Westworld Season 3, Episode 6 – Art & Fashion

Published April 23, 2020 · Updated July 6, 2022

Shat Crew,

I want to say “long time listener, first time writer-in”; I feel like I’ve been a long time listener, but I only found Shat when I was looking for a companion podcast for Watchmen. When I saw that ya’ll has done Westworld too I listened to those pods as I rewatched season 1 and 2 in preparation for season 3. Needless to say I craved more of you and I’ve listened to quite a lot of Shat the Movies too. You are each so different, genuine, and insightful into everything you review and I equally enjoy listening to deep reaching philosophical conversations as much as I enjoy listening to ya’ll crack each other up over wonderfully awful movies.

Anyway, to my thoughts on Westworld season 3, episode 6: Decoherence. On the deep dive Big D commented on the statue in Charlores’s office, noting that it was a foreshadowing of her Charred-lores state to come. I totally agree that this was the symbolism Joy & Nolan were going for. You know that anytime the camera lingers just a little too long on something that would normally just be in the background, it’s for a reason. So this isn’t to offer any different opinion on the purpose of the statue, but here’s a little deep dive. When I first saw the close-up of the sculpture on this episode I immediately thought “oh, is that a Giacometti?” But on closer look it doesn’t look like it (maybe because of the insane prices) but I can’t help but think that he was the artist they were trying to evoke. Alberto Giacometti was a 20th century Swiss sculptor who lived in Paris, and his pieces are these elongated, thin male and female bronze cast figures. He created human figures that were inches tall, life-size, larger than life, and in sizes like the one in Hale’s office. In recent years his pieces have sold for over $100 million each, and I believe he still holds the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold, “L’Homme Au Doigt”, (“The Pointing Man”), which sold for $141.3 million in 2015. Christie’s New York has written his figures “suited the zeitgeist of the war’s [WWII] aftermath – perhaps a positive metaphor for civilization emerging from the years of physical and psychic horror.” Certainly sounds relevant to the present day we see in Westworld. He worked in plaster and then cast them in bronze so that his human figures could be endlessly recreated (again, sounds familiar). Interestingly, he felt as though he were a failure. He was endlessly creating these similar male and female figures (“Walking Man”, “Standing Woman”) but he ultimately felt that he failed to capture life. He was obsessed with creating a reflection of reality, or expressing his vision of reality, but was never satisfied with his work. You can almost see his sculpting method in the rough, eroded surfaces and the emaciated appearance of the figures, how he obsessively worked and reworked them over and over until there was almost nothing left. These figures are reduced to their core. After Charlores crawls out the car fire she embodies this type of sculpture; she has been stripped of everything physically and emotionally now, she’s brought to her core. I think this is setting up her for revenge-mode, and a further divergence from Dolores Prime. Does she team up with Maeve? She’s gone on this journey of waking up in someone else’s body, to feeling like the original Charlotte is trying to take over her body, to taking back control and making her own decision that her “family” was in fact important to her.

There’s more I could tie together about how Giacommti’s sculptures carry themes of isolation and existentialism and general “what is the meaning of life” to Westworld, but you get the idea. I feel like we can take all of these little details in the show and add layers and layers of meaning and symbolism and read into things too far, but that’s part of the fun!

My second topic: Charlores’s amazing fucking outfit. So I loved how ya’ll gushed about this dusty rose cape-coat, cigarette pant, and metallic body suit the same way I did…except I did this in episode 1 of this season. When I first saw her in this outfit in this episode my reaction was something like, “Really? Yes, I love this outfit but I already saw it, I want to see more fashion of the future!” So then I thought, well that has to be intentional. You can’t tell me Charlotte Hale doesn’t have an extensive wardrobe and she has to repeat outfits like this. When we first saw her in this outfit in episode 1 it was at a Delos board meeting and they were talking about taking the company private, she said something about the incident happening in the park 3 months ago, and there was an absentee board member, William. In later episodes we find out why William is missing. So at first you think the board meeting in episode 1 is a flash-forward, after we find out what happened to William. But when we see her in this outfit at Delos in “real time”, at a meeting talking about taking the company private, things go very differently, starting with Serac having that one board member killed.

So… it’s not a flash-forward, but is the board meeting we saw in episode 1 Rohobo’s prediction or simulation of the Delos board meeting to come? But things turned out differently in episode 6 because it couldn’t properly predict Charlores’s actions and because Serac intervened? If it turns out that some of the things we’ve seen haven’t been reality, but rather Rohobo’s predictions of the future that change per Serac’s actions/hosts’ unpredictable actions, then I’m going to have to watch it all from the beginning (which I probably will anyway!). I struggled with the timeline of BernArnold’s glitchy memories in season 2, and I couldn’t piece it together until the end of the season with the help of podcasts and online articles. Season 2 was messing with the audience’s perception of time, and it seems like season 3 is messing with the audience’s perception of reality.

Thanks for the hours of entertainment, it’s been especially helpful lately in quarantine!

Jordan B.
Midland, Texas

PS: 30 year old woman, people always think “Jordan” is a guy’s name

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