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Westworld and Meta-Narrative

I have a theory about Westworld . It's not about the world outside the park or whether or not Ed Harris is a cylon. My theory has to do with the show itself, which seems fixated on the concept of narrative. Westworld  is already drawing comparisons to Lost  and Battlestar Galactica , two shows that trafficked heavily in managing and playing with viewer expectations, but they were still narrative shows that took place in their own worlds. Westworld  is a slightly different animal. Thematically, it's about entertainment that turns against its consumer. So while it has echoes of Lost  and BG , and the obvious antecedents of the 1973 Westworld  film and Jurassic Park , I think there's a strain of influences that are more akin to The Ring  and Mulholland Drive , horror movies that invite the viewer to be just as much of a victim as the characters on screen. The former posits a world in which viewing a film is a death sentence. The latter creates a distorted and disorienting worl

Her Story

Since I'm not working on a novel right now, I took the opportunity to play through a few PC games that had been on my radar, one of which is Sam Barlow's Her Story . I have some quibbles with it, but on the whole I found it very engaging as a piece of experimental storytelling. The premise is that you have been given access to a series of police interviews from the 90s, which feature a young British woman. You type in a search term and the database returns up to five videos with that search in it. You are prompted with the first search term: MURDER. Who died and why you are investigating a decades-old murder (a clock in the game establishes that it takes place in the present) are mysteries to be unraveled. The fact that this is more-or-less a game-ified version of Alta Vista is interesting in itself, but the deftness of the game is in the way it guides the player towards certain revelations. The first videos that come up give you a number of details that send you chasing do