Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Remembering to Forget
- 1 The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
- 2 Sibyl and the Crazed Painting
- 3 Molloy and his Mother in the Room
- 4 Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
- 5 Locating the Beginning and the End in the Triangle
- Conclusion: Losing it all in the Head
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Remembering to Forget
- 1 The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
- 2 Sibyl and the Crazed Painting
- 3 Molloy and his Mother in the Room
- 4 Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
- 5 Locating the Beginning and the End in the Triangle
- Conclusion: Losing it all in the Head
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The chapter discusses HBO's science-fiction television series Westworld. The focus is chiefly on the character of Dolores, who appears in the first season. The aspects of temporal consciousness, remembrance, and forgetting are interrogated vis-à-vis the premise of humans acting as gods and their creations, the humanoid robots searching for their place in the world. Entrapment within someone else's story and temporality may not be necessarily disempowering and may actually initiate the existential quest for liberation and self-determination. Choices are uncovered and allowed to take shape as time-sets on their own.
Keywords: Repetition, Consciousness, Forgetfulness, Women Robots, Dismantling Technology
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘I am in a dream’
‒ Westworld S01E0This is how HBO's science-fiction teleseries, Westworld begins in the first episode. The series has run four successful seasons so far (till the time of writing this chapter), and has managed to captivate the fancies of many of its viewers. I will focus majorly on the first season here in this chapter and use the second season only as a contextual basis of my arguments, where necessary. This is so because I find the first season more fascinating and relevant to this study, given that it delves into the concepts of temporality, memory, gendered rendition of the performative semantics of temporal consciousness more than the second season, aspects that this book seeks to explore in depth.
Westworld is a television series that is premised upon humans acting as gods and their creations, humanoid robots, acting as the hosts (as they are popularly referred to by the humans) upon which the humans run, process and execute their fancies. The robots that look exactly like humans can look, be seen, felt and can feel. The hosts act as the reservoir of actions and consequences that are transmitted to them by their human creators. That is to say, the humans assume a position of control and judgement while the hosts are designed and assumed to be subservient.
What came first ‒ the dream or the thought?
The Wild West-themed adventure park, Westworld presents a carnivalesque sort of a world that also peddles death, rape, plunder and mutilation to its human visitors. In other words, for the humans, it is a world without consequences.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Temporality in Literature and CinemaNegotiating with Timelessness, pp. 75 - 94Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021