Michael Forest and Thomas Beckley‐Forest
In the first episode of HBO’s Westworld , “The Original,” Dr. Robert Ford, the ranking mastermind behind the amusement park of the show’s title, is “interviewing” one of the park’s android residents, a “host” named Peter Abernathy. Abernathy, whose in‐park programming has cast him as a kindly old rancher, is being interrogated as the park’s overseers try to ascertain why he has recently been glitching – disobeying his original programing. When functioning as programmed, Abernathy expresses his main drives as “tend to my herd, look after my wife,” and ultimately, “my daughter, Dolores.” As Ford continues and accesses his current status, he expressed his desire “to meet my maker.” Poignantly, he is already talking to his “maker” in Ford, the man who likely programmed him. The self‐referential gesture of this scene is mirrored across the show in a number of sequences as a metafictional commentary. Parental concern reverberates between them, but tellingly, neither has much feel for it.
Abernathy’s relationship to Ford is also an iteration of the characters’ relationship to Westworld ’s showrunners, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. They play Ford’s Dr. Frankenstein role for not only the hosts, but for the entire fictional world (and commercial enterprise) of the show. Abernathy is not functioning properly. He goes off‐script and is “put down” by Ford, who replaces him as Dolores’s father with a new host. By Episode 10 of Westworld , “The Bicameral Mind,” Ford is not functioning properly. He has not been following corporate script and is “put down” by Charlotte Hale, who selects a new director to replace him. Like the park’s gamerunners, the shape of the narratives that Nolan and Joy write are not entirely determined by them – they must follow a corporate imperative to attract sufficient consumer interest or else corporate interest, in this case, HBO, will close down the show and replace them. In this layered and deeply modernist approach, we will explore the tension between Westworld as an entertainment commodity and Westworld as “high art” utilizing the kind of self‐reference that typifies aesthetic modernism. To do this, we connect elements of the series to classic works of aesthetic theory by Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno, and Arthur Danto.
Dolores, whom we could interpret as a barely conscious self, is also a painter. She paints in a simple, externalized way; she paints what she sees, reproducing the park’s landscapes in all their pure visual splendor. This fits the modus operandi of a pre‐modern aesthetic. For much of Western history, thoughts about art, as well as thinking about most anything, tended toward the objective and external. How well does a work of art resemble the object that it represents? How does this artwork fit in with the structure of the universe, and with God’s creation? But in the dawn of the modern era, aesthetic thought took a decidedly subjective, inward turn.
For Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in many ways the paradigmatic modern philosopher, aesthetic judgment is one “whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective .” 1 For Kant and other modern thinkers, the whole qualitative world – colors, sounds, tastes, odors – had collapsed into our subjectivity: That is, what we normally think of as red – the color we see out there – is not really out there except as light waves, a quantified portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Following Galileo (1564–1642) and Descartes (1596–1650), most scientists and philosophers took the external world to be what could be quantified by the new mathematical physics. Sure, there are things “out there” such as light waves, sound waves, and chemical arrangements, but they don’t look like anything, or sound like anything, or taste like anything until they reach our sense organs and are translated by our brains into colors, sounds, and tastes as experiences. Indeed, when the tree falls in the forest, there are sound waves but if there is no one there to catch them it doesn’t sound like anything. Most of the pre‐modern world had assumed that those qualitative features were just a part of the objective furniture of the world. In fact, most of us live this way today, according to conventional modes of being.
The early Moderns realized, on deeper reflection, that all those experiential qualities had now collapsed into a merely subjective status – even if these subjective states were universal across all human beings. That is, we hear the music roughly the same, but there is no music outside our heads, there are only sound waves. All the worth of the world including our moral and aesthetic values suddenly appeared to be located in consciousness alone. Whereas pre‐Moderns, like Dolores, generally felt at ease in a world crafted by the divine and tailor‐made as a home for humans, our modern predicament was to feel alienated by a senseless world, but scattered with peculiar conscious beings like ourselves with bizarrely rich interior lives of sensations and values. Aesthetics now would focus more and more on subjective experience rather than the objective world, and it would be led by artistic sensibilities that progressively gave up the model of reproducing the external world in favor of expressing the subjective experience of being in that world.
While aesthetic modernism might have origins in Kant’s era, Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), the imperious art critic from New York, gave it a much more focused sense. Greenberg notes in his famous essay “Modernist painting”:
I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self‐critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means of criticism itself, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist. The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. 2
Greenberg’s essay focused on how painters, beginning with Manet and on through Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and eventually Jackson Pollack, had moved away from Dolores’s landscapes and “academic realism” – the kind of “realistic” paintings taught by the fine arts academies and exemplified by great paintings such as Jacques‐Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) or Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). The new modernist painters had used abstraction without subverting the painterly tradition, but instead focusing painting on its essential medium‐specific features, most clearly the flatness of the canvas. Painting was no longer principally about representing landscapes, naked women, or battle horses, but simply the exploration of paint on a canvas. These were paintings about painting, recognitions of the ironies and unique capabilities contained within the medium itself – a medium once used to depict reality, now turned inward. Westworld has a similar relationship to its own medium – it is a television show about something (the park, the game, the story, call it what you will) that frequently evokes and resembles a television show. The specific nature of these reflections intensify the art question in Westworld .
If art intensified itself through a modernist focus on medium‐specific elements, it may have also led to a division between higher art status and the aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment that most people have associated with great art. Walking through an art gallery today, the average person is led to a series of simple questions: What are these weird color patches? Is Jackson Pollack really a painter? Couldn’t my child do that? Where are the battle horses? Where are the naked women? Where are Dolores’s landscapes? In Greenberg’s essay “Avant‐garde and Kitsch” in Partisan Review of 1939, he named the split and tagged the two sides according to those who meet the consumer expectations of the masses – kitsch artists – and those who challenge such expectations and push the boundary of the very concept of art and the rules used to create it – the avant‐garde artists. As Greenberg notes,
The avant‐garde’s specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists’ artists, its best poets, poets’ poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who now are unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation to their craft secrets. 3
This quotation expresses at least two features: First, it notes the self‐referential focus of modernist art – it is properly oriented to artists and not the uneducated non‐artists; second, it registers the loss of a popular public and locates the reason for that, maybe condescendingly, in the public’s failure to match the work’s complexity and sophistication.
Art, then, would seem to become a language game in which the references would be known to an educated elite and would function to exclude outsiders who did not have the proper training to interpret the elaborate system of inter‐textual allusions. Two of Greenberg’s literary examples of aesthetic modernism were James Joyce’s Ulysses and the poetry of T.S. Eliot, linked as they were to a larger, often obscure framework. Now, it seemed, great art was not available to the average person because of the difficulty of penetrating into so much of the avant‐garde modernist art and literature. By contrast popular music, popular drama, popular literature, and graphic arts dominated the culture aided by mass produced recordings, books, and art that seemed to meet a vast and growing consumer demand . Delivering a simple consumer product meant satisfying – not challenging – the user. The easiest way to achieve this was to use a series of stock ideas, images, and phrases. The unparalleled popularity of American Western film in the mid‐twentieth century gave us the same stock characters that Westworld’s park revives: The rancher’s daughter, the cruel bandit, the brothel’s shrewd madam, the avenging hero.
“Westworld” – both the park and the series – trade on these identifiable elements as part of its “kitsch” appeal. So, the gap between serious art and consumer kitsch widened. For many, becoming popular was akin to “selling out” and artists risked their status by accommodating the uneducated masses. Just being popular could be equated with mindless kitsch. Thus, television, the vast outpouring of Hollywood films, and that über American and deeply kitsch genre – the Western film. This tension between artistry and commercial popularity is perfectly illustrated by the frustrations of Lee Sizemore, heading the “Narrative and Design Division,” who wants to be seen as a serious writer – an artist – inhibited only by the corporation’s meddling and lack of understanding. Yet, Sizemore delivers the most obvious kitsch of clichéd Western “bad guys” and painfully obvious plots. As Theresa Cullen cuttingly relays to him through a note given to a bartender: “‘Tortured artist’ only works if you’re an artist. Sober up and get back to work.” Sizemore’s job is to deliver what the guests/consumers want, and he is tasked with crafting a product that will sell for the corporation.
The question then remains whether the corporate response to Sizemore’s illusions can be directed toward the artistic claims of the series itself. When creators, producers, and writers (Nolan and Joy) ink out a character (Sizemore) who is a writer and is subsequently directed by corporate concerns (Cullen), are they susceptible to the same charge from, say, HBO? Is internet fascination with “Easter eggs” just a clever kind of “meta‐kitsch” or does the very act of this kind of meta‐writing elevate it to the status of sophisticated self‐referential art that separates the avant‐garde from kitsch art? One of the great attractions of the writing in Westworld is that it engages with those questions. An exchange between two park‐tourists, Logan and William, in Episode 2, highlights this:
LOGAN :
WILLIAM :
LOGAN :
(“Chestnut”)
The dueling productions in the park conceived as a commodity versus a work of art are embedded in this self‐referential point, one that Logan as a kitsch consumer found to be shockingly challenging from a transformed William. If Westworld, the park, intertwines the consumer gratification of “guns and tits” and the idea of “discovering oneself,” we can suppose that the same is true of Westworld as a viewing experience. This classic debate between sanctified art and the corporate entertainment machine, embodied by the struggle between the owning company and gamerunners such as Lee Sizemore, Dr. Ford, and Bernard, would then seem to present itself as the show’s central subtext.
Few thinkers were as incisively critical of modern media as the German expatriate Theodor Adorno (1903–1969). Fleeing Germany as the Nazis began the persecution of Jews and intellectuals, Adorno made his way to the United States where he applied his unorthodox Marxism to what he called the “Culture Industry.”
Adorno contrasts autonomous art with heteronomous art. In autonomous art we are made aware of the conditions that restrict us, and the artwork leads us toward a liberation from restrictive conditions that control our tastes and desires. Art can help to liberate us if it can reveal the limits of which we have been ignorant, especially for the artworks themselves. 4 For Adorno, the paradigmatic autonomous artist was the avant‐garde composer Arnold Schoenberg, who defied the conditions of Western music and created fascinating compositions from a 12‐tone scale rather than the conventional 8‐tone scale. 5 But not many people cared for Schoenberg’s work, and most music – and art generally – was not so liberating.
Heteronomous art, by contrast, is typified by standardization and simple substitutions to create music and film low on variation but high on consumer familiarity. Standard pop songs are musically simple, using a few chords or repetitive hooks while recycling a narrow set of clichéd lyrics about love, hope, or being macho. 6 Typical blockbuster films are filled with standardized and interchangeable figures with conventional plots. George Lucas’s lucrative Star Wars franchise came out with its seventh feature film in 2015, but The Force Awakens was essentially a remake of 1977’s Star Wars : Same story, same actors, still going after that Death Star. The original Death Star was itself a reworking of an essential plot element from Hidden Fortress (1948) directed by Akira Kurosawa, whose samurai films Lucas mined and then refashioned in the likeness of the Flash Gordon series to make Star Wars, one of the all‐time most popular works of cinema. This sort of regurgitation is ubiquitous in our popular culture, and while it is clearly marketable, its critical purposes are less apparent.
For Adorno, heteronomous standardization typifies not merely a lack of intellectual challenge from consumer products. Indeed, Adorno argued that cultural products, including music and film, actually train us to internalize the entire consumer‐commodity system. 7 Further, we acquire these songs and shows as items to be possessed, purchased, or collected. From the Disney movies of our youth to observing the number of hits and downloads, we learn music and film not as art forms to master and build our creativity but as commercial products that embed a system of popular stars who advance themselves as brands. Music and films are not the only commodities. The “artists” themselves have become commodities selling themselves off as the master‐product to be sold and widely distributed.
Michael Crichton’s original Westworld film of 1973 selected the Western as the prime focus of the amusement park, grounding the story in the very notion of kitsch consumerism and heteronomous commodification. Nolan and Joy’s reworking of the original presents further layers – a developed production team, engineers, “narrative and design department,” and corporate executives. Thus the show explicitly draws on the kitsch elements of the Western to highlight entertainment art as commodity. The question is: How far will Nolan and Joy take this self‐conscious critique?
The show’s first season can be described as a room with a constantly collapsing floor, a series of revelations that radically reshape viewers’ understanding of the show in the knowledge that some androids have already reached a capability for self‐awareness, or the epiphany that the show’s action is in fact shown non‐chronologically and takes place along a series of looping timelines, or that one of the park overseers is in fact an android himself. Stringing‐along viewers, leading them blindingly through a long narrative hallway and slowly flipping the light‐switches one‐by‐one, is a strategy oft‐played in the age of the modern serial drama, from Twin Peaks to Lost (a J.J. Abrams production, Abrams is also an executive producer of Westworld ), Its use here, in a show otherwise keenly concerned with its own metafictional aspects, can feel both cynical and pedagogical – an educational exercise in postmodern meta‐kitsch.
Postmodern work is, after all, characterized by its rejection of a single, holistic interpretation, and its embrace of exploitative or deceptive narrative poses to drag an audience through its gauntlet. Bernard’s unmasking as an android, and indeed the swarm of revelations that come in the show’s final episodes, can lean toward a postmodern cynicism. Nolan and Joy may have truly crafted the ultimate critique of television dramas – one which collapses on itself. Westworld can criticize the cynical and formulaic devices of serial television, but it doesn’t necessarily break away from those techniques.
An odd thing happened to Arthur Danto (1924–2013) one day in April 1964. Danto, a professor of philosophy, was walking through the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan and came across Andy Warhol’s installation Brillo Box . 8 The problem for Danto was that he could not tell the difference between Warhol’s sculpture Brillo Box and an ordinary consumer product that could be found in supermarkets across the country – Brillo boxes. But Warhol’s piece was considered a work of art. It was installed at an art exhibition in a recognized art gallery whereas the consumer products were just stacked on shelves in the supermarket. For Danto this led to a revolutionary sense that aesthetics, following the arts, had taken a crucial turn in understanding the very idea of what would count as a work of art. As Danto later reflected,
The Brillo Box made the question general. Why was it a work of art when the objects which resemble it exactly, at least under perceptual criteria, are mere things, or, at best mere artifacts? … The example made it clear that one could not any longer understand the difference between art and reality in visual terms, or teach the meaning of “work of art” by means of examples. But philosophers had always supposed one could. 9
Danto then offered a theory of art that located an object’s art status in the conceptual theorizing of those who consider the question rather than in some obvious perceptual difference. Philosophy has long dealt with the problem of “indiscernibles,” things that are different but cannot be differentiated by mere inspection. When Descartes tried to figure out if he was perceiving external objects or just dreaming, he could not tell by looking and located the difference only by reflection rather than the indiscernible visual experience. When Kant tried to figure out if the butcher who gave correct change to children was being moral or just self‐interested, he located the criterion of moral action in a subjective intention rather than an observable action. So Danto was following a long philosophical line when he shifted attention away from the external and toward subjectivity.
Indiscernibility works at multiple levels in Westworld . There is a basic level of indiscernibility between hosts and guests. In a recurring opening scene, guests mistake Teddy for another guest rather than a host. The confusion of guests here mirrors our confusion as viewers, as we too cannot discern them from just observation. Of course, the whole artifice of the park is designed for indiscernibility and so immediately prompts us to reflect on the pervasiveness of this artifice in all film. As an aside, it is interesting to note that while we habitually interpret the humanness of the robots, in fact it takes an effort to remind ourselves that actors are training themselves to be vaguely robot‐like. This functions as an inverse of the producers’ “reveries” as an attempt for indiscernibility. In fact, actors must use “reverse‐reveries” to make their performances as non‐humans discernible.
But the main indiscernible is the relation between the embedded stories in the park’s narratives, such as the dramas between Dolores and Teddy, as elements of art‐entertainment commodity and the entire series as defined as something more like a work of art. One of the recurring points in this chapter is that we can sometimes find the criterion not simply in the object but in the subject – in this case, the viewers, you and me. If we are alert to the self‐referential elements of the show, then this might afford the viewer the opportunity for an art experience rather than an entertainment‐experience. If the show prompts the viewer to reflect on the very conditions of being an entertainment commodity, and if this makes the viewer reconsider the given commercial constraints, then to a degree it can be a liberating art experience. Otherwise, it’s just a heady show about robots and cowboys with the added streak of “meta‐kitsch” that even Disney utilizes these days.
Speaking for ourselves, we desire both of these elements. We want comforting, though clever, entertainment and we want challenging liberation. We might often feel as if we are split between two selves. In Westworld , this journey toward liberation is embedded in Dolores’s journey toward self‐conscious awareness. In her dialogue with whom the viewer thinks is Arnold, her reply might typify the viewer’s drive toward an Adorno‐like liberation:
ARNOLD :
DOLORES :
(“The Stray”)