With the debut (finally) of the new HBO series “Westworld,” we discover that HBO has found a new oppressed minority group for evil, white men to rape, oppress, and exploit and this time it is sex-bots.
So, step aside blacks/Asians/women/Muslims/gays/transgenders and whatever minority used to be the top of the pecking order when it comes to evil white exploitation. Now we have robots programed to serve evil white men becoming the next “minority.”
Two episodes into the much-ballyhooed HBO series based on the 1973 Michael Crichton directed, Yul Brenner vehicle of the same name, we find that white people are vicious, mean, murderous, and rapacious.
For those unfamiliar, the eponymous “Westworld,” it is both the name of the series and the name of the fictitious park manned by ultra realistic robots where “rich bastards” referred to as “guests” go to live out their wild west fantasies.
In the original movie the robots went horribly wrong and began to kill the guests who paid big money to become rootin-tootin cowboys. The new HBO version begins in a similar vein with the robots starting to remember their past “stories”–all of which end in their rape and murder.
The series garnered controversy before we got to see a single frame of film when it was made known that actors reading for the part would have to agree ahead of time to doing scenes fully nude — both men and women. Producers explained that in many scenes the robots will be seen without any clothing on, so everyone should assume they’ll be fully nude at one point or another in the series. Many actors and media writers, though, felt this was a salacious and unfair expectation.
Producers, though, defended their requirements and essentially said that we should all just wait to see the show and it would all be logically explained.
If that early controversy caused concern, the series itself is all about “concern.”
Everything about the new HBO series screams foreboding. From the solemn music to the frightened robots who become confused as they remember their horrific past stories. Something is definitely going wrong. But there is one nagging doubt. It may be all going wrong on purpose and the series will be about discovery. Discovery about why the robots are remembering and if this is a glitch or a purpose.
But one thing we for sure have come to understand thus far in these two episodes, all the guests are white and they are all mean. For that matter, all the real people who work back at Westworld HQ are white (except for one character) and they are all mean and callous, too.
Thus far there isn’t any redeemable human character, except perhaps robot programmer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright). We last saw actor Wright on HBO in “Boardwalk Empire” as the pretentious, vicious, and murderous gangster Valentin Narcisse. Here Wright plays a very different role as a man becoming worried and conflicted about his work.
But aside from lead programmer Bernard Lowe, all the employees of Westworld who work at the robot-works inside the park’s headquarters are just as narcissistic, ill-tempered, unforgiving, unsympathetic, and hard-hearted as the rich guests who go around casually killing at the drop of a hat inside the park.
As it happens, nearly all the bad guys in this show are white, such as the “rich bastard” park visitor only called “the man in black” (Ed Harris) who shows less humanity than any of the robots he so casually rapes and kills. And for the most part all the minorities in this show are there to be disrespected, raped, shot, beaten, hanged, and otherwise harmed.
Thus we are led as viewers to feel sorry for the poor, poor robots who are so mistreated by all these “rich bastards.” Thus far, at least, rich people and white people are 100% the villains of this new “Westworld.”
This is not to say that the series is bad. It has high production values, fine acting, and tense writing. Even with this biased flaw, it is worth the time.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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