part0024

T he theme park Westworld, where the wealthy elite of the future go to vacation, is a place of contradiction. Artificial intelligence and biomechanics so advanced they are indistinguishable from living humans inhabit towns with only the technologies of the old West; horror and suffering are wiped away after each day; danger and romance come from situations where Guests can’t be harmed and the object of lust will not say no.

What does it mean to be human when our actions are reversible, harm to ourselves is impossible, and the “other” does not feel (or does she?). Westworld is a place totally different—or so, at least, it seems—from the world we live in, and that’s what makes it so alluring.

The park changes those who visit, it alters the way they think, feel, and who they think they are. Beyond all the special effects, beautiful settings, and even more beautiful Hosts, there’s something underneath, something that the characters sense and feel changing them, but can’t quite put their finger on.

Throughout the show, the characters try to describe the strange and disorienting effects of Westworld, to push them off or to embrace them, and to get a grip on how the park influences their sense of time, space, and self. It’s almost as if the park has a mind of its own. What is it that makes all those who visit Westworld question themselves, their sanity, and even their reality? All the Guests who vacation at Westworld are drawn in by its strange and wondrous ability to transform those who enter, and most leave different from how they arrived.

Everything that seems impossible and out of reach in the visitors’ “real” lives is readily available, and even encouraged at Westworld. Guests choose to be villains or heroes, black hat or white, and enter a completely consuming and detailed reproduction of the American Wild West, with outlaws, sheriffs, cavalry, indigenous tribes, bounty hunters, and bar maids. Lee, the narrative director of the park, exclaims, “We sell complete immersion in one hundred interconnected narratives. A relentless fucking experience” (“The Original”).

There’s only one rule in Westworld; the Guests can’t die. Everything else is on the table. Some Guests choose to romance gorgeous Hosts, track down outlaws with bounty hunters, and follow along with the “narratives,” the stories which the Hosts live out, conjured up by the programming and design teams at the park. Others “go straight evil” (“Chestnut”), using and abusing the Hosts for their cruelest and darkest desires. In a place where you can’t die, your actions, no matter how twisted and horrible, have no consequences, and where “what happens here stays here” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”), anything and everything can happen.

William, an initially reluctant visitor to the park, observes, “Maybe that’s why they come here. Whoever you were doesn’t matter here. There’s no rules or restrictions. You could change the story of your life, you can become somebody else, no one will judge you, no one in the real world will ever know” (“Contrapasso”). In Westworld, paying Guests are free to do whatever they like to whatever Hosts they like, and, the next day, the Hosts’ memories are wiped, and everything returns to how it had previously been.

Nothing in Westworld has any consequences, or, at least, it seems so at first. But maybe what happens at Westworld doesn’t stay in the park. Maybe it permanently alters the way visitors understand themselves and the world outside the park.

This uncanniness of the park affects the Guests, employees, and even the Hosts in unexpected ways. Host Dolores, a rancher’s daughter who begins to realize her world might not be what it seems, observes, “I think there’s something wrong with this world, something hiding underneath. Either that, or there’s something wrong with me” (“Dissonance Theory”). It’s not one single thing, but the park itself , its characters, scenery, the way time passes and the physical isolation of the park, all together, which has this disquieting affect.

French philosopher Michel Foucault suggested that there are places, physical spaces that can alter a person’s experience and understanding of the world. He explains that there are real, physical spaces which we can go to, that are unlike “normal” places, that go against the logic and rules we have come to take for granted and assume to be universal. Perhaps Foucault can give us some insight into the destabilizing power of Westworld. In “normal” places, time passes linearly, consequences have actions, bodies cannot be easily mended, and the dead do not return to life. But in Westworld, we are in the past and present, nothing in the park has lasting consequences, and those Hosts that die awaken again the next morning, resurrected and ready to fulfill the Guests fantasies again.

Foucault called these places “heterotopias,” and explained that they are spaces of “non-hegemony.” This is a highfalutin way of saying “different from our normal, everyday spaces.” “Hegemony” refers to the dominant values and attitudes of a society, those which structure the world around us, and which we unquestionably assume to be universal and true. These are not values which are part of the “natural” world, but, rather, are socially produced by a shared culture. For example, hegemonic masculinity presents the characteristics of aggression towards and domination of women, a “naturally male” trait, and therefore, it is presented as a natural fact.

In reality, these attitudes towards women and masculinity come from our culture understanding of gender, and are not natural or necessary at all. Hegemony make the world intelligible; things follow a set order and make sense. It tells us what the world is, how the world works, and what our place is in it. Hegemony holds us to certain standards. But what hegemony has come to make us believe is turned upside-down and inside-out in Foucault’s heterotopias. In Westworld, unlike the outside world, “You don’t have to worry about what most people would do” (“Chestnut”).

From Greek, “heterotopia” translates to “other place,” meaning to point out a place which is different from those we mostly inhabit. These are spaces of counter-hegemony, which are “others” to the “normal” spaces which adhere to the comfortable and familiar hegemony we are so used to. Heterotopias are not better or worse than other spaces, what is remarkable about them is that they are different . They operate by different laws, are comprised of contradictions, and are simultaneously both in the world and in our heads. Unlike other spaces, which follow our expectations of the world, heterotopias defy our assumptions about space, time, identity, and ourselves. Foucault writes:

There are … real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (“Of Other Spaces,” p. 332)

What Foucault means is that, everywhere, there are places which work by their own rules, and do not follow the usual assumptions which we have come to take for granted. There are places which defy the patterns and workings of the world outside them. These spaces contradict the logic of the other, “normal” spaces, and present a world of new possibilities detached from hegemony.

Heterotopias, Foucault explains, are all around us, even if we only occasionally visit them. Like the characters of Westworld , Foucault struggles to describe these places. You’ve probably been to one of these places yourself. Their experience and affects are difficult to describe, but they are also places in which we are free to image ourselves and the world as new and different. Though rare, most of us have been to a place where we feel like a different person, and the usual laws and rules of the world melt away.

Take Halloween night, for instance. Just for one night a year, the world seems changed and magical; identities are no longer stable, but fluid and shifting. Things we normally don’t believe, that the dead can come back, that spirits might walk the Earth, suddenly seem possible. People dress up, and act in ways and believe things they wouldn’t on any other night of the year. It’s not the costumes, the candy, or the scary movies that do this; there is something about the spaces in which Halloween is celebrated that, if only for one night, contradicts the “normal” world.

There is a particular uncanniness to Halloween, the entire night itself gives rise to strange feelings and behaviors, and, the next morning, the world has returned to normal. Westworld is a heterotopia, where stable beliefs about space, time, and ourselves are contradicted, and Guests find themselves free from their usual expectations for the world, other people, and themselves.

Foucault tells us that where we are is not just a backdrop to our lives, but informs and shapes them, and influences how we see ourselves. Where we are, what kind of a place we’re in, affects how we perceive the world around us, experience time and space, and even who we are. Heterotopias are not imaginary places which only exist in stories like utopias, but are really here in the world. Guests come, at least for the first time, for the thrills and chills, to experience uninhibited violence and sex with others who can’t feel a thing (or can they?). However, we quickly learn the Guests don’t just come for “a warm body to shoot or to fuck” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”). It’s not the gory and steamy displays which really get to the Guests, but, behind all the special effects, it’s what the park does to the Guests that pull them in. Logan, the wealthy business heir and pervy jerk, explains to his future brother-in-law William that Westworld is much more than its R-Rated draws:

I know you think you have a handle on what this is going to be. Guns and tits and all that mindless stuff I usually enjoy. You have no idea. This place seduces everybody, eventually. And by the end you’re going to be begging me to stay, because this place is the answer to that question you’ve been asking yourself … Who you really are. (“Chestnut”)

Like Halloween night, it is not one single thing about Westworld which draws Guests in or produces the particular uncanniness characteristic of heterotopias. It’s what Westworld does to its visitors, how it changes how they think, act, and feel, which is what captures the Guests’ and the employees’ imaginations. Its effects cannot be explained by its cheap thrills, but only by its ability to allow us to experience a new reality, free from the socially-produced hegemony of the outside world, so different from our own; it makes us question everything, even ourselves. Robert, one of the co-creators of the park, says Westworld is “not a business venture, not a theme park. But an entire world” (“Dissidence Theory”).

When we first meet the excited Logan and the apprehensive William, they are preparing to leave their normal world and head into the park. It’s important that the park is physically isolated, the outside world seemingly impossibly far, as if the Guests are not just popping over to a theme park, but literally entering a new world.

Part of Westworld’s magic is that it is both mentally and physically completely separate from the outside world; once Guests drop into the park, they are fully submerged in a new world. No remnants of the outside world remain; Guests even change into Wild West clothes provided by staff, so as to leave everything from their previous life behind. This is important; as soon as the Guests board the train, they are transported to a new reality. Like the ship on the ocean, Foucault’s favorite example of a heterotopia, Westworld exists on its own, separate from the outside world. Foucault writes, “Think of the ship: it is a floating part of space, a placeless place, that lives by itself, closed in on itself and at the same time poised in an infinite ocean” (p. 336). The only thing from the outside world that gets in (and gets out) are the Guests.

The passage of time is especially important to the heterotopic qualities of Westworld. The Hosts in Westworld spend their day going through what those who run the park call “loops,” moving through the narratives written for them by Lee and others, only improvising when Guests want to interact with them. Every day forgetting the day before, waking up the same, and, like Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, reliving the same day again and again. In the first episode “The Original,” we watch Dolores chat with her father, head into town, reunite with her love interest, the gunslinger Teddy, then come home to her murdered parents and a violent gang of outlaws.

This is Dolores’s loop, day in and day out. We watch her wake up in the same nightgown, have the same conversation with her father, and drop one of her tin cans in town which rolls into the foot of Teddy or a curious Guest. Time, in particular, is an important aspect of the heterotopia. Foucault writes: “Heterotopias are linked for the most part to bits and pieces of time … The heterotopia enters fully into function when men find themselves in a sort of total breech of their traditional time.” Further, time passes differently in Westworld. We watch Dolores relive the same day over and over, William (later revealed to be the Man in Black) visits her for decades, every day of their encounter beginning with her dropped tin can rolling off, just like the first time they met.

Westworld is, too, a space both inside and outside of time. Guests visit for a short while, beginning and ending a few days’ stay, but for the Hosts, time never really passes. For decades, Dolores reflects on how “some people choose to see the ugliness in this world,” repeating this in every episode, the barmaid Clementine greets Guests to the Mariposa by caressing their cheeks, and the outlaw Hector robs and loots the town of Sweetwater.

William (later evolving into the Man in Black) ages, marries, and has a daughter, while the Hosts, how they look, what they say, and all their daily activities, stay the same. In Westworld, the past, present, and future live alongside one another, the American Wild West brought back to life by advanced technologies, and the Hosts never age. Robert can start and stop the actions of the Hosts as he pleases, freezing then unfreezing time, and visit his childhood whenever he pleases. Even for the viewer of the show, we watch timelines decades apart alongside one another, not knowing how both so much and so little could change over decades. It is a world both in the past and in the future; with one foot in the world before technology and the other in a post-human future.

Imagination, fantasy, and deviance are set free in a heterotopia where the expectations applied to our normal, everyday lives melt away. The previous beliefs about biology, technology, space and time of the Guests, employees, and Hosts get scrambled, leaving the characters unsure about the world they live in, and themselves.

When William first arrives, he asks the Host Angela, who introduces him to Delos, the company that runs Westworld, if she’s a robot. She responds, “Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?” (“Chestnut”). Note: Delos shares its name with the Greek island Delos, a special and strange place itself, where the first “probation against death” is said to have been established.

William soon sees how the divisions between the Hosts and the Guests, who’s “real” and who isn’t, quickly disintegrates. William becomes obsessed with Dolores and the park, spending decades returning and eventually becoming the sadistic Man in Black, who says, “This place feels more real than the real world” (“The Bicameral Mind”). How does this world, which is completely fabricated, created in a lab, and closely monitored and maintained by staff, make the outside world seem “so unreal”? (“Trompe L’Oeil”). Heterotopias have a way of revealing the absurdities and facades of the outside world. Foucault writes that

heterotopias … have, in relation to the rest of space, a function that takes place between two opposite poles. On the one hand they perform the task of creating a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusionary, all the locations within which life is fragmented. On the other, they have the function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous, and well-arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived, and in sketchy state. (“Of Other Spaces,” p. 335)

Throughout his work, Foucault has explored the ways in which our lives and identities have been defined by opposites, like male-female, good-evil, and normal-abnormal. Foucault writes, “our lives are still ruled by a certain number of unrelenting opposites” (p. 331) which tell us about who we are and about the world around us. In heterotopias, these opposite-pairs come apart, and their divisions become fuzzy and unclear.

In Westworld, the opposites-pairs of biological-technological, human-machine, past-future, and real-unreal, are undone. Are these things really so different after all? What is the difference between the Hosts and the Guests? Or Westworld and the outside world? Is one more real than the other? When Bernard, head of Westworld’s Programming Division, is revealed to be a Host made to look, behave and think like Ford’s late partner Arnold, the differences between human and robot become completely muddled. Bernard asks Ford, “What’s the difference between my pain and yours? Between you and me?” (“Trace Decay”). Perhaps the “opposites that we take for granted” are not so different after all. When Maeve wakes up and meets the low-ranking lab technician Felix, he explains to her she is a robot. Though meant to convince Maeve she isn’t real, their chat makes their differences murkier not clearer.

What, if anything, separates the Guests from the Hosts? If there is nothing, then what makes us human? Just like the Guests, the Hosts love, suffer, cry, and laugh, their lives are structured by routine and they hope and dream for a new life. The more we get to know the Guests and Hosts, the more the Hosts become human and the Guests become robotic.

As strange as Westworld itself is, its power lies in its ability to destabilize what we believe we knew about our normal , everyday world. What we once took for granted as fact, we no longer do. If, in Westworld, time is cyclical, robots like Dolores feel and humans, like the Man in Black, seem not to, we all follow our loops day by day, and the past and future are indistinguishable, what does this mean for our world, or, the world we thought we knew?

In a flashback, Bernard reads this passage of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland , a story about another heterotopia, to his son Charlie, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense! Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”). Westworld doesn’t give us answers, but rather, opens its Guests to question the world they thought they knew. What makes us human? What is real and what is not? And, of course, who, or what, am I ? Westworld makes us doubt the divisions between the opposite-pairs which we have come to take for granted, and which are central part of “normal” spaces. What we once considered “normal” now feels strange and false, having seen another world where the same rules don’t apply.

Encountering a world where space, time, and ourselves are transformed, and defy hegemony, makes the Guests question their life outside, and wonder if they too, like the Hosts, are free, or if they live in a continuous narrative loop. What are we outside our world of opposites, where everything make sense in black and white?

When our beliefs about the world which compose our everyday lives is thwarted, possibilities become endless. It’s not the sex and violence which keep the Guests coming back and the employees enthralled in the Hosts, but it is the way in which Westworld, in undermining what they have come to accept as “normal,” opens a world unbound by our usual notions of normalcy.

In the outside world, time is linear, machines don’t think or feel, and we are told who and what we are. In Westworld, you are in the past, present, and future, physically isolated from the outside world. You choose to be a white or a black hat, and are free to define yourself, outside of the binaries of human and machine, real and not real, and good and evil.