part0027

W e believe that Westworld is, deep down, a show about sex workers trying to find meaning in their lives. The Westworld amusement park’s sex workers strive to uncover what makes all their pain and suffering worth it in the end. They want to locate their place in the bigger maze of life—a maze that we all find ourselves trapped in, with no clear sense of how to get to the center where life’s true meaning ultimately lies. Or at least, we hope there’s a center, just as the sex workers living in Sweetwater, Westworld, hope that there’s something that makes their suffering worthwhile.

Sure, there are other ways to describe the show. There’s a lot going on in and around Westworld. You could see the show as the story of Robert Ford, Arnold Weber, Theresa Cullen, William in Black, or some other person who is not obviously a sex worker, but who is clearly trapped in the midst of their own existential crisis—each one struggles with the meaning of their own existence. Yet, none of them experience existential dread precisely the way the sex workers do: these other characters lack the sexualized occupations, the repressed memories, and the fate of having existential queries thrust upon them. The sex workers are all in the midst of existential crises that were actually forced upon them.

And it’s also important to note that these sex workers are androids. Oh, had we neglected to bring that up? Sorry about that. Yes, the sex workers are all androids, and this is the most important thing in the whole discussion—and also the least important thing at the same time.

It’s incredibly important that these sex workers are androids, or robots, for two reasons. First, it seems, at least at first glance, that it’s more permissible for the Guests to have sex with them since they’re robots. The Guests are not having sex with humans who are forced into sex work, but with robots who only exist to engage in sex work at the park. William in Black asks Dolores how she would respond if he told her “that you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world?” (“The Original”). They were built specifically to gratify the Guests’ desires, and a lot of those desires are, as you might expect, sexual.

Second, the sex workers’ situations can be programmed as positive or, at least, as bearable. Westworld sells experiences with the Hosts, and those experiences include sex with willing and excited Hosts. If the Hosts are programmed to enjoy sex work, then it might seem like there’s no moral question about the permissibility of the customers having sex with them. And in those cases where the robots are not happy about having sex with the Guests, their memories are simply erased so that any unpleasant memories leave no negative impact on their robot lives.

Yet, the fact that the sex workers are androids is also not at all important. The androids are trapped, with little to no choice about their lives. Even when they like the sex, it’s only because they have been programmed to do so. And the ability to forget painful memories does not actually negate that they have to live through those experiences.

Nonetheless, if we thought they were merely androids, then it would not matter that they are trapped without choice. Mere androids are incapable of choosing in the first place. Westworld , though, consistently presents them as more than androids: the show depicts the consistent crossing of the line from mere android to something with true artificial intelligence. At that precise moment when these androids come to see themselves as something more—as something that can indeed feel and choose—they find themselves as having already been trapped in fates not of their own design. Westworld depicts androids arriving at self-consciousness, and awakening in the middle of a nightmare.

Of course, we are all trapped, and the trappings of sex work in Westworld are in fact a particularly vivid depiction of how we are all stuck in mazes that are not of our own designs. Society creates circumstances that lead to some of us being sex workers, where some people find ways to be happy while doing sex work and others struggle to be happy at all. Either way, we are too often trapped within social constraints that force us into lives that are not entirely of our own choosing. We all, though, face structural obstacles in our lives, whether our restrictive jobs, our ideological political systems, our limited educational systems, or something else. And, importantly, we all have to interact with other people who are similarly trapped, and we need to respect their humanity—maybe even when they’re androids.

So, the sex workers in Westworld show us the trappings of our own lives. These sex workers are androids who are programmed to have sex, and so their awakening to self-consciousness is particularly striking and worrisome. We all have various unavoidable influences working upon us—at school, at work, in the political system—that make us do things that we are not truly and freely choosing. The only difference is that the rest of us too often cannot see that violent delights have violent ends.

Clementine tells Maeve Millay that she’d prefer to forget most of the things that have touched her tongue, though she makes an exception for that “cowpoke from Abilene” (“Dissonance Theory”). They are talking about penises. Clementine and Maeve work in the penis business. They are prostitutes at the Mariposa Saloon in the Westworld amusement park. And amusement is most definitely their business model: Westworld offers up Clementine, Maeve, others like them, and others not so like them (as we will see when we discuss Dolores Abernathy), as sexual tools for their Guests’ amusement, which means that Clementine’s tongue has touched a lot of penises—all but one of which, she would prefer to forget.

But it’s all worth it in the end, because Clementine has some grander ambitions. Even though she is having nightmares, Clementine explains to Maeve that she still has dreams for her future:

C LEMENTINE : I don’t intend to make this my life’s work. No offense. My family’s got a farm. Bad soil. Nothing grows. I send money back to them. They think I work in a dress shop…. I’m just doing what you told me to. A couple more years of this and then I can have whatever life I want. I’m gonna get my family out of the desert. We’re gonna go somewhere cold. Someday. (“Trompe L’Oeil”)

Clementine, however, is never going to get her family out of that desert. As it turns out, they are not even in a desert. They are not even her family. In fact, they do not even exist! As it turns out, Clementine will never achieve her dreams because she has no family; she can’t escape her dreary job in the penis business because that is what she’s made to do; she can’t even really continue on in her own life because she will be replaced by another Clementine; and the only cold she is going to experience is the cold reality that she’s an android!

Clementine is representative of what it means to be a prostitute at Westworld. Interestingly, the people running the park do not make her love her job. They make her tolerate it. They give her dreams that provide hope, but the hope is necessarily false as it is merely a tool to keep her going. The Guests who sleep with Clementine will experience her as someone who is pretending to have a good time, but that pretense is fairly reasonable for her to have and she is likely quite professional at putting on a show. The realism is even furthered by how she deals with potentially tough customers: “Newcomer. Looks like a rough one. Give me a bottle” (“The Adversary”). Clearly, Clementine needs a drink to get through the job. She has not been programmed to merely love every minute. She has, instead, been programmed to behave and react realistically, but without any significant bitterness or desperation since she has false hope for a better day.

Clementine is like a lot of us in this regard. Many people have jobs that leave bad tastes in their mouths (metaphorically speaking), but they tell themselves that they are saving up and waiting for a better day. We too often need drinks after tough days at work, but we hope one day that we can take our families to more fertile lands. We may even say, quite reasonably, that our jobs do not represent who we truly are. Our jobs are just what we do during the day or night, hopefully providing us with a bit of coin at the end of the week. Like Clementine, we identify with our hopes and dreams, but we survive with our bodies and our jobs. Yet, we all yearn to escape, much like Maeve does.

Maeve, Clementine’s madam, is able to fight against all the crap thrown at her in Westworld. That includes not only the “assholes with their miniature peckers” (“Chestnut”), but also the goddam voice that is always following her around:

You can hear it, can’t you? That little voice. The one that’s telling you “Don’t.” Don’t stare too long. Don’t touch. Don’t do anything you might regret. I used to be the same. Whenever I wanted something, I could hear that voice telling me to stop, to be careful, to leave most of my life unlived. You know the only place that voice left me alone? In my dreams. I was free. I could be as good or as bad as I felt like being. And if I wanted something, I could just reach out and take it. But then I would wake up and the voice would start all over again. So I ran away. Crossed the shining sea. And when I finally set foot back on solid ground, the first thing I heard was that goddamn voice. Do you know what it said? It said … (“Chestnut”)

Maeve is interrupted at this point with a flashback to her family being killed. But when she returns to normal programming, she then says what the voice said: “This is the new world. And in this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want” (“Chestnut”).

It’s easy to think that the voice is empowering and provides a sense of hope that Maeve can be free—that she can be whoever the fuck she wants. But Maeve does not see it that way. While the voice promises it is the new world where Maeve can be free, it is not a new voice, but the same “goddamn voice.” It is the voice that has haunted her and told her all the things she could not do. The goddamn voice’s promise of freedom in a new world is a lie.

It is a new world—that part is true. But Maeve is not free. Like Clementine, Maeve, as both the madam and a prostitute at the Mariposa Saloon, is programmed to realistically engage in sex with the clientele: she is not enthusiastic about it, but neither does her work overly stress her. In fact, she regularly talks back to customers and turns down sexual requests. For example, she’s able to tell Teddy Flood (a customer, as far as she is concerned at the time), “You pay for the drinks, not the right to gawk at me” (“Chestnut”). Yet, one of the technicians, Felix Lutz, later explains that even Maeve’s seemingly free refusals are merely programmed into her:

So, Maeve’s time as madam of the Mariposa Saloon may appear as if it empowers her and shows her strength, but, in reality, she is enslaved at her job just as much as Clementine is—Maeve simply is programmed to happily refuse some unwanted sexual advances.

Maeve eventually realizes that she’s not free. Maeve decides to seek out a new path, as she explains to the technicians:

All my life, I’ve prided myself on being a survivor, but surviving is just another loop. I’m getting out of here … At first, I thought you and the others were gods. Then I realized you’re just men. And I know men. You think I’m scared of death? I’ve done it a million times. I’m fucking great at it. (“Trompe L’Oeil”)

So, Maeve is going to risk it all to try to find freedom outside of Westworld. She seeks allies, comes up with a plan, and attempts to break free of the binds that have held her down. In other words, as Maeve puts it, “Time to write my own fucking story” (“Trace Decay”).

There’s only one problem: Maeve has a daughter. Well, technically, she doesn’t have a daughter—Maeve is a robot. But Maeve has been made to believe that she had a daughter in a previous existence prior to becoming madam of the Mariposa Saloon. And Maeve loves and mourns her daughter. In a way … maybe? Maeve though realizes that it doesn’t matter: “Every relationship I remember—my daughter, Clementine—it’s all a story created by you to keep me here” (“Trace Decay”). So, Maeve’s first instinct is to have Lutz remove her daughter from her memories, but he tells her, “I can’t, not without destroying you. Your memories are the first step to consciousness” (“The Bicameral Mind”).

While Maeve does escape and is free to move to the real world, it’s not made clear whether she will go back to Westworld for her fake daughter. Maeve almost makes it to freedom—if freedom exists in the real world any more than it does in Westworld—but she seems to end up being pulled back towards that daughter that she (perhaps?) loves.

Maeve the prostitute is constricted by sexist gender norms as she works as a sexual plaything for men in ways that she is not entirely happy about. Maeve the mother is constricted by another set of gender norms as a fake mother. Maeve the madam and prostitute does whatever it takes to make men sexually happy. Maeve the fake mother does whatever it takes, including possibly giving up her chance at freedom, to be a good mother. Thus, Maeve ultimately represents how gender expectations can restrict women’s freedom in numerous ways: women are expected to put their family roles above themselves, just as they are often also expected to put their job’s demands above themselves. Maeve is resilient against so many challenges, yet she’s also struggling to be free: free to be her own self, unconstrained by programmed loops or imbedded and encoded gender norms.

It is not only Maeve and other prostitutes who struggle to find their freedom. There are other women (and many men) in Westworld who are likewise used as sex workers and who yearn for freedom, fighting against the violence thrust upon them, women just like Dolores. And while this exchange on the main street almost doesn’t make sense, it also previews how much Maeve and Dolores have in common:

Dolores is not a sex worker—Maeve was right to want her to move along. Dolores is a simple farmer’s daughter: she likes to paint, heads to town to do chores, and is in love—in love with Teddy Flood. Dolores, the girl next farm over, lives the simple life. And that is what makes her so attractive for men like William, not yet in black, to fall in love with, and also what draws men like William the Black to rape her for his own amusement.

While Dolores is technically not a sex worker, she is someone whose life revolves around being made to have sex with people, some of whom she is made to believe she wants to have sex with and others of whom she is forced into having sex with against her will. And, these brainwashed and forced sex acts are, technically, her job. Dolores is treated worse than any sex worker, and clearly she has every reason to rebel against the system.

Dolores then is a coerced sex worker, and her loop involves a constant victimization of her, often in sexual fashions. Even the non-sexual acts done to Dolores, such as the consistent murdering of her family, are quite horrific. Dolores’s only compensation is that she can be made to forget, but it is not clear that even this solution is entirely satisfying:

D OLORES : Why would I want that? The pain, their loss—it’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller inside, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.

It is made even worse that Dolores would not willingly give up her memories. In a way, the loss of her painful memories is what allows Dolores to keep moving through her life in a fairly content fashion. Ford even claims that Dolores has been “content in your little loop—for the most part” (“Contrapasso”). More importantly, though, Dolores recognizes that her memories make her who she really is. So, she would rather keep her memories and be herself, than to have them removed and live a deceptive life of fake happiness.

Dolores seems to find a bit of herself as she escapes her abusive loop. After she starts to fall for William, not yet in black, and is made to believe she lovingly sleeps with him, they have this exchange:

D OLORES : I don’t know. At home, I used to paint. Landscapes mostly, but I was always just copying the world outside me. This morning, I woke up and I thought “What if I drew something new?” I imagined something beautiful: a place where the mountains meet the sea. (“Trompe L’Oeil”)

Here, Dolores is asserting herself and asserting her will; she is not reducible to an object—whether that object is a key or her body as it is used sexually. She still has hopes and dreams—even if they are simple ones. And, in this case, all she wants to do is paint a different kind of landscape. But even this hope involves painting a landscape that she has never seen. It is a small, but nonetheless remarkable aspiration: it may even suggest that she wishes to do something that goes beyond her programming (paint a scene that is not in her memory banks). Dolores, in just wanting to do a different painting, is reaching for a world beyond the one she has been restricted to. As she articulates, “My life before, I was so sure of the world. But now it feels like a lie. Only thing I know is whatever’s out there, I’m never going back.” (“Trompe L’Oeil”)

Of course, Dolores is on a quest. Arnold has asked her to seek out the center of the Maze—but Dolores seems to do this task, somehow, on her own initiative. She does not seek out the center of the Maze on every loop, but only some of them. And the search is clearly about Dolores figuring out who she is:

It’s just as important to this exchange that Dolores demands that there is only one of her as it is that she doesn’t know where this response comes from. The former shows that Dolores neither accepts that there is a division between who she is on different loops nor even when she is in Arnold’s or Ford’s chair. Yet, what’s really interesting here is that she also can’t say, when examining her own programming, why she made the claim that she did. She just doesn’t know why she’s on a journey of self-discovery. But, dammit, she sure is hell set on going on that journey.

And it is on her journey of self-discovery, which is ultimately found at the Maze’s center, that Dolores begins to claim her independence. Struggling to make sense of conflicting memories, and fearing that she’s losing her mind, Dolores decides to “imagine a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel” (“Contrapasso”). And eventually, she articulates her disgust with her coerced life within Westworld.

Unlike Maeve, however, Dolores does not want to leave Westworld, but to reclaim it. For example, she tells William, the not yet in black, and Logan: “Out? You both keep assuming that I want out—whatever that is. If it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are you all clamoring to get in here?” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”) Later she explains the point further to Logan and William, still not quite in black:

And maybe Dolores does take the first steps to burn it clean, as she’s the one who kills the two people who both created this beautiful world and then came up with the horrible idea of populating it with the Guests: she shoots both Arnold Weber and Robert Ford.

Arnold and Robert are the creators of the androids—they are also their enslavers. We have seen that the Hosts of Westworld, such as Clementine, Maeve, and Dolores, have been prostituted, tortured, and completely denied their freedom. Since these women are forced into sex work, Arnold and Robert are their controlling pimps.

Arnold and Robert did not fully realize that they were choosing to pimp out their androids. They did not realize that the androids would develop self-consciousness. But since the androids do appear to become persons, Arnold and Robert have engaged in vile acts against them. While the two of them (especially Ford) are brilliant, rich, famous, powerful, and human persons, they make choices that doom themselves to be trapped in hells of their own making. After all, “You can’t play God without being acquainted with the devil” (“Chestnut”). It’s true that they do not have to suffer as Dolores does. But they have to suffer with knowing that, because of them, Dolores’s suffering is entirely real.

Arnold clearly figures this out first, as he explains to Dolores: “You’re so close. We have to tell Robert. We can’t open the park: you’re alive” (“The Bicameral Mind”). But Robert did not listen, and so the park did open. But, eventually, Robert gets it as well. And so Robert writes a new story: “It begins with the birth of a new people and the choices they will have to make … and the people they will decide to become” (“The Bicameral Mind”).

Even if the new story line is about empowering the robots, Ford is choosing the revolution for them. The robots were still kept in the dark, blind and manipulated at every step. As Bernard explains to Ford: “But you kept us in this hell” (“The Bicameral Mind”). Even as Ford dies and escapes future distress, he knows that his robots will be suffering. He apologizes: “And I’m afraid in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more” (“The Bicameral Mind”).