deepestcowboytragedy

[deepestcowboytragedy]

Arrival

Human consciousness is directly affected by language.  When we think, we use language--even in our most abstract thoughts, we use words to describe what we imagine.  Our thoughts are thus  limited by language; if we don’t have to vocabulary to describe something, can it exist?  Conversely, language can expand or alter our consciousness as well.  When one learns a new language, one can gain an understanding of concepts that may not even exist in other linguistic systems.  

In Arrival, a 2016 movie directed by Denis Villeneueve, humans are exposed to a completely alien language.  The main character, Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, is tasked with interpreting and translating this new language in order to determine the purpose of the alien visitors.  With the help of theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly, Louise slowly begins the process of unraveling meaning in the alien “heptapod” language.  

The heptapods arrive in a ship that leaves no physical footprint--no waste, no gas, no radiation.  No scientific study can be done, and so the only thing left to do is communicate.  The humans are able to enter the ship every eighteen hours through a door that opens into an anti-chamber that takes them from normal earth conditions into a sudden change.  At a certain distance into the ship, gravity shifts and the laws of physics appear to have been broken.  Suddenly the crew is floating, their worldview shifts, their grounding is lost.  They must make the leap to a new gravity in the ship, where there is no up or down. The cinematic choices mirror these philosophical questions--in one shot they are walking up a wall, the next they appear to be on the ground, and then suddenly they are walking on the ceiling.  It is all the same surface, just a perspectival shift.

We have now reached the eponymous moment of  the alien’s arrival. Louise asks, “So, what happens now?” and Ian replies,  “They arrive.”  The heptapods are named for their seven (hepta-) limbs (-pod).  They resemble large black squids, and make deep, abstract rumbling noises to communicate--until Louise has the idea to bring written language into the picture.  The humans soon discover that heptapods have an entirely different written language, which is made up almost entirely of circles with small additions and adjustments.  We find out that this language is not phonetic--it does not represent their speech. Rather, it is semasiographic, which means it is made up of logograms that convey meaning rather than sound. Not only that, but these logograms are not constrained by a linear sense of time.  They can be read forward or backwards--they are a non-linear orthographic system.  This references the same non-linear thinking we saw when the humans first entered the heptapod ship.  There is no forward or backward, no up or down, and no right or left.  

Ian explains the heptapod language thusly: “Imagine you wanted to write a sentence using both hands starting from each side.  You would have to know each word you wanted to use as well as how much space it would occupy.”  This seems impossible to fathom in our straightforward human consciousness, where we start a sentence at the beginning and end it at the end.  So we are forced to consider how heptapod consciousness is different from our own, and how that has been shaped by their language.  They communicate in a way that moves beyond our human understanding of time, or at least is very different from it.

In learning their language, Louise starts to experience time the way that heptapods do.  Her consciousness is affected by the structure and grammar of the language, and her mind is reshaped by their non-linear system.  The movie itself mirrors the changes that Louise undergoes, although we don’t realize it at first.  The audience experiences confusion alongside her during a series of scenes that we initially assume are flashbacks. However, we finally realize in the end that Louise has been seeing the future due to her new non-linear relationship with time.  We recognize that the little girl, Hannah, is her daughter, and she has given her a palindromic name (it reads the same backwards and forwards) in honor of the heptapod’s non-linear logogram language.  We realize that Ian is the husband that leaves her when he finds out that she knew about their daughter’s illness and far ahead of time.  Louise’s mind is now structured based on the heptapods’ linguistics; her consciousness has been affected and she must live with this knowledge.

The Sapir-Whorf Theory is a linguistic concept stating that language determines thought.  The theory argues that linguistic categories regulate our cognitive capabilities--basically, that the language we speak organizes the way we think.  In Arrival, the filmmakers depict an extreme example of this in the way that Louise is changed as her knowledge of the heptapod language increases.  Her newfound linguistic skills are directly translated into consequences in her cognition and behavior--she is able to interpret time differently and ultimately alter the way she interacts with it.  Louise takes full control of her acquired abilities in order to stop the outbreak of war.   

At this point, humans have misinterpreted the aliens’ message, and each government has stopped sharing their information, leaving a tense world on the brink of war as they threaten attack on the heptapod ships.  In order to stop this dangerous misunderstanding, Louise moves into the future to talk to the leader of the Chinese military, General Chang.  She receives his personal cell phone number and a phrase from him in Mandarin, his wife’s dying words: “In war there are no winners, only widows.”  In the present, she calls the general and repeats these words, proving to him that she has knowledge from the heptapods, causing him to tell his military to stand down.  Louise effectively uses heptapod linguistics to succeed where human communication has failed.

Thus, Arrival depicts the effects of language on human consciousness.  Although it goes rather beyond the scientific in its inclusion of a sci-fi alien race, it shows a thoughtful application of Sapir-Whorf Theory.  Louise’s consciousness is expanded and changed due to her education in this new linguistic system, showing how learning a new language can expose one to concepts beyond one’s original cognitive abilities.  

[deepestcowboytragedy]

Presentation Questions

Blade Runner: Why is it so important that replicants don't return to Earth/Why are the authorities so afraid of the public finding out that there may be replicants on Earth?

Ex Machina: How does emotion/empathy affect how we consider Ava as human/android?  How does this compare to Blade Runner's use of the Voight Kampff test?

Ghost In The Shell: How important is the representation of female bodies in this film?  Why did the filmmakers choose to depict them nude for a large portion of the movie?

District Nine:  How did the viral marketing campaign affect the reaction to this film?  Was the message successful in making connections to race/class/immigration issues?

Arrival:  (mine)

NoseDive (Black Mirror): How does it affect one’s social standing in real life to be completely off social media?  Should it be acceptable?  Do you find it weird if someone doesn’t have a facebook/instagram?

Men Against Fire (Black Mirror):  Othering of the enemy is a distinct tactic used by the military in many forms.  Is it even necessary to make people look like roaches when brainwashing propaganda is so successful already?

Gattaca:  We are already able to make some decisions regarding genetic changes to children before they’re born--where should the line be drawn?  Different countries’ laws vary, but should the world come to some sort of consensus?  Politicans?  Scientists?

Moon: If you kill a clone of yourself, is it murder or suicide?

Minority Report: Do you think we will be able to trick the next-gen Apple X facial scanner by using eyeball swaps? 

Rick & Morty: Is all the barfing necessary?  How does it contribute to the aesthetics of the show?

Akira:  How is understanding of the movie affected by knowledge of the manga?  The movie has become a cult classic, and considered by man to be the ultimate anime--were people (especially in Japan) already very familiar with the story depicted in the 2000+page manga when seeing it?

Dawn of the Dead: The ending revealed in the credits, where we find out that the supposed “survivors” end up dying after all, reminded me of the credits of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where we see that the virus spreads over the entire planet.  How does this acknowledgement that the virus/zombies are truly unstoppable affect our experience of the movie?

Train to Busan: How does empathy play a role in this film?  I.e. empathy from the audience toward the people fleeing, empathy from the humans toward the ‘zombies’, empathy from the audience toward the ‘zombies’, etc.

White Christmas (Black Mirror):  What responsibility do you have to explain to someone why you are ending a relationship/friendship?  

[deepestcowboytragedy]

Blade Runner

Blade Runner, 1982

1.There are a number of themes running throughout the movie. Can you name some of them and discuss the relevance of at least 2 of them as they pertain both to concepts of the future and topics that were relevant in the 1980s in America?

The idea of genetic manipulation and creating AI that could rebel against humans is a common theme in scifi of the 1980s and of today.  Replicants were created to help humans but eventually turned against us.  Mixed in with this is the idea that humans will eventually lose the ability to determine who is human and who is robot--the latest model of replicants can almost pass the Voight Kampff test.

2. A key puzzle raised by Blade Runner is whether we can definitely distinguish between real humans and artificially engineered replicants. Suppose that no test (either objective or subjectively introspective) could show this for sure, would that mean that a given replicant was indeed fully human?

Sure, then a replicant would be human. To be “fully human” is a completely arbitrary idea depending on who’s determining the parameters.

3. One of the more dramatic philosophical points made in the movie is that we can’t trust our memories; that they may have been implanted in us regardless of how true they seem. What is the main reason that we trust our memories as more or less accurate accounts of our past events?

We trust our memories because we do have the scientific capabilities to “implant” memories.  There are ways to manipulate memories through psychological means, etc, but overall most humans don’t have the means or motive to do so.

4. Rachael became convinced that she was a replicant when Deckard described some of her private childhood memories to her. What would it take for you to seriously question the truth of your memories and consider instead that they might be implanted in you as result of a drug or mental defect?

A lot of detail.

5. Are there any questions raised in the movie about whether Deckard himself is a replicant? If so, what are the clues? If so, what sort of impact should this have on Deckard, particularly in view of his feelings about Rachael?

The other detective leaves an origami unicorn in his hallway, showing that he is aware of his memories of the unicorn in the forest, just as he has done for all the other replicants.  This makes Deckard realize that he has been killing his own kind, and that his memories were just as real to him as Rachael’s were to her.

6. A moral message of the movie may be that it was wrong to enslave the replicants and use them as forced labor since they were so human-like in both appearance and thought process. Is there anything that would need to be different about replicants in order for us to feel that it’s OK to use them for labor?

I would prefer to use robots that do not have identities and intelligence for labor.  Factories and machines and computers without feelings can be programmed without all these ethical quandaries.

7. What strategies are used to produce meaning in this film?

Photographs referencing flashbacks to potentially false memories give meaning to this film--they make us question our own memories.  Deckard’s intense scrutiny of the photographs using futuristic technology make us question what could be hiding in plain sight.

Blade Runner 2049

1. What is the significance of an emphasis on eyes in the original movie (1982 version)

In the original movie, Bladrunners use the Voight Kampff test to determine if a person is human or a replicant.  The machine they use measures eye movement, along with other bodily responses (respiration, heart rate, etc) in order to determine if the subject being questioned is human.  Even if the subject responds correctly to a question, their eye movement/pupil dilation was not sophisticated enough to trick the Voight Kampff machines, and thus replicants could be discovered.

2. What is the significance of eyes in Blade Runner 2049? Does it expand the symbolism? If so, how?

In Blade Runner 2049, eyes are used as proof that a replicant has been retired--K collects the eyeball of the first replicant he “retires” and scans it in his police cruiser to confirm that he has completed his mission.  The eyes continue to be used as a confirmation of replicant/human status.

3. What are the overriding themes explored in the new Blade Runner? How different are they from the original movie? What significance do they hold for today’s culture?

The new Blade Runner movie has expanded significantly on the place of replicants in human society.  In the first movie, replicants were purely slave labor on the off-world colony, but in the sequel, they have become far more integrated to life.  However, they are seen with disgust by many, as evidenced by the police officers calling K a “skin job” when he walks down the halls.  Meanwhile, holographic humans have become commonplace as well--and even a replicant can have a computerized girlfriend in the form of Joi.

[deepestcowboytragedy]

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century”

Haraway opens by describing her writing as “an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (291), and that the center of this will be “the image of the cyborg (291).   Cyborgs are described as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291), and Haraway contends that by now we are all cyborgs ourselves.  We are made up of both imagined and material realities, with “the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (292).  Haraway further contends that “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality” (292).  Cyborgs do not follow reproductive norms or biological needs.  They do not fulfill the common human origin story of “the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate” (292).  Cyborgs thus turn ideas of culture and society on their head.  They do not come from or recognize the human origin myth: “the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (293). Rather, “cyborgs are ether, quintessence”(294), and like “our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum” (294).  

Haraway next discusses the use of the term “women of colour” by Chela Sandoval as “a hopeful model of political identity called ‘oppositional consciousness’”(296).  However, she goes on to explain in detail how “Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification” (296) and that “taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience” (297), so it’s unclear to me whether she is for or against the terminology.  It seems Haraway wants to coalesce outsider traits into identities, conflating them cyborgs.

We are then given a chart of terms that transition from alleged old hierarchical dominations to the newly arisen informatics of domination.  For instance, reproduction becomes replication, sex becomes genetic engineering, labour becomes robotics, and mind becomes artificial intelligence.  The new items are all not recognizable as natural, but are instead mechanized, technological replacements.  Everything, including the home, work, and body itself, “can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways” (302).  Biology becomes “a kind of cryptology”(303), as science finds more ways to process information and cross boundaries between man and machine.

Haraway goes further into her cyborg identity for women of color.  She explains that literacy is a defining characteristic in “the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and the phallogocentrism of the West”(311).  So, women of color must focus on writing, and about “the power to signify” (311), but cyborg writing must be “about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (311).  Cyborgs must retell original stories and de-colonize them in order to subvert their meaning.  Haraway gives the example of Cherríe Moraga writing about Malinche (mistress to Cortés) in both Spanish and English, “both conqueror’s languages”(312).

[deepestcowboytragedy]

Black Mirror | Memento

Assignment 2 | Part 1

In “The Entire History of You,” all privacy is destroyed.  When you go to the airport, they don’t check your passport--they scan your memories.  It is the most extreme example of “you shouldn’t be worried if you don’t have anything to hide.”  There is no mention of social networks, but we can probably assume that they are integrated completely into the “grain” itself, allowing people to directly share their memories, rather than photos or videos.  The stigma of not having a grain is akin to not having a facebook--you are looked on with shock, horror, and occasionally a bit of begrudging respect.  But mostly there’s shock and horror.  How can you go through life without the social network?  How do you stay connected with friends?  How do you even make friends?

Technologies like this change communication, social structures, and how people interact.  They change the entire notion of what it is to be human.  Being human is no longer meeting up to play baseball--it’s logging on to play an MMORPG.  It’s not doing homework in the library, but setting up a Google Hangout.  It’s not getting together to go to the movie theatre, but watching something on Netflix and texting about it the next day.  In Black Mirror’s world, even physical interactions are supplanted by the internal screen of the “grain.”  When Liam and his wife have sex, they aren’t even experiencing it in the presence--they are watching memories of previous encounters from their memory banks.

We are living in a world where there are fewer and fewer real-world interactions.  Instead, we interact over a system of screens, allowing ourselves to manipulate our presentation and our presence.  Photos, videos, words--everything is edited and mediated.  At the same time, we are freer to interact with more people than ever before.  We can reach millions of people with a single click.  How does this transform what we present?  And are we more focussed on what we present to others, or to ourselves?  

Assignment 2 | Part 2

Black Mirror’s “The Entire History of You” and the film Memento give two extreme examples of memory: in one, humans are able to recall and replay every experience in minute detail, and in the other, a man live only a few minutes at a time, remembering only what he manages to write down and then decipher from his previous notes.  Both make the viewer consider the importance of memory and trust in the construction of our identites and our consciousness.  How much are we living in the moment versus the past?  How much do we trust our memories, or even our understanding of the present?  In Memento, the main character, Leonard, has no memory to rely on, and so must create a system of “facts” that he writes down for himself and even tattoos on his body.  This seems extreme, and frankly dangerous--how can he be sure that he will understand the meaning behind his short messages?  He claims to have a good intuition after working as an insurance investigator, but we slowly see his mistakes as the movie goes on.  He is easily manipulated, both by others and by himself.  Even when another character, Natalie, flat out tells him she is going to take advantage of him, he cannot maintain composure long enough to write down this new “fact,” and it is lost to him.

Meanwhile, in Black Mirror, we see the opposite.  Every tiny detail of life is recorded and available to be re-watched through a futuristic technology called the “grain.”  In fact, details that one couldn’t possibly notice when living through a moment are able to be zoomed in upon and explored.  The main character, Liam, is able to replay his meeting at work and zoom in on the facial expressions and notes of the three managers interviewing him--something that he couldn’t possibly have kept track of consciously.  Soon, we see him focussing on moments with his wife and her ex-boyfriend Jonas, finding proof of her infidelity.  The white lies she told him at the beginning of their relationship have unfolded into a full on affair, and the “grain” gives him the ability to experience it in painful detail.  He attacks Jonas, forcing him to delete his memories, and then forces his wife to play back her own memories of the affair.  The idea of a private memory, or a misremembered event doesn’t exist in this world.  Everything is considered accurate and ready for analysis.

We live in an odd conflagration of the two worlds.  Our use of social media means we have a short-term memory, like Leonard.  We even manipulate it just like he does, only making notes about what is important to us and our desires.  However, our posts are never truly forgotten like his are.  In that sense, our presence is far more grain-like.  Everything we do online is recorded somewhere, compressed and archived.  

FILM STUDY WORKSHEET | Memento (2000), dir. Christopher Nolan

1. Write a brief summary of the main plot, describing the event or events that are the focus of the film and stating where and when they take place.

Memento follows the journey of former insurance investigator Leonard as he searches for his wife’s rapist and alleged killer.  This is complicated by the fact that in the attack, he suffered brain damage resulting in short-term memory loss: he cannot make new memories, and relies on a series of polaroid pictures, hand-written notes, and tattoos that cover his body in order to remember facts about his daily life and the man he is chasing.  The movie moves backwards, revealing past events as the story progresses, and showing the audience just how crippled Leonard is by his system of notes.  Despite his multiple statements of confidence in his ability to read people, we see his weaknesses when it comes to interacting with others highlighted more and more as the movie goes on.  

2. Name and describe the protagonist and the antagonist in this story.

Leonard is the protagonist in this story, and acts a sort of anti-hero.  He is motivated by vengeance, and lives his life simply in order to find the man that attacked his wife.  Due to his memory condition, he is unfortunately easily manipulated by other characters in the story.  There is not really one true antagonist in this film.  Rather, the other characters shift from friend to foe or just moral ambiguity as we learn more about them.  Since we see everything as scenes in Leonard’s short term memory, it takes a build up of several interactions to get a true read on whether the other characters are there to help or take advantage.  Natalie and Teddy both appear to be helpful to Leonard at first, if rather suspiciously altruistic, but as we see more we discover their motivations.

Teddy is one of the cops that worked on the Leonard’s wife’s case, and is actually helpful at first, but ends up taking advantage of Leonard’s memory loss to his own ends.  Natalie uses Leonard to get back at Teddy for killing her drug dealer boyfriend, and makes it quite clear that she has no qualms about doing so.  She mocks his condition and the death of his wife.

3. In the story told by the film, what is the main conflict and how is it resolved?

Leonard is on the hunt for the rapist and murderer of his wife.  Towards the end of the film we find out from Teddy that they have already found the man responsible almost a year earlier, and that Leonard killed him.  Leonard simply has no memory, and so has continued to search for “John G.”  We also discover through Teddy that Leonard’s wife was not murdered--she survived the attack, but living with Leonard and dealing with his memory loss took a tremendous toll on her.  Teddy suggests that the story of Sammy Jankis was simply Leonard’s made-up attempt to explain away his guilt at her death.  Sammy Jankis wasn’t married--it was Leonard’s wife that had diabetes, and who overdosed on insulin and entered a coma.  Leonard refuses to believe this and is disgusted that Teddy has been using him, deciding that Teddy, whose real name is John Edward Gammel, will be his “John G.”

4. Identify and describe two literary elements or devices that are evident in the movie other than conflict, antagonist, protagonist and imagery. Other literary elements or devices may include: prologue, expository phase, voice, symbol, foreshadowing, flashback, irony, foil, opposition, archetype, motif, characterization, climax, and denouement. For each literary device that you identify, describe the role that it plays in presenting the story told by the film.

One literary device that the movie Memento includes is a series of flashbacks.  Leonard flashes back to his wife and their life before the attack, and he also flashes back to the night of the attack and his injury.  In the film, this device reinforces his issues with memory--his ability to retain and focus on old memories, and his inability to create new memories based on new information.  Towards the end of the movie, we discover that even his old memories, his memories from before the accident, may not be correct--Teddy tells Leonard that it is his wife, and not Sammy Jankis’, that has diabetes.  Suddenly, his flashback switches between pinching her on the leg and giving her an insulin shot on the leg.  He cannot tell what is real.

Another literary device used in the movie is the climax.  However, Memento uses it in a rather unorthodox way--it opens with the climactic scene of Leonard shooting a man in the head.  But it still takes the rest of the movie to build up all the motivation for the scene, and when we finally reach it again in the narrative, it is just as climactic even though we don’t see him shoot again.

5. Music and lighting are part of the way that the moviemakers communicate their message. Go deeper than that. Give two specific examples of how other elements of the cinematic art, such as shot framing, camera angles, camera movement, color, editing choice, or length of take were used by the filmmakers to get their point across.

In Memento, the order of the narrative plays a major role in the way the filmmakers communicate their message.  The movie is edited such that we see scenes in reverse order-- a scene will play out, and then the next scene will end where the previous began.  If a straightforward narrative goes from A to B to C to D, this movie instead moves from point C to D, then B to C, then A to B.  This emphasizes the short term memory loss that Leonard experiences--we begin by experiencing the most recent moment in time.  However, the audience is privileged in that we eventually move backwards and learn more about what has happened to him and brought him to the final point (which was actually the starting point for this movie.

Another filmic element in Memento is the use of flashback.  Leonard cannot make new memories, but he does retain knowledge of his old life, before his accident. He remembers his wife, and the audience is privy to flashes of her and their life together.  The filmmakers use extreme close-ups, fast cuts, and dark lighting in portraying his fading or conflicting memories.

6. List three fictional scientific advances that play an important role in the story and for each: (a) describe the technological advance; (b) describe where the technology is now; (c) estimate how long, if ever, it will take civilization to reach that level of technology; (d) describe the effect that the technology had on the society described in the story; and (e) state whether you think the story was realistic in its portrayal of the effects of the new technology and give your reasons.

Memento does not include scientific advances in its story.  Anterograde amnesia (inability to create new memories) is a real condition that has been documented and explored in the scientific community (Clive Wearing is perhaps the most famous patient) as well as in art  (“H.M.” by Kerry Tribe).

7. Describe a lesson from this film that viewers can apply to their own lives: (1) to help them decide on a position to support on a public issue or (2) in their relations with family and friends. Detail the events that relate to this lesson.

Memento is a film that purports to be about memory, but it also very much about trust.  Leonard must decide how much he trusts himself, how much he trusts others, how much he trusts his instinct, and how must he trusts his “facts.”  He is forced to trust the “facts” that he has previously decided on, because there simply is no other recourse--he cannot check on information, he cannot question what has been written, he cannot ever really know where the information comes from.  He says that facts are more trustworthy than memories, but his facts are a de-facto stand in for his memories, and they are just as easily manipulated.  Indeed, at the end of the movie, we discover that he manipulates himself on purpose when he decides to record Teddy’s license plate number as John G.’s.

Viewers can apply these realizations to their own lives in the understanding that everything we observe can be manipulated.  Facts and memories can all be skewed to someone else’s purpose or to our own.  We must figure out what drives us and move forward as best we can.

[deepestcowboytragedy]

Westworld: From Player Piano to Player One

It Begins...

The opening credits to Westworld begin with what appears to be a landscape, with a sun quickly rising over undulating terrain.  Upon closer inspection, however, we determine that the landscape is a series of rib bones protruding through muscle and sinew, and the “sun” is the mechanical device that we see throughout the rest of the opening, building the various pieces of the world.  In the very next shot, we see this device, a kind of 3D printer on an articulated arm, creating the string inside an upright piano, and then connecting a ligament to a knee.  

We see an old fashioned player piano, a galloping horse and rider with gun drawn, and a landscape of desert cliffs and hills captured in the iris of an eye.  All these tropes of the “Old West” are contrasted and with the hyper-futuristic modeling that is creating them before our eyes in this opening sequence.  Everything is being created in a fully mechanized, computerized way.  In fact, the player piano seems to be the clearest model for the system--something that presents as old and classical, but whose inside has been altered and bastardized to allow for total control.

The final view we have is of a male figure held on a circular device in a clear reference to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.  This, of course, drives in the reference to a constructed man--an ideal body.

Episode 1: The Original

We quickly see that Westworld takes place in the near-future, when humans have successfully developed humanoid robots to the extent that they are almost indistinguishable from humans.  In fact, Westworld itself is a theme park inhabited by these robots, deemed ‘hosts,’ which are meant to play out various storylines every day.  They have some ability to improvise, but are ultimately meant to repeat the same actions and come to the same conclusion day after day for the entertainment of wealthy human visitors who pay to experience their old west fantasies.

We meet Dolores, a veteran host, who is questioned on “the nature of [her] reality.”  We meet Teddy, who we don’t find out is a host until later, when he attempts to defend Dolores and is unable to shoot the Man in Black.  We are constantly questioning the nature of humanity--who is host and who is real?  What is real?

Even the employees at Westworld seem to have different ideas about how real their hosts should be.  The story-writer, Sizemore, thinks they should pull back on the updates to make the hosts more controllable and less unnerving, and suspects there is more to the program than the themepark.  The operations leader, Cullen, agrees that the program means different things to different people (shareholders, developers, guests, etc), but won’t say more.  Foreshadowing!

The first glitch is a portent of what is to come--the story is broken.  Two human visitors are exploring the hillside when the sheriff suddenly glitches out and starts stuttering and slobbering, breaking down mechanically.  The employees of Westworld, however, are worried about the narrative--how can they make sure the park’s storylines keep running if the hosts start glitching out or become dangerous?

Despite the reassurances of the head programmer that the incident will be isolated, soon other hosts are glitching out.  A villain decimates the saloon in a milk-related frenzy.  Dolores’ father finds a photograph of a woman in a city (New York?) and it triggers an existential crisis for him.  The managers are forced to pull hosts out of the park, and we get a more in-depth look at their analysis.  Dolores’ father, Bernard, describes the desire to meet his maker, and when told that his has accomplished this, he gives an impassioned speech of vengeance for the insults and assaults to his daughter.  Although Ford, the founder and creator, claims that this is all a result of his programming (remnants of a horror character that knew Shakespeare quotes, etc), the audience is certainly left wondering just how much was legitimate emotion.

Frankly, can we really be sure who is legitimately human?