Westworld along with many of the Sci-Fi movies of the Seventies still partakes of a certain degree of technological utopianism, something which has evidently completely evaporated by the early eighties. Westworld still has all the trappings (as do its inferior sequel Futureworld, Donald Cammell's Demon Seed, Logans’ Run. Thx 1138, A boy and his dog or Zardoz) of the future as Apollonian and post-scarcity a techno-utopian Age of Aquarius ruled by benign and enlightened beings, though often of course this seeming paradise is built on a dirty secret which the Nietzschean central character in their drive for truth must unmask while (to use the ugly and elitist contemporary expression) the “Sheeple” are content to unquestioningly consume and gratify their newly liberated desires. The out-and-out dystopian trend probably starts with George Millers hugely influential Mad Max, set in a violent post peak-oil world in which civilization has collapsed and continued in the wildly successful sequel The Road Warrior from which almost all later dystopian cyberpunk/Sci-Fi takes its look.
Westworld essentially presents us with post-historic “men without chests” living in a pristine and pampered utopia, the leisure society, forced to rediscover their inner warrior when Yul Brinner's gun slinger robot runs amok. The theme park they visit reprises various Heroic ages and suggests, though not as pointedly as Boorman's Zardoz, that life without violence, without destruction, in a sense a truly post Historical world in which all “desires are satisfied” is impossible, as one of our deepest desires is the urge for danger, for jouissance as opposed to mere pleasure (this is most explicitly spelled out in Zardoz in which jouissance is, rightly or wrongly, symbolized by Sean Connery sporting a handlebar moustache and braided ponytail, clad in scarlet, knitted bullet belt and thong combi). The robot in Westworld, against which the two central characters contend is a return of the repressed on two levels. There is a malfunction within the machine, inexplicable, outside the realm of the technical and scientific, an ineradicable and asocial force. There is a machine in the ghost.
The mal/functioning robot, in the form of Yul Brinner is both the other, the foreigner taking Americas place, remorselessly reinvigorating the heroic masculine icons of American frontier spirit par excellence, and tracking down the flaccid and pampered affluent America of the near future. Brinner's oriental features suggest the "spirit" has passed over to Asia. The robot character is the Japanese worker who, it is assumed, will literally work himself to death in pursuit of the American place in the world, the rugged frontier spirit has passed over to him and is figured as a charmless, alien inhuman presence. The Americans may have had a lot of fun blowing him away but eventually he comes back. Brolin is a liberated swinging guy who wants to get off on some guilt-free violence and sex only to find the real life is hot on his heels and it is in fact nice Richard Benjamin epitome of the suave, cultivated neurotic in Seventies cinema who miraculously survives.
In Terminator the future is the nightmare from which the central characters are trying to awake. In a term over-employed during the last decade by despairing Leftists it is “already always” too late. The past washes terrifyingly forward the future comes rolling back, there is a moment of possibility perhaps, an ever reducing present in which to search about for the some solution to the the twin disasters heading our way. The echo here is of the the greatest Vampire Patriarch of the 70s Houston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown: “The Future, Mr Gittes. The future.”
The past in Westworld is the nightmare we are trying to outrun and we may yet succeed in doing so, man may still in a sense be able to defeat himself, kill that within himself the archaic, atavistic “inhuman”. In this sense Westworld carries a germ of Leisure society utopianism (as the Terminator movies contain a salvationary kernel of Fordism within the post Fordist frame) on one reading. On another it is a call-to-arms. In many respects if we look at another movie based on Crichton's work, the later, 1993 Rising Sun we may be inclined to assume the intent is more politically and socially conservative.
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