Lestworld

My lady love is away and I've been binge-watching Westworld. Everyone keeps talking about how good it is, how the writing is so cerebral. Multiple people urged me to watch it, and kept nagging me to do so. So I did. Honestly, after finishing the first episode I doubted whether the series would rise to meet its heavy praise. Nothing about the pilot drew me in in a way that was meaningful, except maybe for its appeal to my love of westerns. The premise is simple enough: escapism. Wealthy vacationers frequent the park, which is essentially a microcosm of chance impossibility - a trip back in time, to the wild west - where visitors can forget about their real world responsibilities for a while and indulgence themselves in unfettered fantasy. In that way, the show offers the viewer something with the potential to be self aware; the parallel between the viewer and the guests of Westworld is not one that should go unnoticed. Because of this I kept watching, half hoping to see something inventive happen. All seemed rife for a modern commentary on voyeurism, distraction, the willingness to pay exorbitant sums of money for the illusion of satisfaction; the tendency for the modern man to seek satiety in the virtual instead of the real. The recent emergence of viable VR, artificial intelligence, and the ever increasing immersiveness of gaming seemed to set the stage for thoughtful observation. But alas.

Last night I finished episode seven. After seven hours of watching, the show still seems to fall short of being truly engaging. It takes big, weighty questions like the nature of reality, identity, the real vs the unreal, and it uses a unique genre fusion to examine them, but it does so lazily. It's philosophically superficial, yet it postures itself as something somehow more prescient. The whole season has been a repetition of the same theme, running itself in circles. Almost nothing happens until the 7th episode, where the viewer is greeted by an all too familiar twist. None of the characters are particularly compelling, save for Dolores and Maeve, and the story relies on tropes and predictable arcs; the robots are more human than the humans; one of the characters thought to be human is a robot. Surprise! I think what bothers me most is that they started with something too fresh and fertile for the to viewer to be left with something so uninventive.

To get my fill of westerns, I’ve started reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Initially I found myself unable to put the book down, engrossed completely in the macabre foreboding and his distinctive writing style. At this point I’m half way through it and the story has plateaued somewhat. The pacing, which was at the beginning quite pleasant and steady, has slowed to the point that my attention is waning. This won’t deter me though, because this is often how westerns are - mainly slow and sprawling, punctuated by moments of perforation and tension that can only be resolved with spilled blood and gun smoke. His descriptions of the desert topographies are alive and inspired, breathing life into an otherwise barren and uninhabited dustbed. McCarthy has a knack for depicting grizzly scenes in gratuitous, gory detail. At times it’s as though he’s reached between the pages and clapped together a pair of chalkboard-erasers, and through the plume of white dust a savage band of Apaches emerge, menacing, wild and merciless, descending on the reader like a plague. The native American tribes are truly terrifying, but not as terrifying as the band of American mercenaries the story follows. They commit heinous acts of unspeakable evil and insensate destruction, and they do so unrepentantly, with cold impunity. Death’s horsemen. It all gets fairly dark fairly quickly. But with a title like Blood Meridian, what do you expect?