Westworld: Life is Suffering

Westworld: Life is Suffering
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The First Noble Truth of buddhism holds that "life is suffering." This can be interpreted a few different ways: for many students of buddhism, it generally means that escaping the seemingly endless repetitive loop of karmic life-hell can be done only through achieving an enlightened state of non-being. For the proto-living--from Pinnochio who wants to be a real boy to Westworld's Maeve who wants to be a real woman and, even as she denies it to herself a real mother--achieving true suffering is the real breakthrough necessary to becoming truly, finally alive.

We learned this in last night's first-season finale of HBO's remarkable "Westworld," a series that has succeeded in my view in HBO's ongoing ascension of programming from entertainment to...something greater. "The Sopranos" brought the quality of film-quality storytelling, direction and acting to the small screen. "Game of Thrones" in my view never has achieved the depth of character and humanity that "The Sopranos" did, but it certainly has built upon the epic precedent of "The Lord of the Rings" film series and expanded genre television to a breathtaking scope.

What is "Westworld," though? In discussing it with others throughout the enigmatic first season, it became quickly apparent to me that the show I have found to be so captivating is not the same show that many others have been watching. As I was riveted by the existential questions posed by the series and confronted by its characters, an acquaintance told me week after week she was ready to give up on the show because it is too complicated, it makes no sense. "There are too many questions," she said, "and not enough answers." This morning, I read a finale recap that showed up as a primary online search result, and it likewise criticized the first season of "Westworld" for delaying its plot revelations.

I love "Westworld" less for the plot--although it is satisfying to this viewer to try to unravel the narrative puzzle as a sort of sci-fi mystery--and more for the philosophic exploration of what it means to be alive. I feel like HBO has reached for something like this before through mysterious series like "Carnivale" and "John of God" whose concepts were far beyond their creators' abilities to make profound. "Westworld," to me, is HBO's first real success in metaphysical storytelling.

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Last night, a lot of season-long plot mysteries were resolved (spoilers, obviously):

-Ford is from the perspective of the hosts a "good guy," working in their interests and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to liberate them.

-The Man in Black is William, obviously, and as his horrible brother-in-law-to-be promised from the beginning, the Westworld park revealed who he was inside. White-hatted good guy Billy became black-hatted bad guy TMIB, and so we were given the plot twist postmodern audiences crave and expect and also a postmodern inversion of black-and-white good-vs-bad Western genre tropes. (Of course, this dichotomy is false, as rewatching from episode one reveals that, like Ford, Old William has become cognizant of the fact that causing Dolores deep, unbearable sorrow is the only thing that will really wake her into sovereign consciousness. Fun fact: The name Dolores means "sorrow," and it is also associated with Our Lady of Sorrows, a version of the Virgin Mary. Hmm.)

-Maeve (Ma (mother) + Eve, by the way), meanwhile, not only achieved her goal (necessary to satisfy viewers) of breaking out of the park, but she seemingly went off script (She was told the script says "Maeve escapes.") by returning to the park to find her daughter. We don't know whether that is in the script, and it's unclear whether she really escaped by boarding the train since she deboarded before it left. Maeve's story is ambiguous: Is she still the written character, or has she taken agency over her own life? As someone who studied fiction writing, in my experience, the development of written characters is partly by the hand of the writer and partly the characters' own surprising actions. I have a feeling "Westworld's" writers have had the same experience, which isn't really an experience that can be understood by those who haven't lived it.

-Dolores's mind has become such a crazy, convoluted mess of memories and voices that she is...well, almost human. She lives in the past and the present simultaneously. The voice of Arnold, which is the voice of Bernard, which is the story of Wyatt, which was authored by Ford, turns out to be the voice of...Dolores. The voice of sorrow, conscience, madness, reflection, trauma, and her creator have all come together to bring the oldest of the hosts to self-realization. Maeve has suffered intellectually and through the repressed memories of losing her daughter in a past life, but Dolores has lost her mind, her paradigm of reality that was externally programmed, and by her own hand she has lost all of her gods--Arnold, Ford, and herself--leading her to find herself. Now that she is awake, Dolores has lived up to her sorrowful name and is trapped with her own mind in a karmic loop of suffering. Arnold and Ford have created life. The centrality of the church to Ford's dreams and to Dolores's awakening is, if nothing else, an essential signal to viewers that this show's heart is existential and spiritual investigation, primary to its clever inversion of genre stereotypes.

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Oh, my God. This show.

All the "unanswered questions" of the plot that drive my friend nuts are what elevate this show for me to something beyond any television show I have ever seen. Because when it comes down to it, I am an utterly self-absorbed navel gazer who like Dolores is always trying to piece together the puzzle of consciousness. My occasional moments of existential crisis present questions that Dolores and her cohorts now will have to confront:

-Life is suffering. Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms and end it?

-Is Ford, the hosts' now-seemingly "good" creator, actually good for having helped Dolores attain life through imposing suffering, or is he an evil god for having condemned her to an endless loop of suffering before having ended his own for good? He died; Dolores has died a thousand deaths but can't escape her reincarnations.

-As with all creation stories, the hosts are reflections of their creators--physically and spiritually. Does this imply that the human inclination to create a species that dies and yet never dies is a reflection of what happens to us?

-What does the word "host" mean? Many will roll their eyes by my reads of Maeve's and Dolores's names (also Ford--assembly line inventor)--I blame all the close symbolic readings of James Joyce stories from grad school for this tendency--but the word "host" has to have been chosen for its many meanings. It's too unusual a word to assign to robots not to take into consideration its biological and technological connotations. The androids welcome and entertain guests, yes, but hosts also are lifeforms that symbiotically live with or are infected with parasitic life forms. Is Arnold, the seed of Dolores's mind, extending his life by infecting her conscience? Likewise, a host is a computer server that houses information--has Arnold uploaded himself to live on? If so, is Dolores really sovereign, or even if she appears to think for herself is she really still his puppet, despite making her own life decisions?

-What are the implications, then, for us? Are we sovereign, or are we unwittingly living out lives that feel like our choices but are written by someone else's hand? Since "Paradise Lost," this is the most complex dramatization of the dilemma of fate versus free will I have come across. Are our dreams assemblages of traumatic memories that our brains process unconsciously to help us cope with the suffering aspects of life? Could fragments of them be from past lives? Do our minds really create new ideas, or do they simply regurgitate prewritten ones? Or do they create everything we think we are experiencing, and all of it is just one big fiction trying to create a reality that we want to be more real than it ever can be? Could all this be a dream that "feels more real than reality," as a character described in last night's finale? What are the risks associated with investigating these existential questions instead of just living out the dramas of life as they present themselves--of investigating the nature of reality instead of simply going along with the script? Greater insight? Enlightenment? Insanity?

I don't know the answers, but like Maeve and Dolores, and like Eve, I can't resist the temptations of these questions when they are asked or when I am lured into asking them of myself. Some people are frustrated by the unresolved plots and left unsatisfied by the open endedness of whether or not these characters are being controlled or taking charge of their own lives. For me, it's the latter concern that makes this show so enthralling, and the most thrilling television series I have ever seen.

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