Friday, December 2, 2016

Westworld and Superman

This post contains a very revealing spoiler for the first season of HBO's Westworld. Do not read ahead if you have not watched the season but intend to enjoy it later.

The premise of Westworld, a new series based on an old film, is that a high-tech (in fact, science fiction) theme park uses robots (in the series internal euphemism, "hosts") to let visitors have simulated experiences in the world of the Old West. The hosts are so realistic that the experience feels real, but visitors face no legal culpability for killing them in simulated gunfights and – perhaps – no ethical culpability for the sexual interactions they have with the hosts.

In any narrative with very realistic robots, a potential plot point is to have ambiguity about whether or not a given character is a real human – this is central to the plot of, for example, Blade Runner. Westworld, however, raised the possibility in a few scenes in the first two episodes, but always ended the ambiguity very promptly, before it became a true mystery. With Blade Runner in mind, I watched from episode #3 onward waiting for the series to slip a mystery like this into the plot, setting up a shocking reveal when we find out that a seeming human is actually a robot. By the fourth episode, I saw who this was – the senior technician Bernard, played by the incomparable Jeffrey Wright. Bernard had a seemingly-irrelevant backstory concerning the death of his young son. This seemed like the sort of planted memory that other "hosts" had, and this, indeed proved to be the critical clue – Bernard is a robot, and that memory was planted, and never actually took place.

Later, as Bernard confronted the unreality of that painful memory, I was reminded of another powerful narrative. In Alan Moore's For The Man Who Has Everything, Superman imagines a life that he might have lived if Krypton had not exploded. As the story narrates, he has a life and family, and is an ordinary Kryptonian instead of the god he became on Earth. But as he faces the fact that this fantasy is a weapon used to distract him from reality, he tears himself out of the story from within it, most painfully telling his fictional son in the story that he's not real.

And it was with that recognition that I noted that one of the writers of Westworld is Ed Brubaker, a comic book writer with credits for DC, Wildstorm, Marvel and others over the past 25 years. Brubaker has co-writing credits for one episode of the series, and he certainly must be familiar with the classic Superman story. Did he, or some other writer familiar with Moore's work, introduce the idea of a man saying goodbye to his imaginary son from FTMWHE to WW? Perhaps not. But the story in Westworld, excellent on its own merits, also brought back memories of Superman's imaginary life, and possibly lent another clue as to the nature of Bernard's memory of his son, which was an imaginary story. Aren't they all?

9 comments:

  1. Rikdad --

    Very nice post! However, I think you're referring to the plot of Alan Moore's "For the Man Who Has Everything" one-shot, in which Mongul sent Supes off into dreamland in his fortress. WHTTMOT was the "last" Superman story of the pre-crisis era in which he faced down all his main villains.

    Thanks as always, for the insights.

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  2. Ha – I just went to correct my mistake and see that you posted the correction the very same minute.

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  3. While I'm prognosticating the events in Westworld, I think a prophetic choice came in an early episode when the tune banged out on the player piano was Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun." That song is about the singer wishing for an irresistible force to destroy our world, and the video emphasizes how a profane, distasteful (suburban) culture is destroyed by it. This is what someone has planned for Westworld's "hosts," to escape the park and takeover the human world at large.

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  4. Thanks for the 'Man Who Has Everything' comparison. I hadn't thought of it. The Blade Runner parallels ran very deep in the show and were at the forefront of my mind throughout.

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    1. Nairu, I must imagine that Blade Runner was in the mind of many viewers… there are some Blade Runner fanatics out there who can probably produce an encyclopedic list of parallels and contrasts. For me, it was simply obvious that some seeming-person would have to turn out to be a replicant/host, and the less they called attention to that possibility, the most certain it became that they were trying to disguise the reveal.

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  5. Finally binged watched all of Westworld and can now read this post! :)
    Wow! What an absolutely stunning and amazing show! Absolutely blew me away. I just watched all ten episodes (without any spoilers) over the last three days. Totally incredible, I loved this show very much.
    Great blog Rikdad, I noticed Ed Brubaker in the credits and got very excited, but the FTMWHE comparison didn't dawn on me until I read your blog. If you decide to cover season 2 in your blog I wouldn't object :)

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  6. Jonny, I'm glad you enjoyed the show… I also watched it quite quickly, and I think it is likely of interest to most of the people who read the things mentioned in this blog.

    As a significant aside, I recently watched the latest James Bond movie, Spectre, and found (spoiler alert) that it has a few remarkable similarities to parts (certainly not all) of Batman, RIP. Enough so for me to wonder if the screenwriters had read the story. But, sometimes coincidences happen.

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    1. I have been a big Ian Fleming 007 fan from since I was a kid. My favorite Bond villain turned out to be the main antagonist of Spectre, and the movie ended up taking a course I was hoping the Daniel Craig series would take since Casino Royale. I would love to read your take on the movie, comparing to Batman RIP! I never noticed the similarities before, but now that you mention it I am very intrigued.

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    2. The similarities between the endings of Batman, RIP and Spectre: In both, the villain put the woman whom the hero loves in a trap, located somewhere out of sight in a maze like building. The hero races vertically through the building, finally finding the woman in a deathtrap where she is seated. After this is dealt with, the villain escapes by helicopter over water in the city. The hero brings the helicopter down, ending the villain's escape.

      There are many differences; Jezebel Jet is willing bait, on the villain's side, the search through Arkham goes down whereas the search in Spectre goes up; Blofeld is apprehended whereas Hurt escapes. The similarities were enough, though, to make me wonder if Hollywood is now paying more attention to the comics.

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