#7 Westworld
Hey everybody, it's time to boot up Westworld Week! Westworld, as you probably know, is the hit sci-fi HBO show about robots in a cowboy theme park based on the 1973 cult movie of the same name. They just kicked off season 2, and while the internet is being overrun with fan theories and in-depth dissections of new episodes, Weird Blog is taking a slightly different tack. The theme this week is me not understanding what the deal is with everybody wanting robots to be like humans. I have real questions, people, and I need your help. Why is this interesting? Why can't I get into it? And for the love of god, will someone explain to me how to get off on watching robots fuck? I just want to be normal. I have for you a review of the original movie, and then a long-read piece on the HBO show where I speculate about why it doesn't work quite as well. There's a treatise on robot sex, confessions of a droid groupie, and the week ends, like most of my dates, with a Zizek joke. Oh, warning - things are going to get a little NSFW, so if you're uncomfortable with me discussing sex, then how are we even friends. Enjoy, and don't forget to wipe the phone down when you're done.
Westworld (1973)
There once was a boy called Michael Crichton who really didn't like technology and wrote books about the ways in which it was going to kill us all. One of these books became the basis for the bossest movie of all time about a dinosaur theme park run amok. But 20 years before Jurassic Park there was Westworld, another Crichton adaptation featuring an amusement park where the technology fails, the entertainment rebels and things go horribly wrong. Talk about carving out a niche for yourself. Feels like after robots and dinosaurs, all he needs is a zombie story to complete the trilogy. My pitch: the carnage that ensues after a happy serum given to Disney Land employees to create the perfect hosts mutates into a virus, messes up their brains and makes them eat the children. Anyway, Westworld is the name of a secluded compound in the future that rich people pay hefty sums of money to visit so they can live out their fantasies of shooting robot cowboys and sleeping with robot women of ill repute. Not only are the robots designed to look and act perfectly human, anything goes because the machines are programmed not to shoot back and to satisfy every privileged whim. Not at all predictably, this filthy fun town descends into mayhem when the robots malfunction en masse, stop responding to commands, and start slaughtering the human guests. That's it. That's the whole film. All bitchin' 89 minutes of it. I once heard an analysis of 1970s science fiction as both really smart and very dumb, and if 70s scifi was an exclusive club, you can bet your silly boots Westworld would be a card-carrying, gun-toting, robot-humping member. Westworld: because golf just doesn't have enough murder in it.
Tech Support I: Why HBO's Westworld Show Makes No Sense
Listen, I know what you're thinking, but this is isn't my usual anti-HBO spiel. I really wanted to like this one. It's weird and cool and supermeta, plays around with time-lines, and asks in-your-face questions about the nature of entertainment and reality. It's good to see HBO putting its considerable funds into something not quite so committed to being mind-numbingly realistic, for once. But as much as I enjoy the Western-scifi genre clashing and Ed Harris under-acting and old-timey piano pop song covering, the fact is that at its most basic level, this show simply doesn't work. Though, I'm going to argue, it manages to malfunction in a fascinating way I've never quite seen before.
See, in the original movie, the robotic hosts attack the human visitors because of a break-down in their code that causes them to longer see the difference between guests and other machines. Some 1 turns into a 0 somewhere, the safety is off, and shit hits the fan. The series, in contrast, tells the story of how Westworld's hosts slowly become self-aware, grasp the horror of what is being done to them, and turn on their human overlords. The show's robots not only follow a programmed personality, but they actually experience pain, fall in love and fear for their lives as part of that programming. This is what they build on to start thinking for themselves. Which is where things stop making sense. First of all, what is the point of creating robots that //feel// emotions, as opposed to just displaying the right behaviour at the right time for the benefit of the tourists? Especially since their main function seems to be to get raped and murdered on a daily basis? That's inefficient coding. Secondly, and this is my biggest problem, the show never explains how this technology works. If I don't understand how what the robots feel is different from what humans feel, then how will I notice when they start becoming more human? I get robots looking like robots acting like humans (Wall-E). I'm totally on board with robots looking like humans acting like robots (Terminator). I sympathize with robots being basically human in every way and not getting recognized as such (Blade Runner). But robots looking like humans, acting like humans, feeling like humans, that someone tells you are not human but are trying to become human? How do I gauge their progress if I can't tell the difference in the first place? How am I supposed to know what I'm even looking at? And, more importantly, why should I care?
Take the example of the main character, Dolores. Dolores is a pretty farmer's daughter who lives with her dad and is in love with a handsome cowboy. She's also a robot. And over the course of the season, she starts escaping her programmed responses and become "more" than a robot, whatever that is. We see the park's maintenance crew turn Dolores on and off. They tell her a story that moves her to tears and then order her to go zen mid-cry. They can erase her memory and make her follow whatever script. And yet we're supposed to experience the story through her eyes. If Dolores was a farmer's daughter from the Old West who discovered she was made out of robot parts, I would want to know what she does next. If Dolores was a robot who started developing a mind of her own, I'd be psyched cause that's never been done before 🙄. But Dolores sometimes being a farmer's daughter and sometimes being a robot and sometimes being human is like a bad Brechtian loop that keeps throwing me out of the story. What part of this character am I supposed to empathize with anyway? It would be great if the show was trying to teach us how to feel for beings who's inner lives are beyond our grasp. Smart as it is, though, I don't think it's that smart, or that it's trying to be. I think the writers make the faulty, lazy-ass assumption that we'll side with Dolores because she's innocent and we don't like to see innocents manipulated, used and oppressed. But Dolores' innocence-as-farm-girl is so different from her innocence-as-robot is so different from innocence-as-emerging-consciousness, that I never know which one is being oppressed and how it would even understand its own oppression.
I started out believing this was an empathy issue on my part, but I don't think that hypothesis holds. After a lifetime of worshiping at the altar of animation, I'm pretty sure I'd empathize with a pair of socks if you drew googly eyes on one of them and told me the other went blind in a washing machine incident. That would get my right in the 💙, you know? No, I suspect there's a suspension of disbelief problem at work here, where we're constantly asked to believe in characters that the story itself tells us don't really exist. The farmer's daughter is a ruse because she is actually a robot. The robot is a ruse because she is in fact a thinking entity. But the thinking entity still looks, acts and talks like the farmer's daughter, except that by season 2 she is also a mass murderer. What? I feel like Roland Barthes would have some stuff to say about this, but I've always been afraid to read Barthes because he sounds like a perfectly Sep-shaped rabbit hole from which I would never emerge. Guys? Any thoughts?
Tech Support II: On Robot Sex
Another problem I have with this show is the elaborate machine-on-machine action. Before we start, let me stipulate that this analysis might be a personal-preference thing and not some law of nature that applies to everyone, but I still want to talk about it cause it freaks me out. So part of the robot journey to self-discovery is that one of the Westworld hosts gets mad lusty with another host that she shouldn't and they have many a fiery love scene together, because you know, HBO. Although these robots are played by arguably the most attractive people alive, there really is no way to express how cold their passionate make-out sessions leave me as a viewer. And I'm the kind of person who watches Game of Thrones strictly for the orgies (the only thing I want from the final season is the big reveal about what Podrick did to those prostitutes that was so good they ended up paying him instead. They're going to tell us, right? They have to - I giggle every time I see his stupid face now solely on account of that titillating piece of info they dropped back in season 3). But it's not just Westworld. Artificial sexy time is becoming a trend. Last year's Blade Runner 2049 had a whole B plot about the main character falling in love with his hologram Siri AI thing. Gorgeous as the Siri actress was, puppy-eyed as Ryan Gosling looked, and try as I did, I could not get into it. A major portion of this high-budget, expertly made movie became an emotional wasteland because I couldn't take the premise seriously. They did nothing for me as a couple, I didn't perk up whenever they got close, and I couldn't care less when they fell apart. All I felt was bored, impatient, and more than a little annoyed. Not cool.
To be clear - my problem is not with man-machine sex. That I sort of get. I saw this porn video once of a woman lying on a table being worked over by a dildo strapped to some giant mechanical contraption that she controlled with a remote. It's not a personal fetish, but I could still see why that would be arousing, precisely BECAUSE the thing she was fucking was so utterly inhuman and Other. So it's not that I can't relate to humans doing the dirty with non-humans, it's something else. The issue with Blade Runner's AI is that she looks and sounds and acts like a human woman, but we have to pretend that she isn't. So we see two prime specimens of our species getting all hot n heavy, but we are told that one of them is a holographic computer assistant. Then how, I ask you, is that not the same as watching a guy be really into his Windows interface? This is also what makes the Westworld bot-on-bot boning so lame. It's basically your toaster falling on your Roomba and you staring at them shuffling around the kitchen floor for a while. Not hot.
I think this may be another version of to the suspension-of-disbelief problem from earlier. If I buy the premise that these actors are machines, then how am I supposed to get excited being shown any of this? And if I don't buy the premise, then in what way is it different from porn, in that you're not supposed to believe the story, just watch the action? I'm really asking here, people. This whole thing makes me feel ancient, and if it's what the future of fiction looks like, then I'm going to need some serious empathy viagra to keep up.
RILF
I'd like to emphasise that these critical notes are purely about storytelling. I have nothing against robots. I really don't. In fact, let me show you why I'm the last person who can be accused of being a robo-bigot (...robigot?). For the uninitiated: years ago, when I was young and had yet to uninstall my sex drive, I had this blog called FFILF (as in Fictional Figures I'd like To-) about dating fictional men in the style of girly gossip magazines. It's gone now, but I'm going to post two drafts I wrote for the robot section, just to prove how much I'm not some stuck-up flesh supremacist who can't imagine ever getting it on with the more mechanically inclined among us:
All of this reminds me of that Zizek joke about how machines should fuck to take the pressure off of us neurotic human beings. Zizek's ideal date is where two prospective lovers bring their respective electronic stimulators to the rendezvous, plug them into each other and let them go at it, allowing the humans to in the meantime drink some tea and chat like civilized people. I know he's doing a Lacanian bit, but talking movies while watching a strange fleshlight devour my favourite dildo sounds juuuust weird enough to be a total turn-on. Leave it to a Marxist psychoanalyst to finally come up with a robot love scenario I can get into.
Perfect Coda 1
omg omg omg #perfectcoda: Smack in the middle of our Westworld week, Honest Trailers dropped a video written by an actual robot. They're doing charity stuff for the channel, and as part of that, they fed all their 200+ scripts into a some sort of advanced text prediction engine manned by professional comedy writers, and this was the result. If you don't hear from me in a while, it's because I'm trying to figure out how this tech operates and get hired by this company. Because why would I want to work anywhere but for the deranged Dada machine that wrote this magnificent mess 💛
Perfect Coda 2
#perfectcoda 2: Do you guys know what a meet cute is? It's the cute way two people meet in romantic comedies that determines the entire course of their relationship. I have seen a thousand-and-one meet cutes by now, maybe even written a few. They rarely happen in real life, because bars, booze and Tinder, but during last Monday's Met Gala, the result of a truly magical, real-life meet cute was revealed when bizarro Bruce Wayne Elon Musk and electro-pop singer Grimes showed up on the red carpet together. For the record, I don't like Elon Musk. He always sounds as boring as he sounds insane, which, granted, is a tough act to pull off. I suspect he's not fully human, but was accidentally willed into being when Ayn Rand one night had a gay wet dream about that cyborg in Metropolis. Had he never come into those Paypal billions and was now stuck in a basement writing code for someone else's indie game, I believe the world would've gotten along fine without his incessant Lex Luthor-flavoured nerd-billionaire agitprop. Musk's one redeeming quality is the fact that, as opposed to most of these Silicon Valley psychopaths, he does not believe AI is the future. And this is what led him to Grimes, who, my limited research tells me, is a Canadian cult Lady Gaga who makes her own electro-goth music videos in which she shows off how much she can't dance at all. The whole thing would've been too impossibly white for me to comprehend, had it not been for how they met, which is through.... wait for it... a bad pun. Apparently, Musk wanted to do a post on Twitter saying "Rococo's Basilisk", which is a lame, French-art-inspired play on a famous internet-generated AI thought experiment called Roko's Basilisk, only to find out that Grimes had made the exact same joke in one of her videos three years earlier. Some twitter flirting later, et voilà, l'amour. Do I like this story because it sounds like it was spit out by the Dada machine from the previous post? A little. But I have to confess, two incorrigible weirdos finding each other through the same artsy AI pun is one of the most romantic things I've ever seen. It also demonstrates the only useful function of AI - to be the butt of a joke that helps hapless humans procreate. As charmed as I am by this, everybody else seems to have trouble coming to terms with this most random of celebrity hook-ups. There's already a Chrome extension that turns Musk's name into "Grimes's Boyfriend", because that's the Internet for you, Elon, it giveth and it taketh away.
So my cute little reading bots, think about this: what is the least human thing you've ever slept with? Discounting my ex’s answer, which is rightly going to be: "you, Sep", I'd like to know. Name, make and serial number, please, asking for a friend.
- Hasta la vista, babies. -