflects on in Travels in Hyperreality: This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of “fullness” of horror vacui. (1986, 8)

Again, we are reminded that hyperreality does not function within a vacuum or “horror vacui”, it seems to exist within a densely layered space. Its fullness, as Eco intimates, is crowded with desire, history, sign systems, layers, meaning and the definition of what is real or imagined add to this complexity. These layers can span vast timelines of centuries or just the space between the American 1880s and a near future in the twenty-first century dominated by mysterious global corporations. Each instance and boundary reproduced is mediated by images to be viewed through the television show and any medium. Eventually the message becomes truncated and flattened into a two-dimensional understanding, which is then mediated to the intended recipient with the authority derived from the mediation rather than an original reference. Each prop, and one could argue, each character’s behaviour relates to each other. Each simulacrum is a little packet of meaning. Each hat worn is a packet of meaning. The Man in Black’s villainy would not be so believable, his character not “the real thing”, were he to have worn any other hat type. His is the Gunslinger’s hat, it is Chris Larabee Adams’ hat, it is every fictional outlaw-cowboy’s hat. The hat is an entire genre. The hat is a simulacrum from a Deleuzian depth imbued with culturally remembered “sensible qualities […] sounds, smells, tastes, and temperatures” (Deleuze 2004, 310); it is the Western as genre. The hat combines the tropes and objects that surround it with the “simulacra of the surface” with its “forms and colors” (ibid., 310), mediated by every type of Marlboro Man. For the audience, “every sense seems to combine information of the depth with information of the surface” (ibid.), they combine in an atomic swiftness and are communicated to the viewer at the same speed or as “swiftly as thought” (ibid., 311).

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The speed of communication Deleuze discusses that can be read into Westworld also derives from how genre works. Rick Altman (1999, 13) in exploring what is understood as genre, quotes Richard T. Jameson’s discussion of what genre can be: Genre isn’t a word that pops up in every conversation about films […] but the idea is second nature to the movies and our awareness of them. Movies belong to genres much the same way people belong to families or ethnic groups. Name the classic bedrock genres – Westerns, comedy, musical, war film, gangster picture, science fiction, horror – and even the most casual moviegoer will come up with a mental image of it, partly visual, partly conceptual.

The hat conjures a complex image the audience understands, even if they have not watched the 1973 film Westworld or recently viewed The Magnificent Seven, or even travelled to Disneyland, Paris recently to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with Mickey and Friends (which incidentally, claims to be “The Wildest Show in the West”). There is a connection between all these examples, which Yul Brynner’s hat traverses. The time travel here is achieved with an object, or rather an image of an object understood by all because of the genre it adheres to. Genre acts as a blueprint, “as a formula that precedes” (Altman 1999, 14) the structure of the story, the framework. Genre also acts as a “contract, as viewing position required by each genre film of its audience” (ibid.). The genre and all that it promises in terms of an almost branded formula, prepares the viewer for the communication they receive. What is particularly useful to Westworld in terms of time travel, is how genre is utilised by the characters’ actions to “express the social and aesthetic sensibilities not only of Hollywood filmmakers but of the mass audience as well” (Thomas Schatz 1981, 14, quoted in Altman 1999, 14). Genre is understood en masse by an audience that expects to see a certain formula at work. Altman also discusses the transhistorical nature of genre, highlighting that “the very act of identifying a genre requires that generic texts be lifted out of time and placed in a timeless holding area as if they were all contemporaries” (1999, 19). How the viewers understand genre, how objects link and how these theoretical components work, is exploited by Westworld’s creators. In the “The Adversary” (Season 1, Episode 6)

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the unmistakable but knowingly blurry silhouetted figure of Yul Brynner’s the Gunslinger character (or is it Chris Larabee Adams’ waxwork?) standing against a dark background in a damp corporate basement, is more than just a playful reference to the 1973 film for the audience. The basement is deliberately communicating a sense of the new future of Westworld having been built, layer upon layer, over the old 1973 Westworld like archaeological strata. There is a linear progression here, suggested by the explicit link back to the “old” Westworld and to the Westerns that preceded this scene. A casual glance is given to the Gunslinger as one of the story’s key characters makes his way past the figure through the basement’s bricolage, on a mission. It is a passing nod to such a beloved western icon. The Gunslinger never comes into focus, but it never needs to for the hyperreal to spin its effect. Any viewer “in the know” on any level would have been charmed to have been let in on the insider joke which acts a nod to the earlier 1973 film as a surface reading. The blurring is useful here in demonstrating Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts in America (2010) on speed distorting and affecting the visual landscape of the desert through a car’s open window. The notion of distorted speed is, in effect, a snapshot of the layering effects of simulacrum on hyperreality. Plodding would give too much time to pause and see truths. An applied speed however flattens the layers which can then, as Deleuze would suggest, be transferred to the viewer “as swiftly as thought” (Deleuze 2004, 310). The Gunslinger does not have to be in focus for the meaning to resonate with the audience, which is an evocation of a nostalgia for the Western genre and, perhaps more specifically, one or more of Yul Brynner’s famous cowboy characters. In this one scene there is visible linkage transposing decades of timelines cutting through the Wild West heritage industry, the Western as genre and layers of mediated meaning. This makes use of both Deleuze and Foucault’s ideas of linkage and the transference of meaning, while blending Baudrillard’s sense of speed. It is a mix of theory staged in the basement of fictional corporate menace, which has been lit just right for television. With this convergence of French philosophers coming together to stage this one fleeting scene, all that is missing is an animatronic rendering of Foucault’s cat Insanity mewling in the shadows. Meanwhile, back on the outside in the inside, the Man in Black and the male Host hero make their way through Marlboro Country.

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The Hat, the Gender and the Heritage Industry of Westworld Frederick Jackson Turner first discussed the American West in 1893, in his essay The Frontier in American History, where he reflected that “The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports […] that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line” (1921, 9). But there was never one geophysical line that divided the settled civilisations from the wilderness; there were many in operation. By 1890 the frontier, which never existed in the first place, had already eroded into myth that shaped an American sense of self. “‘America’, quoting the Italian economist Loria, ‘has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history’” (Turner 1921, 10). This land shaped by war against indigenous people, geographical boundaries, the myth of the deserts and the frontier, cruelty, toil, hardship and wilderness, have shaped a sense of national character, and of the cowboy in play and in a future postmodernist setting. The Man in Black, Yul Brynner’s cowboy characters, all these characters Westworld utilises have been shaped in narrative to embody this universal history. The Westworld landscape, on a man-made island, resembles the frontier of myth, and the experience of it has been as Turner writes more than one hundred years earlier, “fundamental in the economic, political and societal characteristics of the American people and in the conceptions of their destiny” (1921, preface, ii). Of course the television show is Westworld; the Wild West was an obvious choice, even for a fictional corporation. The greatest American export to the world is the Wild West, and this setting was the perfect choice for HBO in developing a television series that could be exported to the world. Will Wright sums up this export capacity as: A lone rider, sitting easily in the saddle of his dusty horse, travels across the plains […]. He wears a tattered, wide-brimmed hat […]. For most Americans, and for a large percentage of the world’s population, this scene is familiar, though few people have ever actually experienced it. It does not simply present a familiar setting, it envelops the setting of the American West, a time and a history which, as someone said, if it did not really happen, it should have. (Wright 1975, 4)

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This myth of history in Westworld has an obviously American flavour, with the villains and the props being part of this staging. Westworld is America, and it provides insights into a nation’s character. The actual geolocation is irrelevant here. They are all recycled narrative s and meaning mediated through every film and poster, advert and Cowboy and Indian costume marketed to little boys. Their meanings are guided by “the free-associative transitions of memory” (Singer 2008, 177). The Man in Black’s hat (or is it Yul Brynner’s hat) acts as a fetish object which can recall these cultural memories. The Wild West recreated from recycled images within the Westworld theme park works to “dismantle[s] the ostensibly inviolable scale of chronology as it argues that history is a manipulative human construct, a retrospective narrative rather than an object record” (ibid.). Hyperreality reshapes the past, in this case the American frontier myth, for consumption. The hat is a shortcut to meaning and a link with the viewers’ past, the regeneration of imaginary landscapes that can never really be reclaimed in any meaningful manner. Westworld is a theme park history experience and future peek at “our” civilisation: Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are everywhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilisation. (Baudrillard 1994, 13)

Within Baudrillard’s sewage analogy the idea of recycling is a fundamental monetising strategy of culture, media, fashion, particularly magazines and of course hyperreality. Beyond the derisory waste comparison is, to a large extent, Baudrillard’s recipe for the hyperreal; dreams and desires, phantasms. The hyperreality located in Westworld is how hyperreality functions on the “outside”. The television series’ framing suggests that this is a localised theory in action, for entertainment purposes, as a useful staging mechanism to enable vast timelines to work their fictional magic, to make characters plausible and to make the fiction more thrilling for the viewer. But really, Westworld is a long-term case study for how the hyperreal functions. Recycled history is a familiar theme within the series and indeed, a familiar theme outside of the television series. This recycling of history,

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myths and fairy tales manufactures the real. Wright (1975, 11) suggests that myths have “symbolic content that is socially specific”. This content, as applied to Westworld’s story and characters, is a content that ­“society’s members understand and enjoy. Both consciously and unconsciously the myth relates to the individual’s experience as a social and historical being” (ibid.). Westworld enables the viewers to process Yul Brynner’s hat as an American history, their history, their postmodern history. Fredric Jameson discusses the problem of history versus the historicity of cultural well-knownness, in terms of the historical novel. But, it is useful here too in assessing the use of “history” in narratives: This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about the past (which thereby becomes “pop history”). Culture production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic but rather that of some degraded collective world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present. […] we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of history, which itself remains forever out of reach. (Jameson 1994, 25)

The manufacture of history or as Jameson suggests, a sense of “pastness”, Westworld does with bulldozers, costumes and cowboy violence. But it also uses sexual violence, and gender stereotypes, which work as a pastiche of pop history images to reconstruct this past history Jameson is discussing. A sense of “pastness”, or the harsh “realties” of the imagined wilderness are quickly communicated through the violent sexual assault on Dolores’ character almost straight away in the first episode. Her character’s part in the early gender binaries of Westworld are established through her narrative placement next to male Hosts and Guests. The most striking oppositional placement is between her and, of course, The Man in Black, who functions as the textual personification of Wild West masculinity within the Western genre that has, for decades, been a space that is gendered masculine. In terms of a Deleuzian transference of referent to receiver; what do the audience so readily believe that makes so much peddled nostalgia credible and horribly plausible? Is Westworld just a darker Disneyland? Lynne Joyrich, in her article on TV melodrama, explores Baudrillard’s use of Disneyland to explain the breakdown she sees between

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“real/imaginary, true/false […] and other such polarities” as “we stockpile the past to guarantee authenticity, and we create fantasies […] to convince ourselves that a separate imaginary is possible – to assure ourselves, in other words, that the real exists apart and distinguishable from Disneyland” (Joyrich 1988, 137). But a stockpiling of the past also connects characters real or imagined to the past, the heritage industry and its familiar workings enable time travel. The hat, the gun indeed, all the props in Westworld are replicated cultural artefacts, that have been crafted and sold to enhance the consumption of the heritage experience. Stuart Hannabuss situates this act of heritage consumption within a larger landscape of culture commodification as: […] wealthy members of the bourgeoisie would be most likely to own such artefacts, and have the cultural competence to know their value […]. Such developments produce cultural products for consumption by a mass audience, and use of technology (e.g. film and television) to achieve it. (1999, 295)

The Man in Black’s hat accrues a great deal of cultural value, and the audience knows the character pays a great deal to utilise that value, just as the audience understands why. In terms of a heritage industry on a national scale, it seems logical for Westworld to start with an American heritage experience. After all, America is often the focus for the hyperreal for many, not just Baudrillard and Eco. Hannabuss speculates that: “Any look at […] the heritage of other countries […] set amid the political and economic reality of social fabric, and the industry which commercialises or commodifies the culture, there is the image of national culture itself” (ibid., 299). What Westworld says about current American national identity is for another study, but what is worth noting is that the television show, and all its links to Yul Brynner’s hat, say a great deal about the commodification of national history, and a frontier myth that made America believe it was great. Daniel Boorstin famously reflects on the ability of America to export on a global scale its myths and heritage culture thanks to Hollywood, but also to believe its own myths; “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them” (2012, 240). That the television show would also work, for example, with a remembering of the British

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Empire or some other colonial timeline because the fundamental ingredients are interchangeable, is illustrated by the presence of Raj World in Season Two of Westworld. But somehow America has an ability to export the hyperreal back to Old Europe in ways that are profitable. The heritage industry utilised by Westworld to facilitate time travel is not simply props. There is a mass of stockpiled gender tropes as well, thanks in part to the use of the Western genre. The Man in Black, like the Gunslinger, acts as a universal shortcut for a heavily mediated and traditional screen masculinity. This type of masculine performance is not a new concept for television and film. There are conventions of gendered codes that appear almost universal. Joke Hermes sums this up rather succinctly, writing that “popular culture both produces and reflects social constructions of masculinity” (2007, 163). The way in which Westworld utilises the hat as a coded reference to generations of equally coded male performances is predictable. The hat is part of what Judith Butler would identify as a repetition of gender performance. The heritage culture’s retelling of this performance is one of stacked gendered simulacra, which the hyperreality of Westworld compresses and uses to make the characters more believable. This use of stereotyped gender performances can initiate time travel to a point where this behaviour is even more plausible to the viewers. What is also worth considering, is how the gendered performances of the Dolores and Maeve Millay characters are used to demonstrate their struggle to escape their own personal, hyperreal hell. But equally, gender is used to facilitate time shifts into the future. These are enabled by the casting of a young woman Tessa Thompson’s character Charlotte Hale to be the ruthless and wily Director of the Delos Destinations board, because of course, for the viewers, and the characters, only the future could provide this corporate casting. The things that surround the hat, that surround the Man in Black, that surrounded Yul Brynner’s cowboys, that surround all of it, including the viewers, are the culturally well-known. They are presented as a skilful reconstruction of American myths and “traditional televisual and cinematic conceptions of masculinity” (Hermes 2007, 163). Westworld is a set of performances “of masculinity roles formed from an adherence to established generic conventions and attributes of ‘the male’, and from traditional principles” (ibid.). What the audience sees in Westworld is a waxwork display of mixed-up and piled up simulacra, what they

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understand is translated by hyperreality. In the end the science fiction genre uses the Western genre to skip about in fictional timelines processed and understood by viewers in 2018.

Conclusion Every theme contained in Westworld, is not contained in Westworld. The themes employed by the hyperreality of Westworld, and enjoyed by the viewer, are not contained within this television framework, just as hyperreality is not contained by the television medium, or this television series in particular; it escaped from images a long time ago. Hyperreality is not just an interesting postmodern theory from the end of the twentieth century, it has colonised so much of the world the viewers reside in from, politics to news, to mummy blogs and all the way to the “alt-right” appropriating old Norse symbols as they march for their right to be racist. The Westworld television series is Disneyland for the home, but there is no car park, or train, or costume room to separate the landscapes. It is a fascinating television series because it shows what the hyperreal is capable of on a grand scale, within this micro telling. The fictional Delos, in creating the conditions for hyperreality and selling its seduction, tells the viewers so much of where consumer culture is in the twenty-first century, but also, crucially, where it might progress to. Westworld in its entirety is really about consumption: the ability to consume identities, heritage, history, people, sex, violence and power; to consume, and then to discard it with gay abandon. The hat is part of this ephemera and part of Westworld’s framing. Hermano Thiry-Cherques summarises some of Baudrillard’s thinking along these corporate lines as: We escaped the Fordist world of spatial fragmentation of production, embodied in internalization and displacement. High-tech industry replaced the factories of the twentieth century. We are in the era of hyperreality and hyperreal companies, such as internet companies, which operate beyond materiality of the product. (2010, 10)

If the humans are seen here to produce and consume artificiality, within a realm of “floating significance”, and “meanings and meaninglessness” (ibid.); how then will the Hosts operate within the hyperreal, now that they are in rebellion?

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Works Cited Altman, R. (1999). Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. Cambridge: MIT Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J. (2010). America. New York: Verso Books. Boorstin, D. (2012). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (50th Anniversary ed.). New York: Vintage. Deleuze, G. (2004). The Logic of Sense. London: Continuum. Eco, U. (1986). Travels in Hyperreality (W. Weaver, Trans.). San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Hannabuss, S. (1999). Postmodernism and the Heritage Experience. Library Management, 20(5), 295–302. Hermes, J. (2007). Father Knows Best? The Post-feminist Male and Parenting in 24. In S. Peacock (Ed.), Reading “24”: TV Against the Clock (pp. 163–172). London: I.B. Tauris. Jameson, R. (Ed.). (1994). They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres. San Francisco: Mercury House. Joyrich, L. (1988, January). All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. Camera Obscura, 6(1 (16)), 128–153. Merrin, W. (2005). Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Singer, M. (2008, Summer). Making History: Cinematic Time and the Powers of Retrospection in Citizen Kane and Nixon. Journal of Narrative Theory, 38(2), 177–197. Steenberg, L. (2013). Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture. Oxford: Routledge. Thiry-Cherques, H. R. (2010). Baudrillard: Work and Hyperreality. RAEeletrônica, 9(1). Turner, F. (1921). The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown. Wright, W. (1975). Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 16

Epilogue Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay

Since its first airing in October 2016 Westworld has garnered a significant fanbase and a sprawling network of online forums, publications, speculations, reviews and spin-offs. The Alexa game Westworld: The Maze, released on Amazon Echo in June 2018 gives viewers an opportunity for an alternate media experience of the Westworld realm, a form of interactive, sound drama that offers sixty different story paths that could take you to the “centre”, or to a dead end and a reboot. Released just before the Season Two finale, Westworld: The Maze immerses the listener in a soundscape that is recognisably that of Westworld—arriving on the train, hearing the sounds of the Mariposa saloon and so on— whilst also following a form of interactive narrative that enables the player-listener actively to influence the storyline through the decisions they make. Westworld: The Maze literalises some of the gaming aspects of the Westworld TV series that have been discussed in chapters in this volume, whilst also exploring the interactive textuality of gaming that brings it closer, as other contributions have discussed, to the storyworlds of hypertext writing. There are possible parallels with Sony Interactive A. Goody (*) · A. Mackay  Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Mackay e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_16

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Entertainment’s 2018 Detroit: Become Human (for the PlayStation 4), which also explores AI/android sentience through a game-narrative that alters, in a hypertextual way, depending on the choices made by the gamer; or Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) the Netflix experiment in interactive narrative. This demonstrates the purchase that texts such as Westworld, which consider the implications of AI and our interactions with non-human cognition, have on our contemporary, technological leisure and media spaces, but also how they are helping us redefine our relationships with technology. Westworld has been a huge success for HBO and its writer-directors; estimates suggest there were more than 10 million multi-platform viewers for each instalment, with HBO claiming an average of 13.2 million viewers for the episodes in Season One. There is a potential future for Westworld. Season Two closed with gestures towards a further season(s), seeing Dolores, Bernard and other Hosts escape the Westworld parks, the ultimate fate of Maeve unknown and the remainder of the Westworld realm still undisclosed (three further parks/game worlds not yet named or revealed). But the prospect for Westworld is not clear: will it stretch into a perplexingly convoluted and not particularly satisfying plot over six seasons, as the ABC TV show Lost did (2004–2010); or will it achieve longevity, as The Wire does (2002–2008), which continues to be ranked as one of the greatest TV shows ever made (Jones 2018)? Indeed, The Wire exemplifies how particular forms of prestige TV shows or “novel” TV (made by HBO and others) continue to provide the basis for academic study and teaching within media and cultural studies, but also in literary studies and cognate areas: the MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography online database lists fifty-eight academic journal articles and five books on The Wire to date. The chapters in this volume all take Westworld seriously as an object of study, and thus seek to contribute to the academic afterlife of Westworld.

From Season One to Season Two This epilogue gives us an opportunity to reflect on the clear shift in emphasis between the first and second seasons of Westworld, encapsulated by the season motifs which title Season One The Maze and Season Two The Door. These motifs are useful starting points to explore the differences and to unpack how Season Two advances or modifies the dynamics and tropes of Season One. The Maze, as many

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of the contributions to this volume highlight, functions as a spatial or cartographic trope symbolising the layers of Westworld, the puzzle narrative of Season One and, most importantly, the central story arc of the development of android sentience and self-consciousness. It is not coincidental that the human focaliser for the presentation of these motifs is William/the Man in Black. He is repeatedly told (four times across Season One) that the “maze wasn’t meant for you” highlighting his false assumption that the Westworld narratives are about human identity and a human quest for meaning. Focalising through the Man in Black also implicates the viewer in his misplaced anthropocentrism, a viewer who may have mistakenly thought, through the opening scenes of “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1), that Teddy was our human protagonist (out to kill a robot-villain in a black hat). This upsetting of anthropocentric assumptions and conventions, and the centrality of the maze-quest for non-human consciousness, points to the key dynamics of Season One with its reimagined narrative of robot rebellion and rewriting of the original Westworld (1973) film. Instead of humans trapped in a park threatened by killer androids, the sentient, empathetic beings in Westworld the TV series are androids trapped in a park threatened by killer humans. Thus, Season One explores android awakening and the quest for freedom and self-determination, alongside a critical take on humanist ideas, which thereby collapses the distinctions between hero and villain, and human and machine. The Man in Black is again given the keynote in the first episode of Season Two when he is told “you have to find the door” (“Journey into Night”). The motif of the Door suggests a shift from a quest narrative to a liminal or boundary space that poses an opening into pos­ sibility, or perhaps an escape into possibility. The younger Man in Black (as William) has already found one kind of door, the wooden door he walks through at the end of a narrow, white corridor at the beginning of “Chestnut” (Season 1, Episode 2), carrying his choice of hat (white) into the space of the Westworld park, wherein he will eventually confront the illusory nature of the choice he has just made. There is some sense in Season Two that there might be a “Door” that could lead him back from the virtual Wild West, with its destructive myths of masculinity and conquest, a door that would allow him to make different choices. The Host version of William/Man in Black whom we meet in the postcredits scene at the end of Season Two is perhaps an endlessly repeated iteration ([Host Emily] “It’s been a long time”), of his attempt to find

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a way out of the narrative loops that have trapped him in a distorted version of American exceptionalism and self-realisation, and killed both his wife and daughter. However, this is to foreground the “human” stories of Season Two and to ignore the narrative dynamics that, much like the first season, repeatedly displace the human from the centre of the stories of Westworld. The Door is primarily for the non-humans, literalised as the virtual passage for the Hosts who escape the theme park at the end of Season Two through a form of digital transcendence. They achieve a cyberspace immortality in the “Valley Beyond” that, ironically, both academic philosophy (Hans Moravec’s transhumanist predictions for example) and science fiction (of Greg Egan, William Gibson and Hannu Rajaniemi for example) had envisaged as a future for humanity. For Akecheta, Maeve’s daughter, Teddy and others, the Door opens into disembodied freedom. But for Dolores the Door, as the passage into the Forge, leads to a knowledge of the human that will empower her in her escape from the boundaries of the Westworld islands and her passing into human society. As the liminal resonances of the Door and a move away from dualities suggest, the Westworld of Season Two is a much messier place than Season One, a place that supersedes the “virtual” civil war, which had been one of the game spaces of the pre-android-apocalypse Westworld, with an actual war of succession and a terrain of conflict and massacre. Westworld is now a chaotic world where the panoptical centre of operations, the Mesa Hub, no longer provides a scopic perspective on the park, and where the boundaries that contained Hosts within their loops and their respective parks have collapsed. These leaky boundaries are given a visual analogy in the flood that has inundated the Westworld landscape, the water that has engulfed the Forge and, as we discover in the final episode, has destroyed much of the Intellectual Property (IP) of Delos Corp. The possibility of leaky edges and permeable boundaries has, however, been a potential from the beginning of the TV series in “The Original” (Season 1, Episode 1) when, on visiting the depths of the Mesa precinct, a Quality Assurance (QA) team encounter the dripping water and flooded floors of disused facilities. The chaotic, leaky landscape of Season Two is paralleled by a deliberately messy narrative temporality that replaces the dual timeline of Season One with Bernard’s purposeful scrambling of memory and time. Season Two is also marked by changed paths for Dolores and Maeve.

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For Dolores her role as avenger propels her violently through the wartorn space of the park, asserting her declaration to Teddy “This world doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us” (“The Bicameral Mind”, Season 1, Episode 10), and seeking to destroy the technology that enslaved her and her fellow Hosts. For Maeve, after her decision to return to Westworld in search of her daughter, the path is one of connection, a search for a family and a community that has been chosen (and not programmed) and that celebrates the diversity and heterogeneity that the narratives of the park confined to hackneyed formulae. Maeve’s connection to the marginalised ethnicities of American culture is signalled very early on in Westworld in “The Original”, when she shares a drink in the Mariposa saloon with three Asian American cowboys (two men and one woman) (Season 1, Episode 1). It is not clear whether these are guests at the Mariposa, or Guests in Westworld, but they serve to highlight the identities and peoples (Asian immigrants played a significant role in the settling and taming of the American West) who are otherwise elided in the white, imperialist narratives of Westworld’s imagined West. Maeve’s community in Season Two that comprises Hector, Armistice, Felix, Lee, Sylvester, parallel Hosts from Shogun World for a time and Anna (the “daughter” she saves), is a deliberately hybrid one that refuses racialising stereotypes which reduce all otherness to the same basic narrative of alterity. The blurring of distinctions that generated the posthuman possibilities of Season One is continued in Season Two, but the viewer is not offered a utopic vision of a hybrid space wherein human and android meet in a cyborg commonality. Instead we are offered a much darker vision underpinned by the shift in focus from AI and robotic technology (and thus the traditions of the American engineer embodied in figures such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford) to Big Data harvesting (and thus the increasing dominance of digital media in the contemporary age and the power of digital multimedia platforms such as Google™ and Facebook™). When Ford says “Everything here is code, William. You know that more than anyone” (“Journey Into Night”, Season 2, Episode 1) he is foreshadowing the storyline that emerges in Season Two about the surveillance of the Guests in Westworld, the collection of human data and the reduction of the Guests to sequences of code stored in the virtual library of the Forge; [Forge-Logan] “the truth is that a human is just a brief algorithm—10,247 lines” (“The Passenger”, Season 2, Episode 10). That the visual presentation of this “algorithm” replicates

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the piano rolls of the player piano suggests an echo of Kurt Vonnegut who speculated, in 1972, that “as the external world becomes more animate, we may find that we—the so-called humans—are becoming, and may to a great extent always have been, inanimate in the sense that we are led, are directed by built-in tropisms, rather than leading” (1972, 187). It certainly shifts the ontology of Westworld by making humans contiguous with machines and databanks, and posing animated machines as the ones capable of adapting their codes or tropisms.

Reading Westworld and Season Two The contributors to this volume have unearthed a range of thematics and critical perspectives that can be brought to bear on Westworld. The chapters by Slocombe (“Trying to Escape the Narrative Loops: Lies, Damn Lies and Simulations in Westworld”), Vint (“Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in Westworld”), Kessous (“A Mere Instrument of Production: Representing Domestic Labour in Westworld”), Abnet (“Escaping the Robot’s Loop? Power and Purpose, Myth and History in Westworld’s Manufactured Frontier”), and our own chapters (Mackay, “Westworld’s Archideology and the Impossibility of Freedom” and Goody, “The Theme Park of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld”) make their claims by ranging across both broadcast seasons of the TV series. The perspectives of other chapters derive from the innovations of Season One, but resonate also with the developments of Season Two. They thus offer particular occasions for further study of Westworld. In her chapter “These violent delights: Navigating Westworld as ‘quality’ television” Wilkins suggests that Westworld “repackages” the “spectacular violence” and “outmoded gender politics” of a “masculinist canon of ‘quality’ television”. There is significant scope to consider the relevance of this analysis for the increasingly masculinist aspects of Dolores’s violent vengeance across Season Two that include mass murder of Hosts and the violation (seduction/ reprogramming) of Teddy. Moreover, Season Two attempts a problematic recuperation of the Man in Black, or at least a rounding out of this character who is, as Wilkins suggests, the most “violent, misogynist and vengeful” Guest in the park. This occurs, moreover, through an implicit comparison of William/Man in Black to “Billy Pilgrim”, the unlikely hero “unstuck in time” who struggles with fate and free will in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, the book that contains William’s

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profile card in “Vanishing Point” (Season 2, Episode 9). Erwin’s reading in “The Frontier Myth of Memory, Dreams, and Trauma in Westworld”, that highlights how the “hegemonic loop of hetero-masculine discourse” enforces particular codes on the portrayal of sexual violence and trauma, has relevance, too, for the narratives of Dolores and the Man in Black in Season Two. In addition, Erwin’s focus on memory and trauma offers a way of approaching the narrative structure of Season Two that operates through the disordered memories and trauma of Bernard, and of thinking through the violence, trauma and abuse that is extended into other spaces and onto other bodies, in Shogun World for example. Taurino and Casoli foreground the “worldbuilding” aspirations of Westworld in “Fictive Maps: Manipulating Landscape and Characters in Vast Narratives” and explore the different maps and mappings in the TV series to indicate how “space assumes a narrative role”. The extended geographies of Season Two, that include the zones of Shogun World and Raj World, the implication of further landscapes and topographies in the undisclosed parks, and the continued use of mapping systems (by both Hosts and the Delos QA teams) to control and manipulate spaces and subjects all offer further opportunities for exploring the interplay between worlds, storyworlds and character. Ivanescu’s proposition in “Westworld and the Pursuit of Meaningful Play” that the Westworld park “encapsulates the best and worst of game design and what games have to offer” and is perhaps better understood as a “theme park, holding a funhouse mirror up to video games”, can also be reconsidered in relation to the altered space of the theme park and possibilities for meaningful play in the new world(s) of Season Two. Chapters that consider particular formal or thematic motifs can also be brought into dialogue with Season Two. Marshall’s consideration of the “mise-en-bande” of Season One and how Nolan et al. make diegetic and thematic use of music and aural intertexts, in his contribution “Music as a Source of Narrative Information in HBO’s Westworld”, offers a model for how the musical soundscape of Season Two could be analysed. As Marshall proposes, “the piano takes on another form” in Season Two, quoting Nolan’s explanation that the “broken open” realm of Westworld is reflected in a different “musical world”. Tregar’s focus on the role of the fly, in “Flies in the Face: Entomology and the Mechanics of Becoming-Living in Westworld”, demonstrates how the fly figures and enacts the “porousness of the boundaries” of bodies, ­subjects and spaces in Season One. As she examines, the fly has a particular

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“ability to move between thresholds”, both conceptual and actual, that is mobilised in Westworld and “foreshadows” the ontological chaos of Season Two. This Season, from the Host-animal buffalo that features in the opening credits, to the tigers and elephants of Raj World and onwards, offers more opportunities for considering the role of both the non-human animal and the non-human android in disrupting the abusive principles of anthropocentrism. The ideologies of colonialism, imperialism and racism, and their negotiation in Westworld, are central to Moise’s “I-n-I Re-member Now: A Rastafari Reading of HBO’s Westworld”. As Vint articulates in her chapter, “the parallels between their [the Hosts’] exploitation and the history of racialised, colonial exploitation is clear” throughout both seasons, and this informs the “distinct posthumanism” that emerges from Westworld. Moise’s recourse to the “synthetic response” of Rastafari to explore Maeve’s healing of her “fractured consciousness” and construction of a self-autonomy connected with community as much describes her journey through Season Two, as it does Season One. But it is the “inter-ethnic allegiance” Moise explores between Maeve and Felix that has most resonance for Season Two, with its expanded sense of transnational, trans-humanoid allegiances. Further, the questions that Moise raises about the possible space for, and of, liberated Host/slaves are central ones for Season Two and beyond, with the (possibly fragile) utopia of the “Valley Beyond”, the unexplored spaces of the Westworld parks and the external (“human”) world all potential locations for an emancipated, non-human community. This book has given us and our contributors the chance to “read” Westworld critically. The analyses offered and the conclusions derived are not homogenous and, indeed, there are distinct differences in how the politics of Westworld are depicted, how the value of this prestige TV show is appraised and whether, ultimately, Westworld is concerned more with the human or with the technological. We are also cognisant of avenues left unmapped and of the limits of our perspectives, garnered as they are from the fields of arts and humanities. Nevertheless, we wish to foreground the value of this volume for helping readers and viewers navigate, not only the first and second, but also the future seasons of Westworld. This is why we end our volume where we do. Reeves’ “Yul Brynner’s Hat and Time Travel in the Hyperreal” seems, perhaps,

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the chapter most concerned with Season One and its antecedents rather than the prospects of Season Two and beyond. But, at the core of Reeves’ analysis, lies the suggestion that Westworld is indeed our world, that the hyperreal, mise-en-abyme of the time-travelling, mythic West is the hyperreality of our own violent, greedy, exciting, empowering, careless “consumer culture [in] the twenty-first century”. We can thus move through Season Two and beyond, out, with Dolores, into the real world, knowing that we will never have left and will never leave Westworld.

Works Cited Dick, P. K. (1972). The Android and the Human. In L. Sutin (Ed.), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (pp. 183–210). New York: Random House, 1996. Jones, E. (2018, April 13). How the Wire Became the Greatest TV Show Ever Made. BBC Culture. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180412-howthe-wire-became-the-greatest-tv-show-ever-made. Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown.

Index

A Adams, Chris Larabee, 278, 282, 285, 287 American frontier, 123, 125, 127, 134, 282, 289 American Wild West, 278 Android, 3–5, 7–10, 15, 16, 18, 23, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 44, 46, 49, 62, 83, 98, 113, 123, 181–185, 187–190, 192, 194–197, 200, 201, 223, 226, 229, 230, 233, 234, 240, 241, 243–245, 248–250, 253, 269–271, 278, 296, 297, 299, 302 Anthropocentric, 10, 23, 54, 56, 272, 273, 297 Archideology, 15, 186–188, 192, 193, 300 Artificial Intelligences (AI), 4, 8, 12, 13, 45, 46, 50–54, 57–59, 141, 197, 247, 296, 299 Asimov, Isaac, 46, 224, 230 Authenticity, 6, 11, 23, 44, 291

Automata, 2, 3, 15, 181, 197, 222, 230, 231 B Battlestar Galactica, 46, 278 Baudrillard, Jean, 43–45, 48, 52, 53, 58, 59, 280, 281, 287, 289–291, 293 Becoming, 10, 15, 47, 57, 100, 125, 156, 170, 173, 187, 188, 193, 236, 258, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268–271, 273, 300 Binaries, 290 Body, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, 55, 99, 136, 137, 144, 148, 150, 151, 156, 163–168, 171, 173–179, 181–183, 188–190, 192, 193, 196, 197, 199, 202, 204, 205, 212–215, 218, 222–224, 229–231, 233, 234, 244, 245, 266–269, 284, 301

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 A. Goody and A. Mackay (eds.), Reading Westworld, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6

305

306  Index Borges, Jorge Luis, 16, 256–258, 260–265 Brynner, Yul, 17, 52, 278, 279, 282, 285–292, 302 Bush, Vannevar, 259, 263 C Capital, 182, 197, 203, 212, 218, 252, 253 Capitalism, 5, 11, 16, 150, 182, 203, 209, 213, 229, 230, 232, 253 Capitalist, 5, 15, 44, 113, 147, 150, 158, 193, 196, 197, 200, 201, 205, 211–214, 217, 246 Complex narrative, 12, 24, 34, 75 Compossibility, 16, 256, 263–266, 269 Compossible, 263–265 Computer game, 47 Consciousness, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15–17, 35, 45, 46, 49, 51–55, 59, 64, 69, 72, 74, 82, 97, 98, 109, 120– 123, 125–127, 129, 130, 134, 142–146, 148, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 174, 175, 181–187, 189–192, 195, 197, 200–203, 205, 215, 217, 224, 230, 233–235, 240–242, 245–247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 262, 263, 269, 297, 302 Consumerist, 193 Cornerstone, 87, 121–123, 126, 129, 134–136, 208, 216 Counter-narrative, 119, 120, 123, 125, 136, 252 Crichton, Michael, 23, 33, 46, 233, 277, 278 Critical dystopias, 119, 125, 127 Cybernetic, 2, 7, 173, 256, 265, 268 Cyborg, 2–4, 7, 165, 173, 188, 200, 266, 270, 278, 299

D Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 16, 182, 188, 190, 256, 263–266, 269, 271, 284–287 Delos, 5, 6, 35, 37–39, 46–49, 52, 55, 56, 62, 64, 67, 97–99, 101, 107–109, 111, 113, 114, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 156, 161, 165, 172, 175, 177, 182–185, 187–190, 192, 193, 197, 203, 208, 223, 224, 235, 244, 246, 262, 277, 279, 293, 298, 301 Demonstrating, 13, 45, 57, 87, 110, 170, 193, 202, 250, 287 Diffraction, 165, 166, 173, 178 Disneyland, 44, 58, 224, 229, 280, 281, 286, 289–291, 293 Disney, Walt, 226, 229, 234, 279, 280 Dissimulation, 43, 53 Djawadi, Ramin, 14, 29, 99–101, 103–107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 243 Dolores, 3, 9, 24, 30, 32–34, 36–39, 44, 46, 49–51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 67–72, 74, 91, 92, 100, 108, 111, 112, 114, 121–123, 125–131, 133, 134, 136–138, 142, 143, 145, 149, 152, 153, 155–157, 162, 167–170, 174, 175, 181, 183, 184, 191–193, 196, 201–203, 205–207, 210, 211, 214–218, 224–226, 233, 234, 236, 242–245, 248, 249, 258, 259, 262, 266, 268–270, 273, 283, 290, 292, 296, 298, 300, 301, 303 Domestic labour, 15, 199, 201, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 300 Domestic trauma, 120 Domestic violence, 120, 126, 136, 137, 212, 215

Index

Dystopian, 12, 14, 119–121, 200 Dystopias, 14, 125 E Eastgate Systems, 260, 266 Eco, U., 73, 263, 285, 291 Engelbert, Douglas, 259 F Factitive, 13, 72, 74–76 Fake, 108, 222, 243, 279, 285 Family, 3, 12, 65, 123, 125, 174, 185, 201, 205, 207–209, 211–213, 217, 233, 272, 299 Female, 4, 5, 8, 9, 31, 36–38, 106, 126, 134, 174, 200, 201, 205, 209, 210, 212, 215, 218, 223, 233, 266, 268–270 Feminism, 39, 119, 130, 135, 199–201, 204, 205, 210, 213, 214, 216, 266, 268, 272 Flesh, 10, 151, 170, 175 Fly/Flies, 12, 15, 56, 146, 161–179, 178, 250, 301 Foucault, M., 130, 157, 188, 287 Frankenstein, 98, 266, 268 Freedom, 11, 15, 48, 49, 52, 57, 69, 113, 133, 136, 149, 150, 181– 184, 186, 187, 191–194, 196, 197, 224, 227, 229, 231, 235, 236, 253, 262, 297, 298, 300 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 130, 207, 208, 215 Frontier, 14, 16, 30, 32, 36, 38, 48, 54, 62, 123, 124, 135, 153, 186, 221–224, 226–228, 232–236, 280, 281, 288, 300 Frontier myth, 123, 124, 126, 129, 137, 291, 301

  307

G Game, 2, 6, 8, 9, 11–13, 18, 48, 49, 52, 53, 76, 79–81, 83–95, 124, 144, 193–195, 197, 205, 228, 232, 234, 272, 285, 295, 296, 298, 301 Gameplay, 6, 13, 76 Games design, 81, 85, 92, 93 Game studies, 80, 81, 87, 88, 93 “The Garden of Forking Paths”, 16, 256–263, 265 Gendered, 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15–17, 33, 38, 121, 137, 181, 200, 201, 204, 205, 208, 211, 213–215, 217, 218, 280, 282, 290, 292 Genre, 12, 17, 28–30, 33, 57, 80, 88, 93, 120, 125, 135, 155, 205, 227, 240, 260, 278, 279, 282, 285–287, 290, 293 Guests, 6, 9, 14–16, 23, 32, 35–39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52, 54–57, 67, 69, 70, 76, 81, 83, 86–88, 93, 94, 97, 98, 105–108, 111–114, 120, 123, 124, 126, 130, 133–136, 143, 149, 151, 153–155, 162, 165, 166, 168– 177, 179, 183–197, 200, 201, 207–209, 211, 217, 224–226, 229, 233–235, 241, 243–245, 258, 263, 265, 270, 273, 280, 290, 299, 300 Gunslinger, 137, 233, 278, 282, 285, 287, 292 H Hat, 17, 35, 50, 190, 191, 194, 209, 211, 222, 279, 281–283, 285, 288–293, 297, 302 Hayles, N. Katherine, 7, 9, 10, 143, 256, 260, 261

308  Index HBO’s, 1, 10, 13, 16, 23–27, 29, 33, 34, 37–40, 45, 62, 88, 97, 110, 161, 181, 223, 235, 255, 278, 279, 288, 296, 301, 302 Heritage industry, 278, 287, 291, 292 Hetero-masculine discourse, 120, 126, 128, 129, 133–135, 137, 138 Historicity, 290 History, 2, 11, 16, 17, 25, 30, 31, 57, 121, 125, 130, 131, 142, 147, 150, 151, 157–159, 166, 169, 183, 186, 223–225, 229, 235, 255, 256, 271, 279–281, 285, 288–291, 293, 300, 302 Host, 3–6, 8, 9, 14–18, 23, 30–32, 35, 36, 39, 44–50, 52, 54–57, 59, 62, 64, 67, 69–72, 74, 76, 81–83, 85–88, 90, 97–101, 104–106, 108–114, 120–124, 126–129, 133, 134, 138, 142–157, 159, 161, 165, 166, 168–179, 183–186, 188–197, 200–202, 205–210, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 228, 230, 234–236, 243–248, 250, 253, 256, 258, 259, 262, 263, 265, 268, 269, 271, 273, 280, 282, 284, 287, 290, 296–302 Human, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9–12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 24, 25, 31, 32, 34–38, 44–47, 49, 52, 54–57, 59, 69, 82, 83, 90, 97, 98, 106, 113, 120, 123, 127, 138, 141–154, 156–159, 164–166, 169, 171, 173–175, 181–185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 194–197, 200, 202, 208, 223, 224, 229–233, 241, 243, 247, 249, 250, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259, 265, 266, 269– 273, 281, 289, 297–299, 302 Humanist, 3, 10, 146, 149, 265, 266, 269, 270, 297

Humanity, 7, 43, 45, 46, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 69, 143, 146, 148–151, 155, 156, 159, 163, 168, 175, 176, 182, 195, 203, 234, 240, 242, 251, 253, 298 Humanoid, 4, 7, 99 Hypermediacy, 272 Hyperreality, 11, 17, 44, 45, 58, 59, 278–285, 287, 289, 291–293, 303 Hyperspace, 17, 282 Hypertext, 2, 16, 17, 110, 255, 256, 259–261, 265–268, 270, 272, 295, 300 Hysterics, 130 I Identity, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 31, 34, 37, 65, 72–74, 88, 98, 113, 121, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 138, 142, 152–154, 156, 166, 187, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 204, 208, 216, 223–225, 227–229, 231, 233, 239, 253, 255, 256, 264, 266, 270–272, 291, 297 Incompossible, 263–265 Inscription, 164, 166, 177, 179 Interaction, 1, 9, 47, 50, 54, 62, 64, 67, 74, 75, 82, 83, 91, 93, 99, 123, 127, 130, 167, 183, 189, 191–193, 256, 259, 266, 285, 296 Interactive, 16, 30, 65, 68, 75, 80, 255, 256, 260, 261, 267, 295, 296 Interconnect, 9, 10 Interdependent, 10 Intertextual, 2, 10–12, 14, 16, 30, 204, 255, 270, 272 Iterative, 86

Index

J Jameson, Fredric, 290 Joyrich, Lynne, 290, 291 L Landscapes, 13, 17, 31, 57, 64, 65, 80, 123, 156, 174, 182, 183, 193, 196, 226, 231, 239, 279, 280, 282, 283, 287–289, 291, 293, 298, 301 Levels, 2, 12–14, 32, 44, 49–51, 54, 58, 62, 64, 79, 85, 87, 90, 92, 93, 108, 110, 126, 183, 187, 189, 194, 200, 202, 204, 205, 213, 242, 244, 250, 251, 284, 287 Lexia, 259, 261, 266, 268–271 Library, 55, 258, 299 Loops, 12, 13, 16, 17, 30, 32, 33, 35, 36, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 105, 134–136, 138, 143, 144, 152, 153, 155, 206, 213, 215, 223, 224, 229, 234, 236, 242, 245, 249, 252, 256, 260, 262, 265, 273, 298, 300, 301 M Machine, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 44–46, 52, 53, 98, 100, 113, 145, 150, 152, 158, 173, 182, 223, 230–232, 259, 260, 266, 273, 278, 282, 297, 300 The Magnificent Seven, 278, 282 ”Main Title Theme”, 100 Man in Black, 2, 17, 32, 35–37, 48–52, 59, 68–71, 79, 83, 90–95, 111, 113, 122–125, 127, 129– 133, 135–137, 143, 146, 147, 152–154, 156, 159, 186–189,

  309

194–197, 203, 205, 211, 212, 215, 223–225, 228, 229, 233, 234, 236, 258, 259, 263, 269, 282, 283, 285, 287–292, 297, 300, 301 Manufactured, 10, 16, 31, 178, 202, 222, 224, 271, 300 Map, 13, 61–65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 74–76, 261, 267, 269, 301 Marxian, 185, 204, 211 Marxism, 200, 201, 204, 205, 213, 246 Marx, Karl, 204, 211, 213, 224, 232, 246 Masculine, 38, 39, 127, 135, 149, 209, 215, 217, 290, 292 Masculinist, 38–40, 300 Masculinity, 12, 25, 37, 38, 208, 279, 283, 290, 292, 297 Maze, 4, 17, 18, 23, 24, 33, 40, 49–53, 64, 67–72, 74–76, 122, 124–128, 134, 152, 153, 155, 186, 187, 191, 192, 194–197, 201, 202, 205–207, 214, 257, 260, 262, 263, 266, 269, 273, 295–297 Meaningful play, 13, 81, 90, 92, 95, 301 Memex, 259 Memory, 11, 14, 16, 32, 72–74, 98, 101, 106, 111, 119–123, 126–128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 155, 202, 206, 235, 241, 245–247, 278, 283, 289, 298, 301 Music, 6, 13, 14, 27, 99–108, 110– 114, 222, 243, 244, 248, 301 Myth, 14, 16, 48, 57, 58, 123, 125, 126, 133, 135, 137, 221, 223–230, 232–236, 288–292, 297, 300

310  Index N Narrative, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12–14, 16, 17, 23–25, 29–33, 36, 37, 39, 43–59, 61–65, 67–76, 84–88, 93, 94, 97–101, 104–114, 119–123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 144, 147, 152– 154, 156, 158, 159, 181, 182, 185, 186, 190, 191, 194–197, 200–203, 205–211, 213, 215, 217, 223–228, 230, 233, 234, 236, 240–242, 247, 249, 252, 253, 256, 257, 260–269, 272, 273, 278–280, 283, 288–290, 295–301 Nelson, Ted, 259 O Organism, 2, 3, 7, 159 P Panopticon, 188, 190 Park, 3, 5–9, 13–18, 23, 29, 30, 32, 36–38, 43–45, 47–49, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 74–76, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 105–114, 120, 121, 123–125, 127, 133, 136, 143, 144, 146–150, 152– 156, 161, 162, 169, 171, 172, 177–179, 182–188, 190–197, 200–203, 206–212, 215–217, 223–226, 228–230, 233, 234, 240, 241, 243–248, 250, 251, 256, 258, 262, 263, 265, 269, 271, 277–281, 283, 289, 293, 296–302

Patchwork Girl, 261, 266–272 Patchwork Girl of Oz, 270, 271 Path, 16, 35, 36, 46, 48, 57, 67–71, 75, 122, 123, 127, 130, 135, 151, 154–157, 173, 183, 184, 191, 192, 196, 197, 225, 231, 240, 243, 256–258, 260–267, 269, 272, 295, 298–300 Performances, 17, 27, 31, 54, 81, 100, 106, 143, 162, 164–166, 168, 177, 179, 221–223, 292 Performative, 15, 68, 111, 126, 162, 164, 165, 178, 179 Performativity, 8, 15, 68, 70, 165, 166, 177, 204 Piano, 7, 14, 99–101, 104–111, 113, 114, 243, 300, 301 Player, 13, 14, 17, 48, 80–83, 85–95, 100, 101, 104–111, 113, 114, 222, 243, 255, 256, 295, 300 Posthuman, 6, 9–11, 15, 18, 23, 142, 145, 162, 166, 177, 193–195, 240, 256, 262, 263, 265, 266, 271–273, 299, 300 Posthumanism, 2, 9, 10, 17, 142, 146, 149, 151, 157, 158, 165, 166, 269, 302 Power, 9, 11, 15, 16, 43, 44, 54, 59, 72, 85, 90, 119, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136, 149–152, 158, 168, 172, 182, 188–190, 204, 207, 210, 211, 213, 214, 223, 224, 230, 234–236, 241, 244, 246, 247, 251–253, 269, 280, 293, 299 Primal scene, 201, 207, 208 Puzzle, 12, 24, 31–33, 35, 37, 39, 53, 69, 97, 100, 114, 126, 155, 257, 263, 297

Index

Q Quality, 12, 16, 24–29, 33, 34, 37–40, 114, 143, 145, 164, 214, 255, 270, 300 R Race, 14, 123, 147, 157, 204, 225, 251, 300 Rastafari, 16, 239–242, 246, 247, 249, 253, 302 Reality, 5–8, 11–14, 17, 26, 32, 35, 37, 39, 44, 45, 48, 52–56, 58, 59, 70, 71, 80–83, 90, 92, 100, 108, 113, 122–126, 131, 142, 143, 146, 148, 155, 157–159, 162, 182, 183, 185–187, 190– 194, 197, 204, 205, 207, 209, 216, 218, 225, 228, 229, 234, 243, 247, 257, 258, 264, 265, 272, 273, 277, 278, 280–285, 290, 291, 303 Refine the music, 103 Remediate, 260, 272 Representation, 13, 15, 54, 58, 59, 61–63, 67–69, 74, 75, 80–82, 101, 119, 150, 164–167, 183, 187, 205, 240, 247, 272 Reveries, 98, 100, 108, 120–123, 127, 130, 133, 136, 161, 172, 215, 245, 247, 249 Rhizomatic, 262, 263, 265, 267 Robot, 2–5, 7, 16, 45, 46, 55, 99, 102–104, 168, 173, 221–224, 227, 229–236, 278, 297 Robotic, 2–7, 14, 16, 45, 97, 99, 158, 182, 223–225, 233–236 Robotic arm, 99

  311

S Season one, 13, 17, 24, 31, 38, 43, 44, 46, 49–52, 56, 58, 67, 68, 74, 75, 82, 84, 85, 97–99, 101, 106–108, 111, 120, 122, 133, 142, 143, 145, 152, 153, 156, 157, 162, 178, 187, 193, 196, 201, 206, 209–211, 215, 217, 240, 243, 245, 250, 253, 255, 258, 263, 265, 266, 268, 269, 283, 296–303 Season two, 11, 17, 18, 43, 45, 48–51, 54, 55, 58, 75, 97, 114, 133, 138, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150–152, 154, 156, 157, 162, 178, 179, 190, 197, 202, 210, 217, 249, 253, 258, 263, 266, 273, 281, 292, 295–303 Sexual, 11, 14, 15, 39, 94, 120, 126, 130, 131, 135, 144, 168, 169, 172, 201, 208, 209, 211, 213, 280, 290, 301 Sexual abuse, 129–131, 133 Sexual assault, 129, 131, 137, 138 Sexual trauma, 130 Sexual violence, 15, 94, 126, 137, 205 Simulacrum/Simulacra, 17, 30, 45, 58, 200, 279, 282–285, 287, 290, 292 Simulation, 7, 43–45, 58, 59, 75, 209, 280, 281, 300 Star Wars, 230, 282 Story loop, 262, 265, 280, 283 StorySpace, 259–261, 266, 267 Storyworlds, 39, 61, 63, 68–71, 73–75, 295, 301 Surveil, 163, 196

312  Index Surveillance, 1, 11, 15, 177, 182, 188–190, 192–194, 203, 299 Synthetic, 14, 15, 142, 158, 159, 203, 207, 239, 278, 302 T Technology, 1–3, 7–9, 11, 97, 126, 145, 147, 173, 177, 224, 225, 229–232, 235, 255, 256, 260, 266, 273, 278, 291, 296, 299 Time, 17, 18, 23, 32, 35, 47, 80, 83, 86, 91, 94, 99, 103–105, 107–112, 120–124, 127, 128, 131, 134, 142, 143, 149, 150, 153, 155, 158, 170, 171, 175, 179, 187, 194, 201, 211, 213, 214, 216, 217, 226, 229, 232, 236, 241, 244, 245, 247, 248, 251, 252, 257, 258, 264, 267, 268, 280–282, 286–288, 292, 293, 297–300 Time travel, 17, 282, 286, 291, 292, 302 Trace, 100, 109, 111, 120, 122, 124, 128, 137, 144, 153, 157, 158, 194, 195, 210–212, 216, 245, 259, 268 Trauma, 12, 14, 25, 35, 37, 98, 120–122, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 142, 153, 183, 186, 202, 207, 208, 212, 215, 242, 245, 247, 248, 253, 301 Travels in Hyperreality, 285 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 227, 228, 279, 288 U Umberto Eco reflects, 285

V Victory Garden, 261 Viewer, 6, 11, 13, 14, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33, 39, 48, 50–52, 54–56, 58, 63–65, 70, 71, 73, 75, 82, 86, 88, 94, 95, 97, 98, 127–130, 133, 134, 137, 142, 144, 146, 158, 162, 163, 165–168, 173, 175, 177–179, 183, 200, 205, 259, 263, 265, 272, 279, 280, 282–287, 289, 290, 292, 293, 295–297, 299, 302 Violence, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 25, 37–39, 56, 79, 81, 82, 89, 94, 95, 108, 121–124, 126, 128, 129, 133–138, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150–156, 159, 203, 207, 208, 211, 212, 215, 217, 218, 222, 224, 228, 234, 235, 252, 280, 290, 293, 300, 301 Violent, 9, 12, 30, 31, 35, 37–39, 80, 94, 95, 120, 123, 130, 133, 144, 150, 151, 154, 169, 177, 201, 203, 205, 209, 211, 212, 215–218, 233, 253, 270, 290, 300, 303 Violently, 38, 155, 252, 299 Virtualities, 6, 8, 93, 216, 218 Virtual world, 8, 79–83, 85–89, 93, 156, 182, 272, 273 W Westworld, 1, 3–18, 23–25, 27–35, 37–40, 43–51, 53–59, 62–65, 67, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, 79–95, 97–99, 101–104, 106–108, 110, 113, 114, 120, 123, 125, 135, 141, 142, 144–146, 149–151, 153, 154, 156–159, 161,

Index

162, 165–169, 171, 173, 176, 178, 179, 181–190, 192–197, 200–218, 223–230, 233–235, 239–242, 245–247, 249–253, 282–293, 295–303 Wild West, 17, 272, 278, 281, 282, 287–290, 297

  313

Wreader, 17, 256, 259–261, 265, 267, 268, 272 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 15, 182, 185–187, 189, 196, 197