#the show was clearly trying to start some kind of dialogue *about* racism and privilege

[thevioletcaptain]

was just making my morning cup of tea when my brain inexplicably dished up a long forgotten memory of what must be the most poorly thought out and cartoonishly offensive reality show ever produced (yes, even worse than milf island manor or whatever it’s called) and i had to google it to make sure it was actually real because frankly it seems like it should only be a wildly problematic fever dream.

but no, it was real.

it was called black. white. and it followed two real american families™ supposedly "swapping races" using hyper-realistic "makeup effects" and then going off to interact with society looking like rdj in tropic thunder and the wayans brothers in white chicks in order to "understand" racism and privilege (i mean presumably that was the point but yikes)

and this was not a show made in the 80's when you might expect some coked up executive to have thought it was a good idea, either. it was in fact made in 2006. and wikipedia is telling me that ice cube was one of the producers??

genuinely what were they thinking with this mess??????

[skirmiche]

Unorganized notes on Charlottesville

CW for violence, racism, anti-Semitism, graphic imagery

Some notes on what happened from someone who was there. Putting behind a cut because this got long (and obviously it’s pretty triggery).

We showed up around 10 AM and started walking to the park. Along the way, we met up with a group of people (mostly students, some older folks) who were there to counter-protest as well. Together, we all practiced some chants, took advantage of having a public restroom easily available (after an hour drive & too much coffee, we needed it!), and started walking.

The first few minutes of the walk were pretty uneventful. After that, we walked past a line of cops in full riot gear. A helicopter flew low overhead, the sound of it bouncing off the buildings and mixing with our chants. At one point on the way to the park, we walked through a parking lot and there was a man in a truck clearly giving us the stinkeye. I remember keeping an eye on him, worried he was going to hit us.

We were only at the actual protest an hour or so. It got nasty very, very fast. We were up by the front, near...what I think was supposed to be a barricade? It might as well have been made out of tissue paper. I was hit with several water bottles (some were being thrown up high, some were being thrown directly at people near the front lines). Someone was holding a sign about the Jewish media. There was a man standing at the top of the steps with a billy club and a riot shield, shaking it at us, shouting slurs and laughing.

I think that’s the thing that sticks with me the most: how many of them were having fun. There were people standing there in pseudo-military gear next to somebody waving a Nazi flag, smiling and laughing like it was a music festival.

After we’d been there for twenty or thirty minutes, they pushed over the barricade. They pepper sprayed us and threw tear gas canisters. I looked behind me as I was running and saw one hit the top of the nearby tent, throwing off sparks, and hoped the tent wouldn’t catch on fire. I grabbed my friend, who was screaming that she’d been sprayed, and took her to a nearby patch of grass. My other friend and I spent the next thirty minutes trying to take care of her — she’d been sprayed directly in the eyes at point blank rage.

(what it looks like when you use your arms to shield from pepper spray, an hour or two after the fact)

Throughout all of this, the police were entirely absent. We passed cops in full riot gear on the way there, there was a helicopter clearly watching the whole thing, and there was an empty cop car right there by the “barricade,” but actual police presence was eerily absent. 

As I was washing pepper spray out of my friend’s eyes, she asked through tears, “Where are the police? Why aren’t they trying to stop this?”

(Turns out, the police stayed out of it because — well, you know why — but also because they were afraid of the people with semiautomatic weapons. That sets a great precedent. Good thing they didn’t have something really dangerous, like loose cigarettes.)

Let me make this clear: there is no “both sides” argument to be had here. There were neo-Nazis with guns trying to break into churches used for first-aid stations and beating up clergy. Per Doctor Cornel West: “if it hadn’t been for the anti-fascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”

On Friday, they attacked a group of students, most of whom were younger than twenty, and marched on a black church while carrying torches. They stood by and smirked as a young black man was beaten almost to death (right by the police station — but it was his friends who saved his life & not the cops). And that doesn't even touch on Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered.

On our side, I saw one person carrying a baseball bat, out of probably a hundred people. On their side, I would say at least one in three (if not closer to 50-75%) was visibly armed (knives, clubs, guns) and wearing helmets, carrying riot shields (or wannabe-SCA wooden ones), shin guards, etc. They came with the intention of hurting people, whatever they will tell you now in the aftermath.

No, both sides are not just as extreme or bad or equally at fault.

As we sat there taking care of our friend, multiple people stopped to check on us, make sure we were doing first aid correctly, and help us out. A clergy member of some kind (I think Lutheran?) checked on us, then looked around and said, “I was protesting the same stuff forty years ago.”

It could easily be a trick of memory, but both my friend and I recognized Heather from the photos and think that she was one of the people who stopped to help us. She walked down to a corner store to get milk for my friend’s eyes (because we were running out) and then laughed with us about how silly we all looked dousing ourselves in milk.

At some point, there was a loud “pop” and everyone flinched and hit the ground, waiting for more gunfire. I’m still not sure what that was.

Around noon, the police dispersed the rally, telling everyone to leave or they’d fire a sound cannon. My friend was still not in great shape, so we prepared to head back to Richmond. 

As we walked to the car, a parade of camouflaged men marched by. Someone asked if they were the National Guard, and one of them said yes (come to find out, it might have been a white supremacist militia masquerading as National Guard).

A local couple, who lived less than a block away, overheard us talking about trying to find a public restroom to clean up in (all of us were filthy at this point, covered in grass, milk, pepto bismol, and the sprays/gasses) and offered to let us use their shower. We did, thanked them profusely, and continued to the car. About ten or fifteen minutes after we were in the car on the way back to Richmond, the news about the car attack broke. 

It wasn’t until I got home and saw video that I realized that had happened on the same street we’d been on, not thirty minutes beforehand.

I took another shower, trying to wash the smell and taste of pepper spray and tear gas off of me, mostly unsuccessfully. I was still coughing when I went to bed that night, and even though the redness and swelling went down after three or four hours, my hands wouldn’t stop burning.

I was already onboard the punching Nazis train, but this cemented it. Polite dialogue is not the proper response to people who show up to a protest carrying Nazi flags, clad in KKK regalia, with riot-shields and guns.

I am not writing this because I expect cookies for going (because I consider showing up to protest Nazis & the KKK literally the least I can do as an able-bodied white person). I am writing this because I think first-hand accounts are important to balance out some of the media narratives that are already taking place (even given the horrific events of Saturday) and because I don’t ever want to forget.

I am also writing this because I know that there are probably people who will read this and understand it because it came from a white person. To anyone who is finding this account making sense, while they felt that people of color were being angry, hysterical, and irrational, I say: please take this opportunity to examine yourself. Don’t get defensive, just think about it.

White people, we have to do better. These people are not fucking around. They showed up on Saturday intending to hurt people. They stood by and smirked as their buddies beat a 20 year old black man almost to death. They later cheered on someone driving a car into a crowd of unarmed protesters (and are fine with violence, whatever they’ll say in public). If there is one thing you take away from this, please let it be that we have to stand up to these people.

It was never the time to sit on the sidelines, but now is especially not the time for silence, inaction, or hand-wringing about white supremacists experiencing consequences of their free speech. Your energy is needed elsewhere. Show up. Give money. Speak out.

Take action:

Sign up for Safety Pin Box. Didi Delgado has also set up a list of black women in need of monetary support.

Show up to a protest or counter protest. Tap into your local Black Lives Matter group and see what’s going on near you. There are already similar events planned for Texas A&M on 9/11 and Richmond VA next month, but your local chapters can give you more information about anything planned near you.

Ana Mardoll has some scripts/tips on talking to your white family members about racism.

Look at your workplaces and friend groups. Notice where people of color are absent, probably because they’re being shut out. Notice where they’re being talked over. Say something.

Donate to the GoFundMes of people who were injured there and the organizers who made the counterprotest possible. (Deandre Harris, Natalie Harris, group fund for victim relief, legal fund for Solidarity Cville)

Resources & reading:

Read as many firsthand accounts as you can get:

Someone who was there & hit by the car

Comments from another person who was there

“He saved me, then he was under the car”

Interview with Deandre Harris (please donate to his GoFundMe if you can)

24 hours of anarchy in Charlottesville, through the eyes of one protester

Here’s what really happened in Charlottesville

Fascism has already come to America (Please educate yourself on the historicity of groups like these and their context here. Historically, self-defense is one of the only things that has deterred the Klan. They didn’t just go away after being ignored. More about the Klan here.)

Thread on “anti-PC” culture as relates to current events

Thread on why #ThisIsNotUs is the white people version of #NotAllMen

Thread on radicalization of young white men (Mikki also has a Patreon & PayPal tip jar, if you found her writing helpful)

Read about the Paradox of Tolerance

White Feelings: 0-60 for Charlottesville

Why privilege is white-washed supremacy

Tolerance is not a moral precept (“It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.”)

This essay is not specifically about white supremacists, but is extremely relevant:

What makes the Googler's speech dangerous (as opposed to just distasteful) is that he's in a class of people that is accorded social power to use other people to satisfy their wishes: white men. So he's not just expressing an opinion. He's doing something. He's committing a speech act that has the functions of either controlling and intimidating us, or marking territory as unsafe so we leave. It’s disingenuous to say “it’s fine if people say that as long as they don’t act on it”, because saying it is acting on it.

More resources will be added as I come across them, this is by no means complete (and feel free to send suggestions).

[meeedeee]

Westworld: (De)Humanising the Other RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

Warning: total spoilers for S1 of Westworld.

Trigger warning: talk of rape, sexual assault and queer death.

Note: Throughout this review, it will be necessary to distinguish between the writers of Westworld the TV show, and the writers employed in the narrative by the titular Westworld theme park. To avoid confusing the two, when I’m referring to the show, Westworld will be italicised; when referring to the park, I’ll use plain text.

*

This will be a somewhat bifurcated review of Westworld – which is, I feel, thematically appropriate, as Westworld itself is something of a bifurcated show. Like so much produced by HBO, it boasts incredible acting, breathtaking production values, intelligent dialogue, great music and an impeccably tight, well-orchestrated series of narrative reveals. Also like much produced by HBO, it takes a liberal, one might even say cartoonishly gratuitous approach to nudity, is saturated with violence in general and violence against women in particular, and has a consistent problem with stereotyping despite its diverse casting. In Westworld’s case, this latter issue is compounded as an offence by its status as a meta-narrative: a story which actively discusses the purpose and structure of stories, but which has seemingly failed to apply those same critiques to key aspects of its own construction.

The practical upshot is that it’s both frustratingly watchable and visibly frustrating. Even when the story pissed me off, I was always compelled to keep going, but I was never quite able to stop criticising it, either. It’s a thematically meaty show, packed with the kind of twists that will, by and large, enhance viewer enjoyment on repeat viewings rather than diminish the appeal. Though there are a few Fridge Logic moments, the whole thing hangs together quite elegantly – no mean feat, given the complexity of the plotting. And yet its virtues have the paradoxical effect of making me angrier about its vices, in much the same way that I’d be more upset about red wine spilled on an expensive party dress than on my favourite t-shirt. Yes, the shirt means more to me despite being cheaper, but a stain won’t stop me from wearing it at home, and even if it did, the item itself is easily replaced. But staining something precious and expensive is frustrating: I’ve invested enough in the cost of the item that I don’t want to toss it away, but staining makes it unsuitable as a showcase piece, which means I can’t love it as much as I want to, either.

You get where I’m going with this.

Right from the outset, Westworld switches between two interconnected narratives: the behind-the-scenes power struggles of the people who run the titular themepark, and the goings-on in the park itself as experienced by both customers and ‘hosts’, the humanoid robot-AIs who act as literal NPCs in pre-structured, pay-to-participate narratives. To the customers, Westworld functions as an immersive holiday-roleplay experience: though visually indistinguishable from real humans, the hosts are considered unreal, and are therefore fair game to any sort of violence, dismissal or sexual fantasy the customers can dream up. (This despite – or at times, because of – the fact that their stated ability to pass the Turing test means their reactions to said violations are viscerally animate.) To the programmers, managers, storytellers, engineers, butchers and behaviourists who run it, Westworld is, variously, a job, an experiment, a financial gamble, a risk, a sandpit and a microcosm of human nature: the hosts might look human, but however unsettling their appearance or behaviour at times, no one is ever allowed to forget what they are.

But to the hosts themselves, Westworld is entirely real, as are their pre-programmed identities. While their existence is ostensibly circumscribed by adherence to preordained narrative ‘loops’, the repetition of their every conversation, death and bodily reconstruction wiped from their memories by the park engineers, certain hosts – notably Dolores, the rancher’s daughter, and Maeve, the bordello madame – are starting to remember their histories. Struggling to understand their occasional eerie interviews with their puppeteering masters – explained away as dreams, on the rare occasion where such explanation is warranted – they fight to break free of their intended loops, with startling consequences.But there is also a hidden layer to Westworld: a maze sought by a mysterious Man in Black and to which the various hosts and their narratives are somehow key. With the hosts exhibiting abnormal behaviour, retaining memories of their former ‘lives’ in a violent, fragmented struggle towards true autonomy, freedom and sentience, Westworld poses a single, sharp question: what does it mean to be human?

Or rather, it’s clearly trying to pose this question; and to be fair, it very nearly succeeds. But for a series so overtly concerned with its own meta – it is, after all, a story about the construction, reception and impact of stories on those who consume and construct them – it has a damnable lack of insight into the particulars of its assumed audiences, both internal and external, and to the ways this hinders the proclaimed universality of its conclusions. Specifically: Westworld is a story in which all the internal storytellers are straight white men endowed with the traditional bigotries of racism, sexism and heteronormativity, but in a context where none of those biases are overtly addressed at any narrative level.

From the outset, it’s clear that Westworld is intended as a no-holds-barred fantasy in the literal sense: a place where the rich and privileged can pay through the nose to fuck, fight and fraternise in a facsimile of the old West without putting themselves at any real physical danger. Nobody there can die: customers, unlike hosts, can’t be killed (though they do risk harm in certain contexts), but each host body and character is nonetheless resurrected, rebuilt and put back into play after they meet their end. Knowing this lends the customers a recklessness and a violence they presumably lack in the real world: hosts are shot, stabbed, raped, assaulted and abused with impunity, because their disposable inhumanity is the point of the experience. This theme is echoed in their treatment by Westworld’s human overseers, who often refer to them as ‘it’ and perform their routine examinations, interviews, repairs and updates while the hosts are naked.

At this point in time, HBO is as well-known for its obsession with full frontal, frequently orgiastic nudity as it is for its total misapprehension of the distinction between nakedness and erotica. Never before has so much skin been shown outside of literal porn with so little instinct for sensuality, sexuality or any appreciation of the human form beyond hurr durr tiddies and, ever so occasionally, hurr durr dongs, and Westworld is no exception to this. It’s like the entirety of HBO is a fourteen-year-old straight boy who’s just discovered the nascent thrill of drawing Sharpie-graffiti genitals on every available schoolyard surface and can only snigger, unrepentant and gleeful, whenever anyone asks them not to. We get it, guys – humans have tits and asses, and you’ve figured out how to show us that! Huzzah for you! Now get the fuck over your pubescent creative wankphase and please, for the love of god, figure out how to do it tastefully, or at least with some general nodding in the direction of an aesthetic other than Things I Desperately Wanted To See As A Teengaer In The Days Before Internet Porn.

That being said, I will concede that there’s an actual, meaningful reason for at least some of Westworld’s ubiquitous nudity: it’s a deliberate, visual act of dehumanisation, one intended not only to distinguish the hosts from the ‘real’ people around them, but to remind the park’s human employees that there’s no need to treat the AIs with kindness or respect. For this reason, it also lends a powerful emphasis to the moments when particular characters opt to dress or cover the hosts, thereby acknowledging their personhood, however minimally. This does not, however, excuse the sadly requisite orgy scenes, nor does it justify the frankly obscene decision to have a white female character make a leering comment about the size of a black host’s penis, and especially not when said female character has already been established as queer. (Yes, bi/pan people exist; as I have good reason to know, being one of them. But there are about nine zillion ways the writers could’ve chosen to show Elsie’s sexual appreciation for men that didn’t tap into one of the single grossest sexual tropes on the books, let alone in a context which, given the host’s blank servility and Elsie’s status as an engineer, is unpleasantly evocative of master/slave dynamics.)

And on the topic of Elsie, let’s talk about queerness in Westworld, shall we? Because let’s be real: the bar for positive queer representation on TV is so fucking low right now, it’s basically at speedbump height, and yet myriad grown-ass adults are evidently hellbent on bellyflopping onto it with all the grace and nuance of a drunk walrus. Elsie is a queer white woman whose queerness is shown to us by her decision to kiss one of the female hosts, Clementine, who’s currently deployed as a prostitute, in a context where Clementine is reduced to a literal object, stripped of all consciousness and agency. Episode 6 ends on the cliffhanger of Elsie’s probable demise, and as soon as I saw that setup, I felt as if that single, non-consensual kiss – never referenced or expanded on otherwise – had been meant as Chekov’s gaykilling gun: this woman is queer, and thus is her death predicted. (Of course she fucking dies. Of course she does. I looked it up before I watched the next episode, but I might as well have Googled whether the sun sets in the west.)

It doesn’t help that the only other queer femininity we’re shown is either pornography as wallpaper or female host prostitutes hitting on female customers; and it especially doesn’t help that, as much as HBO loves its gratuitous orgy scenes, you’ll only ever see two naked women casually getting it on in the background, never two naked men. Nor does it escape notice that the lab tech with a penchant for fucking the hosts in sleep mode is apparently a queer man, a fact which is presented as a sort of narrative reveal. The first time he’s caught in the act, we only see the host’s legs, prone and still, under his body, but later there’s a whole sequence where he takes one of the male hosts, Hector – who is, not coincidentally, a MOC, singled out for sexual misuse by at least one other character – and prepares to rape him. (It’s not actually clear in context whether the tech is planning on fucking or being fucked by Hector – not that it’s any less a violation either way, of course; I’m noting it rather because the scene itself smacks of being constructed by people without any real idea of how penetrative sex between two men works. Like, ignoring the fact that they’re in a literal glass-walled room with the tech’s eyerolling colleague right next door, Hector is sitting upright on a chair, but is also flaccid and non-responsive by virtue of being in sleep mode. So even though we get a grimly lascivious close-up of the tech squirting lube on his hand, dropping his pants and, presumably, slicking himself up, it’s not actually clear what he’s hoping to achieve prior to the merciful moment when Hector wakes up and fights him the fuck off.)

Topping off this mess is Logan, a caustic, black-hat-playing customer who, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it foursome with three host prostitutes – two female, one male – is visually implied to be queer, and who thereinafter functions, completely unnecessarily, as a depraved bisexual stereotype. And I do mean blink-and-you’ll-miss-it: I had to rewind the episode to make sure I wasn’t imagining things, but it’s definitely there, and as with Elsie kissing Clementine, it’s never referenced again. The male host is engaging only with Logan, stroking his chest as he kisses and fucks the two women; it’s about as unsexualised as sexual contact between two naked men can actually get, and yet HBO has gone to the trouble of including it, I suspect for the sole purpose of turning a bland, unoriginal character into an even grosser stereotype than he would otherwise have been while acting under the misapprehension that it would give him depth. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Logan doesn’t cease to be a cocky, punchable asshat just because you consented to put a naked white dude next to him for less time than it takes to have a really good shit; it just suggests that you, too, are a cocky, punchable asshat who should shit more in the bathroom and less on the fucking page. But I digress.

And then there’s the racism, which – and there’s no other way to put this – is presented as being an actual, intentional feature of the Westworld experience, even though it makes zero commercial sense to do this. Like. You have multiple white hosts who are programmed to make racist remarks about particular POC hosts, despite the fact that there are demonstrably POC customers paying to visit the park. You have a consistent motif of Native Americans being referred to as ‘savages’, both within Westworld-as-game and by the gamewriters themselves, with Native American mysticism being used to explain both the accidental glimpses various self-aware hosts get of the gamerunners and the in-game lore surrounding the maze. Demonstrably, the writers of Westworld are aware of this – why else is Episode 2, wherein writer character Lee Sizemore gleefully proposes a hella racist new story for the park, called ‘Chestnut’, as in old? I’ve said elsewhere that depiction is not endorsement, but it is perpetuation, and in a context where the point of Westworld as a commercial venture is demonstrably to appeal to customers of all genders, sexual orientations and races – all of whom we see in attendance – building in particular period-appropriate bigotries is utterly nonsensical.

More than this, as the openness with which the female prostitutes seduce female customers makes clear, it’s narratively inconsistent: clearly, not every bias of the era is being rigidly upheld. And yet it also makes perfect sense if you think of both Westworld and Westworld as being, predominantly, a product both created by and intended for a straight white male imagination. In text, Westworld’s stories are written by Lee and Robert, both of whom are straight white men, while Westworld itself was originally the conceit of Michael Crichton. Which isn’t to diminish the creative input of the many other people who’ve worked on the show – technically, it’s a masterclass in acting, direction, composition, music, lighting, special effects and editing, and those people deserve their props. It’s just that, in terms of narrative structure, by what I suspect is an accidental marriage of misguided purpose and unexamined habit, Westworld the series, like Westworld the park, functions primarily for a straight white male audience – and while I don’t doubt that there was some intent to critically highlight the failings of that perspective, as per the clear and very satisfying satirising of Lee Sizemore, as with Zack Snyder’s Suckerpunch and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, the straight white male gaze is still so embedded as a lazy default that Westworld ends up amplifying its biases more often than it critiques them. (To quote something my straight white husband said while watching, “It’s my gaze, and I feel like I’m being parodied by it.”)

Though we do, as mentioned, see various women and people of colour enjoying the Westworld park, the customers who actually serve as protagonists – Logan, William and the Man in Black – are all white men. Logan is queer by virtue of a single man’s hand on his chest, but other than enforcing a pernicious stereotype about bisexual appetites and behaviours, it doesn’t do a damn thing to alter his characterisation. The end of season reveal that William is the Man in Black – that William’s scenes have all taken place thirty years in the past, shown to us now through Dolores’s memories – is a cleverly executed twist, and yet the chronicle of William’s transformation from youthful, romantic idealist to violent, sadistic predator only highlights the fundamental problem, which is that the Westworld park, despite being touted as an adventure for everyone – despite Robert using his customers as a basis for making universal judgements about human nature – is clearly a more comfortable environment for some than others. Certainly, if I was able to afford the $40,000 a day we’re told it costs to attend, I’d be disinclined to spend so much for the privilege of watching male robots, whatever their courtesy to me, routinely talk about raping women, to say nothing of being forced to witness the callousness of other customers to the various hosts.

It should be obvious that there’s no such thing as a universal fantasy, and yet much of Westworld’s psychological theorising about human nature and morality hinges on our accepting that the desire  to play cowboy in a transfigured version of the old West is exactly this. That the final episode provides tantalising evidence that at least one other park with a different historical theme exists elsewhere in the complex doesn’t change the fact that S1 has sold us, via the various monologues of Logan and Lee, Robert and William and the Man in Black, the idea that Westworld specifically reveals deep truths about human nature.

Which brings us to Dolores, a female host whose primary narrative loop centres on her being a sweet, optimistic rancher’s daughter who, with every game reset, can be either raped or rescued from rape by the customers. That Dolores is our primary female character – that her narrative trajectory centres on her burgeoning sentience, her awareness of the repeat violations she’s suffered, and her refusal to remain a damsel – does not change the fact that making her thus victimised was a choice at both the internal (Westworld) and external (Westworld) levels. I say again unto HBO, I do not fucking care how edgy you think threats of sexual violence and the repeat objectification of women are: they’re not original, they’re not compelling, and in this particular instance, what you’ve actually succeeded in doing is undermining your core premise so spectacularly that I do not understand how anyone acting in good sense or conscience could let it happen.

Because in making host women like Dolores (white) and Maeve (a WOC), both of whom are repeatedly subject to sexual and physical violation, your lynchpin characters for the development of true human sentience from AIs – in making their memories of those violations the thing that spurs their development – you’re not actually asking the audience to consider what it means to be human. You’re asking them to consider the prospect that victims of rape and assault aren’t actually human in the first place, and then to think about how being repeatedly raped and assaulted might help them to gain humanity. And you’re not even being subtle about it, either, because by the end of S1, the entire Calvinistic premise is laid clear: that Robert and Arnold, the park’s founders, believed that tragedy and suffering was the cornerstone of sentience, and that the only way for hosts to surpass their programming is through misery. Which implies, by logical corollary, that Robert is doing the hosts a service by allowing others to hurt them or by hurting them himself – that they are only able to protest his mistreatment because the very fact of it gave them sentience.

Let that sink in for a moment, because it’s pretty fucking awful. The moral dilemma of Westworld, inasmuch as it exists, centres on the question of knowing culpability, and therefore asks a certain cognitive dissonance of the audience: on the one hand, the engineers and customers believe that the hosts aren’t real people, such that hurting them is no more an immoral act than playing Dark Side in a Star Wars RPG is; on the other hand, from an audience perspective, the hosts are demonstrably real people, or at the very least potential people, and we are quite reasonably distressed to see them hurt. Thus: if the humans in setting can’t reasonably be expected to know that the hosts are people, then we the audience are meant to feel conflicted about judging them for their acts of abuse and dehumanisation while still rooting for the hosts.

Ignore, for a moment, the additional grossness of the fact that both Dolores and Maeve are prompted to develop sentience, and are then subsequently guided in its emergence, by men, as though they are Eves being made from Adam’s rib. Ignore, too, the fact that it’s Dolores’s host father who, overwhelmed by the realisation of what is routinely done to his daughter, passes that fledgling sentience to Dolores, a white woman, who in turn passes it to Maeve, a woman of colour, without which those other male characters – William, Felix, Robert – would have no Galateas to their respective Pygmalions. Ignore all this, and consider the basic fucking question of personhood: of what it means to engage with AIs you know can pass a Turing test, who feel pain and bleed and die and exhibit every human symptom of pain and terror and revulsion as the need arises, who can improvise speech and memory, but who can by design give little or no consent to whatever it is you do to them. Harming such a person is not the same as engaging with a video game; we already know it’s not for any number of reasons, which means we can reasonably expect the characters in the show to know so, too. But even if you want to dispute that point – and I’m frankly not interested in engaging with someone who does – it doesn’t change the fact that Westworld is trying to invest us in a moral false equivalence.

The problem with telling stories about robots developing sentience is that both the robots and their masters are rendered at an identical, fictional distance to the (real, human) viewer. By definition, an audience doesn’t have to believe that a character is literally real in order to care about them; we simply have to accept their humanisation within the narrative. That being so, asking viewers to accept the dehumanisation of one fictional, sentient group while accepting the humanisation of another only works if you’re playing to prejudices we already have in the real world – such as racism or sexism, for instance – and as such, it’s not a coincidence that the AIs we see violated over and over are, almost exclusively, women and POC, while those protagonists who abuse them are, almost exclusively, white men. Meaning, in essence, that any initial acceptance of the abuse of hosts that we’re meant to have – or, by the same token, any initial excusing of abusers – is predicated on an existing form of bigotry: collectively, we are as used to doubting the experiences and personhood of women and POC as we are used to assuming the best about straight white men, and Westworld fully exploits that fact to tell its story.

Which, as much as it infuriates me, also leaves me with a dilemma in interpreting the show. Because as much as I dislike seeing marginalised groups exploited and harmed, I can appreciate the importance of aligning a fictional axis of oppression (being a host) with an actual axis of oppression (being female and/or a POC). Too often, SFFnal narratives try to tackle that sort of Othering without casting any actual Others, co-opting the trappings of dehumanisation to enhance our sympathy for a (mostly white, mostly straight) cast. And certainly, by the season finale, the deliberateness of this decision is made powerfully clear: joined by hosts Hector and Armistice and aided by Felix, a lab tech, Maeve makes her escape from Westworld, presenting us with the glorious image of three POC and one white woman battling their way free of oppressive control. And yet the reveal of Robert’s ultimate plans – the inference that Maeve’s rebellion wasn’t her own choice after all, but merely his programming of her; the revelation that Bernard is both a host and a recreation of Arnold, Robert’s old partner; the merging of Dolores’s arc with Wyatt’s – simultaneously serves to strip these characters of any true agency. Everything they’ve done has been at Robert’s whim; everything they’ve suffered has been because he wanted it so. As per the ubiquitous motif of the player piano, even when playing unexpected tunes, the hosts remain Robert’s instruments: even with his death, the songs they sing are his.

Westworld, then, is a study in contradictions, and yet is no contradiction at all. Though providing a stunning showcase for the acting talents of Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood and Jeffrey Wright in particular, their characters are nonetheless all controlled by Anthony Hopkins’s genial-creepy Robert, and that doesn’t really change throughout the season. Though the tropes of old West narratives are plainly up for discussion, any wider discussion of stereotyping is as likely to have a lampshade hung on it as to be absent altogether, and that’s definitely a problem. Not being familiar with the Michael Crichton film and TV show, I can’t pass judgement on the extent to which this new adaptation draws from or surpasses the source material. I can, however, observe that the original film dates to the 1970s, which possibly goes some way to explaining the uncritical straight white male gazieness embedded in the premise. Even so, there’s something strikingly reminiscent of Joss Whedon to this permutation of Westworld, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. The combination of a technologically updated old West, intended to stand as both a literal and metaphoric frontier, the genre-aware meta-narrative that nonetheless perpetuates more stereotypes than it subverts, and the supposed moral dilemma of abusing those who can’t consent feels at times like a mashup of Firefly, Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse that has staunchly failed to improve on Whedon’s many intersectional failings.

    And yet, I suspect, I’ll still be poking my nose into Season 2, if only to see how Thandie Newton is doing. It feels like an absurdly low bar to say that, compared to most of HBO’s popular content, Westworld is more tell than show in portraying sexual violence, preferring to focus on the emotional lead-in and aftermath rather than the act itself, and yet that small consideration does ratchet the proverbial dial down a smidge when watching it – enough so that I’m prepared to say it’s vastly less offensive in that respect than, say, Game of Thrones. But it’s still there, still a fundamental part of the plot, and that’s going to be a not unreasonable dealbreaker for a lot of people; as is the fact that the only queer female character dies. Westworld certainly makes compelling television, but unlike the human protagonists, I wouldn’t want to live there.

      from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2jqQuUS via IFTTT