‘Westworld’ asks “who” not “what”
OCTOBER 4TH, 2016 — POST 274
The following will contain spoilers for Episode 1 of HBO’s Westworld.
You can’t talk about the first episode of Westworld without talking about its title sequence. In a style not far removed from Apple’s “industrial design porn” product videos, the sequence depicts the process by which the robot inhabitants of the Westworld theme park — horse and human alike — are crafted by 3D-printed muscle fibres atop a metal skeleton before being dipped into a bath of liquid “skin”. Simple robots build smarter, better robots. These robots are costumed, brought to life, echoing early cinematic experiments of the analysis of a horse’s run. More than a tip of the hat to Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano as a printed page rolls through a player piano: the piano plays itself, plays the score we’re hearing (and will continue to hear every day-cycle of Westworld). Organism and inorganism blur — but instead of contrasted in their incompatibility we revel in just how similar they are.
The essential difference between the organic and inorganic is something Westworld surprisingly doesn’t seem to care much about. Participating in a cycle that has recently included movies like Ex Machina and Her, that we spend a lot of the pilot caring about non-human entities is a fact that we too care less and less about. This is evident in the two little tricks Westworld pulls for those that know the original Michael Crichton movie.
In Crichton’s original, “newcomers” arrive on hovercrafts to Westworld, in HBO’s — led by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy — they come on more traditional steam locomotive. One such “”newcomer”” (yes, that’s double quotes), is Terry — one of our best candidates so far for a central character. Arriving like this, amongst others that talk about paying to come here, about how they plan on spending their time (“going full evil”), we read Terry as human. But it is revealed later that he isn’t a newcomer, in fact a “host” — a robot inhabitant of Westworld — whose “spawn point” each day just happens to be on the train. The second comes in the form of our closest candidate for Big Bad™. The Man In Black — that in the original Westworld was a robot played by Yul Brynner — at least so far seems to be human. So, immediately, we have a robot in the place of a human and a human in the place of a robot.
It is then less about what these things are and more about what they do — that is, who they are. In his ruthless “killing” of several hosts in front of Terry, The Man In Black is read as a robot, even for those that aren’t familiar with the original film. He’s unkillable like Terminator, immune to the guns the hosts posses. But the perception of his inhumanity extends from deed, not some fact about his existence. And Terry and Dolores conversely are human in their burgeoning love, in Dolores’ painting of the landscape. It’s not just they are capable of reliably replicating an image of humanity, but rather can’t help but be human.
The player piano, the robotic Equus — both images run in stark opposition to their historic conception. Vonnegut’s player piano was emblematic of an evacuation of humanity to automated overlords — the tragedy of even the simple beauty of playing a piano robbed by mechanism. The horse once caught in a series of timed cameras to study its movement instantiated inorganic demystification, scientific quantification of simple organic facts. Mechanically, a horse’s run is monumentally complex. But organically, nothing could be more natural. That naturality could be so corrupted by mechanism is a natural impulse in the face of technology. Which is why it’s so important both of these images are so present in Westworld in the interest of negating their common interpretations. That a piano is played — whether by the fingers of human, robot, or just a printed sequence — is all that matters.
If you enjoyed this, please take the time to recommend, respond, and share this piece wherever you think people will enjoy it. All of these actions not only help this piece to be read but also let me know what kinds of things to focus on in my daily writing.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
