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Westworld: The Original

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”

HBO’s latest prestige drama has finally arrived in the station, and it’s a doozy. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s spin on Michael Crichton’s 1973 eponymous film is just as beautiful and fascinating as I hoped it would be.

The premise is complicated to explain: Westworld is a high-tech theme park with a wild-west theme. Androids—known as “hosts”—populate the world, and “guests” pay exorbitant fees to participate in shoot-outs, whoring, and old-timey gambling. In a riff on Asimov’s laws of robotics, the hosts cannot harm the guests, but the guests can do whatever they want to the hosts. It’s that privilege that many of them are paying for.

In just this pilot episode, we see guests run from an android who seems to be having a stroke, shoot an android in the neck and laugh about it (“Look at her wriggle!” cries another guest), and rape an android. Not all of the guests are working through their issues with evil: we also see a family with a young boy who just wants to explore the world.

But that family is the exception, and cruelty is the norm. Or maybe “cruelty” is the wrong word: is it bad to do harm to a robot that won’t remember? As far as the guests know, the androids are no different from NPCs in a video game, or characters on a TV show.

We, as viewers, might feel differently. In a plot that evokes one of my favorite Person of Interest episodes, the hosts are on narrative loops that allow for variation within set parameters. Teddy (James Marsden) and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) don’t always meet, but when they do, they love each other until one of them—usually Teddy—dies. It’s a credit to the script, the direction, and the actors that I cared deeply about these characters, and I felt sadness at their fates both in the particular (Teddy gets shot again!) and the general (they don’t know Teddy gets shot every time).

But not all is right in Westworld. Thanks to a new upload from mastermind Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins), some of the hosts are glitching: exhibiting stroke-like symptoms, acting out of character, and even realizing that their reality is not real.

The behind-the-scenes team spends most of this episode dealing with the glitch; along the way, we learn about the team that makes this unreality a possibility: Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) takes care of the hosts and Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) deals with them when they become defective.

Both seem frighteningly impersonal, but in different ways. In one scene, Bernie stares at Theresa, then tells her that he loves the way her eyebrows move when she’s angry but trying to hide it. Can he record it for future reference as he builds more hosts? Theresa, on the other hand, seems to be making a play for the top spot, currently occupied by Dr. Ford; her knowledge or suspicions about the corporate goals will either help or hinder her ambitions.

Throughout this first episode, most of the tension is based on what characters know or don’t know. What is corporate’s agenda, and why don’t they care that the cold storage has been uncold for weeks? Did Dr. Ford know that his “reverie” upload would cause the hosts to glitch? If so, what is he planning? Do the techs realize what Ed Harris’s Man in Black is up to?

However, this is not a show that seems to be building towards a gigantic mind-bending revelation that everything we think is true, isn’t. Mysteries were solved almost as quickly as they emerged: Teddy is a host, not a guest. Dolores’s dad spouted Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, and John Donne—no googling needed. All apparent ambiguity was quickly clarified. We don’t know what will happen, but we aren’t asking ourselves what is happening.

That’s not to say the show lacks subtlety. I loved the visual echo of the milk—which two different killers poured onto their victims—and the viscous goo that the hosts are made of. Dr. Cullen smoking a cigarette raises questions about free will and reality denial; her quick dismissal of the potty-mouthed subordinate reminds us that even in the real world, many people treat others as disposable.

My favorite moment, and the one that evoked some of the mindbendiness that Nolan is so good at, was the choice to set the saloon shoot-out to an orchestral version of the Rolling Stone’s “Paint It Black,” a song about our desire to do bad when faced with good. Like any nondiegetic music, it briefly reminds us that we are watching fiction staged for our benefit. We root for people to die violent, splashy deaths, and we cheer evildoers when they are fun to watch. So how are we any different from the wealthy guests who pay for the privilege of, essentially, watching this show in live 4D?

Those sorts of questions lurk in the background: What is the nature of reality, and how much can we trust ourselves to know the answer to that question? Is our sense of free will a delusion? Nature? Nurture? Spectacle? They are interesting ideas to ponder after too many hard lemonades in a dorm room, but weak ingredients to build an entire show on. That Westworld manages to keep those ideas present but understated is to its credit.

Less understated is the landscape, which is beautiful. It evokes the old Hollywood westerns—as does the entire premise of the theme park, of course—but even some meta-awareness can’t spoil the beauty of the American Southwest, which is the most beautiful place in the world. I loved the contrast between the worlds: the wide vistas and rock formations of Westworld vs. the windowless lab where the techs work.

I went into this premiere wondering if it was going to be a total headtrip. It wasn’t. But it is beautifully acted, well written, and gorgeous to look at. It’s got Big Themes up the wazoo, and I didn’t even think about checking my email once while watching it. I cannot think of a heartier recommendation than that.

Reveries:

• I had a fun time playing “spot the actor,” and I’m delighted to announce that I found Rodrigo Santoro (as the bandit Hector), whom many of us know as Paulo from Lost.

• I had a devil of a time finding Liam Hemsworth (Gale from The Hunger Games), probably because he’s not in this show. The Hemsworth I was looking for is Luke, older brother to Thor and Gale. He plays Stubbs, one of the techs.

• So, are there other parks? Is there an Eastworld?

• Ed Harris’s character is called The Man in Black. Not the Man in Black from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. And not the Man in Black who goes to my (old) Trader Joe’s.

• Do you think the Man in Black is trying to figure out how the androids work?

Three out of four realities.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

6 comments:

  1. Loved it! It hit all the right sci-fi buttons. I wish there was more buzz about it though. My (Dutch) friends just don't know much about it. I'm deeply curious about all the lower levels under the facility. The 'cold' storage looked like a run down mall...

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  2. I *wish* I'd loved it. I was sort of bored and sort of confused. Or maybe I was just drowsy.

    I get what you're saying, Josie, about how us watching violence on television might not be any different than what the guests were doing to the hosts, but the actors on the shows we watch know what they're doing and what's happening to them, and they can go home at the end of the day and spend their exorbitant salaries. These poor programmed creatures in Westworld -- well, I kept thinking of Dollhouse.

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  3. I'm was definitely impressed and intrigued. What worries me though is that there isn't enough story here to sustain this series across multiple seasons.

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  4. So. Westworld (the place, not the show) is profoundly disturbing. It was obviously created to fulfill the fantasies of men, mostly white men. We're lead to believe that guests rape hosts which is obviously horrible in and of itself but what actually seemed worse from my perspective was that the hosts rape (or threaten to rape) each other even when no guests are around? It's perverse. Like, who programmed these things??? How sick are they?

    Can guests harm other guests? How do they know which are the guests and which are the hosts?

    James Marsden getting cast as the guy fated to lose the girl again and again has to be an in-joke. He always loses the girl in his movies whether it be to Wolverine, Superman, Ryan Gosling, or Patrick Dempsey.

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  5. Josie, I don't know if they have other worlds here, but in the 1973 movie (which I saw as a kid when it came out and it messed with me), they talked about Roman World and Mediieval World. They played no role in the plot and seem superfluous so I don't expect to see them here.

    I didn't like this episode much, but I want to give it a chance so I'm binge watching the first five tonight and I'll form an opinion after that.

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  6. I enjoyed this review of an intriguing opener and look forward to continuing along as I watch the series. But I'm with Sunbunny on finding the way the show portrays most of the guests acting. And as an avid gamer, I think the show is misjudging how people would actually behave in this setting.

    Yes, violent games are very popular. However, because the hosts can't hurt the guests--a consequence of playing the game in the physical world rather than a virtual one--there's no challenge to the gunfights. It's like playing a game in "God-mode", which isn't the most popular way to play. You can't get the adrenaline rush players crave when there's no chance of failure.

    So I think the violent play would only appeal to the genuine sadists, not most gamers. And the virtual brothel strikes me as pointless since Westworld is apparently so expensive that it would likely be cheaper to hire a prostitute in the real world (unless you're a violent sadist). I'm a little disappointed that outside of the marketing we see few of the kinds of players that I would guess would actually predominate. It seems like the show's creators have a very dark view of human nature. Or maybe just a dark view of the people rich enough to afford to play here?

    Westworld makes a lot of noise about the storylines, but we don't actually see the guests interacting with them that much. A lot of gamers like to replay games and see how different choices affect the outcomes, so I would think we'd see a lot of guests performing experiments. And while they talk about Westworld enabling people to be who they really are, we don't actually see any pure roleplayers in the game. There'd be lots of gamers who'd want to pretend to be part of Westworld and invent their own backstories. Given the beauty of the setting and the complexity of the hosts A.I., I think there'd be a real danger of some guests wanting to abandon their real lives entirely.

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