WESTWORLD, A VICTIM OF THE MODERN TREND TO RUSH TO JUDGMENT.
GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO TELEVISION
Our age being what it is, t he first episode of HBO’s Westworld wasn’t even actually finished before complaints began rolling in. The first rumblings came in some early reviews of the series, but once the pilot hit the air, the regular media took its cues from social media, and spent the next few days weighing in on the hyper- violence and aggression towards women of the sci- fi series’s first episode, in particular a scene involving the apparent rape of its main android, Dolores ( played by Evan Rachel Wood).
The type of complaints should be familiar to virtually anyone who reads anything about television on the Internet: the violence is gratuitous, rape is not a mere plot point, how often do we need to go down these dark paths, etc. In the case of Westworld, they do not emerge entirely from a vacuum: as much as anyone, HBO has been responsible for the de facto idea that indulging in graphic darkness is essential to television that deserves to be taken seriously.
From Sopranos on through to Game of Thrones, HBO’s programming has shown an obsession with violence, sex and their intersection. Game of Thrones in particular has started to address these concerns, somewhat, but it’s probably reasonable to say that the network as a whole has, up until recently, been happy to play in a simplistically mature space without always thinking it through, or at least not thinking of it as anything other than gritty realism, a grand self-justifying end.
The immediate critique of Westworld is a critique of legacy, an act of proud ignorance, of forcing something about which we know virtually nothing into a narrative that we have already constructed and explained. Westworld revealed exactly one-tenth of its intentions and arcs to an audience, and it was lumped in and pilloried for its supposed failings. This is not much different from judging the success of a superhero movie on the leaked photos of the costumes, although I suppose we do enough of that too.
While the second episode perhaps assuaged some of these critiques, I don’t think you need to have done anything much more than paid attention to the first episode and some of the chatter around to get a sense that there is more at work here than meets the eye. Westworld’s actresses have all been rather explicit about the extent to which their gaggle of prostitutes and victims are complicated and explored. But even the show itself drops some pretty stark hints about the extent to which it’s going to be a metacommentary on narrative tricks and human desire.
It is a show set in a theme park that lets people act out their fantasies; the pilot introduces us to the equivalents of the park’s writer, dir- ector and set designer. Good lord, one of the last lines is a Shakespeare quote, delivered with seething portent equally to Dolores and the audience: “These violent delights have violent ends.”
Do you want a hyperlink explaining how sometimes dialogue can have more than one meaning to pop up directly on your screen?
There are certainly a lot of hints that Westworld is going to offer a critique of the very violence and sexuality it displays — and, perhaps more germanely, of what it is exactly that attracts us to it, and how creators deploy that for their own ends — but for all I know it could easily turn tin- eared, or utterly blinkered, or be dropped entirely in favour of six straight hours of James Marsden using a gun penis to have sex with every single woman who appears on the show. The point here is that we may want to let a story that’s been conceived as at least a 10-parter get even halfway through its running time before we try to decide what it is.
The odds of that, naturally, are rather dim. As a medium, television has grown in prestige with the Internet’s ability to pick it apart in ever more particular and rapid ways. Thanks to its serialized nature, thanks to the fact we still all kind of experience it at roughly the same time, thanks to its ( still) relative ubiquity, it has become the most dissected form of storytelling, if not art in general, we have. Every episode of any show worth its salt will get a novella’s worth of recaps by the following day, to say nothing of the explainers, Q&As, worshipful appreciations and wild speculation about “where it is going.”
Which is fine, I guess — you spend your 80 years here your own way — but it also seems to sell short the very medium it purports to be supporting. One of the key factors of television’s rise to artistic prominence is the fact it is now stretching its story over multiple hours: it’s not just discrete little hour-long playlets featuring all the characters you know and love. But this growing scope has been met by and large with narrowing focus, to the point where even the biggest, most hyped event series of the television season has 20 minutes to make its case before it is dismissed, or anyway condemned for ideas it has barely even had time to mouth, much less explain.
Perhaps the growing complexity of Westworld, at least over the next few episodes — and assuming its critics even bother to continue to watch — will be enough to remind people to approach these things — these multimillion dollar undertakings designed by dozens if not hundreds of people over years to both entertain and intellectually provoke you — with a spirit of curiosity, rather than easy condemnation.
Probably not, though. We have to think things awfully quick these days. Maybe someone should make a series about that, and get the conversation started.
WESTWORLD REVEALED EXACTLY ONE-TENTH OF ITS INTENTIONS.