Postmodern Hyperreality in HBO's Westworld

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).

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