WESTWORLD AND THE METICULOUS WAY THE SHOW DELIVERS ITS MESSAGE.
How Westworld critiques the narrative guesswork it has inspired
‘It was Arnold’s key insight, the thing that led the hosts to their awakening: suffering,” Westworld founder Robert Ford tells Bernard, Ford’s robotic recreation of his friend and co-creator, on the season finale of the HBO series Westworld. “The pain that the world is not as you want it to be.”
It is the ultimate upending of the true purpose of Westworld, what we thought Ford was creating all this time, what the park’s visitors thought they were paying for. Just as The Man in Black — finally, probably a bit too slowly, even in the moment, revealed to be good ol’ William — surmised, there’s nothing in it for the guests when all they can do is win. Having all your dreams fulfilled is no path to enlightenment; it’s not a journey inward so much as a projection outward, a version of who you would be with no struggle, no pain.
The world never offers us such an opportunity — not even, as it will come to pass, Westworld, at least not for the people who are currently stuck in the park. Earlier in the season, we heard several characters — all hosts, as it turns out, assuming the timelines even out — repeat a variation on the same line: “This pain is all I have left of them.” It turns out that pronoun was always a reference to themselves. The pain is the only insight they have into their own being, the memories of trauma, the “reveries,” the only way they will begin to understand who that voice in their head really is.
I assume we can agree that their loops, forcing the hosts to endure endlessly rhyming forms of suffering on the assumption they will become dimly aware of it, is a long and cruel way to bring understanding to them. And yet at least some of the message of Westworld’s first season has been that we, the crude, cruel and unchanging humans, do not understand anything until we revisit it, again and again.
Among its many metafictional tricks, Westworld the show is built on loops as much as the park, casting us back to earlier moments we are only dimly aware of. ( Actually, with the Internet hive mind, our memory is somewhat more like the hosts now, able to live in every moment, through screenshots and reddit essays, but at least in the first few minutes of a callback reveal things are hazy, I would hope.)
In fictional terms, it’s an endlessly firing series of Chekhov’s guns, clockwork mechanics being placed on tables, to be picked up and fired inevitably but hopefully surprisingly — and maybe even mysteriously, as its cascading kept prodding bigger questions.
So we get a human/ host switcheroo in the first 20 minutes of the show paid off seven episodes later. We get the implication that a host can’t harm a human without some obvious programmatic intervention, and the hints that someone had been messing with Maeve’s code, paid off in the finale, with the reveal that Ford is seeding an entire revolution. ( Which, speaking of revealing bigger questions, is another fun one the show prods: What do you do when even your awareness is the product of a program, your freedom is someone else’s careful plan?) All Ford’s philosophical talk about stories based on truth, a villain who aims to usher in another world, even the disappointment of telling a story that only explains who the teller is, circles back as he delivers his final speech, and the first shots of the robot revolution ring out.
This eternal recurrence is some proof of how meticulous the show is. Selfishly, I kind of hope that the reveal of this care will dampen the enthusiasm for trying to solve it like it’s just that little maze puzzle that so disappoints William. I suspect it will only deepen it, though, only make people more sensitive to coming twists, and the arms race between creators and infinitely connected audience will continue. It’s a game that clearly both sides enjoy, though I think you can read a note of critique of this approach to art in the finale: These games, again, are just silly distractions, the journey inward — of character, of audience, even of creator — being the major idea.
As the host Dolores finally comes to realize, it’s all about meeting with that voice inside that’s telling you to find the centre of the maze, not finding the actual centre of the maze. Once you can start listening to that, well, that’s when the real questions begin.
IT’S ALL ABOUT MEETING WITH THAT VOICE INSIDE THAT’S TELLING YOU TO FIND THE CENTRE OF THE MAZE, NOT FINDING THE ACTUAL CENTRE OF THE MAZE.