Westworld and Imaginary Hierarchies

[mallorys_camera]

So-o-o, continuing my life of perpetual Scut Factory toil and endless cinematic idyll, I watched the original, cheesy, 1970s movie Westworld last night.

I must say, the movie is quite a bit better than the pretentious HBO television series it inspired 45 years later. For one thing, it doesn’t use the robot malfunction as a turgid metaphor for race relations.

Robots don’t want to be free. Machines don’t have desires in any human sense of the word, so TV shows like Westworld that anthropomorphize them are no more profound than Lady and the Tramp.

Freedom is just another one of those imaginary hierarchies that only human beings can make up. I mean—it’s meaningful to us humans, of course. But then, we live in a world that’s entirely governed by imaginary constructs such as money, the superiority of men and the Presidency of Donald Trump. As Sapiens teaches, There are no gods, no nations, no money, and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.

Forget The King and I and The Magnificent Seven: Westworld is truly Yul Brynner’s defining cinematic moment. Oh, the relentlessness with which he stalks his prey! The musical click of his heels against the ground.

Westworld was the first movie to use the technology we now know as CGI. Interspersed amidst tracking shots of Yul Brynner’s inexorable pursuit of Richard Benjamin are brief flashes of the world as Yul Brynner’s circuitry sees it. Very clumsy, pixilated shots but effective: What would be the point, after all, of programming a Yul Brynner gunslinger to see the world as we see it? Yul Brynner does this small, catlike shift of his head when the gunslinger registers movement—which is how it senses its prey. Subtle and exactly right for the part.

Westworld was an hour and 48 minutes well spent, and as a complete nonsequitur, I must add here that Yul Brynner’s son is actually a professor who teaches American history at Marist, and one day, I really must work up the courage to audit one of his classes.

###

No other news as such to report. I am Socially Isolated, which I should try to change, I suppose. It’s not mentally healthy, though I’m not particularly lonely or anything, having many amusements, the cat and a medley of casual conversations at my disposal should I choose to partake in them.

Khadija passed her CNA exam, which means I will no longer be working with her. I did manage to convince her to go for her GED.

If you want to talk about imaginary human hierarchies, Khadijah would be an interesting place to start. That woman is crazy brilliant and yet the accident of her birth, a woman in a Tangiers slum in a male-dominated social order, meant she was never even taught to read. Un-fucking-believable.

Comments

[thisnewday]

LOL, I had an unopened "Westworld" DVD leaning against an already full row on the bookcase in my living room. After I finally opened and watched it, not too long ago, I took something else off the shelf and filed "Westworld" properly so as to not have Yul Brynner's mad eyes staring at me every time I entered the room.

My wife was a last-generation American Khadija, who grew up in a now-demolished Greek/ Ukrainian immigrant neighborhood of Syracuse's near eastside, and might well have been a full-fledged MD if not for the poverty of her upbringing, the minimal expectations for girls of her background, and the dearth of opportunity which she did, to a large extent, manage to overcome even as a wife and mother to our four children.

I've heard a number of such stories, about women of her generation--native-born but effectively held under by the slow evolution of this culture. I'm glad that the "real" Khadija made it here and that you've been able to help her to realize at least this much of her dream and to perhaps envision something beyond it...

[mallorys_camera]

Yul Brynner is something in that movie, isn't he?

The waste of human potential in any context is appalling, but since I'm a woman, the subjugation of other women in that regard is always my personal fight. Your wife must have been an extraordinary human being.

[thisnewday]

"Your wife must have been an extraordinary human being."

Thanks, I've gathered as much from my own retrospection and from hearing the stories of those to whom she was a nurse-preceptor and mentor.

And I truly appreciate your stories as evidence that her fight is well-maintained in the hands of other strong women...

[sabotabby]

I loved both the show and the film, but they're very different sorts of stories.

[mallorys_camera]

The first part of Season 1 of the television show was fun! But then the show got all meta. UGH. 😃

[lethe1]

I get so sad about all the wasted talent of people who grow up in the most dire of circumstances and who have no means of escaping and fulfilling their dreams.

[mallorys_camera]

Yeah. I do, too.

As incessantly as I complain, I know how very, very lucky I am to have been born to the circumstances I was born to.

[smokingboot]

Big reveal:

Robot Yul Brynner really turned me on. I think I was twelve or something. He had started to wreak havoc with my hormones in the King and I, but this just made everything worse.

[mallorys_camera]

Ha, ha! That is too funny. 😃