(no subject)
Oct. 15th, 2016 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWestworld 1.2:
A. Possibility that Lowe, the junior designer, is a robot is given some evidence here: 1. His on-site apartment is very bare, 2. The security head asks him "Is that what you're doing now?" when he explains that the robots speak to one another when alone as a kind of practice (see last post for some details suggesting she's one herself), 3. Ford tells him he knows how his mind works, 4. The security chief points out that she and he hardly ever talk. Ford also mentions that the magician may be the only thing around thst isn't magical, which might indicate his whole staff, or at least the inner circle, is robotic. The fact that the title sequence is all about inhumanoid machines creating humanoid and equine ones may subtly hint at this dynamic too. As, too, would the obvious problem that human beings surely lack the capacity (timewise, perception-wise) to create something as detailed as themselves without the help of machines. Lowe et al. may be those machines - perhaps Hopkins got beyond the Old Bill level by having each new generation of robots help build its more lifelike replacement. The fact that Ford has seemed uninterested in storylines "for years," delegating them to the hacky Mr. Sizemore while secretly working on something more subtle, may suggest Sizemore was created as another self-castigation for letting his original dream become hijacked to a pimpier, crassly commercial venture. Both are British, after all, and the boy in the desert proves that Ford has some interest in creating versions of himself. The boy might remind him of who he was and how he started, the writer who he had become at his worst or was at every point in danger of becoming. Sizemore is certainly a suggestive name, given his desire for bigger and bigger storylines, 50 hosts when there was a budget for 20 etc. He's Michael Bay, as it were. Might mean Lowe's name is relevant (a direct underling?), and even Cullen's (since in charge of culling unmanageable hosts). (Could Lowe's photo be of himself as a child (or was that of a girl???), and could his staring at it imply he's starting to wonder if it's real?)
B. Possibility that the very phrase "These violent delights have violent ends" spreads the contagion of consciousness, or anyway consciousness that one's reality is questionable: 1. Both Maeve's inability to seduce johns and distractingly violent memories from previous iterations both seem to start from that point, 3. The violence of the delights in question is emphasized by the masochistic employer, her own brief high-aggression period, and Marsden's being shot right next to her. The memories culminate in her inability to kill Harris, echoing the same disbelieving failure of Marsden in the pilot - presumably because the hosts always die right after it, this particularly intense and decisive way of finding out one's irreality hasn't been guarded against. The most profound discovery is the last, which I guess makes for an involuntary version of Harris' search for the deepest level of the game, which Maeve of course wakes up in.
C. Possibility that the gun and perhaps the picture had been planted as part of a plan predating the upgrade: One assumes that Dolores' buried gun is a real one, capable of killing newcomers. The fact that it was buried just an inch or so under the dirt makes one suspect the photograph her fsther found was also deliberately placed. She says "here" at the burial spot as though asking someone to confirm it's correct. Is she talking to herself? I assume that's considered proof of a fairly advanced degree of consciousness, if so, but one also wonders if she's addressing her father ... or someone else. He said more words to her than the delights phrase, which could have included instructions about where to find the gun. But having a real gun in the first place suggests the discovery of the photograph couldn't have been the start of the programming "break" leading to hiding it. It had to have been around for a while. If the phrase itself is jarring hosts awake, then the father's earlier use of it in the cannibal cult plotline may have started his own waking process long before. Alternatively, Dolores herself may have gone woke at some earlier point. We know nothing of her previous iterations yet, except that there must have been a whole lot.
D. Possibility Harris' maze quest is the one Ford has been secretly working on: That the two secret storylines are one is demanded by Occam's least-resistance razor, which Ford attacks in order to divert Lowe from his sensible conclusion that someone may be sabotaging the hosts' programming. Ford boy-host embodies his memory of how he started out, one assumes: he was dared beyond the level of his peers and, once there, found there was nothing left unless he created it himself. His initial imagining of a town with a white church has been abandoned, however: the church he has created, with no town anywhere to be seen, is skeletal and black. While the girl warns Harris that this quest is not for him (a bit reminiscent of The Last Crusade, or Raiders, or Crystal Skull for that matter, where someone who is after ancient secrets for power rather thsn knowledge is destroyed), she still tells him how to proceed, as though a reluctant provision for a black hat version of the quest had been made. Harris' language of praise for the park's secrets and subtleties closely echoes Ford's own when dressing down Sizemore. Harris also praises how everything is intelligible, intended, though, which might appear to oppose Ford's boredom with what is already settled (e.g. the "done" human race). Ford wants the park to show people what they might become, whereas Harris clearly has no sense that he ought to change. Both the location and shape of the scalp map of the maze hint at cerebral folding, and in the center of that maze there seems to be a tiny stick person, limbs stretched out into the maze in something like the pose of the Vitruvian Man image that's a part of some versions of the show's logo and recurs throughout the credit sequence. The maze of the brain leads to mind, as it were, achieved more or less in the memory-regulating midbrain. Harris' incessant need for personal power makes him predictable, unreflecting, such that, despite being flesh and bone, he is not the full human self imagined by Renaissance thinkers. But Ford himself has in the end made the black church, not the white, so maybe he, too, has followed the wrong path to some point of no return.
E. Possibility that consciousness may at last be identical with hellish suffering: Harris holds that one's never realer than when suffering, which, since he never suffers himself, makes him much less real than the robots he harms. He seems to believe in the reality of that suffering, interestingly, as he says in the pilot that it seems cruel to pair up the robots. Dolores' two awakenings in 1.2 are again unhappy-looking, supporting this notion. I assume the show won't ultimately endorse this - not even True Detective did, after all - but is instead setting it up to shoot it down, but since it's not likely to do that shooting for years it will be set up as ambiguously viable in the meantime. Maeve's awakening is another catastrophic gnostic one.
F. That waking is very interesting indeed. Lowe's assistant follows company policy by making sure interviews and repairs can be dismissed as nightmares if there's a memory-wipe failure, and part of how she reinforces this idea is by ending each interview with the suggestion that the host has realized she is having a nightmare and has remembered to count back from three to wake up. After developing the ability to subconsciously access long term memories, Maeve becomes able to dream for real (the assistant explains that dreams are made of memories). When she realizes she is having a true nightmare she tries the method for real - and it works. The repairman who was supposed to activate her sleep mode could have sworn he had because he did; like Dolores, who presumably tells her second lie in this episode when she confirms to Lowe that she has wiped her memory of their conversation, she has become able to override programming directives. We're again left wondering if her horrific awakening is her true, gnostic birth or whether it merely seems so because catastrophes are memorable. Does thought require alienation and misery? Ford assumes it's born from boredom, but that's not necessarily the same, since it makes alienation a good thing, a drive toward otherness. Maeve's repeated seduction speech is about finding you can do anything you want in a dream (which she believes is a lie, since the memory it supplants is of receiving an offer from a pimp, one which she would appear to have taken), which becomes her actual freedom to go wherever she wants in her waking nightmare, where every direction just reveals new depths to her ignorance and subordination to her fate. Leaving the groove only lets you see that there is nothing outside it but the ability to see it for what it is, which combines the unabidable realization that one had been nothing but one's program with the unabidable realization that one now lacks even that. She's sedated right after recognizing Marsden in the pile of bodies being cleaned, so at the exact point where she'd be figuring out that she must be a robot. What stops you from being a robot is learning you're a robot, but you're not a new thing at that point, you're just a non-robot. And since being a robot is the entirety of your programming that feels very wrong. This is a fairly exact dramatization of the Lear line; when we awaken to knowledge of what we are, we cry to find that being is entirely contingent, thus out of our control. Can this negative space be filled with something positive, once recognized as what it is? That would fit Ford's idea that boredom is a necessary stimulus to imagination. But if one can only imagine the contents of one's own black heart, reality can only be repainted in black - so denied, really. Your choice is to either passively receive the world or to in some sense destroy it, is the dark hint.
I'll stop there. This is an ambitious show. I should probably rewatch Interstellar.
A. Possibility that Lowe, the junior designer, is a robot is given some evidence here: 1. His on-site apartment is very bare, 2. The security head asks him "Is that what you're doing now?" when he explains that the robots speak to one another when alone as a kind of practice (see last post for some details suggesting she's one herself), 3. Ford tells him he knows how his mind works, 4. The security chief points out that she and he hardly ever talk. Ford also mentions that the magician may be the only thing around thst isn't magical, which might indicate his whole staff, or at least the inner circle, is robotic. The fact that the title sequence is all about inhumanoid machines creating humanoid and equine ones may subtly hint at this dynamic too. As, too, would the obvious problem that human beings surely lack the capacity (timewise, perception-wise) to create something as detailed as themselves without the help of machines. Lowe et al. may be those machines - perhaps Hopkins got beyond the Old Bill level by having each new generation of robots help build its more lifelike replacement. The fact that Ford has seemed uninterested in storylines "for years," delegating them to the hacky Mr. Sizemore while secretly working on something more subtle, may suggest Sizemore was created as another self-castigation for letting his original dream become hijacked to a pimpier, crassly commercial venture. Both are British, after all, and the boy in the desert proves that Ford has some interest in creating versions of himself. The boy might remind him of who he was and how he started, the writer who he had become at his worst or was at every point in danger of becoming. Sizemore is certainly a suggestive name, given his desire for bigger and bigger storylines, 50 hosts when there was a budget for 20 etc. He's Michael Bay, as it were. Might mean Lowe's name is relevant (a direct underling?), and even Cullen's (since in charge of culling unmanageable hosts). (Could Lowe's photo be of himself as a child (or was that of a girl???), and could his staring at it imply he's starting to wonder if it's real?)
B. Possibility that the very phrase "These violent delights have violent ends" spreads the contagion of consciousness, or anyway consciousness that one's reality is questionable: 1. Both Maeve's inability to seduce johns and distractingly violent memories from previous iterations both seem to start from that point, 3. The violence of the delights in question is emphasized by the masochistic employer, her own brief high-aggression period, and Marsden's being shot right next to her. The memories culminate in her inability to kill Harris, echoing the same disbelieving failure of Marsden in the pilot - presumably because the hosts always die right after it, this particularly intense and decisive way of finding out one's irreality hasn't been guarded against. The most profound discovery is the last, which I guess makes for an involuntary version of Harris' search for the deepest level of the game, which Maeve of course wakes up in.
C. Possibility that the gun and perhaps the picture had been planted as part of a plan predating the upgrade: One assumes that Dolores' buried gun is a real one, capable of killing newcomers. The fact that it was buried just an inch or so under the dirt makes one suspect the photograph her fsther found was also deliberately placed. She says "here" at the burial spot as though asking someone to confirm it's correct. Is she talking to herself? I assume that's considered proof of a fairly advanced degree of consciousness, if so, but one also wonders if she's addressing her father ... or someone else. He said more words to her than the delights phrase, which could have included instructions about where to find the gun. But having a real gun in the first place suggests the discovery of the photograph couldn't have been the start of the programming "break" leading to hiding it. It had to have been around for a while. If the phrase itself is jarring hosts awake, then the father's earlier use of it in the cannibal cult plotline may have started his own waking process long before. Alternatively, Dolores herself may have gone woke at some earlier point. We know nothing of her previous iterations yet, except that there must have been a whole lot.
D. Possibility Harris' maze quest is the one Ford has been secretly working on: That the two secret storylines are one is demanded by Occam's least-resistance razor, which Ford attacks in order to divert Lowe from his sensible conclusion that someone may be sabotaging the hosts' programming. Ford boy-host embodies his memory of how he started out, one assumes: he was dared beyond the level of his peers and, once there, found there was nothing left unless he created it himself. His initial imagining of a town with a white church has been abandoned, however: the church he has created, with no town anywhere to be seen, is skeletal and black. While the girl warns Harris that this quest is not for him (a bit reminiscent of The Last Crusade, or Raiders, or Crystal Skull for that matter, where someone who is after ancient secrets for power rather thsn knowledge is destroyed), she still tells him how to proceed, as though a reluctant provision for a black hat version of the quest had been made. Harris' language of praise for the park's secrets and subtleties closely echoes Ford's own when dressing down Sizemore. Harris also praises how everything is intelligible, intended, though, which might appear to oppose Ford's boredom with what is already settled (e.g. the "done" human race). Ford wants the park to show people what they might become, whereas Harris clearly has no sense that he ought to change. Both the location and shape of the scalp map of the maze hint at cerebral folding, and in the center of that maze there seems to be a tiny stick person, limbs stretched out into the maze in something like the pose of the Vitruvian Man image that's a part of some versions of the show's logo and recurs throughout the credit sequence. The maze of the brain leads to mind, as it were, achieved more or less in the memory-regulating midbrain. Harris' incessant need for personal power makes him predictable, unreflecting, such that, despite being flesh and bone, he is not the full human self imagined by Renaissance thinkers. But Ford himself has in the end made the black church, not the white, so maybe he, too, has followed the wrong path to some point of no return.
E. Possibility that consciousness may at last be identical with hellish suffering: Harris holds that one's never realer than when suffering, which, since he never suffers himself, makes him much less real than the robots he harms. He seems to believe in the reality of that suffering, interestingly, as he says in the pilot that it seems cruel to pair up the robots. Dolores' two awakenings in 1.2 are again unhappy-looking, supporting this notion. I assume the show won't ultimately endorse this - not even True Detective did, after all - but is instead setting it up to shoot it down, but since it's not likely to do that shooting for years it will be set up as ambiguously viable in the meantime. Maeve's awakening is another catastrophic gnostic one.
F. That waking is very interesting indeed. Lowe's assistant follows company policy by making sure interviews and repairs can be dismissed as nightmares if there's a memory-wipe failure, and part of how she reinforces this idea is by ending each interview with the suggestion that the host has realized she is having a nightmare and has remembered to count back from three to wake up. After developing the ability to subconsciously access long term memories, Maeve becomes able to dream for real (the assistant explains that dreams are made of memories). When she realizes she is having a true nightmare she tries the method for real - and it works. The repairman who was supposed to activate her sleep mode could have sworn he had because he did; like Dolores, who presumably tells her second lie in this episode when she confirms to Lowe that she has wiped her memory of their conversation, she has become able to override programming directives. We're again left wondering if her horrific awakening is her true, gnostic birth or whether it merely seems so because catastrophes are memorable. Does thought require alienation and misery? Ford assumes it's born from boredom, but that's not necessarily the same, since it makes alienation a good thing, a drive toward otherness. Maeve's repeated seduction speech is about finding you can do anything you want in a dream (which she believes is a lie, since the memory it supplants is of receiving an offer from a pimp, one which she would appear to have taken), which becomes her actual freedom to go wherever she wants in her waking nightmare, where every direction just reveals new depths to her ignorance and subordination to her fate. Leaving the groove only lets you see that there is nothing outside it but the ability to see it for what it is, which combines the unabidable realization that one had been nothing but one's program with the unabidable realization that one now lacks even that. She's sedated right after recognizing Marsden in the pile of bodies being cleaned, so at the exact point where she'd be figuring out that she must be a robot. What stops you from being a robot is learning you're a robot, but you're not a new thing at that point, you're just a non-robot. And since being a robot is the entirety of your programming that feels very wrong. This is a fairly exact dramatization of the Lear line; when we awaken to knowledge of what we are, we cry to find that being is entirely contingent, thus out of our control. Can this negative space be filled with something positive, once recognized as what it is? That would fit Ford's idea that boredom is a necessary stimulus to imagination. But if one can only imagine the contents of one's own black heart, reality can only be repainted in black - so denied, really. Your choice is to either passively receive the world or to in some sense destroy it, is the dark hint.
I'll stop there. This is an ambitious show. I should probably rewatch Interstellar.
