Cyborgs have feelings, too
The Show: Westworld, Season 1, Episode 4 (HBO) The Moment: Playing cyborg
Deep inside the hyperrealistic Westworld theme park, cyborg programmer Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) runs a diagnostic test on lifelike android Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood). Guests pay $40,000 per day for the privilege of raping and murdering the robots, who are then rebuilt and have their memories wiped.
But Dolores is beginning to remember.
“What happened to your parents?” Bernard asks.
Dolores hyperventilates, cries. “Reduce emotional affect,” Bernard orders.
Dolores’s face and voice fall. “They were killed,” she says flatly.
“I can make your pain go away,” Bernard says.
“The pain is all I have left of them,” Dolores says. “You think grief will make you smaller inside, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening in me, like rooms I’ve never explored.”
“Did we write that for you?” he asks.
“I adapted it from a scripted dialogue about love,” she replies.
Westworld is full of complex ideas, written smoothly into the characters and plots: playing God makes one insane. Violent delights have violent ends. It’s heady stuff, often horribly sad.
But man, it must be a hoot to play a cyborg.
Wood, James Marsden (cowboy) and Thandie Newton (whorehouse madam) play the lead robots, but there are literally scores of others, often naked, often blown apart by the guests. (It looks fantastic — production costs must be staggering.)
What could be better for a thesp than toggling between programmed character and blank slate; than playing multiple death scenes, love scenes, scenes of bravery and fear?
Westworld is a fever dream about how precarious civilization is. It’s an actor’s dream, too. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.