Abstract

By utilising the theories of Slavoj Žižek this paper will focus on Westworld’s human visitors and read them as “mechanised” by the park’s ideology—one Žižek would characterise as an “archideological” fantasy, where we are split between self-awareness and unconscious fantasy. If the human bodies are indeed “mechanised” by Westworld’s ideology, rather than read the relationship between androids and humans as Other, my methodology proposes the possibility of a bridge between humans and androids, where Westworld’s space acts as the catalyst for bodily control. The space of the park is one characterised by surveillance and penetrability from the “real” world beyond, where lifts break the park’s surface; where software “upgrades” are performed in glass offices; and where the overseers observe and monitor bodies via the dome at Westworld HQ. The penetrability of space by those in control of the park, therefore suggests the impossibility of the freedom the park purports to offer, and such spatial surveillance and territorialisation is not only enforced on Ford’s androids, but also on the human visitors who must accept the park’s ideology. It is the humans who must also become part of Westworld’s mechanised landscape in order to achieve their fantasy.