Westworld and our Exponential Paranoia
The feeling I had somewhere between where my heart starts and my stomach ends as the end credits of the Westworld pilot were rolling can only be described as an unexpected debilitation. A thump. It was comparable to the moment I finished reading the last word of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Just an intense feeling of “now what?” — so strong that all I could do was curl up in foetal position and hope that everything can start all over again. Such is the paranoia that both Lot 49 and Westworld instil somewhere deep inside its audience. The difference is that while one has been doing this since publication in 1965, the other started doing this on a weekly basis in October 2016 — and arguably to a much greater magnitude depending on where it goes in the weeks to come.
A reboot of a film from 1973 of the same title, Westworld is set in the not-too-distant future where people can pay for a full-immersion trip into the Wild Wild West. And I mean full immersion, complete with android animal and human ‘hosts’ that are indistinguishable from their warm-blooded biologically human guests. The 1973 film didn’t gain much traction, but it was part of a tradition of sci-fi films that explored the doom and gloom associated with technological advancements. For instance, the 80s saw the rise of the Alien franchise, complete with hi-tech machinery, government conspiracies, and of course, aliens. Much like John Hurt’s body after the alien spawned its baby inside, Sci-Fi exploded on to cinema screens, dominating them for a good decade and a half. But with TV shows like Stranger Things and Westworld, why are we seeing a resurgence of this trend now?
In that not-too-distant past where gore and sci-fi on the cinema screen comes from, there was also an air of paranoia, mostly fuelled by the Cold War. Technology was sinister, and undoubtedly had something to do with Mutually Assured Destruction or the Space Race. Communication lines were tapped, always looking out for Soviet spies. One could never trust the government. Some say that this came to a frenzied end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But with Wikileaks, ISIS, Trump, and Brexit, it’s getting harder to see why our governments warrant more trust from us today than they did in the time of Nixon or Reagan. So if nothing else, in the post-Cold War age, the paranoia should intensify. And on TV, this shows.
Today, showing a scary piece of machinery on screen would be cheesy at best (2000s-era Daleks anyone?). We’ve grown up, we already know of technology’s limitless potential, that doesn’t scare us anymore. And for those of us born in the 1990s, perhaps it never scared us to begin with. What scares us now is how that potential will be harnessed. If the paranoia before was because of what technology can do, today it is because of what technology has done.
Take the character of the Man in Black from the Westworlds of past and present. This antagonist from the movie was a robot ‘host’ gone wrong, chasing down human guests and killing them. Yet in Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO rendition, the Man in Black is a human guest. Following the laws of Westworld, inside this theme park he is immortal — something he uses to his advantage, massacring townspeople left and right to get to the highest level of the game. With this switcheroo, it’s clear that Nolan and Joy are trying to say that we are no longer the victims of the Man in Black, we are the Man in Black. If you want to get trippier with this, perhaps what they’re saying is that the distinction between an evil robot and a human is not so hard to make.
Looking outside of the obvious antagonist/protagonist binary, the very fact that it’s easier to align our sympathies with the humanoids than with the humans says a lot about the aims of the show. There’s something jarring about the scene where the theme park technicians are servicing the prostitute bot Maeve, and one of the developers discloses that the humanoids are programmed with the concept of nightmares as a safeguard in case their memories are not wiped at the end of the day. She says with the most disdainful apathy, “can you imagine how fucked we’d be if these poor assholes remembered what the guests do to them?” Even if a well-meaning guest enjoys a night at a brothel, one has to wonder if the guest has inadvertently participated in rape, and if we, in turn, have inadvertently participated in its witnessing.
The new frontier that Westworld’s lead developer, Bernard Lowe, is trying to cross is not the replication of the human form; rather, it’s the replication of the human essence. Each host is built to be able to improvise responses and often talk to each other as a way to practise ‘realistic’ conversation. But more than that, we see in Bernard’s conversations with the oldest host in the theme park, Dolores, that he is trying to build a person. By the third episode, it is clear that Bernard is more than simply intrigued by the idea that even conscience can be subjected to coding. And the effect of his experimentation is visible when Dolores, poor sweet Dolores who has been programmed not to hurt a fly, smacks one to its death against her neck.
From the guest who terrorizes the very ‘human’ hosts for his personal amusement, to the technicians who facilitate this, to the developers who see building artificial conscience as scientific progress — it is clear that the humans are the villains here. Gone are the days of sci-fi when product of technology was the terrifying unknown. We have now entered an age where our exploitation (or should I say ‘exploration’) of technology’s limitless possibilities is a source of genuine terror. It’s all good and well to have robots that look exactly like humans, but what if we truly were able to build robots that can think and feel like humans? And I wouldn’t be wrong in saying that we’re not so far away from achieving this. What sort of reality would that be? And where would we fit in it?
Westworld’s success lays in uncovering this intense paranoia we’re not always willing to admit — that perhaps when it comes to technological advancements, maybe there is a line and we’re millimetres away from crossing it. When a bewildered child asks Dolores, “you’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re not real,” perhaps her look of confusion speaks for all of us watching. After all, if we can digitize and replicate conscience itself, then what does it mean to be real?
