How HBO's Westworld indicts its own viewers

The show seizes on our impulse to glut ourselves on pleasure, and it isn't nice about it. It makes us seem cheap and unimaginative and horrible.

Westworld
(Image credit: HBO)

HBO's Westworld began by tricking us into believing that Teddy Flood (James Marsden) was its "real" protagonist, only to kill him and incidentally reveal how indistinguishable the "guests" in the show's fantasy park are from their victims, the robotic hosts. The second episode invites us to fall for this trick again, but this time we're closer to the mark.

Jimmi Simpson plays William, a man visiting the park with his rapacious future brother-in-law. We see the park's tourist scaffolding this time — a luxe affair with clean lines and bespoke wardrobes where people dress and prepare to board the train to Westworld. In case the philosophical import of this preparatory stage is lost on you, a beautiful blonde literally invites William to choose between white and black hats. "Are you real?" William asks her. "Well," she says, "if you can't tell, does it matter?"

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.