Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Westworld

Published October 27, 2016 · Updated July 6, 2022

I love your podcast and the attention the way you include viewer input. I’d love for you to spend some time exploring all of the literary allusions that add meaning to this show, but I think that you could probably spend a full episode just on the connections between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Westworld.

As you probably remember, Brave New World is about a future dystopian England where everyone pursues pleasure at the cost of human connections. Humans are created in labs, programmed to pursue a life of happiness and pleasure, and to avoid emotional pain. One of the main characters is a man named Bernard Marx whose role is to serve as a sort of conscience: he represents the reader, who is both fascinated by the world but also disgusted by it.

Bernard gets himself into some trouble when, after a visit to the “Savage Lands” — an American Indian reservation in the Southwest — he brings back a man, John, who was born in the Savage Lands to a woman who was left behind during a trip. Bernard brings John back to humiliate John’s father, the Director and a boss who earlier humiliated Bernard.

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John grew up with one book, a collection of Shakespeare’s plays, and this guides his life. The title of the novel is itself an allusion to a quote from The Tempest: “O brave new world/That has such people in it!” John attempts to make the people of modern society see the dangers of technology in controlling people and the population, but they ignore him and he runs away. He becomes a public spectacle and people follow him to a lighthouse where they begin an orgy. John commits suicide and the society continues on. In this world, no one prays or believes in a god, but they do swear to a sort of deity, Ford.

Both surface and deeper connections are fairly obvious, and I think that they also provide a pretty solid road map of what to expect in the show. I agree with you and many of your listeners that the Westworld Ford is a type of god–whether he’s “real” or not doesn’t really matter; Ford is the creator of this world. I think that this novel also reveals the Westworld’s Bernard’s weaknesses–he is going to humiliate Ford and/or the Delos Corporation, either intentionally or not, in pursuit of trying to find some deeper truth.

As I’ve been watching the first few episodes, I’ve been trying to figure out which character is the “John” of Westworld. It might possibly be the Man in Black, but I think it’s more likely to be Peter, who, in a previous version was a Shakespeare troupe member. And I think that we’re going to see something come alive in Cold Storage at the hands of Peter. (Besides, that guy is too good an actor to be relegated to one episode, right?!)

Anyway, I think that you could find even more connections, and it’s worth exploring the influence of Brave New World on Westworld. For added fun, check out this comic by Stuart McMillan, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” The thematic connections between Brave New World, Westworld, and our own entertainment culture are pretty cool.

Thanks again for your work–it’s great fun to listen to your initial “instacast” followed by the podcast later in the week! – Christine

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