Westworld: Telegraph for The Winter Line

Have a Theory? Share It Now!

Love the podcast, it’s truly my fave. I have a few thoughts on the last episode, if you’ll indulge me, but I guess that’s what you’re paid the big bucks for…

I’m pretty annoyed with the discussion of “free will” as if it’s even worthy of discussion. Just take a minute to think about the ridiculous assumptions underlying notions of free will: total individual autonomy, self-sufficiency, total ownership, isolation, domination over all non-human entities on this planet, etc. It’s a sociopathic delusion! Why do we bother with this absurd conception of “freedom”? Well, because of European imperialism and colonization. As an American in the United States, it seems pretty fucking clear that all of our notions of freedom are rooted precisely in what Westworld critiques in Season 1: I can do whatever the fuck I want to whoever the fuck I want with no consequences whatsoever. Okay, then, so people believe that “free will” means being Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

Let’s just stop fucking talking about free will, eh.

Instead, Ashley had a super good idea, which was to talk about this dual idea of being a subject. I loved that section of the episode, and I’d like to take it a little further. In addition to everything Ashley mentioned, we can augment the self-defeating absolutism of “free will vs. slavery” to be something more like agency within a context, or “subjectivity.” One way of thinking about that is definitely the duality of being a subject in the park vs. being subjected to the rules/scripts of the park, but I think we can go even further. Think about the “subject” of a sentence, grammatically.

Here’s three theories of how we come to self-recognition:

1. Lacan’s Mirror Stage: A child recognizes themselves in the mirror & thinks, “I am that other.”

2. Althusser’s Interpellation: A police officer calls out “Hey, you!” and you turn around to think, “You is me.”

3. Fanon’s Sociogeny: A young white girl on a train in Paris sees a Black man from Martinique (Fanon) and says to her mother, “Look, a Negro!” and he thinks to himself “Them is me.”

Think about the grammatical subject of each of these sentences. The first situation seems resonant with Season 1, in which the bicameral mind seems to suggest a notion of a self talking to a self–a kind of mirror–is what it means to be conscious. It’s super simplistic. Yes, it appeals to people who want some kind of definition of consciousness that has nothing to do with history or power or culture, but that’s just simply ridiculous. As are most of the theories around the series that ignore the way the show is playing with and exploring genre.

Take another meaning of subjectivity: subjectivity vs. objectivity–the way that a subject is positioned vis-a-vis an object, a positioning. This is not absolute, but contextual and social. I think this is more of what we’re seeing Westworld productively explore: who are we as an “I” in the context of the collective “we” with whom we associate and struggle. That’s shifting and changing. It’s not “identity,” which is a stagnant and reductive idea of a self. It’s iterative, not unlike algorithms and DNA. Or genre. Genres are iterative, and Westworld is ultimately a show about genres even more than it is about narrative or character.

At least that’s how I watch it. I like your podcast especially because I can tell each of you watch it differently, which I love. Let’s watch differently, not just in the same mode of trying to figure out some kind of puzzle that doesn’t exist. But if it did exist… Right now, I’d guess that Caleb is William. I’d guess that Rehoboam doesn’t actually work to control the world, but it’s the faith of the world in Rehoboam that allows it to succeed. That’s what a Panopticon is–not total surveillance, but people internalizing the surveillance to self-govern. It’s the Wizard of Oz–no true master behind the curtain.

Love the show, sorry for the crazy mess of comments!
Stephen Poland

P.S. I write about Westworld on Medium & you can check it out here if interested.

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