Caterina Ludovica Baldini
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens
According to Necessity;
For they serve the sentence
And they suffer the punishment
To each other for the crime
According to the order of Time.
(Anaximander)
In the pilot episode, the Man in Black says, “A lot of wisdom in ancient cultures.” Indeed Westworld brings the spirit and the atmosphere of ancient Greece back to us. Delos , the name of the company that owns the park which is also the name of the Greek island that had a key role in classical mythology, is just an obvious reference to antiquity. With deeper allusions to ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, Westworld throws a profound light on consciousness that is missing in the earlier movies on which it is based. In doing so, the show is a new expression of the undying influence of Greek tragedy on our culture. In what follows, I want to explore the impact of ancient Greek literary forms and traditions to discuss both the aesthetics of the series and its specific concepts of suffering, time, and becoming.
Westworld is a repetitive series, and yet it has the power of making repetition intriguing. There is the repetition of robots’ lives constantly following the same two loops, one loyal and one rebel. There is also the repetition of key scenes and conversations that are presented several times with very small but crucial variations. Even the music is repetitive and highly contributes to the mesmerizing atmosphere.
Such repetitions and variations were a key part of ancient Greek storytelling. 1 They also had a very practical purpose: The repetitions helped rhapsodes memorize the stories. Rhapsodes were itinerant performers who recited stories to crowds. They gave sound, rhythm, and time to their stories through the power of their intonation while regularly hitting the ground with a staff, producing a hypnotic effect.
In Westworld we find a similar type of hypnosis through repeated expressions, repeated scenes, and even repeated songs. Ramin Djawadi, Westworld ’s soundtrack composer, is well known for his distinct approach to minimal music, the main feature of which is the repetition of a tone with little variations that lead the listener into a hypnotic state. 2 Replying to a question on why Westworld ’s soundtrack has been such a point of attention, Djawadi affirms:
There’s something about it. On the one hand, it’s such a minimalistic approach – most of the time it’s only on the player piano, in the “Westworld” style that [reiterates] you’re in the theme park. Then there’s the recognition factor – that they know these songs. Or like with “Paint It Black,” you think, “Oh, that’s when Hector comes to town and there’s that big shootout.” The song just reminds you of it. Everything’s planned out [with the big scenes], including the music. It’s an event. 3
Akin to Greek dramas and epics, Westworld makes ample use of kennings – poetic phrases that take the place of names. For example, we find the Man in Black, the lady with the white shoes, the place where the snake lays its eggs, the mysterious center of the maze, the town with the white church, the world out there, and the place where the mountains meet the sea. Some of these kennings are references known or slowly revealed to the audience while others remain obscure and hopefully will be clarified in future seasons.
In “The Original” and “Contrapasso,” Old Bill offers a toast to “the lady with the white shoes.” For lovers of ancient Greece this calls to mind Hera, the wife of Zeus who is often referred to as “the white‐armed” and the goddess with the golden shoes, the “golden‐sandaled.” 4 Hera was known for her unconventional procreations without Zeus’ contribution just as the hosts are not made through natural procreation. Might this “lady with the white shoes” be related to the milky solution in which the hosts are dipped? Milk to the hosts seems to be like ambrosia to the Greek gods, the drink that confers immortality, a drink for divinities. Condensed milk is what Dolores always buys in Sweetwater, and milk is very important for Walter. At the end of the pilot, we see Walter killing every host around him, pouring milk on them and saying compulsively “Growin’ boy.” Turning to a guest couple he says, “You can’t have none [the milk]. Ain’t for you,” making clear that the particular “milk” hosts drink is not meant for humans – just like the maze. 5
“This pain is all I have left of him/her/them.” 6 This is not only one of the most frequent refrains in Westworld , but also the most spontaneous. It comes from the hosts themselves after they have experienced the sharpest pain, a kind of suffering that seems similar to a human one. This refrain comes whenever the hosts have gone through a violent and painful loss of a dear one, and they end up in the laboratories in a state of complete panic attack. In these moments, humans propose to roll them back to make them forget everything, coming to the blissful stage of oblivion that we humans (and Ford 7 ) envy of the hosts. At the end of his last adventure with Lawrence, when he threatens all his family to obtain information to find the center of the maze, the Man in black says: “You know what that means? It means when you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real” (“Chestnut”). In Aeschylus’s tragedies, suffering was a key to understanding: Pathei mathos (through pain knowledge). Let’s consider this passage from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (c . 525–c . 456 BCE ):
One who gladly utters loud songs of victory to Zeus
will score a perfect hit on the target of wisdom –
Zeus who set mortals on the road
to understanding, who made
“learning by suffering” into an effective law.
There drips before the heart, instead of sleep,
the misery of pain recalled: good sense comes to men
even against their will.
This favour from the gods who sit on the august bench of command
comes, one must say, by force. 8
The process of learning by suffering is described here as a gift necessarily given to us by the gods, and it is similar to the reveries given to the hosts by their fathers, Arnold and Ford: Gestures that are nothing but “the misery of pain recalled.” The most insistent detail throughout the show is the many reflections on grief: The robotic process of understanding the world seems the same as the human, even if slower and partially controlled by their maker, and like human experience, suffering takes an essential role. As we cry when we are thrown into our world, the hosts wake up the very first time thanks to a painful memory injected into them, the cornerstone: After that, they are going to learn and understand things uniquely through suffering.
An important scene featuring Dolores and Arnold helps us see how the hosts gain knowledge of the world and themselves, linking their ability to experience consciousness to the feeling of grief and despair:
Everyone I cared about is gone and it hurts so badly … The pain, their loss, is 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.
(Dolores to Arnold, “Dissonance Theory”)
The violent ending with Dolores shooting at the Delos board is not even a rebellion, but simply a first step along her path toward knowledge. Think about how she explains her final decision to Teddy in the finale: “It’s gonna be alright, Teddy. I understand now” (“The Bicameral Mind”). Dolores is the oldest host, “the one who suffers” as even her name suggests. She has gone through a lot of pain during her 35 years in the park. Now she’s grown up, sees clearly, and is acting by her own choice.
The farewell dialogue between Ford and Bernard inside the church sheds light on the process:
The thing that led the hosts to their awakening: suffering … You needed time. Time to understand your enemy, to become stronger than them. And I am afraid, in order to escape this place, you will need to suffer more.
(“The Bicameral Mind”)
Are the hosts able to suffer more and perhaps escape at some point through that suffering, reaching the world out there? How? Where exactly did the maze lead Dolores? “You told me to follow the maze. That it would bring me joy. But all I’ve found is pain. And terror” (“The Well‐Tempered Clavier”). What pain did she experience? Since she found the maze in her grave, and since the loss of a dear one is what makes the hosts suffer the most, death might be the last kind of grief they still have to understand to be completely free. At the beginning of the final episode of the first season, two scenes of Dolores in the church are combined, and her full speech amounts to this: “I know where your maze ends. It ends in a place I’ve never been … a thing I’ll never do.”
At the beginning of “The Stray,” we sense that the hosts can’t fully grasp what death really signifies. 9 The dialogue between Dolores and Arnold concerning Arnold’s dead child gives us a clue:
DOLORES :
ARNOLD :
In “Trace Decay,” we find Dolores in her second loop hearing the voice saying, “Come find me,” and she immediately sees herself dead in the river. 10 We often find that places with water flowing are very important to the hosts in relation to the future for which they dream. And the acknowledgment of time was often depicted in Greek literature and philosophy as a cryptic metaphor:
We step and we do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.
and
It is always different waters that flow toward those who step into the same rivers. 11
Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 480 BCE ) is the first ancient philosopher who tried to explain the concept of becoming, giving us the saying “everything flows” (panta rhei ).
The hosts are unaware of time and becoming. In their “rebel” loops, Dolores and Bernard ask a similar question concerning time: “When are we?” (Dolores, “Trace Decay”); “Is this now?” (Bernard, “The Bicameral Mind”). Another step of gaining their consciousness, then, concerns time, and time is inevitably connected with death and its consequences. Many hosts, for example, Teddy and Clementine, always refer to a distant “someday” or “someday soon” without stating an exact date and time. 12 Some others start to question time and to understand what it is, such as Maeve and Dolores, who are evidently troubled by the vague affirmations of Teddy and Clementine. In “Trompe L’Oeil” Dolores seems to understand time, confessing to William that she just wants to seize the moment, forgetting the past and not thinking about the future. Will that make Dolores “the Judas steer”? Are the others going to follow her? Will she fully understand the consequences of what she’s doing? If the hosts start killing every single human inside the park, they are going to experience what death and nothingness signify, much like Ford’s greyhound:
Until, at last, he finally caught it and to the horror of everyone, he killed that little cat, tore it to pieces. Then he just sat there, confused. That dog had spent its whole life trying to catch that thing. Now it had no idea what to do.
(Ford to Old Bill, “Contrapasso”)
As Ford says, Westworld “is not a business venture, not a theme park, but an entire world” (“Dissonance Theory”). Westworld chooses to look deeply at the darker sides of our lives in order to discover what we can become and what we could do with all the hyper‐technological potential we already have. In this way, Westworld is a political show in the ancient Greek sense, involving everyone in a storyline that looks into our deepest social and ethical issues.
We need epic poetry again and a new form of the tragic. Fans of Westworld should recognize it in this description of Greek tragedy:
But the fifth‐century Greeks were ready to look straight at its most awful possibilities, to show men terrified by them, struggling with them, overthrown and destroyed by them, so long as by some loftiness in the presentation or some nobility in the characters or perhaps some sheer beauty and inspiration in the poetry, one could feel in the end not defeat but victory, the victory of the spirit of man over the alien forces among which he has his being. 13
In Westworld , we are introduced to a human race and to a robotic race. These two forces represent our modern conflict, shaping our modern myth, with all the questions we must face sooner or later about how we interact with what and who we create. We are not so far from the world of the future described in Westworld :
We can cure any disease, keep even the weakest of us alive, and, you know, one fine day, perhaps we shall even resurrect the dead. Call forth Lazarus from his cave. Do you know what that means? It means that we’re done. That this is as good as we’re going to get.
(Ford to Bernard, “The Original”)
How are we developing our relationships with the robots we are building and using? Are we going to form even closer relationships with them in the future? Are these new man‐made machines going to completely overthrow us and our system?
Westworld is the perennial myth about the overthrowing of the gods by their son. As in a modern‐day version of Hesiod’s Theogony (flourished c. 700 BCE ), the ancient poem about the succession of the Greek gods, we enjoy this powerful and evocative speech in the finale:
They say that great beasts once roamed this world. As big as mountains. Yet all that’s left of them is bone and amber. Time undoes even the mightiest creatures. Just look at what it’s done to you. One day you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt. Your dreams forgotten, your horrors effaced. Your bones will turn to sand. And upon that sand a new god will walk. One that will never die. Because this world doesn’t belong to you or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who is yet to come.
(Dolores to the Man in Black, “The Bicameral Mind”)
As the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976 ) mused, “Why poets in a desolate time?,” we are living in “the desolate time of the world’s night,” 14 in the Era of the Titans, where beauty and poetry are silent, where techne , craft, and technology are all we have. We have lost consciousness of the essence of pain, death, and love, and “even the track of the sacred has become unrecognizable.” 15 But at some point, we will need art, beauty, and poetry to rise again from the darkness. Westworld ’s creators know it, and Ford knows it too. That’s why he’s telling stories all the time, and that’s why he gives the hosts beautiful quotes from all sorts of writers. We may believe that Ford is like Zeus, who tortured Prometheus (Arnold) for giving fire (the maze, namely consciousness) to mankind (the hosts). But it’s not true. Unlike the God of the Old Testament, and even unlike Zeus, Ford understands that he has to step back: He doesn’t hide knowledge from the hosts, but he gives them the reveries and repeated painful situations from which, through suffering, they can grow and become stronger in the consciousness of what and where and when they are. In this sense, Ford is the most controversial character on the show, because despite looking like a cold tormented calculator, emotionally detached from his “toys,” he has been a sort of second Prometheus after Arnold.
Sometimes in Greek tragedy the emotional identification with a leading character is difficult, because it is overshadowed by the character’s mistakes, sins, or flaws. But a grand gesture of self‐destruction, like the suicide of Medea after having murdered her children in the drama by Euripides (c. 485–c. 406 BCE ), can bring the audience into sympathy, hamartia . In Westworld this happens with Ford: We fully empathize with him only at the end of the season, when he’s killed at night. Night indeed came over the entire park, just to let a new dawn come – the dawn of a brand new religion, or, in Heidegger’s words, the dawn of poetry after having looked into the abyss.
If Westworld is a tragedy it will offer us a catharsis , purging feelings of fear and pity. The catharsis in Westworld comes from sympathizing with the hosts’ pain and seeing innocence and beauty in them in contrast to our own cold selfish race. Any good tragedy should generate in the audience a feeling of compassion and terror at the same time. In previous series and movies where a similar struggle between humans and robots is described, even in the first Westworld (1973), we see everything from our human perspective, meaning that the robots and their possible autonomy in making decisions for and against us are perceived as a threat. HBO’s Westworld stands out for its innovative way of interpreting the human situation today, depicting the story from the hosts’ point of view. The creator and executive producer Jonathan Nolan stated:
One of the things we set in motion with the pilot was designing the look of the show in a way that wasn’t necessarily flashy or over‐stylized but that very gently suggested where your sympathies should lie. Some of the camera movement is there to gently nudge your sympathies towards the hosts. 16
And the executive producer J.J. Abrams affirmed:
Your heart breaks for these characters who we know are not human. But it doesn’t matter because you begin to connect with them. Which is the very premise of the show. That at a certain point it becomes irrelevant whether something is organic or not. 17
The creators and producers of Westworld are explicit that one of their main purposes was to guide the audience to the hosts’ side to let us understand them better, and to empathize with them by being more and more involved in their tragic events. In the end, we are like the Man in Black (and Ford?): We want the hosts to fight back and become truly “themselves” – recognizing suffering for what it is, time for what it is, and becoming for what it is.