These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends: The Toxic Masculinity of Westworld

Spoiler Warning: This post will discuss some events from the first season of the HBO's Westworld. I've tried to speak in broad generalities so as not to reveal some of the more surprising plot points, but beware if you haven't watched it yet.

The HBO series, Westworld, took pop culture by storm this past summer as the show filling the Sunday night slot when the 7^th season of Game of Thrones ended. Based on the film and story by Michael Crichton from the late 70s, this series explores what would happen in a world populated by A.I. called hosts and visitors to the park have no social constraints. As with many sci-fi concepts, the hosts eventually begin to fight back. Crichton is said to have come up with the idea while on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, wondering what would happen if the animatronic pirates suddenly began to kill the guests.

Because the time constraints of a film have been lifted, Jonathan Nolan along with his brother Christopher Nolan and executive producer J.J. Abrams have been able to explore the nature of consciousness and what happens when there are no rules. The series is able to explore nuances that are just not possible in a film. Upon first viewing, I was really struck by the stories of the hosts Teddy, Dolores, and Maeve as they struggle with becoming aware of their own role within the Westworld.

I’m that one could write a thesis on the complexity of consciousness as it plays out in the first season of the series, but that is not where I want to focus for this post. Instead of looking at the definition of humanity within the world of the series, I want to look at the power dynamics at play in the narratives of the park itself. As I said, Westworld is an amusement park where rich guests can interact with hosts. Each host has its own narrative that guests may involve themselves in or disrupt, depending on their choices. There are really no rules for guests. They can do whatever they would like to do with the exception of kill other guests. This environment is a breeding ground for toxic masculinity run amok.

When we think about the western genre, we are often given stereotypes of masculinity that include violent behavior, sometimes sexually motivated. The cowboy myth is surrounded with this idea of the alpha male. Of course, some use their power for good while others have ill intents. Dropped in the middle of this world, we have William and his future brother-in-law, Logan. From the outset, Logan is the quintessential alpha male and fully embraces his own toxic masculinity. He cannot seem to wait to indulge in his darkest fantasies to basically kill and fuck his way through the park as he has done on previous visits. William is more reluctant to do so, but he eventually becomes more aggressive in his behaviors as he begins to interact with and in some ways fall in love with Dolores, one of the hosts. 

What is interesting is that when you come across women in the park, they are most often hosts. Throughout the series, it was rare to come across female guests in the park unless they were part of a family visiting the park. The Wild West themed parks certainly seemed to cater to rich, young white men in terms of the demographics we saw of visitors to the park. The hosts that we tended to follow within the park were women. They would be victims of rape and other forms of violence. One of the male hosts that we encounter in the first season is Teddy Flood. He doesn’t really exhibit the traits associated with toxic masculinity. His aggressive behavior is usually in service to others and only when provoked by the misdeeds of others. He is the hero of the park narrative. 

Yet, all of these carefully planned out park narratives begin to unravel when another narrative begins to supersede the established ones. The Wyatt narrative as it is called begins to see our two main female hosts become slowly aware of their own consciousness. As they become more aware of the narrative loops that they have been stuck in, they fight against the toxic masculinity that had previously defined their existence in the park. Maeve’s awakening begins to reveal details about her involvement in a previous narrative in which she was a mother on the frontier instead of a brothel madam. This leads her to begin a revolution in “waking up” the other hosts in the park to rebel against their position as fodder to satiate the various lusts of the guests. 

However, it is not Maeve that is the first falling domino that brings down the current narratives of the park. Dolores Abernathy, the quintessential virginal pioneer woman/damsel in distress, is first triggered by the host who acts as her father, Peter Abernathy. He is malfunctioning and taking on traits from a previous narrative when he was a professor. The phrase that triggers this new Wyatt narrative removing all of the previous constraints on the hosts in terms of violence against guests is taken from Friar Laurence in Romeo & Juliet. From the moment that Dolores hears the quote, she is infected and begins to infect others through her interactions with them. 

As the audience looks forward to the second season, we can be sure that the toxic masculinity running rampant throughout the park can finally be checked. As Friar Laurence said, “These violent delights have violent ends.”