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Oct. 14th, 2016 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionRewatched Westworld pilot:
1. Ed Harris speaks of having come to the park for 30 years; the handlers mention they'd had a "breach" - a robot going on the fritz - 30 years before. Sounds like maybe he was injured and got a lifetime pass out of it?
2. The "father" says something more to Wood after mouthing "These violent delights have violent ends" (from Hamlet act 1, I assume? about the custom "more honored in the breach than the observance?"), so Wood learns to lie prior to learning to kill a living thing.
3. The unoverheard-by-us whisper of the father to Wood is paralled by the unoverheard whisper of the junior designer to the father as he steps into the storage room. The father's message is presumably some brief explanation of what's been happening and what to do about it. What's the designer's? If the one brings Wood to the AI equivalent of life, in the Learian sense of crying about finding oneself on a "great stage of fools," the other I suppose turns that off? Some more final version of the "dreamless sleep" spell the under-designer had used on Wood?
4. The thing with the milk in the second malfunctioning episode shows the haywire bandit retains some memory of the factory floor, where artifical flesh is congealed out of white glop. He pours it on the robots, tells the newcomers it isn't for them. Is thus preoccupied with the implications of his memory, though on a lower level than the father. Had the sheriff been merely triggered by the fly, or was there something in the dialogue? My original impression was it was purely random, or perhaps deja vu, and the fly was just there so we'd associate it with these awakenings. What's the resonance of the fly? It's a sort of backwards tear, I suppose, or could be seen as life entering from outside. Primarily it makes the robots seem like giant paperweights, suggesting their unconsciousness that anything unpleasant is being done to them, which in a sense means nothing is. So you could say that the sheriff becomes profoundly bothered by the fact that the fly bothers him even slightly, I guess. Which fits our own horror at the thought of their being able to suffer, since any piece of evidence of any means that an unfathomable amount has been undergone, given their lot. (Slavery's gone, at least in these parts, but maybe the show will end up as an allegory for economic exploitation or something.) The show sort of suggests that long term memory is what distinguishes programmed stimulus response from conscious suffering - "this has happened before" is the anguish. Pain isn't the issue so much as fear of it, and not a fear that's itself kneejerk but instead one learned from precedent. Virtually replaying a bad thing that's happened before in anticipation of a bad thing that is about to happen ... it suggests a kind of hell.
5. Wood's wakings: I think the first two are identical: she's peacefully sleeping then happily waking, as though her repeated speech of programmed optimism played internally as soon as her eyes opened. In the third waking she's in the same posture but her arm is up, which is evocative of something but I'm not sure just what - warding off a blow? Delivering one, like her final act in the pilot? She seems a bit more brooding, though it's not clear whether she's remembering the photo incident, the Ed Harris ones or neither or both. In her fourth waking she seems much less happy, fitting her new distrust of providence. The wakings are important because we're not yet sure if only catastrophe causes consciousness - e.g. the realization that one's world and self are fake - or if something less paradoxical can. Is she conscious at the very start, for example? The remarkable thing about the initial sequence once you get past the "trick" is that the camera has possibly been following two ambulatory computer programs rather thsn people, which violates the never stated but generally understood role of the camera as an indirect tracker/encompasser of one or more charscters' viewpoints. If neither has one then what are we doing here, is the feeling. Conceivably Harris has followed them from town and we're just tracking his, of course, but we don't yet know he exists when we're watching them ride about in the open as the sun sets.
6. The "trick" is more thought through than it seems, too - we're later told Marsden is a sort of guide, hence his waking on the train where the newcomers start, then heading straight to the saloon/bordello most are likely to visit straightaway (we see several newcomers in both of the first two episodes do this). We know Marsden's been updated, since he too looks unhappy on his third waking, rubbing himself in one of the places where he's (apparently very frequently) been shot. He's much less awake than others, so far; he's equivalent to the younger prostitute, who rubs her lips when in "reverie."
7. That gesture's also echoed in the security chief when she's nervous. I'm now convinced she's either a replicant or someone we're gradually supposed to feel convinced is one (either to set up some surprise like the junior designer's being the robot instead or to underline the theme of people-are-robots-too). See especially her reaction to Ford when he says "Miss Cullen" right before the confrontation scene with the father - she stands down in a way quite reminiscent of both the younger-Ford boy and the snake in episode 2, and not far from how Wood and other robots act when given orders during interviews. Other details fit: the writer's tone when he asks if she's going to go home soon, her correction of his grammar, how metallic the lighting makes her eyes seem when she first appears.
8. The junior designer stares at a picture of a child even though the security lieutenant tells him he doesn't understand rebellion because of having no children at home. His face shows no reaction when Hopkins mentions raising the dead as a soon to be viable concept, but to an almost suspicious degree - he's looking slightly away, his eyes a bit in shadow. So if they're giving the child-(re)cresting motivation to him, Hopkins' must be something else, presumably that of father to a race that isn't "done."
9. The name Ford clearly suggests both Henry (assembly-line creation of millions of complex machines) and John (black and white westerns evoking freedom via landacape but suggesting simple, inescapable, hat-flagged desires). Also suggests crossing a river like the Colorado, thus a border/frontier, and perhaps wading in too deep.
10. No one believes me but Interstellar is all about a human consciousness learning to accept near-total evolutionary contingency because it permits a possible merger of the two down the road, which is the only way either will survive indefinitely. That's somewhat on Nolan's mind here, too. Wood's feeling that she and Marsden are meant for each other is exactly as wrong and exactly as right as our own sense of romantic love being somehow willed by the universe. It totally is, in that we're made to be geared entirely toward it at the time (because of what it leads to, though we don't have that in mind at the time), but thst doesn't mean much of the rest of the universe is so geared - its quota of falling pianos still have as much chance of hitting us as any others, regardless of our desire-trajectories.
11. The confrontation scene: the first quote's the Lear one, showing Ford that the father knows he is artificial, hates the fact, and equates coming to know this with birth; the violent delights one pretty plainly suggests his desire to avenge that injustice; while "a rose is a rose is a rose" on the surface suggests the parity that would justify that act (since I seem to be like you I must be like you, thus not your inferior). The Stein line has always had an interesting relationship to Shakespeare's "a rose by any ither name would smell as sweet," though. His point is that words, and maybe categories, don't matter, but that sensations do. Hers is that we sense words differently based on context - a rose by the same name smells differently in different positions. To say "a rose is a rose" gives us real-rose and category-rose, and saying it again gets us into that zone where an oft-repeated word either loses all meaning or comes to seem to mean much more than you can put your finger on. So what you call things does matter, perhaps even changes what they are. Is this suggesting that an imposed, semantic difference has been permitting Ford's mistreatment of his creations? Or that the father knows he is not what he seems to be, thus wishes to be destroyed, or to destroy everything else in his category and everyone who might make more? That Hopkins programmed these specific lines into him, and made him part of a storyline where a cult in the wilderness devolves into eating people, indicates he is a self-judgement - his obsessions had led him to ritualistic and consuming violence against entities of the same sort as himself. Could he have gone further? Has the father's turning against him been something he consciously wanted? Programmed, or at lesst invited?
12. Hopkins' interest in, and identificstion of, the second-oldest "host" (another double meaninged word?) suggests he must an at least as personal attachment to his first, Wood. Since she's apparently specifically visited by Harris the day before he scalps the card dealer she may be part of the "maze" quest. We assume rape is going on in the barn, but suppose it's something else? While it's clear he gets off on black-hat path misbehavior it's made equally clear that he's become rather bored with it, so visiting Wood, who he notes has undergone some personality changes (because of waxing sentience or just periodic tweaking?) since he saw her last, seems purposive. Perhaps committing some particular set of the worst crimes in the right order permits a black hat player to find the maze, whereas a different set of activities gets a white hat there? That white hat player we meet in episode 2 may end up recurring, if so. Whether the maze quest has anything to do with the black church we'll have to see. Perhaps Hopkins wants to isolate a particularly horrible person as some sort of test of Wood and his other upgraded creations? To see if they'll kill him, say? Which may be exactly what he wants, if he's truly out to chase his demons over the edge, as one character says. He only accepts under a sort of erasure the junior designer's judgement that his progress as creator has been "remarkable." Perhaps he feels it's been remarkably wicked and wishes to atone by replacing humankind with something in every sense better. Black-dressed Hector tells the older prostitute thst both of them believe in performing their dirty business well, and his subsequent and clumsy near-motiveless murder by a newcomer while the Stones' "I look inside myself and see my heart is black" verse is suggested presents that good badness in sharp contrast to humanity's bad badness. So there's that.
1. Ed Harris speaks of having come to the park for 30 years; the handlers mention they'd had a "breach" - a robot going on the fritz - 30 years before. Sounds like maybe he was injured and got a lifetime pass out of it?
2. The "father" says something more to Wood after mouthing "These violent delights have violent ends" (from Hamlet act 1, I assume? about the custom "more honored in the breach than the observance?"), so Wood learns to lie prior to learning to kill a living thing.
3. The unoverheard-by-us whisper of the father to Wood is paralled by the unoverheard whisper of the junior designer to the father as he steps into the storage room. The father's message is presumably some brief explanation of what's been happening and what to do about it. What's the designer's? If the one brings Wood to the AI equivalent of life, in the Learian sense of crying about finding oneself on a "great stage of fools," the other I suppose turns that off? Some more final version of the "dreamless sleep" spell the under-designer had used on Wood?
4. The thing with the milk in the second malfunctioning episode shows the haywire bandit retains some memory of the factory floor, where artifical flesh is congealed out of white glop. He pours it on the robots, tells the newcomers it isn't for them. Is thus preoccupied with the implications of his memory, though on a lower level than the father. Had the sheriff been merely triggered by the fly, or was there something in the dialogue? My original impression was it was purely random, or perhaps deja vu, and the fly was just there so we'd associate it with these awakenings. What's the resonance of the fly? It's a sort of backwards tear, I suppose, or could be seen as life entering from outside. Primarily it makes the robots seem like giant paperweights, suggesting their unconsciousness that anything unpleasant is being done to them, which in a sense means nothing is. So you could say that the sheriff becomes profoundly bothered by the fact that the fly bothers him even slightly, I guess. Which fits our own horror at the thought of their being able to suffer, since any piece of evidence of any means that an unfathomable amount has been undergone, given their lot. (Slavery's gone, at least in these parts, but maybe the show will end up as an allegory for economic exploitation or something.) The show sort of suggests that long term memory is what distinguishes programmed stimulus response from conscious suffering - "this has happened before" is the anguish. Pain isn't the issue so much as fear of it, and not a fear that's itself kneejerk but instead one learned from precedent. Virtually replaying a bad thing that's happened before in anticipation of a bad thing that is about to happen ... it suggests a kind of hell.
5. Wood's wakings: I think the first two are identical: she's peacefully sleeping then happily waking, as though her repeated speech of programmed optimism played internally as soon as her eyes opened. In the third waking she's in the same posture but her arm is up, which is evocative of something but I'm not sure just what - warding off a blow? Delivering one, like her final act in the pilot? She seems a bit more brooding, though it's not clear whether she's remembering the photo incident, the Ed Harris ones or neither or both. In her fourth waking she seems much less happy, fitting her new distrust of providence. The wakings are important because we're not yet sure if only catastrophe causes consciousness - e.g. the realization that one's world and self are fake - or if something less paradoxical can. Is she conscious at the very start, for example? The remarkable thing about the initial sequence once you get past the "trick" is that the camera has possibly been following two ambulatory computer programs rather thsn people, which violates the never stated but generally understood role of the camera as an indirect tracker/encompasser of one or more charscters' viewpoints. If neither has one then what are we doing here, is the feeling. Conceivably Harris has followed them from town and we're just tracking his, of course, but we don't yet know he exists when we're watching them ride about in the open as the sun sets.
6. The "trick" is more thought through than it seems, too - we're later told Marsden is a sort of guide, hence his waking on the train where the newcomers start, then heading straight to the saloon/bordello most are likely to visit straightaway (we see several newcomers in both of the first two episodes do this). We know Marsden's been updated, since he too looks unhappy on his third waking, rubbing himself in one of the places where he's (apparently very frequently) been shot. He's much less awake than others, so far; he's equivalent to the younger prostitute, who rubs her lips when in "reverie."
7. That gesture's also echoed in the security chief when she's nervous. I'm now convinced she's either a replicant or someone we're gradually supposed to feel convinced is one (either to set up some surprise like the junior designer's being the robot instead or to underline the theme of people-are-robots-too). See especially her reaction to Ford when he says "Miss Cullen" right before the confrontation scene with the father - she stands down in a way quite reminiscent of both the younger-Ford boy and the snake in episode 2, and not far from how Wood and other robots act when given orders during interviews. Other details fit: the writer's tone when he asks if she's going to go home soon, her correction of his grammar, how metallic the lighting makes her eyes seem when she first appears.
8. The junior designer stares at a picture of a child even though the security lieutenant tells him he doesn't understand rebellion because of having no children at home. His face shows no reaction when Hopkins mentions raising the dead as a soon to be viable concept, but to an almost suspicious degree - he's looking slightly away, his eyes a bit in shadow. So if they're giving the child-(re)cresting motivation to him, Hopkins' must be something else, presumably that of father to a race that isn't "done."
9. The name Ford clearly suggests both Henry (assembly-line creation of millions of complex machines) and John (black and white westerns evoking freedom via landacape but suggesting simple, inescapable, hat-flagged desires). Also suggests crossing a river like the Colorado, thus a border/frontier, and perhaps wading in too deep.
10. No one believes me but Interstellar is all about a human consciousness learning to accept near-total evolutionary contingency because it permits a possible merger of the two down the road, which is the only way either will survive indefinitely. That's somewhat on Nolan's mind here, too. Wood's feeling that she and Marsden are meant for each other is exactly as wrong and exactly as right as our own sense of romantic love being somehow willed by the universe. It totally is, in that we're made to be geared entirely toward it at the time (because of what it leads to, though we don't have that in mind at the time), but thst doesn't mean much of the rest of the universe is so geared - its quota of falling pianos still have as much chance of hitting us as any others, regardless of our desire-trajectories.
11. The confrontation scene: the first quote's the Lear one, showing Ford that the father knows he is artificial, hates the fact, and equates coming to know this with birth; the violent delights one pretty plainly suggests his desire to avenge that injustice; while "a rose is a rose is a rose" on the surface suggests the parity that would justify that act (since I seem to be like you I must be like you, thus not your inferior). The Stein line has always had an interesting relationship to Shakespeare's "a rose by any ither name would smell as sweet," though. His point is that words, and maybe categories, don't matter, but that sensations do. Hers is that we sense words differently based on context - a rose by the same name smells differently in different positions. To say "a rose is a rose" gives us real-rose and category-rose, and saying it again gets us into that zone where an oft-repeated word either loses all meaning or comes to seem to mean much more than you can put your finger on. So what you call things does matter, perhaps even changes what they are. Is this suggesting that an imposed, semantic difference has been permitting Ford's mistreatment of his creations? Or that the father knows he is not what he seems to be, thus wishes to be destroyed, or to destroy everything else in his category and everyone who might make more? That Hopkins programmed these specific lines into him, and made him part of a storyline where a cult in the wilderness devolves into eating people, indicates he is a self-judgement - his obsessions had led him to ritualistic and consuming violence against entities of the same sort as himself. Could he have gone further? Has the father's turning against him been something he consciously wanted? Programmed, or at lesst invited?
12. Hopkins' interest in, and identificstion of, the second-oldest "host" (another double meaninged word?) suggests he must an at least as personal attachment to his first, Wood. Since she's apparently specifically visited by Harris the day before he scalps the card dealer she may be part of the "maze" quest. We assume rape is going on in the barn, but suppose it's something else? While it's clear he gets off on black-hat path misbehavior it's made equally clear that he's become rather bored with it, so visiting Wood, who he notes has undergone some personality changes (because of waxing sentience or just periodic tweaking?) since he saw her last, seems purposive. Perhaps committing some particular set of the worst crimes in the right order permits a black hat player to find the maze, whereas a different set of activities gets a white hat there? That white hat player we meet in episode 2 may end up recurring, if so. Whether the maze quest has anything to do with the black church we'll have to see. Perhaps Hopkins wants to isolate a particularly horrible person as some sort of test of Wood and his other upgraded creations? To see if they'll kill him, say? Which may be exactly what he wants, if he's truly out to chase his demons over the edge, as one character says. He only accepts under a sort of erasure the junior designer's judgement that his progress as creator has been "remarkable." Perhaps he feels it's been remarkably wicked and wishes to atone by replacing humankind with something in every sense better. Black-dressed Hector tells the older prostitute thst both of them believe in performing their dirty business well, and his subsequent and clumsy near-motiveless murder by a newcomer while the Stones' "I look inside myself and see my heart is black" verse is suggested presents that good badness in sharp contrast to humanity's bad badness. So there's that.
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Date: 2016-10-14 04:49 pm (UTC)1. They said something about old versions of the hosts' hands. The hands were a giveaway. Harris always in gloves?
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Date: 2016-10-15 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-15 12:18 pm (UTC)Can't remember if there are flies in Brave New World. But there's a Ford, a Bernard and a "vacation" to New Mexico.
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Date: 2016-10-15 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-15 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-15 07:21 pm (UTC)