Westworld

HBO's series Westworld is certainly marvelous in many ways.  The show's title sequence alone sets a high standard for spooky ambience and a kind of macabre grandiosity that characterizes the show -- we see some kind of pale fibers being extruded to coat robot bones and, even, formulate hazy eyes that reflect the pillars and spires of monument valley; skeletal hands play a strangely melancholy melody; a player piano program slides across the screen in time with the music; an alabaster cowgirl on a cadaverous horse seems to gallop across the screen; a beautiful face is half-skull.  And, further, it may be that Westworld is dramatically successful in some way that I don't understand -- perhaps, there is a way of watching these gargantuan TV extravaganzas, becoming embedded in their fantasy worlds, and, therefore, intensely involved in the action that I simply don't understand.  For better or worse, I'm a product of pre-cable network television:  accordingly, I reflexively expect a TV show to establish a couple of plot points before the first commercial, another plot point deepening the conflict in the show's second segment before the mid-show ads, a reversal of fortune or plot happening in the third quarter of the show and the denouement tying things together just a few minutes shy of the one-hour mark.  By contrast, Westworld establishes one enigmatic plot point per hour-long episode, refuses any clues as to its ultimate narrative direction, and seems more interested in inserting enigmas into the show's circumstances (I hesitate to call the rambling, repetitive events a "plot") than in moving the action forward in any intelligible way.  Five hours into the show, Westworld feels like it is just beginning and I still have no clear sense for what the program is supposed to be about or how its characters interrelate.  Elaborate back-stories are suggested, but we are given only hints and whispers about them.  And, most destructively, the show's exceedingly lethargic and, even, retrograde pace gives the viewer too much time to speculate as to aspects of the proceedings that don't really make any sense and that seem to not have been thoroughly thought through -- to what extent are the robots allowed to harm the guests?  Certainly, we see them inflicting all sorts of mayhem on visitors to the park although, of course, none of the tourists ever get really injured.  How are the damaged, dead, and dying robots retrieved at the end of each day?  How are they restored to operation in the park?  Exactly how big is this park?  Does it encompass the whole world?  (I think this suggestion is increasingly being made as the show progresses).  What is the spatial relationship between the subterranean operating rooms sparsely populated by Westworld staff and the grandiose exteriors shot in Monument Valley,  Canyonlands, and Moab?  The premise of the program is that vastly wealthy people come to the park to indulge in their sadistic fantasies -- these fantasies apparently involve killing lots of people, torture of various kinds, and rape.  If satisfying these fantasies is the park's raison d'etre, then, why does the park have an Old West theme -- who watches Westerns anymore?  (The Old West theme made sense in Michael Crichton's original version of this story because middle-aged men with lots of money in 1970 had been raised on cowboy movies -- and, in any event, I think Crichton's theme park also had a Roman subdivision for people who wanted to indulge in sword and sandal sadism.)  But HBO's Westworld seems accessible primarily to those with the incomes of smarmy venture capitalists, High-Tech start-up gurus, hedge fund managers etc.  -- why wouldn't these kinds of people better enjoy GestapoWorld where they could prance around as concentration camp commanders or, perhaps, PlantationWorld where visitors could enjoy floggings, lynching, and hosts of compliant slave girls; and for that matter, where is AmericanPsychoWorld?  To be fair, the show hints that WestWorld is a relatively tame threshold to increasingly violent and sadistic story-lines in more remote parts of the park.  (Sweetwater, the fantasy world's gateway, is a fairly benign Old West village; but we know that there are, at least, two other cities a day's ride from Sweetwater that are exponentially more debauched and, at the fringes of the theme-park, some kind of nihilistic war is going on where, apparently, anything goes.  Why do we need the robots?  Why couldn't the same adventures be delivered in some kind of virtual reality format without the physical carnage that requires nightly reconstructive surgery on the poor "hosts" as the robot saloon girls and gunfighters are called.  Parts of the story make no sense.  At one point, a staff member is shamed and blackmailed because he has had sex with one of the inert robot women while repairing her.  But why should this be considered shameful?  In fact, since the guests are entitled to have sex with the robots, why would a staff technician not have similar privileges -- a sort of perq of employment or, indeed, an obligation to check the functioning of the female machine's innards?  And assuming that acting out violent and sadistic fantasies still carries some level of shame and moral reprobation, aren't the guests who go "black hat" -- that is, become villians -- running the risk that their conduct in the park will result in black mail or public exposure?  The viewer has literally hours to contemplate these questions because the plot doesn't advance at all -- indeed, each episode seems more or less duplicative of preceding show.

At heart, after five hours of WestWorld here is what we know:  something is wrong with the robots.  They are beginning to recall, if only dimly, previous atrocities inflicted upon them.  This causes the robots to become anxious and may, even, induce malfunction in them.  But so far nothing has been seriously broken and malfunctioning hosts have either been repaired or exiled to storage or, in one case, incinerated.  Two female robots are the center of this disturbance:   Dolores, a female programmed to be the damsel in distress and perennial rape victim, and a mulatto saloon girl and brothel-keeper.  These two hosts sense that something is wrong with the world -- that there is a pattern to their misfortunes and that, in fact, there is another subterranean world (the repair facility) lurking beneath the appearances available tot hem.  In effect, WestWorld seems to be the Emile of robotics -- the plot, so far as one exists, involves the education of the robots.  This education has a Platonic tinge -- Dolores and the saloon-girl are gradually led to the belief that they have selves, that these selves have endured countless indignities in daily reincarnations resulting in death, wounding, rape or other kinds of abasement -- their memories of these harms are supposed to be wiped clean after each day's plot-lines conclude, but this process seems to be inexplicably failing.  (The show suggests that several of the technicians, including a morose Black scientist, are, perhaps, subverting the system and, even, using techniques similar to psycho-therapy to guide the robots to recall their past lives.)   The show's principal miscalculation, as far as I can see, is that it focuses on the inner lives of the robots -- we are kept close to Dolores and the saloon girl and each episode adds a tiny bit of incremental knowledge to what these two characters know, or suspect, about the nightmare world in which they operate. Weirdly, the show is designed for us to sympathize and identify with the robots and not their masters or the tourists who so casually and cruelly make use of them.  But, of course, the robots aren't supposed to have any kind of inner life at all -- they have no psyches and no souls and, therefore, an inert blankness exists at the center of the show.  The park management are all either vicious or stupid; Anthony Hopkins has the thankless role of making various gnomic utterances that are posited as riddles that we aren't (yet) supposed to understand -- I am guessing that he has populated the park with various versions of himself (for instance, a small boy) and his lost loved ones, but this isn't yet clear.  Ed Harris plays a guest who has gone decisively "black hat" -- he rides around the park like Jack Palance butchering robots and scalping them.  The nature of his quest is also unclear -- it has something to do with penetrating to the center of the maze that the park represents.  (It's intriguingly suggested that Harris' villain is world-class philanthropist in the world outside of the park -- this is a wonderful idea but not one that the show develops since it's focus is primarily on the robots and their existential crises.)  The elaborate and majestic scenery featured in the simulated Old West is contrasted with the stark, stylized laboratories underlying the park, a series of glass cubicles in a black void where the naked hosts are repaired or interrogated -- this contrast is effective, if crazy from a practical perspective (why would the robot repair stations be starkly lit glass cells hovering in a great dark void?) 

Although Westworld is about satisfying fantasies, the show is surprisingly penurious with respect to providing pay-off to its viewers.  In each episode, the show builds to a point at which it seems that the robots are about to revolt.  All clues suggest that the robots are on verge of violent uprising.  And, when we see them repeatedly and viciously abused by the trashy tourists, the viewer desperately wants to see them revenge themselves on the guests.  But this satisfaction is delayed, subverted, and, it seems, indefinitely postponed.  Here is a bad sign:  I fell asleep in the middle of the fourth episode and, when I woke up, the plot had not advanced one scintilla.  The robots are programmed to complete what the show calls "loops" -- these loops are circular rounds of narrative that always return to the same point.  Westworld seems caught in an interminable loop from which it can not extricate itself.