CHAPTER 14

The Alpha and Omega: Myths and Paradoxes of Masculinity on the Frontier

Allan W. Austin, Patrick L. Hamilton, & Alicia H. Nordstrom

“This place is the answer to the question you’ve been asking yourself . . . Who you really are . . .”

“Boys are shame-phobic: They are exquisitely yet unconsciously attuned to any signal of ‘loss of face’ and will do just about whatever it takes to avoid shame.”

—clinical psychologist William Pollack²

Masculinity and violence go hand-in-hand in American society, as males are the more common perpetrators and victims of violence.3 Experts have argued that masculine stereotypes lock growing boys into a set of rigid social norms that perpetuate emotional over-reactivity, poor coping, and a lack of social support seeking, which can result in anger and violence.⁴ Such violence in young boys is seen as “simply a boy’s attempt to stop dishonor and shame by taking the offensive,”⁵ a view that rewards aggression for self-protection. Westworld specifically explores the gender identity and transformation of William. The frontier setting of the series serves as the ideal context to explore the myths and paradoxes of masculinity because it represents one of the pioneering historical time periods in which these exact myths surfaced.

The Paradox of Masculinity

Masculinity is “a dynamic, socially constructed and institutionally backed form of power, independent of an individual’s sex.”⁶ Hegemonic, or traditional, masculinity emphasizes male dominance and control while simultaneously encouraging female oppression.⁷ Social norms that demand hegemonic masculine gender roles create an internal crisis that reflects a paradoxical state of disconnection. “The Boy Code puts boys and men into a gender straightjacket that constrains not only them but everyone else, reducing us all as human beings, and eventually making us strangers to ourselves and one another . . .”⁸ With anger and aggression as the primary means of emotional catharsis, men who display hegemonic masculinity often channel their frustration and feelings of inferiority into sexual aggression and dominance, further deteriorating the quality of potentially intimate relationships.⁹

Masculine Violence in the Frontier and Westworld

Westworld is suffused by the masculine violence of the American frontier. Visitors to the theme park, indeed, seemingly confront mayhem at almost every turn, witnessing shootouts on Main Street, bare-knuckled brawls over accusations of cheating at poker, vicious robberies, and—if courageous enough to venture outside town limits—confronting Native Americans and/or Confederate renegades. That such violence appears endemic to this fictional frontier setting is hardly surprising. The prevailing romantic vision of the American past imagines the frontier much like Americans in the last decade of the nineteenth century did, celebrating the frontier experience for creating an exceptional American people in the image of the rugged frontiersman. However, historians have painted a very different picture, explaining instead that, as an American identity crystalized, it emphasized (among other factors) a manliness that impelled Americans to violence aimed at erasing unmodern peoples. This process embedded American masculinity, from the very start, in violence as well as in a tendency to regularly resort to war to provide cathartic relief from psychic crises of identity. Masculine violence, grounded in the frontier, in this way not only created but literally continues to discipline the American identity.10

Masculinity in Westworld

In this context, Westworld instantiates this ongoing conversation about masculine identity and its consequences in its depictions of William and the Man in Black. These are, in fact, the same character, with the Man in Black being the present-day version of William who, some thirty years prior, enters the park. William’s narrative arc in the show’s first season traces faithfully the regenerative myth of the frontier and its inherent violence. The plainly milquetoast male as which William enters transforms into someone approximating the late nineteenth century vision of an exceptional American. Conjoined to William, however, is the Man in Black. Their pairing reveals the ultimate futility of William’s regenerative quest as he descends into violence and sadism. The portrayals of these two characters in Westworld similarly pairs frontier-based constructions of masculinity with a savage violence that predicates them, revealing a paradoxical emptiness to the entire enterprise that serves to critique broadly unquestioned American gender norms and identities.

The Alpha: The Frontier Journey of William

On an individual level, William’s arc in Westworld enacts a psychological version of the frontier scenario long celebrated by Americans. This scenario proceeds through several stages: separation from the “metropolis” or civilization, followed by regression to a more “primitive state,” and subsequent conflict, the end result of which is “progress.”11 Westworld personifies this transformation within the figure of William; he undergoes a psychological regeneration that brings him closer to that putative ideal of hegemonic masculinity.

For William, the stages of separation and regression occur almost simultaneously upon his arrival in Westworld. William separates by leaving behind his normal life and environs and arriving (as all guests do) at the park’s undisclosed location. Flanked by one of the female hosts, he is led to a changing room filled with the paraphernalia of a cowboy. In changing from his button-down shirt, blazer, and slacks to the dungarees, vest, shirt, jacket, and white cowboy hat suited to the frontier, William regresses by adopting the dress and accoutrements of an earlier era. Further symbolizing this process of separation/regression are the trains William rides. The first, which brings him to the park, is an ultra sleek, ultramodern, and pristine vehicle, while the second, via which he enters Westworld proper, is a steam locomotive.

William’s need for the kind of masculine regeneration the frontier supposedly offered is likewise made clear. Much of this underlining occurs via Logan, who, outright criticizes William as being an “uptight prick,” “afraid of making a mess,” and “inoffensive” in the real world.12 The show contrasts their behavior to similar effect as Logan fights, shoots, and has sex with wild abandon almost immediately and throughout the series. William, on the other hand, remains thoroughly awkward and noncommittal, and thus fails to exhibit the kind of rugged, confident, and self-efficacious masculinity that the frontier, according to the American myth, beckoned and fashioned. Though he selects a white cowboy hat—indicating his “good guy” status inside the park—he only carries it, donning it in the end only because Logan puts it on him; similarly, where Logan indulges in both a stabbing and an orgy to begin his experience, William balks at similar offers.¹³ William’s awkwardness, diffidence, and generally self-effacing manner all signal how he falls far short of long-held American understandings of a masculine ideal and hegemonic masculinity, and thus how in need he is of the self-discovery with which the park tantalizes its male guests.

The bulk of William’s arc over the remaining eight episodes comprises a series of conflicts that, together, provide a crucible through which William’s manhood will be distilled. They move him from the kind of weak-willed individual who stands by while a woman is taken hostage to the hardened, more mercenary man who abandons his friends.¹⁴ By the end of his time in the park, the now-hardened William aptly displays many of the hegemonic masculine traits that Americans have long celebrated: a rugged strength, expedience, mastery, inartistic yet powerful, and perhaps above all, a domineering individualism that can work for either good or evil.¹⁵ William’s psychological frontier journey culminates in this final transformation. He, as an individual, has undergone the same kind of mythic narrative that earlier Americans imagined for their history, becoming that masculine ideal upon which they predicate their tale of national and cultural progress.

The Omega: The Man in Black and the Paradoxes of Frontier Masculinity

Perhaps not coincidentally, the revelation of what William has become arrives at the exact moment of an even larger one: that William and the Man in Black are one and the same, separated by roughly thirty years.16 Prior to this point, William’s and the Man in Black’s storylines appeared separately, the writers luring the audience, for at least some time, into assuming that both their plots occur simultaneously. Thus, if William’s arc represents one narrative of transformation, the revelation that he becomes the Man in Black proffers a second, subsequent evolution, one that does much to expose and even critique as paradoxical precisely that same frontier myth and the kind of violent masculine identity it generates.

For one, the Man in Black’s depiction throughout the series casts that hegemonic masculinity within a much more sadistic light. In his first appearance, he attacks Dolores and her father—murdering the latter—and later exsanguinates and scalps a host.¹⁷ As series creator Jonathan Nolan describes, the Man in Black is “a human guest who has taken the fantasy to its utmost extreme. He wants to play the villain, he wants to be the bad guy. Omnipotent, manipulative, evil.”¹⁸

But if the Man in Black extends the park’s fantasy to such sadism, he is likewise extending that frontier masculinity—and its concomitant violence—to the same extreme. In doing so, the series serves as a convex mirror image of the frontier Americans once described and now remember. They elided, in doing so, the violence inherent within the frontier myth; they focused, instead, on the American farmer as a civilizing force, but downplayed the violent and bloody slaughter of Native American tribes that was also a part of western expansion. The Man in Black’s depiction, in contrast, exposes this identity’s basis in violence. Underlining how the Man in Black serves as a sadistic extension of William is his encounter with Maeve in a previous storyline. As the Man in Black coldly explains, he killed Maeve and her daughter as a further trial of his masculine identity, to see if he indeed possessed a capacity for true evil and thus, in true frontier parlance, see what stuff of which he was truly made.19 Such cold cruelty gets exposed not then as an anomaly in what William became, but as a natural evolution from the same kind of man.

Concomitant with this sadism, the Man in Black’s narrative arc further reveals a jadedness or decadence to this masculine ideal. Americans, in celebrating a mythical frontier, tried in the twentieth century and beyond to ignore the implications of the frontier’s closing, begging the question of just what would happen next to an American society and masculinity that depends on such a space’s continued existence. In a way, the Man in Black raises the specter of this very question for the kind of masculinity he too embodies. The Man in Black’s quest in the series is essentially one for meaning, or “truth” as he will repeatedly call it. Having come to the park for over thirty years, he’s experienced all that it has to offer, exhausted it in the same way extending American civilization to the west coast exhausted the possibility and promise of the frontier. That truth the Man in Black seeks is dual. For one, he pursues the mystery of “the maze,” the one “story” in the park that has heretofore eluded him. This truth remains elusive, however; the maze’s provenance is for the hosts like Dolores and Maeve, as their “solving” it equates to their own self-discovery.

Perhaps more crucial to the paradoxes he embodies about frontier manhood is how the Man in Black yearns to make the park real by allowing the hosts to truly fight back. He agonizes at times over the artificiality of the park experience precisely because the human guests like himself so clearly dominate it: They can kill and maim hosts as they please, but not vice versa. The Man in Black appears to chafe against this falsehood, and he gets what he’s looking for, as Dolores proves nearly his match in their climactic confrontation.20 Then as an armed host army—all now apparently freed of their inability to kill—approaches a party of gathered guests and company board members, the Man in Black smiles as he faces what, in fact, he wished for, his “truth.”

The larger “truth” of the Man in Black, however, is that he represents the sadism underneath the masculine ideal he approximated once as William, but then spirals into purposeless decadence. If, then, William embodies the kind of idealized manhood the frontier both required and engendered, the Man in Black represents an even darker side of this ideal that Americans have obscured or denied on both individual and national levels.

Westworld’s critique of the hegemonic masculinity personified in William/the Man in Black does not end here. Though the Man in Black survives the initial host uprising, a darker reality haunts him and what he embodies. All he has done is enter into a new game that has him going through many of the same motions: encountering the same persons, journeying to the same locations, facing similar conflicts.²¹ Such resonance and repetitiveness suggest that the Man in Black, far from being freed by the new circumstances in the park, is trapped in a loop that could lead just as easily to his destruction as his salvation. So too, then, might the series be said to suggest such masculinity is a self-destructive loop, and that the expression of it remains a kind of empty decadence through how William/the Man in Black finds himself going through the same motions as he—and perhaps men in general—have before.

Masculine Gender Role Stress

Research has identified unhealthy social, emotional, behavioral, and health consequences of hegemonic masculinity resulting from unrealistic expectations of toughness, dominance, and emotional suppression.22 Studies have found that men may experience specific stress related to the gender expectations of their social roles.²³ This masculine gender role stress (MGRS) may manifest during times of perceived threat when men are experiencing feelings of incompetence or inability to display masculine behaviors, and it’s tied to higher levels of anger, anxiety, and health risk behaviors. Researchers have identified five MGRS dimensions: physical inadequacy, emotional inexpressiveness, subordination to women, intellectual inferiority, and performance failure.²⁴ William’s moral deterioration over his 30 years at Westworld reflects MGRS across these five domains. His increasingly violent and aggressive behavior attempts to compensate for his inadequacies. Does the Man in Black get what he desires, or does he ultimately fail when his female counterparts—Dolores and Maeve—solve the maze and fulfill their identities before he does?

Contesting the Frontier

Notes

1. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 7, 2016).

2. Pollack (1998), p. 33.

3. Pope & Englar-Carlson (2001).

4. Pollack (1998).

5. Pope & Englar-Carlson (2001), p. 368.

6. Mankowski & Maton (2010), p. 73.

7. Connell & Messerschmidt (2005); Smith et al. (2015).

8. Pollack (1998), p. 6.

9. Smith et al. (2015).

10. Turner (2017); Hixson (2008).

11. Slotkin (1998), pp. 11–12.

12. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 7, 2016).

13. Episode 1–2, “Chestnut” (October 7, 2016).

14. Episodes 1–3, “The Stray” (October 16, 2016); 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

15. Turner (2017).

16. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

17. Episode 1–1, “The Original” (October 2, 2016).

18. Episode 1–1, “The Original” (October 2, 2016).

19. Episode 1–8, “Trace Decay” (November 20, 2016).

20. Episode 1–10, “The Bicameral Mind” (December 4, 2016).

21. Episodes 2–12, “Reunion” (April 29, 2018); 2–14, “The Riddle of the Sphinx (May 13, 2018).

22. Mankowski & Maton (2010).

23. Eisler et al. (1988).

24. Eisler et al. (1988); Moore et al. (2010).

25. Mast & Kawin (2000), pp. 293-294.