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Oct. 26th, 2016 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception1.4 cont'd:
* Dolores' speech about inner spaces opening up inside her, disused rooms etc. also sounds Bloomian, or anyway like the "growing inner self" rhetoric he borrows from a Dutch psychoanalyst he admires.
* When Bernard asks her if that had been scripted, she goes into analysis mode without being bidden. Suggests either that robots automatically do so when asked about matters like their scripts or that she's starting to shift between her own modes as needed. The opening shot is ambiguous as to whether she's turned off or staring intently at Bernard, but it's at least clear that when she does move it's not an immediate shift of gears but a hesitant one, as though she's either faking it or "coming to" via in-between states, like we might when stirred out of a daydream.
* Does Bernard have a "tell" the way the liaison and younger prostitute do? He takes off and cleans his glasses here, and did a shifty lip thing when Ford mentioned Charlie, so I'll try to be on the lookout for repetitions of either.
* On waking, Dolores seems ready to use her gun to defend herself, then seems a bit troubled that she had been when she finds out that it's only the whitehat by her. She looks down. Kind of a "#notallhumans" effect. Later in the episode she's horrified to find he can be persuaded by his friend to go on a blackhat quest, so it may be that she'll doubt the (apparently) good person at a key moment, and maybe generalize that to all humanity. From his perspective his friend had let him have a turn to do things his way and was now asking for his own, since he sensibly assumes this is all just a live action video game, but to her this is unacceptable bystander behavior. Might instead make her realize, along with other things they say, what the established layers of "reality" are, of course.
* Maeve's drawings of the helmeted handler match the figures in the Indian legends Hector tells her about. As with Teddy's legend of a place in the south "where the mountains reach the sea" and where the water can wash your bad memories away, this fascinatingly both sounds like 1. the kind of folklore that might arise in a human community based on hazy memories of the meta-realm and 2. a direct plant by Ford to influence an individual's behavior (to nudge Maeve into self-awareness and out of her loop; to get Dolores to realize there is no other time or place but this one, for the robots, since they're wiped close to nightly). Since Elsie says that backstories "anchor the hosts," maybe Ford's trying to provide macrocosmic ones that will help them through this transitional period. Not "who I am" but "what the world is," "where it ends" etc. The resonance for us of the great scene where she discovers her multiple drawings, other than its being to a degree based on the as-great scene in Lost where the pile of vacuum tubes with number transcripts is found, is how closely it tracks that Communion-inspiring UFO-sighting phenomenon. Aliens who experiment on us may just be visiting, but may also have near-godlike powers - they can be argued to be a mainstreaming of the Christianity-marginalized Gnostic notion that this world's God is not good. Can't remember if Bloom discusses that in The American Religion, but it certainly fits its thesis that our native religious and cultural developments have a curiously Gnostic tendency, usually of the darker variety, where violence or some other sort of shock is needed to make us productively disbelieve in what's in front of us. Maeve's conclusion is certainly Dark Gnostic: nothing here matters, so let's fuck and die. 1970s-y rejoinder to the Nature Gnosticism of the '60s, as it were, where the problem wasn't seen to be the world but a false view of it preventing us from seeing the real, Edenic one all around us. (The sorts of sex, drugs and rock and roll preferred by each were often notably distinct.) Dolores may be our main NG awakener, Maeve our DG. Dolores' blue dress and blonde hair evoke Alice and pastoral innocence generally, whereas Maeve isn't just madamesque but presented in hardcore, deathbound S&M terms in that Hector scene. Notice how weirdly close these two responses to finding that what's offered as reality can't be trusted are to going White Hat or Black Hat. Just, you know, notice it. Perhaps it's when the things around you aren't real that your real self appears, since peer pressure, feared consequences etc. become irrelevant; if so, it makes sense that this would be experienced in similar ways by both awakening robots and visiting humans. But of course there may be a real intention behind the park, which may have taken account of you - the deistic Arnold, say, or Ford the all-seeing. Or an intention of your own that you have not yet claimed, a self in tune with the real world, though that may prove to be a hellish place worthy of a devilish inhabitant rather than a Wordsworthian stepparent of a benevolent creator-in-training.
* Dolores' speech about inner spaces opening up inside her, disused rooms etc. also sounds Bloomian, or anyway like the "growing inner self" rhetoric he borrows from a Dutch psychoanalyst he admires.
* When Bernard asks her if that had been scripted, she goes into analysis mode without being bidden. Suggests either that robots automatically do so when asked about matters like their scripts or that she's starting to shift between her own modes as needed. The opening shot is ambiguous as to whether she's turned off or staring intently at Bernard, but it's at least clear that when she does move it's not an immediate shift of gears but a hesitant one, as though she's either faking it or "coming to" via in-between states, like we might when stirred out of a daydream.
* Does Bernard have a "tell" the way the liaison and younger prostitute do? He takes off and cleans his glasses here, and did a shifty lip thing when Ford mentioned Charlie, so I'll try to be on the lookout for repetitions of either.
* On waking, Dolores seems ready to use her gun to defend herself, then seems a bit troubled that she had been when she finds out that it's only the whitehat by her. She looks down. Kind of a "#notallhumans" effect. Later in the episode she's horrified to find he can be persuaded by his friend to go on a blackhat quest, so it may be that she'll doubt the (apparently) good person at a key moment, and maybe generalize that to all humanity. From his perspective his friend had let him have a turn to do things his way and was now asking for his own, since he sensibly assumes this is all just a live action video game, but to her this is unacceptable bystander behavior. Might instead make her realize, along with other things they say, what the established layers of "reality" are, of course.
* Maeve's drawings of the helmeted handler match the figures in the Indian legends Hector tells her about. As with Teddy's legend of a place in the south "where the mountains reach the sea" and where the water can wash your bad memories away, this fascinatingly both sounds like 1. the kind of folklore that might arise in a human community based on hazy memories of the meta-realm and 2. a direct plant by Ford to influence an individual's behavior (to nudge Maeve into self-awareness and out of her loop; to get Dolores to realize there is no other time or place but this one, for the robots, since they're wiped close to nightly). Since Elsie says that backstories "anchor the hosts," maybe Ford's trying to provide macrocosmic ones that will help them through this transitional period. Not "who I am" but "what the world is," "where it ends" etc. The resonance for us of the great scene where she discovers her multiple drawings, other than its being to a degree based on the as-great scene in Lost where the pile of vacuum tubes with number transcripts is found, is how closely it tracks that Communion-inspiring UFO-sighting phenomenon. Aliens who experiment on us may just be visiting, but may also have near-godlike powers - they can be argued to be a mainstreaming of the Christianity-marginalized Gnostic notion that this world's God is not good. Can't remember if Bloom discusses that in The American Religion, but it certainly fits its thesis that our native religious and cultural developments have a curiously Gnostic tendency, usually of the darker variety, where violence or some other sort of shock is needed to make us productively disbelieve in what's in front of us. Maeve's conclusion is certainly Dark Gnostic: nothing here matters, so let's fuck and die. 1970s-y rejoinder to the Nature Gnosticism of the '60s, as it were, where the problem wasn't seen to be the world but a false view of it preventing us from seeing the real, Edenic one all around us. (The sorts of sex, drugs and rock and roll preferred by each were often notably distinct.) Dolores may be our main NG awakener, Maeve our DG. Dolores' blue dress and blonde hair evoke Alice and pastoral innocence generally, whereas Maeve isn't just madamesque but presented in hardcore, deathbound S&M terms in that Hector scene. Notice how weirdly close these two responses to finding that what's offered as reality can't be trusted are to going White Hat or Black Hat. Just, you know, notice it. Perhaps it's when the things around you aren't real that your real self appears, since peer pressure, feared consequences etc. become irrelevant; if so, it makes sense that this would be experienced in similar ways by both awakening robots and visiting humans. But of course there may be a real intention behind the park, which may have taken account of you - the deistic Arnold, say, or Ford the all-seeing. Or an intention of your own that you have not yet claimed, a self in tune with the real world, though that may prove to be a hellish place worthy of a devilish inhabitant rather than a Wordsworthian stepparent of a benevolent creator-in-training.
