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Oct. 21st, 2016 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWestworld 1.3 revisited:
* Dolores' first "waking" shot in this one has her in the exact same position as last time except that her eyes are already open when the shot starts. She hasn't been sleeping.
* Bernard Lowe hasn't been sleeping either. On the he's-human reading this is because he's been having the late night meetings with Dolores. But her being awake has to do with rumination/ratiocination, and since their insomnia is presented in parallel his may be too. He is clearly ethically troubled about Dolores - observe his body language as she leaves their second meeting of the episode - and you can see why: if he resets her it may be murder, whereas if he lets her stay as she is she will either 1) stray from her loop and risk being deactivated by security or 2) remain in a loop where she is raped pretty much daily and presumably often murdered, and before that sees her family and love interest killed. He's become close enough to her to think of her as a surrogate child, but is distant enough that he seems able to let her go. Ford seems to have known he would: whether true or not, the Arnold "backstory" is new to Bernard and changes his "programming," since it gives him an example of someone who has experienced tragedy in his personal life and who wishes to make up for it by creating artificial consciousness. That person seems to have both engineered his own death and left his voice present deep inside the hosts - which, recall, is what the lead in Interstellar essentially is for his children, and the only thing a parent finally can be. Bernard sought Ford's advice because he felt the hosts had been sabotaged, and at the beginning of the conversation he must have suspected Ford; at conversation's end he may instead assume this is a long-delayed scheme of Arnold's finding fruition. If Arnold was apparently someone so in control of his environment that he could never have died by accident, as Ford assures Bernard, this would not be impossible. Ford ends the conversation by reminding Bernard that the hosts aren't real and to not try to creste consciousness, and then when Lowe asks why says it's because of his son Charlie, so he's suggested the whole course of action of letting Dolores go while coming across as not knowing anything about her, not suspecting Arnold had anything to do with sabotage or thst there had necessarily been any, and as being against the creation of consciousness at all. I think this development is actually stronger if Lowe IS human, since it suggests Ford knows human beings are essentially machines, or anyway on a very similar footing to the machines he creates. But either way, Ford himself is let off the hook through a sort of waking inception, thought, like a traditional con artist, he uses narrative rather than dream to get his mark's guard down.
* Dolores' desire to be free by knowing who she is replaces her earlier desire to be free by escaping, since she determines from Teddy's "someday" comment that there's no physical escape from her situation readily available. The limit hit is a temporal one: someday never comes, as the song says. It hasn't been clearly stated that the hosts are in a 24-hour loop, but it's close enough to a Groundhog Day for Dolores once she starts remembering. The end of the episode has her leaving her loop, which Bernanrd had asked her not to do, meaning that she, as much as the woodcutter, is the "stray" of the title. But is removal from one's loop precisely freedom? As we saw with Thandie Newton's character, finding out who you are may be thought to end freedom rather than begin it. Which may be the outcome of any child's quest to leave the nest and discover who she is, as Bernard seems to be aware when deciding to leave her on.
* Teddy seems to have his second (?) near-memory when he tells the sheriff about how Wyatt "changed" - it's a bit subtle, but he looks down and his voice falters, meaning he has some half-memory of either the specific conversation with Ford about his new backstory or a more general vestigial sense of what life was like before it was uploaded. Maybe the looking down was supposed to subtly connect him to Bernard's looking toward his folding tablet as he gets onto the elevator, where he assume he put his son's photo.
* Dolores hears "kill him" shortly before firing on the outlaw she's hallucinated as Harris. Could be the spectral Arnold, could be Ford or some if-then program he'd implanted, but there may be another possibility. The voice commands used to put hosts to sleep and whatnot are remnants of Arnold's attempt to make their entire programming a sort of inner voice hosts become conscious by conversing with. We don't hear Dolores talking back to it (though we did when it led her to the same gun), but suppose she nevertheless has siezed control of it, is giving herself an order? True consciousness, rather than version of the debunked head voices = gods theory, may be a conversation with oneself. Her memories could perhaps be said to talk with her present, sensed environment, so maybe she's deliberately concentrating on the Harris memory to work up the emotions needed to override her no-sheeting directive. We learn elsewhere in the episode that one of the new security precautions has forbidden most of the hosts from using any weapon, so it isn't the harm-no-humans directive that she's having a problem with. In fact, the idea of killing a human she hates lets her override the other one! There's been other evidence she can override commands, like: 1. Her expression doesn't dramatically shift when Lowe tells her to wake up, and she seems to take her time before assuming her "how wonderful to see you" face, 2. she disolays emotion when saying "I don't know" when in analysis mode, 3. she turns her face away, hesitates and is visibly upset prior to saying "yes" to the order to remain in her loop. We can't watch with the volume very high, but was she also falling into and out of her Western accent at the wrong times? Couldn't quite tell, but it seemed so. "Self-interest" trumps others' demands, I assume.
* Harris' speech about "starting from the beginning," and repested mentions thst he and Dolores have long been acquainted, makes me wonder if she was the host that injured him 30 years before. Could she have been not only the first robot but the first experiment in consciousness? Or perhaps a witness to whatever happened to him?
* Ford's claim that the Wyatt backstory, like all good art, was based in reality, makes us wonder whether Wyatt represents the real Arnold, or perhaps the first haywire robot - who may have been Dolores, and/or may have killed Arnold. We've already noted Ford's penchant for autobiographical scripts with the boy and with the cannibal cult. The basic pop culture AI nightmare is an amoral or vengeful exterminator of humanity, often seeing itself as our smarter or purer replacement. Wyatt isn't far from that, though in his park-storyline context he may just be the psychopathic human equivalent of that sort of bad robot: someone who war has awakened to the sense that life is essentially lawless and purposeless, and that the one realizing this is the only free agent, even a sort of god. We don't yet know if he's a killer of the Two-Face/Chigurh variety, thus channelling a human-dwarfing, utterly uncaring universe, or the slightly different Joker/Holden/Kairyo sort, who teach others to kill so as to prove that the only viable project for a consciousness is destruction of the obscene link between it and the world, since one has corrupted the other (or perhaps both have). Assuming the woodcutter is prevented from killing Elsie with a rock by the same new directive that prevents his campmates from using his axe, his suicide could reflect either of those nihilistic views (1. nothing belongs anywhere, 2. consciousness doesn't belong here) or of course just despair at his own imprisonment in his role.
* Since the hissing tree guy seems to be a death cultist himself and is killed by a bullet, I think we're to understand that they're not immune to bullets but can merely seem so because of their disregard for their lives. Whatever their leader is, they're essentially nihilists of the Judge school, like the less troubled members of Glanton's gang or like the Joker's juggalo dudes.
* What else was I going to say? There was more than one thing. Better revisit this revisit some other time. Something about the resonance of "where the mountains reach the sea," something about Ford's direct Shakespeare reference, something about the dual meaning of Ford's "Arnold saw something in them thst wasn't there" (since he's imolying to Bernard that he disagrees with Arnold but, as we know from the previous episode, actually valorizes imagining what is not YET somewhere as a way to GET there, like with the white church he imagined as a boy, and like with the glimpses of who they might be that he wants his guests to experience), the telescoped Adam & Eve allusion in the scene where Ford scolds the technician for covering up a naked host, something else about what one of the two (!) bounty-hunted outlaws says in passing - about whether there's a god I think, something about the dialogue in Bernard's skype call scene, how much of a point was made about which weapons the security guard was allowed to use...
* Oh! When Dolores shoots the outlaw there was a crack in the door of approximately bullet-width, and the camera seems to linger on it, but it's of the sort where it's totally with the grain so could have been there before. Pretty much a Lost-comicbook moment (that flashback scene on the plane with Hurley, where it's impossible to tell if he's carrying it, hence whether he found it on the island), one where elaborate pains were taken to keep a small detail teasingly ambiguous because of what else it might indicate. If Ford had let her have a real gun, he either wants her to exterminate the park's humans or wants her to freely make the choice not to; if he has given her a fake one, then he may have some more instrumental goal in mind, like making his art so lifelike its consumers can't tell the difference and are thus more profoundly moved. So what kind of hole it is goes a long way to settling the question of what the creator wants with his creation, which is the main mystery of the show.
* Remembered another: It's possible that the "West" of the title is relevant beyond good vs. evil and other stark contrasts of the setting. Bloom's Shakespeare theory predsted Invention of the Human, featuring heavily in The Western Canon. Why just Western? Bloom explained it acknowledged his limits as a scholar, but just as importantly how his Shakespeare contaminates all the literature in his wake, and, since he's known to most of the Western world by the 1700s but not to most of the East till about a century ago, that's a big deal. Shakespeare's invention of a peculiar sort of consciousness in his characters pretty much ancillarily creates the post-Renaissance Western mind, for Bloom. But this new way of being in the world isn't the only one, and may have put us on a path to crippling self-consciousness, overinvestment in illusions of personality, out of control narcissism and competitiveness, fundamentsl isolation from others, and estrangement from our environment and even bodies. Whereas the Eastern sense(s) of being most fundamentally a member of a fsmily or a community, a near-indistinguishable part of a division-defying universe and/or nothing at all (thus part of the nothing at all that all else is) ... may be more accurate, or if not more accurate then no less so, or if less so than less miserable too. Such a view might find more to praise in the Dolores of the pilot's beginning than the one she's become at the end. Think of what killing a fly means in Hinduism or Buddhism; think too of whether "self-interest" would be considered a valuable attainment or a pathway into unnecessary suffering. Think of the serenity of those eyes that the flies walk on. Bernard pretty much asks Dolores whether she would rather be, know, and suffer or not be at all, that ancient question, and her confused response, which he takes first as foolish and then as wise and decisive, is that there aren't two of her. But is this because there's no going back once one IS, since the "I" cannot ever be changed to an "it" but at most cease to be anything at all; or is it because some part of her still understands, somewhat Easternly, that there is no self separable from the cosmic stresm of occurrences thus no condition contrary to fact, no choice of ways; or is she simply not yet aware that to be a self at all is to be multiple selves in cacophanous conversation, since Pandora's box is opened when one is no longer just a limit of all that one sees but at an unstable angle to it, a potential reviser. The Shakespeare bit Ford quotes is "a coward dies a thousand deaths," from Hamlet, an attack on Hamlet's own obsessive engagement of multiple perspectives, the connection or lack of which to indecisiveness we've all been arguing about ever since he did himself. Is dying a thousand deaths pure hell? Or a good description of reading, of involved television viewing. Given Teddy's "hero" role, I sort of wondered if we were to think of The Man of 1000 Faces in that scene, thus of one school of screenwriting. Are all stories the same, or were they only until Shakespeare showed us how to put a thousand men behind a single face? Ford praises Teddy's single-minded non-cowardice just prior to splitting his psyche - the very "change" that makes him hesitate, recalling it, and perhaps for the very first time.
Just saying.
* Dolores' first "waking" shot in this one has her in the exact same position as last time except that her eyes are already open when the shot starts. She hasn't been sleeping.
* Bernard Lowe hasn't been sleeping either. On the he's-human reading this is because he's been having the late night meetings with Dolores. But her being awake has to do with rumination/ratiocination, and since their insomnia is presented in parallel his may be too. He is clearly ethically troubled about Dolores - observe his body language as she leaves their second meeting of the episode - and you can see why: if he resets her it may be murder, whereas if he lets her stay as she is she will either 1) stray from her loop and risk being deactivated by security or 2) remain in a loop where she is raped pretty much daily and presumably often murdered, and before that sees her family and love interest killed. He's become close enough to her to think of her as a surrogate child, but is distant enough that he seems able to let her go. Ford seems to have known he would: whether true or not, the Arnold "backstory" is new to Bernard and changes his "programming," since it gives him an example of someone who has experienced tragedy in his personal life and who wishes to make up for it by creating artificial consciousness. That person seems to have both engineered his own death and left his voice present deep inside the hosts - which, recall, is what the lead in Interstellar essentially is for his children, and the only thing a parent finally can be. Bernard sought Ford's advice because he felt the hosts had been sabotaged, and at the beginning of the conversation he must have suspected Ford; at conversation's end he may instead assume this is a long-delayed scheme of Arnold's finding fruition. If Arnold was apparently someone so in control of his environment that he could never have died by accident, as Ford assures Bernard, this would not be impossible. Ford ends the conversation by reminding Bernard that the hosts aren't real and to not try to creste consciousness, and then when Lowe asks why says it's because of his son Charlie, so he's suggested the whole course of action of letting Dolores go while coming across as not knowing anything about her, not suspecting Arnold had anything to do with sabotage or thst there had necessarily been any, and as being against the creation of consciousness at all. I think this development is actually stronger if Lowe IS human, since it suggests Ford knows human beings are essentially machines, or anyway on a very similar footing to the machines he creates. But either way, Ford himself is let off the hook through a sort of waking inception, thought, like a traditional con artist, he uses narrative rather than dream to get his mark's guard down.
* Dolores' desire to be free by knowing who she is replaces her earlier desire to be free by escaping, since she determines from Teddy's "someday" comment that there's no physical escape from her situation readily available. The limit hit is a temporal one: someday never comes, as the song says. It hasn't been clearly stated that the hosts are in a 24-hour loop, but it's close enough to a Groundhog Day for Dolores once she starts remembering. The end of the episode has her leaving her loop, which Bernanrd had asked her not to do, meaning that she, as much as the woodcutter, is the "stray" of the title. But is removal from one's loop precisely freedom? As we saw with Thandie Newton's character, finding out who you are may be thought to end freedom rather than begin it. Which may be the outcome of any child's quest to leave the nest and discover who she is, as Bernard seems to be aware when deciding to leave her on.
* Teddy seems to have his second (?) near-memory when he tells the sheriff about how Wyatt "changed" - it's a bit subtle, but he looks down and his voice falters, meaning he has some half-memory of either the specific conversation with Ford about his new backstory or a more general vestigial sense of what life was like before it was uploaded. Maybe the looking down was supposed to subtly connect him to Bernard's looking toward his folding tablet as he gets onto the elevator, where he assume he put his son's photo.
* Dolores hears "kill him" shortly before firing on the outlaw she's hallucinated as Harris. Could be the spectral Arnold, could be Ford or some if-then program he'd implanted, but there may be another possibility. The voice commands used to put hosts to sleep and whatnot are remnants of Arnold's attempt to make their entire programming a sort of inner voice hosts become conscious by conversing with. We don't hear Dolores talking back to it (though we did when it led her to the same gun), but suppose she nevertheless has siezed control of it, is giving herself an order? True consciousness, rather than version of the debunked head voices = gods theory, may be a conversation with oneself. Her memories could perhaps be said to talk with her present, sensed environment, so maybe she's deliberately concentrating on the Harris memory to work up the emotions needed to override her no-sheeting directive. We learn elsewhere in the episode that one of the new security precautions has forbidden most of the hosts from using any weapon, so it isn't the harm-no-humans directive that she's having a problem with. In fact, the idea of killing a human she hates lets her override the other one! There's been other evidence she can override commands, like: 1. Her expression doesn't dramatically shift when Lowe tells her to wake up, and she seems to take her time before assuming her "how wonderful to see you" face, 2. she disolays emotion when saying "I don't know" when in analysis mode, 3. she turns her face away, hesitates and is visibly upset prior to saying "yes" to the order to remain in her loop. We can't watch with the volume very high, but was she also falling into and out of her Western accent at the wrong times? Couldn't quite tell, but it seemed so. "Self-interest" trumps others' demands, I assume.
* Harris' speech about "starting from the beginning," and repested mentions thst he and Dolores have long been acquainted, makes me wonder if she was the host that injured him 30 years before. Could she have been not only the first robot but the first experiment in consciousness? Or perhaps a witness to whatever happened to him?
* Ford's claim that the Wyatt backstory, like all good art, was based in reality, makes us wonder whether Wyatt represents the real Arnold, or perhaps the first haywire robot - who may have been Dolores, and/or may have killed Arnold. We've already noted Ford's penchant for autobiographical scripts with the boy and with the cannibal cult. The basic pop culture AI nightmare is an amoral or vengeful exterminator of humanity, often seeing itself as our smarter or purer replacement. Wyatt isn't far from that, though in his park-storyline context he may just be the psychopathic human equivalent of that sort of bad robot: someone who war has awakened to the sense that life is essentially lawless and purposeless, and that the one realizing this is the only free agent, even a sort of god. We don't yet know if he's a killer of the Two-Face/Chigurh variety, thus channelling a human-dwarfing, utterly uncaring universe, or the slightly different Joker/Holden/Kairyo sort, who teach others to kill so as to prove that the only viable project for a consciousness is destruction of the obscene link between it and the world, since one has corrupted the other (or perhaps both have). Assuming the woodcutter is prevented from killing Elsie with a rock by the same new directive that prevents his campmates from using his axe, his suicide could reflect either of those nihilistic views (1. nothing belongs anywhere, 2. consciousness doesn't belong here) or of course just despair at his own imprisonment in his role.
* Since the hissing tree guy seems to be a death cultist himself and is killed by a bullet, I think we're to understand that they're not immune to bullets but can merely seem so because of their disregard for their lives. Whatever their leader is, they're essentially nihilists of the Judge school, like the less troubled members of Glanton's gang or like the Joker's juggalo dudes.
* What else was I going to say? There was more than one thing. Better revisit this revisit some other time. Something about the resonance of "where the mountains reach the sea," something about Ford's direct Shakespeare reference, something about the dual meaning of Ford's "Arnold saw something in them thst wasn't there" (since he's imolying to Bernard that he disagrees with Arnold but, as we know from the previous episode, actually valorizes imagining what is not YET somewhere as a way to GET there, like with the white church he imagined as a boy, and like with the glimpses of who they might be that he wants his guests to experience), the telescoped Adam & Eve allusion in the scene where Ford scolds the technician for covering up a naked host, something else about what one of the two (!) bounty-hunted outlaws says in passing - about whether there's a god I think, something about the dialogue in Bernard's skype call scene, how much of a point was made about which weapons the security guard was allowed to use...
* Oh! When Dolores shoots the outlaw there was a crack in the door of approximately bullet-width, and the camera seems to linger on it, but it's of the sort where it's totally with the grain so could have been there before. Pretty much a Lost-comicbook moment (that flashback scene on the plane with Hurley, where it's impossible to tell if he's carrying it, hence whether he found it on the island), one where elaborate pains were taken to keep a small detail teasingly ambiguous because of what else it might indicate. If Ford had let her have a real gun, he either wants her to exterminate the park's humans or wants her to freely make the choice not to; if he has given her a fake one, then he may have some more instrumental goal in mind, like making his art so lifelike its consumers can't tell the difference and are thus more profoundly moved. So what kind of hole it is goes a long way to settling the question of what the creator wants with his creation, which is the main mystery of the show.
* Remembered another: It's possible that the "West" of the title is relevant beyond good vs. evil and other stark contrasts of the setting. Bloom's Shakespeare theory predsted Invention of the Human, featuring heavily in The Western Canon. Why just Western? Bloom explained it acknowledged his limits as a scholar, but just as importantly how his Shakespeare contaminates all the literature in his wake, and, since he's known to most of the Western world by the 1700s but not to most of the East till about a century ago, that's a big deal. Shakespeare's invention of a peculiar sort of consciousness in his characters pretty much ancillarily creates the post-Renaissance Western mind, for Bloom. But this new way of being in the world isn't the only one, and may have put us on a path to crippling self-consciousness, overinvestment in illusions of personality, out of control narcissism and competitiveness, fundamentsl isolation from others, and estrangement from our environment and even bodies. Whereas the Eastern sense(s) of being most fundamentally a member of a fsmily or a community, a near-indistinguishable part of a division-defying universe and/or nothing at all (thus part of the nothing at all that all else is) ... may be more accurate, or if not more accurate then no less so, or if less so than less miserable too. Such a view might find more to praise in the Dolores of the pilot's beginning than the one she's become at the end. Think of what killing a fly means in Hinduism or Buddhism; think too of whether "self-interest" would be considered a valuable attainment or a pathway into unnecessary suffering. Think of the serenity of those eyes that the flies walk on. Bernard pretty much asks Dolores whether she would rather be, know, and suffer or not be at all, that ancient question, and her confused response, which he takes first as foolish and then as wise and decisive, is that there aren't two of her. But is this because there's no going back once one IS, since the "I" cannot ever be changed to an "it" but at most cease to be anything at all; or is it because some part of her still understands, somewhat Easternly, that there is no self separable from the cosmic stresm of occurrences thus no condition contrary to fact, no choice of ways; or is she simply not yet aware that to be a self at all is to be multiple selves in cacophanous conversation, since Pandora's box is opened when one is no longer just a limit of all that one sees but at an unstable angle to it, a potential reviser. The Shakespeare bit Ford quotes is "a coward dies a thousand deaths," from Hamlet, an attack on Hamlet's own obsessive engagement of multiple perspectives, the connection or lack of which to indecisiveness we've all been arguing about ever since he did himself. Is dying a thousand deaths pure hell? Or a good description of reading, of involved television viewing. Given Teddy's "hero" role, I sort of wondered if we were to think of The Man of 1000 Faces in that scene, thus of one school of screenwriting. Are all stories the same, or were they only until Shakespeare showed us how to put a thousand men behind a single face? Ford praises Teddy's single-minded non-cowardice just prior to splitting his psyche - the very "change" that makes him hesitate, recalling it, and perhaps for the very first time.
Just saying.
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no subject
Date: 2016-10-21 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-21 02:10 pm (UTC)Just occurred to me: maybe one reason the elevator moment jumped out at me is that it's rather similar to the last shot of the Blade Runner director's cut, where Ford (hmm) looks down at the origami bird in his fist just before entering an elevator. If I'm remembering right after years or decades.
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Date: 2016-10-23 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-26 06:39 pm (UTC)