‘Westworld’ And The American West As Locale For Self-Reconfiguration

It is perhaps unsurprising that Westworld is Westworld; if American mythology is to be staged anywhere, the West is a natural locale. In the original Westworld, the West meant a zone in which certain kinds of adventures were facilitated: gun battles mostly, but also sex with perfect strangers who cared little for who you were and only wanted your money. In the new Westworld, an implicit motif of the first becomes more explicit: Westworld is where you go to find yourself–whoever and whatever that may be. In this new Westworld, the landscape, only background scenery in the old, now becomes more prominent; we are reminded again and again of its beauty, wildness, and implacable hostility and indifference. If you want to make a show about self-discovery, reconfiguration, journeys into and across space and time, the American West–for many historical and cultural reasons–is a good call. The physical spaces are vast, mapping neatly on to the immense unexplored spaces of the mind; the beauty is enthralling, sparking vision after vision in us of possibility, and also, as Rilke reminded us, bringing us closer to terror: those cliffs, those bluffs, those steep walls, that burning sun, the rattlesnakes, the dangers of other humans. The deployment of the American West also taps into a deeper mythology that self-discovery takes place away from other humans–in the wild. If we are to traverse our mind, then Westworld–like many other recountings of human experience before it–suggests we need tremendous physical spaces too. We could not do this in a crowded city. Those endless horizons and canopies of the sheltering sky are necessary for the suggestion of infinite possibility.

And then, there is the violence. The American West’s land is soaked in blood, in memories of a people decimated, of massacres, starvation, and rape. If you want to stage a modern day genocide–and the continuing thirty-five year old slaughter of ‘hosts’ is most definitely a genocide, even if an eternally recurring one–then, again, the West is the correct locale. It is significant that in this version of the American West, there are very few Native Americans; there are some ‘greasers‘–cannon fodder, obviously–but very few ‘redskins.’ The makers of the show seem to have wisely decided that it was best to mostly write Native Americans out of the show rather than risk getting their depiction and usage wrong, which they almost certainly would have. (The one episode in which Native Americans make an appearance, they are the stuff of nightmare, much as they must have been for the ‘pioneers,’ their imaginations inflamed by stories of how they had to keep their women safe from the depredations of the savages on the prairies.) This American West is one which has already been cleansed of the Native American; an alternative rendering of Westworld, one whose dark satire would have cut too close to the bone, would be one in which park visitors would get to shoot all the whoopin’ n’ hollerin’ Injuns they wanted.

MedievalWorld, SamuraiWorld would also allow for the exploration of themes pertaining to the possible sentience of robots, but their locales might not, at least for American audiences, suggest the possibilities of our own reconfiguration quite so well.