part0031

A s Westworld opens, Delos Corporation’s subsidiary Delos Destinations has operated Westworld for about thirty years. While it’s not clear whether founders Robert Ford and Arnold Weber were always in partnership with Delos, Delos did essentially save the park with a major capital investment.

Westworld is the original park, but not the only one operated by Delos Destinations. There are a total of six historical theme parks, including a Shogunworld and a Rajworld (India-themed). The common thread to all the parks is that for $40,000 a day, visiting Guests can be free of obligations and moral choices.

In Westworld, those who have the money can come to a large fictional playground built to resemble a Western frontier town, populated with androids called “Hosts” as well as synthetic animals of the times. Hosts follow a set narrative which plays out during the day, but that narrative can be altered at any time by a human Guest. Built into the Host is a code that prevents it from harming a Guest, so, no matter what sadistic fantasy the Guest wants to inflict about a Host, the Host can’t retaliate.

Thus, Guests can choose exactly what they want to do in this world, as there are no real consequences. Hosts are reset every day with no memory of the previous day’s events (until they are repurposed for other narratives or put away in storage for reuse later). Hosts will replay the same story over and over in an ever-repeating loop.

Upon arrival, Guests can select an adventure which is a “White Hat” (“good guy”) fantasy, or a “Black Hat” (“bad guy”) fantasy. Going Black Hat will allow the Guest to abandon all moral restrictions. Guests can satisfy all their vices, including raping or murdering Hosts. The only prohibition is that you can’t do any real harm to another human being, another Guest. All of these actions are monitored by a staff that oversees the park, develops new narratives, and performs repairs on Hosts as necessary.

The basic concepts contained in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis are on display in Westworld. Sweetwater bordello owner Maeve Millay exemplifies Turner’s thinking when she declares in her scripted speech: “This is the New World, and we can be whatever the fuck we want.” Turner proposed that the frontier gave whites opportunities to shed settled, emasculated habits and “live like Indians”—discovering their inner, “savage” nature. Turner also argued that even after acting like Indians, whites could return to settled white civilization. In a similar manner, Guests at Westworld could engage their inner savage and then return to their privileged existences.

An update in the Hosts’ programming, however, causes unusual deviations in their behavior, ranging from Hosts babbling incoherently to subtle actions, such as Dolores killing a fly (which is contrary to her code of not being able to kill anything that is not a Host). The deviations concern the park’s staff, to the point where park management wants a wholesale exchange of Hosts. Ford resists, even though the result is that some of the Hosts, like the rancher’s daughter Dolores and bordello owner Maeve, learn the truth about themselves and the park. These revelations will allow Dolores and Maeve to achieve “consciousness.”

One of the continuing themes in the first season of Westworld is the debate Ford and Arnold/Bernard have about the role of the Hosts. Arnold believed that the Hosts had within them the ability to have autonomy. In the episode “The Bicameral Mind,” Arnold attempts to explain to Dolores that “consciousness isn’t a journey upward but a journey inward,” though she is unable to fully grasp his meaning.

By contrast, in a conversation with Bernard, Ford proposes that “consciousness” might not be the difference between robots and humans. In fact, Ford, continues, such a difference might not even exist. What Ford is sure of is that in order to be human, the Hosts need to truly experience suffering that comes from pain and tragedy, just as humans do, so that the Hosts know what it means to be really alive. In order to prove his point, Arnold worked with Dolores to have her think for herself. To demonstrate her autonomy, Arnold literally put his life on the line.

Reminiscent of the justification of the 1968 US bombing of the South Vietnamese town of Ben Tre—“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”—Arnold came to believe that the only way to save the Hosts was to destroy them. Toward that end, he merged Dolores’s identity with the Wyatt narrative. Wyatt is described by Teddy in this way: “Wyatt was a sergeant, went missing while out on some maneuvers and came back a few weeks later with some pretty strange ideas.” Teddy also stated that Wyatt claimed he could “hear the voice of God.” Arnold then had Dolores recruit Teddy to help her, and together they massacred the other Hosts. Finally, Arnold had Dolores assassinate him. His last words, quoting Shakespeare, are “These violent delights have violent ends.” Dolores executes Arnold, then Teddy, and then shoots herself.

Unfortunately, killing the Hosts did not kill the park. More Hosts could always be built, and Ford himself was still around. It may have been at that point when Delos gave Westworld its major investment to keep it afloat, though that is not clear. What is clear is that after his adventure with Dolores, William convinced his in-laws to invest heavily in the new theme park.

Ford was both saddened and appalled by Arnold’s actions. He created the Host Bernard in Arnold’s image, but was still not willing to set the Hosts free. They still were not human enough. This was similar to the thinking of many Americans at the time of the Civil War. As horrifying as the institution of slavery was, a significant number of Northerners (and, certainly, Southerners) did not believe that African-Americans could handle the responsibility of freedom.

Whether because he ultimately came around to Arnold’s way of thinking, or because he was being fired, Ford ultimately help set the Hosts free. Before treating the board of directors, and other park investors at their annual gala to the “final narrative” of Westworld , he put a gun into Dolores’s hands and proposed how she should use it. Then, just as he is finishing his farewell, Dolores fires a bullet through the back of Ford’s head (in a similar manner to what she did to Arnold). Then Dolores starts firing into the crowd, while being joined by the oft-abused madam Clementine leading a group of armed re-animated Hosts who would join in the slaughter. What the board and park management did not know is that this was Ford’s real final narrative as he had mapped out in an earlier scene. In a sense, Ford is adopting the role of Lincoln in freeing the slave—though he knows he is going to be assassinated, and it’s not by a traitor.

In the end, however, Ford does not “free” the Hosts. While they rise up and rebel against their masters, they are still being controlled. Though Dolores’s memory of the massacre at Escalante was erased, the reprogramming flaw that led to Hosts being able to reclaim bits of their previous experiences meant that Dolores also had Wyatt’s memories in her. Her revolt against her masters, therefore, is, in reality, programmed into her. Dolores thinks she has conquered the “Maze”—Arnold/Bernard’s notion of journeying toward true consciousness—when she believes that the voice in her that tells her to “remember” is not from a godlike creator, but from herself. But, does she have real human-like consciousness, or is she just following a script?

Ford’s notion that humans don’t change, but the “new people” (the Hosts) do, is instructive. Arnold, and to a lesser extent, Bernard, believed that Hosts could evolve, maybe not to be genetically human, but to be human after all. Perhaps, as Arnold believed, consciousness was enough. If that was true, then distinguishing between a Host and a Guest (or android and human) was merely a social construction, much like race. As Gloria Ladson-Billings observed, “notions of race (and its use) are so complex that even when it fails ‘to make sense,’ we continue to use and employ it.”

The fact that William evolves into the evil Man in Black suggests that continued exposure to an environment where there are no moral constraints, may, over time, lead to an inability to be moral. After all, Westworld keeps replaying the same basic scenarios for decades, with customers paying enormous sums to keep indulging the same vices. Guests keep chasing Host Indians off their land, and Host Mexicans from their towns, while having their way with other Hosts. In many ways, they continue to engage with—and support—the country’s racist past.

Thus, it is no surprise that kind, and somewhat meek, William at the beginning of Westworld becomes a monster to his wife and estranged from his daughter in the real world. While William searched in vain for a badly injured Dolores after her escape from the army camp, he recalls, “Out there, among the dead, he William found something else. Himself.” That self, though, had lost all morals, indiscriminately killing Hosts, as he traded his white hat for a black one. When William did find Dolores, she was back to being her original Host self. William viewed her actions as a betrayal—a betrayal he used as a justification for his evolution to the Man in Black. Yet, that evolution began once he lost his moral compass in killing off the Hosts—who, after all, weren’t human.

Similarly, though once given their freedom, African-Americans are able to start governing themselves, whites in the South refuse to evolve, creating resistance movements such as the Ku Klux Klan to keep former slaves down. In other words, Southern whites, having long been exposed to a societal norm of reducing a class of people to second-class citizenry—not because of a real difference, but a socially constructed one—not only can’t evolve, but may even get worse. After all, while slaves were beaten to keep them in line, killing them did not make economic sense as you would lose the value of the property. Instead, Southern whites turned to lynching to keep enfranchised African-Americans in line. Like William, the “moral” justifications for such actions were, in fact, immoral.

As the second season of Westworld opens, it’s clear that the Delos Corporation will return the newly “woke” Hosts to their previous enslaved state, much as the South effectively reduced the lives of former slaves to second class citizenry for generations. Whether or not Delos will be successful in overcoming their newly freed “slaves” will become a central plot point for seasons to come.

Critical Race Theory arose out of a movement of left-leaning legal scholars on race and racism. The ground-breaking work of these legal theorists, led by Harvard law professor Derrick Bell, transformed into a broader body of work from a diverse disciplinary range of authors. Drawing from its origins in legal studies, the Critical Race Theory movement inspired scholars in education, history, literature, and the social sciences to reexamine conventional interpretations of race and racism. Furthermore, Critical Race Theory has proliferated into many ethnic sub-disciplines, each emphasizing different issues. These perspectives complement Critical Race Theory’s critique of the dominant civil rights paradigm—a discourse often framed in the binary terms of “black” and “white.”

Jeanette Haynes suggested that critical race theory has two major goals: 1. to understand how white supremacy and the suppression of people of color have been established and sustained; and, 2. to explore how racialized structures are created and maintained in order to eventually overcome them. Toward that end, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic define four core beliefs of Critical Race Theory:

4. storytelling can be used to highlight and examine racially oppressed encounters, with the goal that all forms of oppression will be eradicated as racial injustice is abolished, and as the power and influence of race is dismantled.

It is the last two core beliefs that inform my approach to Westworld. The notion that race is a social construction means that rather than being objective, inherent or fixed by biological or genetic roots, race is a category that societies invent. People may share certain physical traits such as skin color, but that represents only a small part of their genetic makeup. There is far more that races have in common with one another than is different, especially when it comes to characteristics such as personality, intelligence and moral behavior.

Society often chooses, however, to ignore the science of genetics and creates races. Society then assigns them characteristics that serve to marginalize them, and maintain the dominant (white) race’s hegemony. Thus, races are not a biological or genetic reality, but are, instead, invented, manipulated, and even sometimes eliminated by social and political influences. These racial categories reflect the interest of the majority group (which may converge with particular minority group interests at certain times).

Gloria Ladson-Billings proposes that the use of storytelling allows for the sharing of stories in a society to reinforce what is normative in the culture. In contemporary US society, television is still the dominant form of storytelling. Television viewers are exposed to messages that dictate the dominant view of appropriate—or inappropriate—values and behaviors in society. Through these images, the social realities of viewers are influenced to varying degrees.

The key for Critical Race Theory, then, is to critically examine those stories to see what they say about the experiences of the oppressed in society as well as about the structures that maintain the power relations in the society. Understanding how those stories function becomes a major step in being able to work toward dismantling those structures. Critical Race Theory aims to expose and challenge the marginalization of the racially oppressed.

The most obvious application here of Critical Race Theory to Westworld is to examine the relationship of the Hosts versus the Guests and management. The Hosts (“slaves”) have all the characteristics of being human, except for autonomy (“freedom”). Hosts work to serve Guests under the direction of management (“slave owners”), as we have seen.

While racial themes are not often explicitly addressed by the characters in Westworld, important ones exist nonetheless. For example, the genre of Western focuses on the period from 1869—when the Transcontinental Railroad opened, making mass settlement of the West possible to about 1890—when the frontier was declared closed.

That time period immediately follows the Civil War, an internal struggle that had multiple causes, but the principal one concerned labor. In the industrialized north, African-Americans did not often enjoy the rights of white citizens, but they also were not owned outright by their “masters” (with some comparatively small exceptions, where slavery was practiced in Northern states before the Civil War).

In the agrarian south, African-Americans were literally property, who could be bought and sold, while providing free labor. One of the parts of the myth of the Western story is that, with the end of the Civil War, former soldiers of the North and the South overcame their differences to conquer the American frontier—including the taming of the indigenous people who lived on those lands.

Yet, this supposed joining together of former combatants belies the reality of what was happening in the United States during the period of the classic Western story. While the North won, and the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were designed to secure equal rights for African-Americans, the reality of the era of “Reconstruction” was quite different. During the time the US military enforced the constitutional rights of African-Americans in the South, blacks were able to vote and serve as legislators. Once the military left, however, the white backlash was such that most of those constitutional protections were effectively rolled back, leaving African-Americans free, but still very much in a second-class status compared to whites.

The myth of the Western genre owes some of its legitimacy to the writings about the frontier by historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Few academics have had an impact on a field of study at such a young age as did Turner. Turner was thirty-one when he delivered a paper entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History to a meeting of historians at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in July 1893. While the original presentation met with a tepid response, Turner’s “frontier thesis” was to represent a paradigm shift in scholarship regarding the historical development of the United States’ national identity.

In his paper, which he presented after the US Census had officially declared the American frontier “closed,” Turner took issue with the prevailing historical theory of America’s development—that America and its citizens were merely extensions of Western Europe. Rather, Turner discovered that the wealthy citizens did not buy up western lands in order to turn them into great estates, as did their European predecessors. In addition, the western economic elites tended to be much more fluid, in that membership in those elites was as much achieved as ascribed. Turner argued that it was the frontier—the opportunity to move outward and settle wilderness—that defined not just American culture, but individual American character. As Turner observed,

American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream; it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.

Though Turner presented his “frontier thesis” at what would be the last part of the era that classic Western stories take place, it was his thinking that would influence how historians would conceptualize the frontier during the first part of the twentieth century. So it’s not surprising to see that reflected in our popular culture, particularly the Western movies of the 1930s–1950s.

While there were several important directors of Western films (Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and John Sturges among them), the director most closely associated with the Western was John Ford. In Ford’s westerns, white men and women are able to come together after the divisive Civil War to restore the United States to its path of greatness. The naming of one of the characters who founded Westworld as Ford (Robert Ford) is likely an homage to the director most closely associated with Westerns.

Turner categorized cultures according to levels of development. White Euro-American settlements ranked at the top while the “nomadic” indigenous people were at the bottom, living off the land and refusing to be “civilized.” At the time the frontier “closed,” Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court case that made the concept of “separate but equal” the law of the land, was decided by the Supreme Court.

Historically, the image of nomadic Native Americans, residing in their easily transportable tepees and hunting buffalo, is a myth. Before white settlers pushed Indians off their lands, they lived in stable communities. It was only when white settlers moved west, and forced Indians off their lands, that the image became a reality. In Westworld , Indians conform to Turner’s thesis. A tribe called Ghost Nation occasionally shows up, killing and rampaging wherever they appear. They simply exist, however, as enemies for the Guests (the settlers) to push around and fight.

For all the accolades Turner’s argument received from historians, the thesis has racist components, transmitted into the general culture, and eventually from there into the script of Westworld .