1984 Influenced Westworld

Published December 2, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

I have an observation that I think you might find interesting. I think the overall message of the show is going to be like that of “1984,” and can be extrapolated from what the creators did in “Memento.”

Ford tells Bernard that there is no difference between the guests and the hosts, and that consciousness is an illusion. I would say that the full idea there is that consciousness is an illusion borne of the complexity of experience. The third of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws is “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We don’t know what consciousness is or even how to define it, so you could theorize that consciousness is just a hand-wavy word for something too complex for us to understand, and be indistinguishable from magic.

I don’t think they “program” the hosts by scripting their future actions, and we haven’t seen them do that kind of programming. I think they just limit their experience by providing a hand-crafted memory, controlling the kinds of language and images they are allowed to understand, and providing them with motivations. Then Westworld plops them into the game where their limited experiences put them in a loop. The Westworld staff only know what the loops are by having observed them in the past. I think this is why they went to the trouble of building all the animals : because they found that having free animals introduced enough complexity to make the loops unpredictable. They needed to know that everything they do up until they engage with a guest is 100% predictable.

This is also the explanation for the hazmat suits when resetting the world – they need to control the starting state as much as possible. And this is also why they say that it gets more and more wild the further you get out of town. They aren’t able to reset the state of the world as exactly out there.

This is also why the reveries are causing the hosts to behave unpredictably; they are introducing the complexity of experience. It’s not that they are having an awakening, because Ford tells us that doesn’t exist. They are having reactions that are impossible to predict due to the sheer complexity of past experience, but it was always there.

This is straight out of “1984,” where the state limited knowledge and language to control the population. And the creators played with the same thing in Memento, where the protagonist’s lack of memory put him in a loop that he could only try to modify by writing cryptic notes to himself.

– Brent S.

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