The environment also gets a short shrift.
The “Westworld” space is therefore a fairly milquetoast world-it looks much more like a John Wayne movie than the West ever did. And the only hint at an Asian influence occurs in the train station when guests arrive at or leave the park-we hear Chinese spoken over the loudspeaker. Hispanics appear, but only as peripheral to the story, and often in a bandit or outlaw context. Those peoples, however, are not treated with any sort of care in “Westworld.” American Indians only appear as exotic threats who might kill the white protagonists (similar to what Neva Jacquelyn Kilpatrick describes old Westerns in Celluloid Indians). These people led complex lives, had their own dreams and desires, and sought to make the West into a space that they envisioned. Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese workers, played prominent roles as well, especially in building the railroads. American Indians were the land’s first inhabitants, and they, along with Hispanics, had to be violently removed for whites to take over the land. West, in general, had many non-white peoples who were and are central to the region’s history. For sure, Westworld is not specifically about the Gold Rush. history up to that time ( Roaring Camp, 12). Historian Susan Lee Johnson has called the nineteenth-century Gold Rush “among the most multiracial, multiethnic, multinational events” in U.S. Non-white groups are similarly misrepresented. A tremendous amount of violence was visited on American Indians, but the sort of outlaw culture that we popularly imagine simply did not exist on anywhere near the scale as it does either in “Westworld” or our imaginations. West was not terribly violent, at least toward whites.
Murders and rapes abound, and bandits frequently ride into town for “mayhem” (as they say), only to gun down every civilian they can find. With that in mind, in what ways does “Westworld” play into our sense of what the West was? Well, for one, the show and park are incredibly violent. (Imagine an historian creating such ripples today!) The nation’s western expansion had helped to craft a national self-image just as much as any founding father ever had, and the supposed closing of the West meant that the United States would need to find a new way to define itself. Indeed, when historian Frederick Jackson Turner proposed his “Frontier Thesis” in 1893, positing that the West was over, the country went through a bit of a shock. So much of our national identity is bound up in the West. West was, or at least what we think it should have been. With this blog post, I wanted to highlight how the show uses the idea of a theme park to play with our ideas of what the U.S. The rest of this post contains some potential (but not obvious) spoilers to the show, so if you have not finished season one, you might consider stopping at this point.
Like many people, I have been captivated by HBO’s new series “Westworld.” Based on a 1973 Michael Crichton movie of the same name, the show fictionalizes a future where incredibly life-like robots populate a western-themed adult fantasyland.