![]() These shows were the original “Law & Order”-the base coat for TV drama and the source material for children’s games. “Bonanza” ran for fourteen years, “Gunsmoke” for twenty. By 1958, there were twenty-eight Western dramas on the air. In this context, the Western setting is a logical one, given that it reflects TV’s own frontier days, when prime time was wall-to-wall cowboys. Four episodes in, however, “Westworld” is more about just how hard it is to create such a show. If the entire series felt like that scene, as destabilizing and beautiful as a nightmare, it might become as dazzling as “The Leftovers” or “Hannibal,” the kind of ambitious shows that push past their premises into something profound. Her knees buckle, and she gets hauled away and put back into the story. They may be cyborgs, but to her and to us they seem like bodies in a mass grave. She’s trembling, panicked, naked, with no idea where she is or what’s happening-she’s never seen anything except the frontier set-and when she stumbles into an empty gray warehouse she finds herself staring at hundreds of corpses, piled like logs. In one eerie scene, an unconscious cyborg who is being repaired wakes up on the operating table, grabs a scalpel, and escapes. At its richest moments, “Westworld” glimmers with political resonances, as the best speculative fiction can in its way, it’s about vulnerable citizens forced to repress atrocities so that their nation can drape a patriotic story over its ugly history. It’s a multivalent metaphor, a play on the “brain wipes” that appear in a lot of science fiction, like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” swirled together with the rebellious-fembot anxieties of a movie like “Ex Machina.” At times, the cyborgs reflect the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” as brainwashed creatures whose desires are programmed into them sometimes their grisly flashes of memory, which occur after a digital update, feel more like P.T.S.D. This unsettling motif is one of the most effective aspects of “Westworld”-we keep seeing the cyborgs waking from nightmares they can’t understand, or shuddering with trauma until a technician soothes them with a command. Then, at night, they go to bed and forget everything, to start all over again. ![]() Every day, the hosts are raped, shot, and tortured. They’re slaves who don’t know they’re slaves, providing immersive-and ultraviolent-entertainment to paying customers, in settings such as saloons and a dusty frontier wilderness. And, crucially, they’ve shifted the story’s sympathies from the visitors to the cyborgs, known within Westworld as “hosts.” These hosts, who believe they are cowboys and Indians, hookers and virgins, are far more layered than the tourists who exploit them and the technicians who service them. They’ve also transformed the black hat from a cyborg into a human, who approaches the theme park as if it were a video game. In adapting it for television, Nolan and Joy have made a few wise moves, including trimming the film’s alternative fantasy worlds, Rome World and Medieval World. The source material for “Westworld” is Michael Crichton’s campy nineteen-seventies thriller, in which Yul Brynner plays an unstoppable black-hat robot who kills the guests in a kind of symbolic slave rebellion. Her struggle with her own identity, as she evolves from the object of the story to its subject, feels something like a sister act to Jessica Rabbit: she’s not good, she’s just drawn that way. This is largely owing to a spectacular performance by Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores, one of Westworld’s robots, an unspoiled farmer’s daughter, that stock figure of every raunchy vaudeville joke. So far, it works, mostly-not because it’s perfect but because it gets under your skin. It’s the kind of trippy conceptual project that would be unbearable if it weren’t so elegantly made. Created by the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, “Westworld” is explicitly, and often wittily, an exploitation series about exploitation, full of naked bodies that are meant to make us think about nudity and violence that comments on violence. Self-cannibalism and the snake that eats its own tail: that’s a fair description of “Westworld,” a come-hither drama that introduces itself as a science-fiction thriller about cyborgs who become self-aware, then reveals its true identity as what happens when an HBO drama struggles to do the same. I have vivisection! Self-cannibalism! A special little something I call the “whoroboros.” He’s the head of the “narrative department” at Westworld, a frontier-themed vacation park where customers act out their darkest fantasies. “This story line will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens,” Lee Sizemore brags. Every day, the show’s cyborgs undergo trauma.
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