POSTMODERN HYPERREALITY IN HBO’S WESTWORLD

Giulia Caparrelli

Professor Sarram

COM 470

5 December 2016

Caparrelli 2

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” asks an unseen, external speaker in the pilot’s dark and unsettling opening scene of HBO’s new TV series, Westworld

(“The Original”). This question is addressed to a blood-stained, naked woman that is seemingly kept in captivity in the depths of a mysterious, aseptic dungeon. At a primary level, it may be interpreted as a specific, ideological interrogation, aimed at ascertaining whether the subjected hostage still believes in the doctrines of the ideology she has been fed.

At a deeper level, it suggests a more general, philosophical and existential inquiry. Indeed, the question seems to be directed towards the audience itself. Viewers are immediately drawn in, called upon, and unconsciously prompted to interrogate themselves in a similar way: Is reality really real? How can I tell? Adding to this uncertainty and destabilization, the fact that the aforementioned confined woman, towards whom the spectator starts to feel pity and sympathy, is in reality a robot clearly complicates matters.

Based on the eponymous 1973 science fiction movie by Michael Crichton, Westworld is set in a Western theme park inhabited by so-called “hosts” and regularly visited by

“newcomers”. The amusement park offers wealthy visitors – it costs $40,000 per day! – a thrilling experience, an extreme vacation in the pursuit of violence, sex, and extreme fun, an opportunity to “live without limits” as promised by its flashy advertisement. What is most eerie is that, although inhabitants and guests outwardly look exactly the same, the former are synthetic androids carefully designed inside the maze-like headquarters of Delos Corporation, the owner of Westworld. Here, the use of highly advanced technologies to recreate both a

Western world and its lifelike characters has a double purpose: it is both necessary to faithfully reproduce “an authentic copy” (Eco 6) that can stimulate and enhance visitor’s real pleasures, and to preserve the safety of the experience – after all, it’s all robotics and no one can really get hurt. Ultimately, the appeal of this TV series lies precisely in its exploration of the interplay between authenticity and reproduction, between humanity and machinery.

However, what is at stake is not merely a perceptual dilemma, but also an ontological inquiry Caparrelli 3 carried out through a multilayered questioning that is inherently postmodern both in its subject matter and style.

Contemporary debates about postmodernity take center stage in Westworld. Today society is said to have “transition[ed] from modern…to postmodern ways of life” (Laughney

147). This condition is firstly ascribed to the ever-increasing proliferation of media, images and signs that saturate and overload people’s lives. Technological developments such as the

Internet, virtual reality, and life simulation games such as The Sims and Second Life now mediate direct lived experience and give rise to cyberculture. The result is that there is no longer a clear-cut distinction between reality and representation: “representations are reality and reality consists of a myriad of representations” (Hodkinson 266). But postmodern critics go even beyond the concept of representation, and address the danger of simulation: whereas the former has still some relation to reality, the latter is a brand new creation substituting reality. According to Sherry Turkle, the Internet has become “a culture of simulation” (qtd.

275), where “cyborg identities…[blur] the boundary between human and technology, authentic and artificial” (Hodkinson 276). This technologically mediated environment has indeed dramatic consequences also on the self, which, according to Mark Poster becomes

“unstable, multiple and diffuse” (447): identities “become increasingly hybrid and fluid”

(Hodkinson 274). Taken to the extreme, and paired with reflections on posthumanism and artificial intelligence, Westworld is an exploration of the “hyperreal culture of simulacra”

(275) that drives contemporary society.

The concepts of hyperreality and simulacra are key to understand the simulated nature of the current media environment, and, in turn, of Westworld. They have become attached to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who wrote Simulacra and Simulation (1981), and is now regarded as one of the main figures of postmodern thought. According to him, the hyperreal is “a real without origin or reality” (388); it is the outcome of simulation.

Surpassing the mechanisms of representation and the equivalences of semiotics, “the era of Caparrelli 4 simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials” (388): it implies the creation of a new real by “substituting the signs of the real for the real” (389). The simulacra that were once mere representations become the real itself. Thus, Baudrillard denounces the

“omnipotence of simulacra” (389), and the “murderous power of images, murderers of the real” (390). Echoing such arguments, the Italian semiotician and intellectual Umberto Eco observes in his Travels in Hyperreality (1977), “the sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement” (7). According to him, hyperreality becomes a “substitute for reality”, and, paradoxically, “something even more real” (8). With its over-saturation of images, the current media landscape is far from being a pure reflection of reality, and rather acquires a hyperreal status to entertain consumers.

Similarly, Westworld portrays a simulated world with simulated beings, recreating a hyperreal environment for visitors to enjoy.

Interestingly, both Baudrillard and Eco cite Disneyland as an example of hyperreality and simulation. Being an amusement park, Disneyland clearly shares many features with the fictional Westworld; thus, the theorists’ ideas may be easily applied to both parks. Before delving into the analysis of this fairy-tale world, Eco express his fascination with the enormous amount of “absolutely fake [amusement] cities” that fill up the United States.

Similar to Disneyland, “there are [reproduced] ‘ghost towns’…Western cities of a century or more ago” (40). In describing one of those, Eco uses expressions that strikingly resonates with the setting of Westworld:

“First of all, there is the realism of the reconstruction: the dusty stables, the sagging shops, the offices of the sheriff…the jail, the saloon are life size and executed with absolute fidelity; the old carriages are covered with dust…the shops are open…[blending] the reality of trade with the play of fiction…The customer finds himself participating in the fantasy because of his own authenticity as a consumer; in other words, he is in the role of the cowboy or the gold-prospector who comes into town to be fleeced of all he has accumulated while out in the wilds”. (41-2)

Then, Eco turns to Disneyland, drawing parallels with Louis Marin’s analysis of a

“nineteenth-century frontier city street that receives entering visitors and distributes them Caparrelli 5 through the various sector of the…city” (qtd. in 43). Both Disneyland’s Main Street and

Westworld’s principal road serve the same purpose of introducing people to an “at once absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic” world (43). Once inside, it is the “total fake” that draws the attention of the newcomers: here, “the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program. In this sense, Disneyland [but also Westworld] not only produces illusion, but – in confessing it – stimulates the desire for it” (44). In fact, the fake “corresponds much more to our daydream demands” than reality (44). Adding to the paradox, in Westworld the robotic hosts are living in a “sun-soaked town teaming with sweaty humanity”, while the real human beings are working in the “cold, subterranean, sterile robotic” Delos headquarters (Hibberd). The fantasy world looks definitely more desirable.

Similarly to Westworld, the robots are Disneyland’s wonders. “You realize that they are robots, but you remain dumbfounded by their verisimilitude” (Eco 45). Indeed, the guests in the HBO’s drama frequently marvel at the perfect likeness of the androids, and at times even forget they are mere 3D-printed automata. At the same time, the viewers keep mistaking them for real human beings, and HBO’s showrunners play on this ambiguity to build up plot twists. Much as in Westworld, “Disney’s robots are masterpieces of electronics; each was devised by observing the expression of a real actor, then building models, then developing skeletons of absolute precision, authentic computers in human form, to be dressed in ‘flesh’ and ‘skin’” (45). It is at this point that, ‘the completely real’ becomes identified with the

‘completely fake’” (7), and the completely fake takes over the completely real in terms of appeal.

Along similar lines, Baudrillard draws attention to the artificiality and simulated status of Disneyland. In doing so, he takes a step further, and attempts to explain what lies behind both the rationale and the attractiveness of the simulation. “[W]hat attracts the crowds the most is…the social microcosm, the…miniaturized…real America” (Baudrillard 393)”.

Still, according to the French philosopher, Disneyland does not play at simulating reality, but Caparrelli 6 at dissembling the absence of reality. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of…the America that surrounds it [is] no longer real, but belong[s] to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation” (393). The fact that

Disneyland is conceived of as “a play of illusions and phantasms” (393) only fosters the illusion that reality is something distinguished from simulation. Similarly, the emphasis human beings/workers at Delos Corp. place on Westworld’s artificiality draws the attention away from the analogous artificiality they experience in everyday life: mediated communication, constant use of high tech tables, interaction with holograms and robots.

Ultimately then, both Disneyland and Westworld may be considered, in Baudrillian terms,

“simulation[s] of the third order” (393).

It is to account for hyperreality that Baudrillard theorizes a step-by-step development, or rather, a degradation of the image in four different phases: from reflection to mask, from appearance to simulacrum. This same trajectory may be applied to analyze Westworld. In the first stage, the image “is the reflection of a profound reality” (390). At a superficial level, the fictional Westworld may be considered a reflection of the past, and a representation of the

Old West with its typical frontier cities. Here, the equivalence, although naïve, is transparent:

Westworld functions as a traditional sign with an identifiable referent. On a deeper level, though, one realizes that what Westworld really represents is an ideology, the myth of the

Old West. At this second stage, the image “masks and denatures a profound reality” (390).

The correspondence becomes opaque as the sign operates within a two-fold ideological realm. On the one hand, Westworld attracts visitors embodying the alluring promise of “The

Frontier” and a deep nostalgia for a still cherished, by-gone world. On the other hand, it feeds the hosts’ worldview, subjects them to the system (and to their storyline), and keeps them inoffensive. If one looks yet closer, this entire world starts to appear as a giant, orchestrated simulation: the image here “masks the absence of a profound reality” (390). The aforementioned discussion about Disneyland falls into this third category. As previously Caparrelli 7 observed, Westworld may function as an appearance as well. However, its full potential is unleashed at a fourth stadium, where the image “has no relation to any reality whatsoever[, but] it is its own pure simulacrum” (390). The robots/hosts are a clear example of this final phase: once conceived of and designed according to real-life models, they have long surpassed their referents. “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test1 after the first year,” says

Dr. Ford, creator and founder of Westworld, “But that wasn’t enough for Arnold [his associate]. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness” (“The Stray”). And that is what eventually happened. After numerous technological advancements and unexpected glitches, the robots have acquired sentience, awareness, and a will of their own. Dr. Ford himself refers to one of his creations as “simulacrum”, recognizing that they have now become such, and can have legitimate claims on reality. They can actually substitute real people as a dramatic plot twist will demonstrate: Bernard, head of the prestigious hosts’ behavioral department, is a robot himself.

It is relevant to observe that this blurring saturation and taking over of images also profoundly affects people’s idea of the self. In the postmodern world, “identities have become increasingly fragmented and unstable” (Hodkison 273): symbolic meanings have multiplied, and people can identify with a plethora of fleeting simulacra. Moreover, Poster argues that especially with advancements in virtual reality, it is now possible to “[place] the individual ‘inside’ alternative worlds. By directly tinkering with reality, a simulational practice is set in place which alters forever the conditions under which the identity of the self is formed” (446). This may be true of the visitors who enter Westworld and “plunge into the past” (Eco 9) in “total absorption” (Poster 450): there, they can take on a different role from the one they occupy in real life. As Jeffrey Wright, the actor who plays Bernard, observes,

1 “A test proposed (1950) by the English mathematician Alan M. Turing to determine whether a computer can ‘think’…A computer’s success at ‘thinking’ can be measured by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject.” (“Turing Test”) Caparrelli 8

“the guests in the park have really stepped through the virtual lens into the experience…So now they’re interacting in full form with the game that is the park, and with the characters and hosts in a way that now we kind of experience through GTA V and these types of role-playing games”. (qtd. in Bingley)

Moreover, the hosts themselves may be considered an example of the postmodern self. As programmers constantly tweak the androids’ personalities, wiping their memories, and assigning them different roles, the hosts eventually find themselves with a stratified, multilayered personality. Even though most of their previous backups are hidden, when glitches start to occur, all that pent-up material is released, and the hosts begin to play out different roles on multiple narratives through altered loops. “The break-up of the individual subject” reached in contemporary society is thus illustrated in Westworld: “at this point [the subject] exists only as a set of different virtual roles being played out within the virtual world” (Hodkison 278). The overall result is that Westworld largely resembles a videogame.

The showrunners confessed they took inspirations from games such as “Red Dead

Redemption” and “Grand Theft Auto” both for setting and storytelling construction (Renfro).

Consequently, Westworld may be considered a postmodernist2 media text also in terms of its formal elements. The current media environment is saturated with “media

[referring] to other media, forming an interchangeable array of empty simulations that rarely, if ever, refer to any reality outside themselves” (Hodkison 272). As Westworld mirrors videogames, it appears to be aiming at reflecting other media rather than reality. According to

Frederic Jameson, it follows that postmodernist texts heavily rely on “intertextuality” and

“pastiche,” which he defines as “blank parody” (415): it is the indiscriminate act of drawing from different sources and merging them together to create new products. Specifically in terms of genres, Westworld may be considered one of these “newly manufactured hybrids”

(Hodkison 274): it simultaneously falls into the categories of science-fiction, western, and thriller, while also borrowing tropes from adventure films, detective stories, psychological

2 Postmodernism refers to the aesthetics of postmodernity. Caparrelli 9 dramas, and apocalyptic scenarios. The final trajectory of a postmodernist medium is the total involution towards itself. Indeed, “the greater proliferation of content, the more self- referential it becomes” (Hodkison 277). Media have now become extremely self-conscious of their structure, and tends to frequently point out to their status as fiction. Westworld “is acutely aware of its own layers of simulacra. The show constantly calls attention to itself as a show, as a play” (Turner). It is “a meticulously constructed, obsessively self-analyzing show, tailor-made for a pop-culture era dominated by TV and discussion of TV” (Seitz). Most obviously, Westworld brings viewers behind the scenes of any major TV series. “Like HBO showrunners, Westworld’s designers ‘pitch’ plot arcs. They ‘massage’ storylines. They plant backstories to deepen [the hosts’] characterizations” (Nussbaum). Lee Sizemore, the head of

Westworld’s narrative department, proudly proclaims, “this storyline will make Hieronyms

Bosch look like he was doodling kittens” (“Chestnut”). This iconic utterance clearly alludes to the ever-increasing intricacy and multilayered storytelling that is popular today.

The conclusion is that there seems to be nothing else outside to refer to. As Jacques

Derrida would say, “there is nothing outside the text” (qtd. in Reynolds). What remains is an endless chain of signs pointing out to other signs in an endless chain of signification. As much as images have taken over society, Westworld clearly hints at a possible hosts’ uprising: the simulacra are going to become “the murderers of their own model” (Baudrillard

390).

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