Westworld Guide
Something’s troubling Westworld and its overseers: the robots are behaving strangely, as if some dawning self-awareness has taken root in their wiring. This awakening is seen mostly through Dolores and Maeve’s eyes, as they begin claiming agency over themselves and claiming, in certain cases, reprisal for the harm done to them. So we’re still dealing with an assault narrative but Westworld’s larger inquests into consciousness interestingly house Dolores and Maeve’s survival stories, allowing for a compelling, if unsubtle, metaphor for humanizing, or un-objectifying, women. I’m saying this as a man, and I know that some female colleagues I’ve spoken with find Westworld’s sexual politics irredeemable. To me, the show seems aware of its own themes and imagery, and so far is addressing them textually in encouraging ways. I don’t really know how to segue from that topic to a broader endorsement of the show, so I’m just gonna do it: by the end of the fourth episode, I was fully sold on Westworld, my brain tingling and itching for more. They both give terrific performances, modulating themselves to seem just shy of human—which, uncanny valley be damned, makes them all the more engaging. Outside the park, Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Shannon Woodward all scheme and fret, each actor working smartly, persuasively. It’s a very strong ensemble, which also includes Jimmi Simpson and a marvelously scuzzy Ben Barnes as two park guests: one timid and decent, the other a callow ghoul. Westworld’s vastness, its sprawl of characters and plot lines, could easily be unwieldy and confusing. But instead it’s rather carefully, thoughtfully crafted despite a reportedly troubled production. Well, beyond the first episode, anyway. Once the show’s two halves fuse together the dark Western yarn marrying the pensive, eerie futurist science-fiction the series becomes something beguiling.
Based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie, Westworld is set presumably sometime in the future, when a possibly mad scientist (played in forlorn whispers by Anthony Hopkins) has built a massive theme park of sorts, populated by incredibly lifelike robots called hosts. For whatever reason, Dr. Ford decided to style his synthetic world like the Wild West; a staff of writers comes up with shootouts and bank robberies and all kinds of other familiar story lines for the park’s guests to enjoy. But those guests, who are paying a small fortune to be there, can really do whatever they want, beyond harming other guests. This being a sick, sad world, many of those guests murder, rape, and torture. But it’s all O.K., because it’s just robots, right? Here, Westworld seems to be setting itself up as yet another prurient, cynical, dispiriting show. Specifically, the series is steeped in themes of sexual violence, almost exclusively toward women through both overt instances and in the very implication of its premise. The park’s guests want sexbots passive and pliable women whose consent is at best male-programmed, and at worst, and most often, utterly inconsequential. Don’t you see? These shows are showing us terrible things because the people are terrible. That lame excuse doesn’t even apply to Westworld’s more ingrained, more pervasive problem: its inherent love-hate, lust-scold relationship to the literal objectifying of most of its female characters. The first two episodes of the show don’t really give one much hope on this front. Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton both play hosts, and both Wood’s sweet ranch girl Dolores and Newton’s saucy prostitute/madam Maeve are brutalized in casual, ugly fashion. (This is sold as entertainment to Westworld’s guests, and to Westworld’s audience.) Based on these two episodes, Westworld seemed destined to be another series that has not found (or not tried to find) a way to raise the stakes for female characters without subjecting them to some form of sexual violence.
But the third and fourth episodes (which is as far as I’ve seen) then begin to do some interesting course correction, perhaps even script-flipping. Something’s troubling Westworld and its overseers: the robots are behaving strangely, as if some dawning self-awareness has taken root in their wiring. This awakening is seen mostly through Dolores and Maeve’s eyes, as they begin claiming agency over themselves and claiming, in certain cases, reprisal for the harm done to them. So we’re still dealing with an assault narrative but Westworld’s larger inquests into consciousness interestingly house Dolores and Maeve’s survival stories, allowing for a compelling, if unsubtle, metaphor for humanizing, or un-objectifying, women. I’m saying this as a man, and I know that some female colleagues I’ve spoken with find Westworld’s sexual politics irredeemable. To me, the show seems aware of its own themes and imagery, and so far is addressing them textually in encouraging ways. I don’t really know how to segue from that topic to a broader endorsement of the show, so I’m just gonna do it: by the end of the fourth episode, I was fully sold on Westworld, my brain tingling and itching for more. There is a mystery a great, shadowy, probably existential mystery at the heart of the series, one that’s tantalizingly introduced in fits and starts. I’ve not been so intrigued by this kind of television mythology since, I daresay, the first season of Lost. Westworld, created by Lisa Joy Nolan and her husband Jonathan Nolan, is not a roaring entertainment piece like Lost was in its early days. It’s grim and introspective and deeply troubling. But the world is almost equally as well-built as Lost’s was. I’m eager to explore every facet of it, most of all what’s occluded or hidden or buried just underneath the external fabric of the show. Ed Harris, grizzled and scary, plays a longtime returning park guest who has figured out every bit of Westworld’s mechanics, except for this big final mystery. He’s hell-bent on finishing the game only he seems to really think of the Westworld experience as a game and shoots and stabs every robot he can in his pursuit. Squinting and speaking in his calm, flat tone, Harris expertly embodies this kind of determined menace, playing a terrifying villain whom you want to follow, so complete and magnetic are his knowingness and conviction.
His story intersects with those of others, like James Marsden’s dashing hero with a secret, Rodrigo Santoro’s smoldering outlaw, and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal’s steely murderess. Wood and Newton are also involved, of course, but they’re more on their own journey Dolores and Maeve gazing not into the navel of the park, but up and out, sensing perhaps a bigger world that’s watching and manipulating them. They both give terrific performances, modulating themselves to seem just shy of human—which, uncanny valley be damned, makes them all the more engaging. Outside the park, Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Shannon Woodward all scheme and fret, each actor working smartly, persuasively. It’s a very strong ensemble, which also includes Jimmi Simpson and a marvelously scuzzy Ben Barnes as two park guests: one timid and decent, the other a callow ghoul. Westworld’s vastness, its sprawl of characters and plot lines, could easily be unwieldy and confusing. But instead it’s rather carefully, thoughtfully crafted despite a reportedly troubled production. Well, beyond the first episode, anyway. Once the show’s two halves fuse together the dark Western yarn marrying the pensive, eerie futurist science-fiction the series becomes something beguiling. It’s beautifully acted and intricately written, frightening and probing and provocative. I am perhaps taking it on a good deal of privileged faith that the series will continue to interrogate the gender disparity intrinsic in its premise; if it does, it will be well worth watching. I don’t think this is going to set the globe aflame like Game of Thrones did. But Westworld could at least assert itself as a rare kind of truly transporting television what we might have once called must-see. You’ll be getting a chance to build a theme park full of hyper-realistic robots of your own in just a short while thanks to Warner Bros. Interactive and Behaviour Interactive, the folks behind Fallout Shelter. In the new Westworld mobile game, you’ll be leaving the uncanny valley far behind you as you manage every facet of your morally dubious, simulated robo-sanctuary.
