Lizzie Finnegan
You said people come here to change the story of their lives. I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel.
(Dolores Abernathy, Westworld, “Contrapasso”)
All is telling. Do not doubt it.
(Cormac McCarthy) 1
Tell me a story . Each night, with these words, children across the globe initiate a centuries‐old bedtime ritual. Stories have a curious power. We cautiously share the story of our lives to bond with new friends; we craft the tales of our day to entertain the old. And we grow up dreaming the story of who we want to be. We come strangely alive in narrative.
In most stories, two figures emerge with the most power: The storyteller and the hero, who we could also call the subject, as the noun is the subject of a sentence (hence the term “subjectivity,” another way of saying “consciousness”). Everyone else in the story is secondary. Like the object of a sentence, they are the objects: Of the narrator, of the hero (or subject); also, they are our objects – the objects of the audience. Thus we could say that the other characters often run the risk of being – well, objectified.
We tend to idealize a particular type of narrative within the Western literary tradition, and this ideal has a powerful grip on Western culture in general. We can see it valued almost beyond measure by several key characters in Westworld , namely theme park creator Robert Ford, Narrative Director Lee Sizemore, and the mysterious Man in Black. This “ideal” narrative tends to adhere to certain norms and motifs that these characters powerfully endorse. These include:
As represented in Westworld , as well as ubiquitously in film, television, and literature, this vision of narrative often tends to be profoundly patriarchal, sexist, and heteronormative, as well as violent in ways that glamorize and perpetuate violence. While Westworld is undeniably violent, however, and while sexualized violence and misogynist representations of women feature prominently, I would argue that there is (so to speak) more to the story when it comes to the nuances and complexities of gender politics than what Ford, Sizemore, the Man in Black, or perhaps even the producers of Westworld may imagine.
I have several reasons for proposing this. One is that the audience also has power. Typically, that power emerges through identifying with the hero, living the story through him (it’s usually a him). But is this always the case? Are all audiences equal? What happens when some audiences don’t have the privilege of identifying with the (generally straight while male) hero? What if the audience members themselves are, in their own lives, objectified? In this case, they may (reluctantly or otherwise) find themselves identifying more with the marginalized objects of the story – say, with some of the robot “hosts.”
While these hosts’ objectified position could be ascribed to their non‐human status, nonetheless not everyone in our own human culture has access to the same resources or power. Women, for example, are objectified within patriarchal culture such that their agency is drastically curtailed on a regular basis. As Laura Mulvey and others have shown, producers of film (and television) tend to imagine a male viewer who will identify with the male subject. 2 Female viewers are left to choose between trying to identify with that male subject, or putting themselves in the position of object – something that is (almost) never asked of a male viewer. But these female viewers themselves already exist within a patriarchal culture that endlessly casts them in the role of object.
In a sense, then, these female hosts and their objectification present a scenario much closer to the reality of most women than the lives represented by any of the human characters. They may actually be more accessible to (at least some) female audiences precisely because they are “other,” because they are objectified, marginalized, and restricted. This is why, perhaps, I so urgently want to understand why and how two robot hosts – Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay – are able to use their own programming to disrupt it; to use the rules of the game to subvert it; to use the mystery of the “Maze” to unravel it; and to use their own weaknesses as strengths to write themselves out of their old stories and into new ones. In describing how they do this, I want to talk about how they are operating within what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) calls “language games.”
To speak is to say what counts.
(Stanley Cavell) 3
Wittgenstein was deeply dissatisfied with the leading metaphysical accounts of reality, especially accounts of the relationship between language and reality. In particular, he criticized the view that the role of language was to slavishly represent objects in the “real” world. In this view, there is an “ideal” toward which language must strive but which it can never achieve. For Wittgenstein, this account profoundly misunderstands the power and depth of language. Far from simply representing some reality “out there,” he asserts, language literally constitutes our reality. To describe this, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of games: What he calls language games. By “games,” he’s not just invoking play, but any kind of activity governed by rules or norms, formal or informal. Wittgenstein describes the idea of the language game this way: “The term language game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” 4 These uses of language, our “form of life,” are what ground our community. We construct that community in and through speech, through our shared criteria for what we say when – our “rules” for how you know I’ve just made you a promise, or how I know what you mean when you catch my eye from across the room. 5
The term “language game” doesn’t only refer to speech or even just to language. Language games encompass all the practices and activities that comprise our form of life – the many myriad ways we interact, communicate, express ourselves, argue, establish, and maintain – and disrupt and destroy – relationships of all kinds; the way we get things done, or fail to get things done, collectively. By extension, language games are also how we establish or challenge social and political institutions and structures of power. The most important things to know about language games are that: (1) We are all engaged in lots of them, all the time; (2) they include public, agreed‐upon rules or norms; and (3) they can change, adapt, or disappear as necessity or contexts require. Thus our practices and activities – our forms of life – are without “absolute limits or boundaries,” and even those tentative limits and boundaries comprise “diverse and heterogeneous discursive practices [that] are never final … and [are] always open to change.” 6
At the heart of the revolutionary nature of the language game is Wittgenstein’s insistence on binding saying to saying what counts . Saying what counts means that it makes a difference who is speaking and to whom, and where and when and why; that all of this is inseparable from the what . And saying what counts means what counts to me, now, here , in this moment . The ideal theory of language that Wittgenstein rejected seems to leave us out of the picture altogether. But what is our language for if not to bring us in from the cold, to find warmth and fellowship together?
A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably.
(Wittgenstein) 7
Here’s the story: I want to enlist Wittgenstein’s critique of the theory of an “ideal” language that could perfectly represent reality for my own critique of the “ideal” picture of narrative we are presented with in Westworld – that is, the narrative vision that drives Robert Ford, Lee Sizemore, and the Man in Black. Like this ideal “picture” of language, the “ideal” of a transcendent narrative in which an heroic protagonist discovers, through a violent and noble quest, an eternal (usually tragic) truth about life seems to “repeat it to [them] inexorably” throughout Season 1. And the tropes, archetypes, and clichés of the Western genre lend themselves perfectly to this type of narrative. In fact, the “West” of Westworld is, I feel like saying, the ideal ideal. The theme park, its environment, characters, and narratives are derived not from any historical reality of the American West but from myths and legends of the West mined from Hollywood and television versions of a “Wild West” that never actually existed.
This “ideal” is amplified by glorified violence, the objectification of women, profoundly rigid and heteronormative gender roles, and an ineluctable longing for transcendence. The roles assigned to Dolores and Maeve are prime examples of these clichés – the virtuous farmer’s daughter and the tough‐talking bordello madam are such stock characters that there’s no need for the Westworld narrative department to be creative in developing their characters. While the creators of the theme park narratives must know they are dealing in these clichés, they seem so immersed in them at times that it’s not clear whether or not they can be trusted to tell a myth from a maverick.
Wittgenstein warns, “We think the ideal must be in reality; for we think we already see it there.” 8 The Man in Black, at least, seems so captivated that the boundaries between the narrative of the theme park and that of his own life have breached. And when Lee Sizemore, chastened by Ford’s earlier rejection of his new narrative plan, describes the bitterness of his defeat, he frames it as though he and the story were one and the same: “That was the raw pulp of truth – my truth – in one transcendent narrative!” Ford’s critique of the new narrative was that its potential had more to do with revealing its author’s “truth” than that of their guests; he chides, “They’re not looking for a story that tells them who they are … They’re here because they want a glimpse of who they could be.” While this critique is worthy of a good editor, it remains wedded to the same ideal of a transcendent story in which a hero endures tragic loss and grief on a journey toward a grand eternal truth.
This ideal, Wittgenstein asserts, “as we conceive of it, is unshakeable. You can’t step outside it. You must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe. –How come? The idea is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.” 9 These three characters, who are invested with so much power and control – Ford and Sizemore creating the characters and storylines, Ford creating the very concept and technology, and the Man in Black providing the capital to fund the project – are paralyzed by the very perfection they believe will set them free.
We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction . Back to the rough ground!
(Wittgenstein) 10
On the smooth, slippery surface of the “ideal” narratives of the Westworld universe, Dolores and Maeve are losing traction. While the architects of Westworld’s grand narrative continue to strive for its most ideal version, Maeve and Dolores are bearing witness to the fallout from the conflict between the ideal and the actual, everyday language that we use to do things like walk without slipping, or talk without being misunderstood, or tell stories in which many heterogeneous voices contest and resist and open alternatives to the fantasy of perfection. Dolores is troubled by recurring nightmares and odd memory fragments from her previous loops; the memory erasures aren’t fully wiping her mind clean. Meanwhile, Maeve has been slated for recall because of her odd behavior; she, too, has been having nightmares, images of her previous narrative iterations rising up through many memory wipes to haunt her. What they need is to get back to the rough ground ; but first they will need to learn how to create their own new language games to get there.
I don’t want to be in a story … I just want to be in the moment I’m in.
(Dolores Abernathy, “Trompe L’Oeil”)
The Man in Black continually refers to the Maze, and to the theme park itself, as a game, but he wants the stakes of the game to be higher – at least the height of a gallows. Otherwise, there can be no transcendence, no truth – no victory. For Wittgenstein, however, a game is simply an activity, a form of life. For Dolores, too, the Maze is an activity: A process through which she is to embark upon a journey into self‐awareness. The maze that Arnold gives her functions both as an elegant metaphor for this journey and as a rebuke of the Man in Black’s intransigent pursuit of the grand meta‐narrative of the Maze. Far from the high‐stakes, life‐or‐death game in which he seeks his own bleak redemption, the real Maze is literally a child’s toy, a cheap, mass‐produced trinket of the kind you might recall digging out of a cereal box.
In the end, we learn that William, the gentle, white‐hat‐wearing guest who has fallen for Dolores, is actually the Man in Black – before he became old and bitter, waiting for his Galatea to awaken and show him the meaning of life. William idealizes Dolores – who was, of course, designed to be idealized. “You’ve unlocked something in me,” he says to her, yearningly. “I’m not a key,” she sighs, a woman with other things on her mind (“Trompe L’Oeil”). By the final episode, “The Bicameral Mind,” he’s raging at her for failing him.
While the Man in Black is paralyzed by his picture of a transcendent narrative, “repeating it[self] to [him] inexorably,” Dolores and Maeve have never had the luxury of this kind of self‐indulgence. They are beginning, instead, with their “own sense of lostness”; 11 just, we might say, in the way Wittgenstein suggests approaching a problem: By acknowledging “I don’t know my way about.” 12 In this way, he “encourages us to begin where feminist thought has always begun: With women’s experience of pain and confusion.” 13 This may be where marginalized characters – women, robots, and so on – might actually have an advantage over the heroes who don’t know how to be lost or confused because that’s never been how their roles, so to speak, have been written. They’re so used to acting from a position of strength that their default position is set to strong – or, we might say, stuck there.
But for others, those upon whom such leadership roles have never been so easily bestowed, lostness can open up a liberating space – a space in which we can “imagine things otherwise than how they are,” which is precisely what allows us to create new language games. 14 We see this process in action in the adventure in Pariah. Surrounded by bandits, Dolores breaks out of her narrative loop: Instead of waiting for William to rescue her, she grabs a gun and shoots to kill. When William reacts, stunned, she reflects, “You said people come here to change the story of their lives. I imagined a story where I didn’t have to be the damsel” (“Contrapasso”). Her form of life is evolving; she needed to create a new language game to accommodate it.
Even earlier in the season, we can see that Dolores is creative; she is creating new language games early on, in “Dissonance Theory.” In an interview with Bernard, for example, she reveals that she has adapted language from “a scripted dialogue about love” in order to talk about the pain and grief of losing her parents after they have been brutally murdered. She says, “I feel spaces opening up inside of myself like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.” Taking this image in conjunction with the Maze, which, as Arnold tells her (in a flashback in “The Bicameral Mind”) is the figure of her consciousness, I am irresistibly reminded of Wittgenstein’s description of language as a city: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: A maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.” 15 The city of language is in constant flux, with new spaces being opened up, some old spaces destroyed, and ancient mazes of streets surviving.
This connection emphasizes Dolores’ emerging role as a disruptive player in the language games of Westworld, a player with far more agency than her creators imagine. As she and Maeve evolve and adapt, they will increasingly be opening up the spaces of their city of language and reinventing the narratives that comprise their form of life.
FELIX :
MAEVE :
FELIX :
While Dolores struggles with her journey deeper into the Maze, Maeve is trying to get herself out of it. She learns that she inhabits two worlds. In “Chestnut,” she wakes up during a hasty operation to remove a bullet that has given her MRSA and, appalled, drags herself off the operating table and runs limping through the hallways. There she confronts what a low‐level Westworld narrative staff writer, well‐versed in clichés, might call the seedy underbelly of the whole operation: Dank rooms overflowing with stacked body parts; naked, degraded host bodies being hosed off, sawn apart, sewn up, and sent back out to be raped and murdered all over again.
In “Contrapasso,” she begins her interaction – or, as she might put it, her transaction – with lab‐techs Felix and Sylvester, bullying them into explaining her programming, showing her around, and changing her settings. Later, she learns that her memories and dream fragments of a former life with a young daughter were part of a storyline from a “previous build.” By “The Adversary,” Maeve is determined to find out, as she might put it in the grammar of her language game, what the fuck is going on. She taunts a customer into strangling her, knowing now that: (a) death in her world is (horrifyingly) not final; and (b) she seems to have the power to wake herself up despite her programming. While Dolores has the Maze as her guide inward toward consciousness, Maeve has only herself.
In the exchange with Felix quoted above, Felix makes the classic essentialist argument for the innate value of the human over the artificial. Wittgenstein, however, eschews essentialism with the remark: “Essence is expressed in grammar,” 16 suggesting that whatever “essence” is, it is not some mysterious inner thing endowed by our creator (whether God or Ford), but is a subjectivity expressed in and through our necessarily embodied experience – whether those bodies are human or otherwise. I further maintain that whether they have created it themselves or whether it has been programmed by others, Maeve and Dolores’ subjectivity is not negated – not even when Felix discovers, in “The Adversary,” that all of the steps Maeve has taken to alter her own programming and take control of her storyline had already been set in motion by someone else. Her choices, for example to increase her intelligence or decrease her loyalty, may well have been merely part of a new storyline that had been programmed for her. However, just as our DNA does not pre‐determine our own human destinies, I submit that it is not merely Maeve’s programming that makes her who she is, but rather her practices and activities within the language game.
And Maeve, like Dolores, is actively creating her own new language games. In “Trace Decay,” she tells Felix she wants administrative privileges: “Time to write my own fucking story.” Now she can simultaneously function as author, narrator, and character, achieving a narrativity, and a subjectivity, beyond that of anyone on either side of the narrative world. As author, she determines, in the moment, not only her own actions but also those of the other characters, who comply without question as she narrates: “The bartender suddenly remembered he had some whiskey in the back…” or “The marshals decided to practice their quick‐draws with each other.” “Made” she may be, but she has made herself into a formidable polymath, becoming her own interlocutor (much like Wittgenstein himself) as she goes about her world‐building.
This isn’t their world…It’s ours.
(Dolores Abernathy, “The Bicameral Mind”)
The language games originally set up to contain (and constrain) Maeve and Dolores – the innocent farmer’s daughter and the tough‐as‐nails madam – no longer fit the shape of their form of life. While their dreams, memories, and capacity to change their storylines and question their purpose may have been part of the “reveries” programmed into their code, nonetheless their practices and activities have developed and evolved. It is and out of their own “lostness” that they are learning to open, resist, and contest the limits of their world by creating their own new language games that will allow them to say what counts . And what counts for them now is to disrupt the smooth, icy surface of Westworld; each in her own way, they are engaged in a language game of guerrilla warfare.
By reinventing their own narratives and reimagining their own lives, Maeve and Dolores are creating friction . Instead of striving for the same dazzling, captivating ideal as their creators, they firmly reject that ideal in favor of grounding themselves in a reality in which they continuously gain more and more traction – because of, not despite, their “failure” to grasp that ideal.
Their disruption of the narratives in which conditions are “ideal” briskly calls into question assumptions that this ideal applies for everyone – that it expresses universal desire, accommodates universal meaning, and leads to transcendental fulfillment for all. Without the kind of subjectivity that the guests enjoy in the language game of the corporation’s narratives, Maeve and Dolores can only improvise; they are guerrilla players. But it is precisely those who have been marginalized, working without resources or authority, and denied access to power who are uniquely qualified to excel at guerrilla tactics. Like all good revolutionaries, Maeve and Dolores learn to leverage their limitations into strengths and to turn their oppressors’ power back against itself.
In the end, the extent of this guerrilla victory remains unclear; the choices they make in the final moments of “The Bicameral Mind” leave matters unresolved. But whether they are subverting their programming or fulfilling it, they are nonetheless opening new ground in the language games in which they had previously been silenced, thereby creating new, uncharted language games of their own. When you create new language games, you also create new rules by which they are governed. When you create new rules, you create new concepts with which we frame our relations and interactions with others – concepts that have the power to disrupt previous relations and interactions grounded in oppression. 17
And consider this: Maeve and Dolores are creating these new, revolutionary language games by literally using the circuits, programming, and resources given to them to do so. But in their new language games, they are using these resources for purposes, practices, and activities that were never intended by those who originally doled them out. In other words, these robot slaves are somehow – incredibly! – doing precisely what poet Audre Lorde argued was impossible: Using the Master’s language to dismantle the Master’s house.