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Oct. 20th, 2016 02:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionSome further Westworld thoughts:
It's highlighted that the park means one thing to customers (fulfillment of sex, power or other fantasies), another to shareholders (money), and another to management. One assumes the latter would be interested in something capable of bringing in even more money than real-life-movie vacations do. Two ready possibilities come up: military/espionage uses of lifelike robots and (much more interestingly) eternally youthful replacement bodies for the rich. Ford's plan, which seems fully known only to him, may be just a version of this - an artificial brain needs to be capable of consciousness before another's can be downloaded into it, after all.
But it may instead be a fourth, entirely unknown to the security chief, like fathering a race of independent AI who will outshine or replace humanity as paragon of nature etc. The blechiness of those other motives tells us there may be a good case for that replacement, though Ford also is interested in showing people who they might be, a method we see working on the whitehat newcomer. He's set up as good artist vs. Sizemore's bad artist, so I suspect his allegiance to a different sort of more isn't one that's supposed to exclude humanity. Some ambiguous signs point to his not believing in the reality, or maybe the importance, of his creations' feelings, so it's possible moving a human consciousness into a human-2.0 robot is his aesthetic goal as well as his company's financial one. But I think those signs, like cutting a robot's face with a scalpel to show Lowe the lack of reaction, could as easily be about how he hasn't YET created consciousness.
Except with, perhaps among a few others, Dolores. Who is thus a sort of daughter. On a sort of island. Who has been raised to be better than the people her aging "magician" father left behind. Who have nevertheless followed him there. And whose manifest guilt may either merit their destruction or prove forgivable due to saving features of the better among them.
Sound familiar? Dolores' optimistic set speech about life etc., how she speaks of the newcomers - this is Miranda, in "what brave new world" mode. (Ed Harris may prove a sort of Caliban, and maybe Arnold, if real and flitting about in people's heads, a version of Ariel, but who knows yet.) Dunno if the show is committed enough to this correspondence to have Whitehat be a Ferdinand and whatnot, but it doesn't need to be.
One thing about this Tempest possibility is it renders more likely that the show's influenced by Bloom's Shakespeare. While many take Prospero as a mask for Shakespeare, Bloom's contention that Shakespeare's real magic was to create self-aware characters means that Prospero's can be seen that way. Suppose Miranda was not just raised on the island but made there, the successful version to Caliban's botched one. Because that IS the botching of Caliban, that he isn't sentient in the right way, knows only kissing up, kicking down, scheming. Caliban's loveless and reductive, Miranda loving and full of wonder. And what else has his magic even done? All he ever did there was imprison Ariel (who's basically the magic anyway), fight Sycorax (routing some previous magician/artist? reclaiming something from a hostile nature?), and raise two kids to adulthood, one poorly. The kids are the focus. Otherwise the island is just an island - though full of wandering voices saying what he bids and surrounded by winds and clouds blowing where he wishes (sounds a bit like Shakespeare's turbulent, polyvocal verses). But if kids are characters, and maybe, inclusively, works of art based around them ... then all writing has been able to do is make a worse version of a human being followed by a better. With the restoration of the latter to the human race ending a writer's purpose in this world.
(Huh. The Tempest is thus more of a template for Crusoe in England than Defoe's Robinson is. Be still, my thoughts, and dare not that way tend.)
Is Prospero only an exile in the way that any artist is an exile, or is there a specific axe Shakespeare's grinding? Hard to see his career as having had a peak, then a lull, then a restoration to full honor, but there's room between the iffy WH stuff, shake-scene stuff, the Jonson and possibly Chapman rivalries, the little boy troupe vogue etc. for such business to have busied. Hell, the very existence of his Timon, which is pure rant in places, bespeaks some bitter period of disappointment. May explain Coriolanus, too. Suppose Shakespeare felt his kind of art had been rejected in favor of another, that he was in efect now practicing it by himself all alone. I can't remember if Bloom actually theorizes, in Invention or elsewhere, that Shakespeare himself saw his magicianship as ultimately character-based, or that he felt he'd changed human nature by showing people how listening to themselves could enable self-change, or that The Tempest comments on either phenomenon. But even if he doesn't Nolan and co. might put the theory and play together for him, and offer a Tempest where the inventor of better sorts of human consciousness and of art both castigates and subsequently forgives the worse sorts of both, at last leaving his best creations in the hands of those few ready to receive them. (Dolores is literally in Whitehat's at the end of 1.3.)
Could the ubiquitous non-getting of Interstellar, by admirers and detractors alike, have rendered Nolan sympathetic to such a reading of Shakespeare? With the island exile maybe being television itself, and, what, Caliban Person of Interest, Miranda Westworld?
My brain is doing that thing it does again. Shit. I've also been wondering quite a bit about a Lolita connection, with Dolores, but that's probably just carryover from all that Mr. Robot decoding I got caught up in.
It's highlighted that the park means one thing to customers (fulfillment of sex, power or other fantasies), another to shareholders (money), and another to management. One assumes the latter would be interested in something capable of bringing in even more money than real-life-movie vacations do. Two ready possibilities come up: military/espionage uses of lifelike robots and (much more interestingly) eternally youthful replacement bodies for the rich. Ford's plan, which seems fully known only to him, may be just a version of this - an artificial brain needs to be capable of consciousness before another's can be downloaded into it, after all.
But it may instead be a fourth, entirely unknown to the security chief, like fathering a race of independent AI who will outshine or replace humanity as paragon of nature etc. The blechiness of those other motives tells us there may be a good case for that replacement, though Ford also is interested in showing people who they might be, a method we see working on the whitehat newcomer. He's set up as good artist vs. Sizemore's bad artist, so I suspect his allegiance to a different sort of more isn't one that's supposed to exclude humanity. Some ambiguous signs point to his not believing in the reality, or maybe the importance, of his creations' feelings, so it's possible moving a human consciousness into a human-2.0 robot is his aesthetic goal as well as his company's financial one. But I think those signs, like cutting a robot's face with a scalpel to show Lowe the lack of reaction, could as easily be about how he hasn't YET created consciousness.
Except with, perhaps among a few others, Dolores. Who is thus a sort of daughter. On a sort of island. Who has been raised to be better than the people her aging "magician" father left behind. Who have nevertheless followed him there. And whose manifest guilt may either merit their destruction or prove forgivable due to saving features of the better among them.
Sound familiar? Dolores' optimistic set speech about life etc., how she speaks of the newcomers - this is Miranda, in "what brave new world" mode. (Ed Harris may prove a sort of Caliban, and maybe Arnold, if real and flitting about in people's heads, a version of Ariel, but who knows yet.) Dunno if the show is committed enough to this correspondence to have Whitehat be a Ferdinand and whatnot, but it doesn't need to be.
One thing about this Tempest possibility is it renders more likely that the show's influenced by Bloom's Shakespeare. While many take Prospero as a mask for Shakespeare, Bloom's contention that Shakespeare's real magic was to create self-aware characters means that Prospero's can be seen that way. Suppose Miranda was not just raised on the island but made there, the successful version to Caliban's botched one. Because that IS the botching of Caliban, that he isn't sentient in the right way, knows only kissing up, kicking down, scheming. Caliban's loveless and reductive, Miranda loving and full of wonder. And what else has his magic even done? All he ever did there was imprison Ariel (who's basically the magic anyway), fight Sycorax (routing some previous magician/artist? reclaiming something from a hostile nature?), and raise two kids to adulthood, one poorly. The kids are the focus. Otherwise the island is just an island - though full of wandering voices saying what he bids and surrounded by winds and clouds blowing where he wishes (sounds a bit like Shakespeare's turbulent, polyvocal verses). But if kids are characters, and maybe, inclusively, works of art based around them ... then all writing has been able to do is make a worse version of a human being followed by a better. With the restoration of the latter to the human race ending a writer's purpose in this world.
(Huh. The Tempest is thus more of a template for Crusoe in England than Defoe's Robinson is. Be still, my thoughts, and dare not that way tend.)
Is Prospero only an exile in the way that any artist is an exile, or is there a specific axe Shakespeare's grinding? Hard to see his career as having had a peak, then a lull, then a restoration to full honor, but there's room between the iffy WH stuff, shake-scene stuff, the Jonson and possibly Chapman rivalries, the little boy troupe vogue etc. for such business to have busied. Hell, the very existence of his Timon, which is pure rant in places, bespeaks some bitter period of disappointment. May explain Coriolanus, too. Suppose Shakespeare felt his kind of art had been rejected in favor of another, that he was in efect now practicing it by himself all alone. I can't remember if Bloom actually theorizes, in Invention or elsewhere, that Shakespeare himself saw his magicianship as ultimately character-based, or that he felt he'd changed human nature by showing people how listening to themselves could enable self-change, or that The Tempest comments on either phenomenon. But even if he doesn't Nolan and co. might put the theory and play together for him, and offer a Tempest where the inventor of better sorts of human consciousness and of art both castigates and subsequently forgives the worse sorts of both, at last leaving his best creations in the hands of those few ready to receive them. (Dolores is literally in Whitehat's at the end of 1.3.)
Could the ubiquitous non-getting of Interstellar, by admirers and detractors alike, have rendered Nolan sympathetic to such a reading of Shakespeare? With the island exile maybe being television itself, and, what, Caliban Person of Interest, Miranda Westworld?
My brain is doing that thing it does again. Shit. I've also been wondering quite a bit about a Lolita connection, with Dolores, but that's probably just carryover from all that Mr. Robot decoding I got caught up in.
