Does Westworld Have a Woman Problem?
A precursor to Jurassic Park, the original Westworld
expanded on Crichton’s exploration of fear within failsafe systems,
i.e., resorts, theme parks, and even governments destroyed by hubris.
While the protagonists of Jurassic are led astray by their egos—Who told
John Hammond cloning carnivorous dinosaurs was a good idea in the first
place?—Westworld’s heroes suffer thanks to
their ids. Guests come to the park to lose themselves in fantasies
involving shoot-em-ups and consequence-free sex with women who are
literal sex objects, and the fact that they can play out these scenarios
with androids serves only to heighten their hedonism. Treating the
robots with a recklessness they would never show toward fellow humans,
they’re permitted to push boundaries, seeking out kills and conquests in
a controlled environment where every vice is considered permissible.
In
the film, repercussions come courtesy of Yul Brynner’s Gunslinger, a
homicidal robot whose defective programming compels him to hunt down
visitors. With the perspective focused solely on the visitors and
programmers behind the scenes, the audience’s sympathies align with the
humans. HBO’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan-helmed update adds the
viewpoints of the robotic hosts, whose existences are controlled by the
park guests they’re meant to service and a team of engineers who
regularly wipe their memory banks to keep them docile. Lacking a
complete understanding of their reality, they play out each day in a
loop: A band of outlaws rolls into town like clockwork to fulfill
visitor dreams of heroism, fake frontiersman prod tourists with tales of
adventure each morning, and Dolores, the spirited farmer’s daughter
played by Evan Rachel Wood, is fated to watch her family die every
night.
As the park’s oldest android and the show’s center, Dolores embodies many of Westworld’s
issues. As a host, her role within the park is clearly defined, but it
serves to deny her a means of breaking the cycle in which she’s trapped.
Designed to be trusting and warmhearted, her outlook prevents her from
acknowledging her world’s dangers. Incapable of memory, she doesn’t
notice when her malfunctioning father is replaced with another robot
and, after 30 years of being abused by Ed Harris’s malevolent Man in
Black, she still lacks the ability to recognize her attacker, who mocks
her for this before dragging her into a barn for an off-camera assault.
Sitting with the head programmer after being reset, Dolores shares her
belief that how you choose to see the world dictates your experience of
it, but beneath her optimism is tragedy. Used repeatedly by men,
incapable of leaving her homestead thanks to her code, and devoid of
agency, Dolores in her current state can neither grasp nor change her
victim status.
The same can be said for the
other female androids. In contrast to the human women, Sidse Babett
Knudsen's no-nonsense quality-assurance head and Shannon Woodward's
sarcastic behavior technician, the robots that work the park serve one
purpose only. With her backstory yet to be fleshed out, Angela
Sarafyan’s hooker with a heart of gold, Clementine, exists for
objectification, batting her eyelashes at every man who crosses her
path. Thandie Newton’s brothel madam, Maeve, possesses grit the other
hosts lack but is at the mercy of engineers who tool with her
personality sensors to perfect her seduction techniques. The non-human
women are at the mercy of their captors, even as they begin to exhibit
signs of consciousness. When Maeve dreams of an alternate existence
where she and a daughter live quietly in the desert, it’s only a matter
of time before the Man in Black shows up to end their happiness.
Simple lives interrupted by the threat of violence is a recurring theme in the Westerns that Westworld
takes its visual cues from, but the lives of its hosts owe much to the
science fiction tradition. The idea of female androids designed for male
pleasure is explored in everything from Blade Runner’s gynoids to The Stepford Wives, Scarlett Johansson’s disembodied OS in Her, and Alicia Vikander’s curious femme fatale in Ex Machina.
In most instances, the creations rebel in some way, questioning the
nature of their existence and their roles, much to the surprise of their
flesh-and-blood creators. Westworld
subverts the trope by making the android perspective the default. Scenes
may cut away to the team pulling the strings, but their actions serve
mainly to inform the choices of the hosts. It’s no longer a story of
flawed androids vs. people; it’s a question of whose actions are more
human.
Though
Harris provides a truly amoral villain in the Man in Black, whose hunt
for the fabled Maze leads him toward acts of increasing depravity, the
true source of evil in Westworld is the self-indulgence of its humans.
Both
the visitors, who pay upward of $40,000 per day to immerse themselves
in the park’s bespoke illusions, and the programmers display a blatant
disregard for the feelings of the hosts. The apathy is to be expected—as
we are frequently reminded, the hosts are not people—but that makes it
no less jarring. The warped nature of the park desensitizes those
engaged in its inner workings: Couples pose with the “dead” bodies of
outlaws they’ve shot; higher-ups turn their backs on the sadistic
actions of frequent guests; and the chance to kill, rape, and dismember
without fear is billed as the ultimate luxury vacation. The fakes are
the ones who exhibit the bulk of the show’s sensitivity, their
programmed emotions more in line with human reactions than anything
displayed by the guests.
The empathy imbalance
between the guests and the hosts drives the story. As the androids gain
awareness of their place within the park’s pecking order, their horror
at what they’ve been subjected to changes them. Maeve’s experience of
waking up mid “repair” and seeing the factory-like facility in which she
was made and Dolores’s attack left an indelible impact on each
character. Whether either will experience anything as gratifying as
Brienne’s defeat of the Hound or as woefully human as Cersei’s blinding
ambition remains to be seen, but both seem fed up with being subject to
the park’s whims. At the end of the third episode, Dolores takes on a
Rebus a fellow host, turns his gun on him, and fires after being
threatened. The move, unprecedented for a host, is a desperate act of
self-preservation, and proof that even the weakest among the hosts is
capable of fighting back.
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