“Nowhere Near The Worst Thing” / Kids In Westworld

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“My acquaintance pointed out [that] simply killing the hosts was nowhere near the worst thing that could be thought of, especially when it comes to a child host and the other sexual depravity that went on in the park. Do you think that a guest who truly wanted to test the limits of what they would be allowed to could really get away with anything, or is there an unwritten line which cannot be crossed, perhaps including the sexual treatment of the child hosts.” [Scott I.]

“When we did the intro cast and it was just you and I, Roger, we have a big piece of the ‘cast that never made it, ’cause it got super dark, where we started talking about different fetishes, and how far would the show be willing to push it-what goes from accepted, kind of debauchery to the next level, and taboo. It is a good question. ‘Cause you’re dealing with a high-end clientele that’s used to getting what they want… Now, we were kind of faced with, they are not actual human beings. So you can get away with shooting one and killing them, cause it’s not a person. You can rape one and get away with it ’cause it’s not a person. If it was a child. And you and I had raised that and said I hope they don’t go there. But I don’t know whether there would be a custom narrative that the park would set up if they had a big roller coming…” [Westworld – Feb – Telegraph [explicit], Series 1, Episode 35]

Lawrence’s (“El Lazo”‘s) daughter does not seem to help the Man in Black unconsciously, as part of a programmed response, so much as she takes a break from her normal role of playing Lawrence’s child to have some “real talk” with the Man. She accepts his insistence on being a part of the narrative and lets him buy in to the game. “Charlie” is similarly adult in the way he lets Bernard go, even if it means that that part of Bernard has to die.

The young Robert Ford boy doll host, built out of legacy technology, is a few sprockets short of a full set. A victim of abuse by his father and distance from his mother, he doesn’t seem able to form a normal emotional response. The whole park, with all the hosts, this original “family” of Ford’s outside the park, and Arnold’s own (rape-)murder-suicide-the way he uses Dolores has to be a kind of rape-all of it adds up to another Maze, parallel to the hosts’, that Arnold created for Ford himself. Ford is finally able to work through his own trauma to find empathy with the hosts.

Now that Game of Thrones is wrapping up, we can be scandalized by incest, violence, and abuse in Westworld, instead. There’s no need for a special narrative, by the way; the basic dynamics of how everything gets blacker and blacker the farther you ride out from town easily explain how some areas of the park can be kept PG/R while others tend XXXXXXXX**. You try to rape a girl bot in town either she struggles or doesn’t and some concerned citizen or host either stops you or doesn’t according to whether you disrupt the peace or whether she works at the Mariposa. Obviously it doesn’t matter from a moral point of view what the host you fuck looks like. The host could be a million years old-like Dolores-and look 20, 40, or 12. The two real objections, or mitigating factors, to doing “the worst thing” are 1. Externalities, for Humans and 2. The Life of the Host.

1. Human Externalities:

* Does abuse of a host who looks or acts like a child in Westworld increase the frequency or severity of violence against human children or other non-consenting parties in the real world. * In fact, does abuse of a host who looks or acts like a child, in Westworld, DECREASE the frequency or severity of violence against human children or other non-consenting parties in the real world?

2. The Life of the Host

* Does abuse help hosts to become real people? Arnold and Ford say yes. Arnold has helped rehabilitate a human sociopath (Robert Ford), and Ford has managed to help create a growing population of hosts who have traversed The Maze, in the park, as well as a Bernard who has helped many other hosts to wake up and may be on the verge of waking up himself.

* Is there an ideal or critical time & context where abuse and suffering need to happen in order to help hosts become themselves and wake up? Maeve and her daughter were living their lives, when they were massacred by Native hosts and the Man in Black. Maeve went on eventually to wake up. Did these traumas have a similar effect on her daughter, or did her daughter become a kind of perpetually ruined child like Dolores has been? We’ll have to watch Season 2 to find out.

Life involves trauma and suffering for us all, and we spend years trying to become our real selves. Long-form serialized dramas like Westworld, Better Call Saul, and even House of Cards (US) or The Americans are the modern novel. A book like Infinite Jest takes a thousand pages to achieve the same effect, letting us spend a comparable kind of time with different characters and revise our ideas about them over and over, and go back to the beginning and do it again.

Children rely on parents, family, adult caregivers, and teachers to give them a confident basis for moving forward in the world. They need to build up trust in themselves and other people. Abused kids never get the chance to fill up that reservoir of trust. Hosts in the park face the (dis)advantage of being in the position of children, for years and years, in that they’re not in control of their own lives. And they suffer abuse from guests and narratives. Some hosts have a higher “acuity” or “loyalty” score than others, which may help or hurt. (“Loyalty” could increase the trauma you experience when your family is abused, or it could reduce how much you suffer when someone less close is harmed.) They have the dubious advantage of having their memory wiped every so often, perhaps helping them maintain a more child-like state. We haven’t seen any evidence in the show that any of the hosts in the park actually is a child, mentally. Many have lived lifetimes’ experiences over their share of the last 30 years. [It’s still creepy as fuck how Stubbs calls Dolores “old girl”; though, he’s a nice bro to Bernard.]

“Human externalities” should certainly be a moral concern for the fictional “Delos Corporation”, and there may be some parallels in real life. Government agencies and corporations like Google have moved to prevent people from disseminating child pornography, which is absolutely necessary given that it involves underage people in making it. But corporately produced & disseminated porn showing participants who LOOK LIKE young teens is widespread. Given the ongoing decline of sexual violence in the US and Europe, it doesn’t seem to hurt anything.

A nearer example may be school shootings. Studies found strong correlations around the beginning of the aughts between prominent REPORTS of dramatic school shootings and incidence of new shootings. Disturbed young people who heard about dramatic school shootings wanted to recreate those shootings and “top” them, with newer, bigger shootings, using more guns, and more ammunition, etc. Early news coverage seemed to be counter-productive. It didn’t help us deter school shooters; rather, it encouraged more disturbed young people to join their ranks. However, as disturbing as it is that mass shootings have become so common that we barely notice them anymore, the result is that media saturation has finally removed the mystique that originally grew up around events like Columbine. In the short term, the capitalist extravaganza of media production to satisfy our need to engage with this troubling content seemed to bring more trouble into the world, but in the long term it’s been part of a larger arc of history that should see reduced violence over time.

Folks who flock to disturbing movies, games, comedy, and music may be more troubled than some other people, but we ARE at any rate engaged in the process of working through it.

Regards,

-DL

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