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centric bias” toward artificial intelligence that the audience is often trained to have by movies and TV depictions, Nolan and Joy decide “to start within their reality,
believing in their reality along with them and fully being sunk into that” (Gibberd,
“‘Westworld’ Producers Answer Our Burning Post-Premiere Questions”). The
watching experience of Westworld takes the audience through a cathartic process of pity and fear for the downtrodden, yet the unsettling distance from those uncanny others is also marginally retained. It is in the hesitation of the audience to take sides that a cognitive estrangement fully takes its critical effect. In contrast to the narrative
perspective, the editing techniques are the subtlest approach to achieving theaudience’s identification with the hosts. At times, the audience is radically put into the hosts’ cognitive position and synchronized with their temporal confusion. In order not to disrupt Rieder’s theoretical framework with a great portion of discussion of camera movement and framing, I postpone the analytical discussion of editing techniques to chapter five.
Besides narrative perspective and editing techniques, the text’s deconstructive self-criticism also intensifies the swing between the poles of hosts and humans by inviting the audience to re-examine the definitive characteristics that differentiates humans and hosts in the beginning of the first season. Works of science fiction
explore a problematic normative system from an unreal but possible angle by creating a similitude of social reality with rigorous scientific details. This defining
characteristic of sf brought forth by Darko Suvin is also the critical potential that Rieder identifies in the strategy of double identification. Besides the invention of hosts, the most significant sf innovation in Westworld’s season one is “the loop.” The
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loop can be understood as the hosts’ lifestyle, the screenplay of their highly predictable life, and the only version of the social realities they are able to discern.
With the use of the loop, humans manage and control the hosts. This device of the loop which stages a wide range of socio-political questions also serves as the touchstone for a fundamental question in Westworld: where to draw the discursive borderline between humans and hosts?
We can see this dynamic playing out in specific character relationships. For instance, Young William at first considers the host Dolores a conscious human(oid) being and fervently falls in love with her during his first visit to the park. Then, he comes to believe that Dolores lives only in a loop and possesses no true
consciousness. Seeing Dolores enact their romantic first-encounter with someone else, William decides that Dolores is not what he once thought she was (a human? a
conscious mind? or a lover? William speaks opaquely). William says to her, “And you were nothing if not true” (“The Bicameral Mind”). This event pivots Young William into the ultimate evil-doer in the park. For William and other guests, the hosts only exist in the moment of acting out the given scripts without “real” death and memory; therefore, the loop disqualifies the hosts as conscious lifeforms, possessing intrinsic value as liberal humanism grants to human beings. This conception that the loop is the major difference between humans and hosts is also what a number of the early episodes, particularly “The Original” and “Chestnut,” try to establish. Once it is established, however, the series overthrows and deconstructs this belief system in the latter part of the season arc.
The latter episodes of the first season obscure this defining difference between
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humans and hosts. Dr. Robert Ford is one of the creators of the park, a Frankenstein-like scientist played by Anthony Hopkin. In the eighth episode, when being asked about the difference between the minds of a human and a host, Ford reveals the conclusion of his thirty-year musing:
There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define
consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. (“Trace Decay”)
Since the hosts and humans cannot be distinguished in appearance, one needs to appeal to other features to differentiate the two similar lifeforms. The series first hypothesizes that “consciousness” is the innate attribute, or say the “threshold” or the “inflection point,” of a human mind, a hypothesis that secures humans in the center of his Ptolemaic cosmos because they are just so inherently “special.” After the series suggests that the hosts are not “real,” conscious lifeforms due to the unique design of the loop, Dr. Ford as scientific authority then revokes or disputes this conception of consciousness, canceling the anthropocentric definition of human mind. In other words, according to Ford, life forms that do not acquire critical thinking or their self-consciousness of choice-making are inadequately qualified as “conscious” beings, humans and hosts alike.
By crossing out consciousness as the innate attribute and the cultural
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definition of humans, Dr. Ford deconstructs the antithetical binaries in confrontation: conscious/unconscious, true/unreal, human/host, self/other.
Furthermore, Dr. Ford also points out the uncanny otherness in self, thus
problematizes the park’s putative classification of the subject and the object in a cognitively alienated context for the audience. In the most common human behavior of living in a routine, he identifies the otherness which has been estranged in the hosts’ behavior pattern, the loop. By pinpointing everyperson’s ordinary behavior of following daily routines without thinking in hosts’ futuristic, alienated behavior pattern, the audience is brought to this text’s estranged sf space to confront and recognize the alienated otherness in the self whose conceptual consistency and definitive unity are “putative.”18 As Naoki Sakai argues in “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?,” generalized classifications of humanity like nationality, gender, race, and culture that “[discriminate] one set of people from and against others” is contradictory in itself. More often than not, such classifications are the “displacement and condensation of social conflict and estrangement.” Similarly, the logical fallacy in the European’s fantasy of time that assigns the binary time zone of past and future to two groups in confrontation is the displacement and condensation of the colonist interest to justify rapacious marauding and national genocide of the Tasmanians. Westworld also reveals that the fallacy of “consciousness” is a displacement of humans’ capitalistic
18 In “The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?” Naoki Sakai terms the West as one of the categories of humanity “a putative unity” which, while “constitute[s] social reality and serve[s]
significant roles in discriminating one set of people from and against others [emphasis added],”
“contains contradictions within itself” (1). As other generalized classifications of humanity like gender, race, culture, and nationality, the concept of the West is the “displacement and condensation of social conflict and estrangement,” which therefore cannot be dissociated from “colonial modernity.”
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indulgence in dominating unarmed beings. This exposure of the putative classification of the self and the other further intensifies the critical effect of double identification. On the one hand, the series shows the alienated others’
potential to frighten, to threaten, and to destabilize human authority and civilization. On the other hand, the show’s narrative perspective, techniques of editing, and the deconstructive self-criticism move beyond the anthropocentric bias against the artificial human beings by swinging the audience’s identification from humans alone to both hosts and humans, as iterations of the same being.