Abstract
Contextualising Westworld in the long history of robots in American culture, this paper explores how the show’s focus on narrative loops reflects a larger interest in the power of history to raise the consciousness of disempowered peoples. As a twenty-first-century TV show about robots, Westworld is burdened by the plots and tropes that have dominated over two centuries of stories about robots and automata, including the 1973 film of the same name. Like its robotic “hosts,” however, the show is trying to break out of the conventional narrative loop of mechanical rebellion that has become engrained in popular culture. It does so, the paper argues, by substituting a cathartic and supportive narrative of resistance that focuses, contrary to almost all other robot stories, on the bodies and minds of white women and men and women of colour. The show, the paper suggests, is about the consciousness-raising power of history.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Advertisement. (1788, March 31). To-Morrow Evening. The Independent Gazetteer, 3. Available at: https://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers. Accessed 10 April 2012.
Advertisement. (1794, February 17). New Theatre. The Baltimore Daily Intelligencer, 3. Available at: https://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers. Accessed 10 April 2012.
Anonymous. (1801, February 21). Falconi. Federal Gazette, 3. Available at: https://www.readex.com/content/americas-historical-newspapers. Accessed 10 April 2012.
Anonymous. (1854, August 16). Automatic Labor. New York Daily Times, 4. Available at: https://www.proquest.com/products-services/pq-hist-news.html. Accessed 15 May 2009.
Anonymous. (1923, January 1). R.U.R. A Dramatic Indictment of Civilization. Current Opinion, 61–62.
Bady, A. (2016). “Westworld,” Race, and the Western. The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-westworld-failed-the-western. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (Sheila Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published in 1981)
Čapek, The Brothers. (1961). R.U.R. and the Insect Play. London: Oxford University Press.
Dain, B. (2002). The Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dinerstein, J. (2003). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Flanders, R. (1931). Taming Our Machines: The Attainment of Human Values in a Mechanized Society. New York: Richard R. Smith.
Ford, H. (1939, 5 March). Machines as Ministers to Men. New York Times, AS7. Available at: https://www.proquest.com/products-services/pq-hist-news.html. Accessed 9 October 2015.
Georges Louis Le Clerc, Comte de Buffon. (1792). A Natural History, General and Particular (Vol. 7). London: J.S. Barr.
Gleason, W. (1999). The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Graebner, W. (1991). Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers.
Higbie, T. (2013). Why Do Robots Rebel? The Labor History of a Cultural Icon. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, 10(1), 99–121.
Hoganson, K. (1998). Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hunnicutt, B. (1988). Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kang, M. (2010). Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kasson, J. (1976). Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in American, 1776–1900. New York: Grossman Publishers.
Marx, L. (1964). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mayr, O. (1986). Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Nye, D. (1994). American Technological Sublime. New Bakersfield: MIT Press.
Seward, W. (1954). The Reaper: Argument of William H. Seward in the Circuit Court of the United States. Auburn: William L. Finn.
Slotkin, R. (1973). Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Slotkin, R. (1992). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper Perennial.
Smith, H. (1950). Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Steiner, M. (1998). Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West. Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 48(1), 2–17.
Taylor, F. W. (1911). Shop Management. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Trachtenberg, A. (1982). The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang.
Turner, F. J. (1893). The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Available at: https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history. Accessed 10 May 2018.
Voskuhl, A. (2013). Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Westworld. (2016, October). Home Box Office. First Shown.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Abnet, D. (2019). Escaping the Robot’s Loop? Power and Purpose, Myth and History in Westworld’s Manufactured Frontier. In: Goody, A., Mackay, A. (eds) Reading Westworld. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14515-6_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14514-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14515-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)