“Self-cannibalism and the snake that eats its own tail: that’s a fair description of “Westworld,” a come-hither drama that introduces itself as a science-fiction thriller about cyborgs who become self-aware, then reveals its true identity as what happens when an HBO drama struggles to do the same.”
“This unsettling motif is one of the most effective aspects of “Westworld”—we keep seeing the cyborgs waking from nightmares they can’t understand, or shuddering with trauma until a technician soothes them with a command.”
“It’s a multivalent metaphor, a play on the “brain wipes” that appear in a lot of science fiction, like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” swirled together with the rebellious-fembot anxieties of a movie like “Ex Machina.” At times, the cyborgs reflect the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” as brainwashed creatures whose desires are programmed into them; sometimes their grisly flashes of memory, which occur after a digital update, feel more like P.T.S.D.”
“At its richest moments, “Westworld” glimmers with political resonances, as the best speculative fiction can; in its way, it’s about vulnerable citizens forced to repress atrocities so that their nation can drape a patriotic story over its ugly history.”
“In this context, the Western setting is a logical one, given that it reflects TV’s own frontier days, when prime time was wall-to-wall cowboys. By 1958, there were twenty-eight Western dramas on the air. “Bonanza” ran for fourteen years, “Gunsmoke” for twenty. These shows were the original “Law & Order”—the base coat for TV drama and the source material for children’s games. Their violence was controversial but also all-American and wholesome, since Westerns were America’s proud form of self-mythology: laconic heroes saving the world from bad guys in the name of protecting pure white women, over and over.”
““Westworld” is about what it means to take those generic plots and mold them into something modern: a prestige product that satisfies the taboo desires of a niche consumer base. Like HBO showrunners, Westworld’s designers “pitch” plot arcs. They “massage” story lines. They plant backstories to deepen characterizations. When glitches appear, they panic over the need to halt production, much as “Westworld” itself did, when it shut down during shooting for a rewrite. They are uneasy, at times, about the ethics of their labor. In real life, “Westworld” can’t just be good—it needs to be a hit, too. It’s HBO’s bid for a franchise to succeed “Game of Thrones,” following two pricey flops, “Vinyl” and “True Detective.” For both the show and the show inside the show, the key is to reproduce the alchemy that HBO perfected when it slid the Bada Bing into “The Sopranos”: to provide adult entertainment in both senses.”
“A friend who was a little girl during the fifties remembers those early cowboy shows as being more poisonous than the open sexism in the culture. In every episode, men had adventures—but when a woman showed up the fun stopped. That’s not true in “Westworld,” where Wood’s Dolores is by far the most promising character, a traumatized Eve who seems poised to become an avenger.”
“Blond and creamy-skinned, a painter and an optimist, she’s engineered for customers to fall in love with and to want to protect; that impulse carries over to the HBO viewer. A lead designer (an appealingly melancholic Jeffrey Wright) meets Dolores on the sly, to deliver tests of her programming that feel more like therapy sessions. “Have I done something wrong?” Dolores asks him, as servile as Siri. In the tradition of Asimov’s Three Laws, she assures her creators that she could never harm a living creature. But, when she smacks a fly dead against her neck, her smile stays dreamy.”
“She can lie and she can kill—that’s how we know she’s becoming a real girl.”
“This is not to say that the show is feminist in any clear or uncontradictory way—like many series of this school, it often treats male fantasy as a default setting, something that everyone can enjoy. It’s baffling why certain demographics would ever pay to visit Westworld. Would straight women be titillated or depressed by cyborg hookers? Why would a lesbian guest—coded, obnoxiously, as less than hot—behave with a prostitute exactly as a straight man would? Where are all the gay male bachelor parties? The American Old West is a logical fantasy only if you’re the cowboy—or if your fantasy is to be exploited or enslaved, a desire left unexplored. (For a taboo-breaking joint, Westworld has few kinks.)”
“So female customers get scattered like raisins into the oatmeal of male action; and, while the cast is visually polyglot, the dialogue is color-blind. The result is a layer of insoluble instability, a puzzle that the viewer has to work out for herself: Is Westworld the blinkered macho fantasy, or is that “Westworld”? It’s a meta-cliffhanger with its own allure, leaving us only one way to find out: stay tuned for next week’s episode.”