In HBO’s Westworld (2016), the eponymous theme park provides an escape for the ultra-rich, seducing them with the promise that they can “live without limits” within a simulacrum of the American Wild West. The park’s creators use highly advanced artificial intelligence to bring 20th-century silver screen stereotypes to life, and elite guests are invited to interact with these “hosts” without fear of consequence, judgment, or danger. This popular series, based on Michael Chrichton’s 1973 scifi thriller of the same name, explores the impulses that drive a common fascination with an idealized, fictive past, the sense of artificial nostalgia that contributes in large part to the continuing allure of the Western genre in film, television, and literature. In Wilderness and the American Mind, a definitive study of Americans’ ever-changing relationships to the wild, historian Roderick Frazier Nash suggests that such nostalgia for a “simpler time” sets in the moment the threat of danger is neutralized. A sense of repulsion at a harsh landscape that carries with it a host of ever-present natural threats is immediately, and ironically, replaced by a longing for the perceived purity of the wilderness as soon as the landscape is tamed. Using both Nash’s study and Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture as theoretical guides, I will examine the allure that brings guests to the Westworld theme in droves, based on a perceived simultaneous proximity to, and safe practical remove from, the threats posed by man, beast, and nature within a heavily stereotyped vision of the 19th-century American West.
About the presenterMiriam Hahn Thomas
Miriam Hahn Thomas earned her Ph.D. in Theatre from Bowling Green State University in 2014, where her doctoral work focused on representations of Native Americans in the theatre of the 1960s American Counterculture. She has since taught courses in theatre at Kennesaw State University, Bowling Green State University, and Ball State University. She currently serves as Arts Administrator, Production Manager, and Adjunct Professor of Theatre at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.