The Ethical Quandary of Choosing a Hat; or How Westworld Was the Real “Bad Place” All Along
On the surface, the dystopian drama of HBO’s Westworld couldn’t be further from the heartwarming comedy of NBC’s The Good Place. However, the two concurrently airing series both deal with the same epistemological imperative: “Know thyself.” Consequently, they grapple with the same philosophical question: “Who am I?” The issue of the “self” has been at the root of most, if not all, philosophical thought, and it is an issue that is inextricably bound up in the very fabric of ethics.
As conceived in modern Western thought, the self is a contained entity that interacts with the world around it and may leave an impact or be impacted, but is ultimately a coherent whole that exists independent of all that is Other. It wields free will as its only weapon - a weapon in which it has had no training. The connection between this self and ethics has been widely explored. From Socrates to Descartes, Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, examination of the self seems always to lead to questions of morality. Is a person inherently good or evil, or is it a choice? Do we really have free will if we’re the product of our environment, including our physiological makeup? Can we trust our senses, our view of the world, our “selves” to give us access to that which is Real? What does it mean to be one’s authentic self and why should one bother? Is the self a justification to be selfish? Or can the responsibility of self-determination create its own moral framework?
Let’s pause there. In fact, all of these questions have already been raised in both series - both of which are only on their 2nd season. And while both series are exploring the issues in complex and interesting ways, my project is not to decipher their messages. Rather, I am fascinated by the overlapping of the approaches both fictional worlds have taken. Both narratives are located inside a non-linear, and often recursive, time. While initially, Westworld’s hosts are the only ones experiencing this queer temporality, by the end of the first season, there is no mistaking that the audience, too, has been dragged into a time outside of time. Like the hosts, we are unclear on what is happening when - and this is the series’ primary method of mystery-building. On a more narrative level, the hosts’ eventual attainment of consciousness, of personhood, of the self, rests almost entirely on their ability to retrieve lost memories. Unable to control or parse through the temporalities of their memories, the hosts are jolted out of their programmed non-selves.
The Good Place takes up this same queer temporality angle by “rebooting” its characters, starting with Janet. By the third episode of season 2, our four protagonists have had their memories erased over eight hundred times. Much of the character development in this season depends on the recovery of those lost memories. Though the audience has seen a season’s worth of interactions between the protagonists, the characters themselves are only aware of having interacted for a few weeks. Chidi and Eleanor’s relationship is jump-started by the discovery of a videotape and the brilliant Mindy St Claire’s bored retellings of their prior encounters. Tahani and Jason’s relationship is disrupted by Janet’s unprocessed and unremembered love for Jason. And Michael’s cold, evil heart (probably not a heart, maybe a marble) is softened by what at this point may be years of watching the humans grow and care about each other. One might say that he knows them better than they know themselves.
Part of what makes queer temporality queer is that it depends on one’s relationality to others. Queer is in so many ways opposed to the “normal” or more accurately, the accepted default. But if there is no queer, no other, no different, then there can be no normal. Normality desperately needs the queer. Likewise, if there is no Other to compare one’s experience of time against, there can be no “normal” or “straight” time either. The disrupted and disruptive time warps that pull the narrative strings of both series depend entirely on the characters interactions with one another - and so do the characters’ moral choices.
Perhaps the most interesting theme the shows share, however, is that of trauma. The Good Place somehow manages to approach the idea of eternal torture and damnation in a lighthearted way. Shitty Eleanor Shelstrop is motivated by fear of torture to enlist Chidi for help, and Good Eleanor is born. Over and over again. The premise of Michael’s architectural plan is simply that Hell is Other People. His diabolical scheme is simply to put four very different people together and wait for them to torture each other. And they do - but only because they care. Only because they are trying to be good. In Westworld, on the other hand, the apparent lead characters - both white, powerful, and male - and literal showrunners of the park, are the Man in Black and Ford, and though they are often pitted against each other, they seem to have the same deeply disturbing goal. They want to torture the hosts to self-awareness. The basic, underlying premise of the show is that conscience, and hence personhood, is attained through suffering. By that logic, both William and Ford could be seen as the good guys. They’re just trying to grant the hosts free will! Self-determination! Autonomy. Except that they’re clearly not.
The implications of torture and suffering on identity formation are certainly complex, and I’m not sure yet where the stories are going or how they will end. But both narratives seem to grapple with trauma on a deeper level, as a catalyst or the spark of life. There is plenty of evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, of the disruptive effect severe trauma can have on memories, and by extension one’s sense of time. The only PTSD symptom more common than flashbacks is missing or fragmented memories of the traumatic event. The traumatic past is either painfully absent or eternally present. The temporal acrobatics performed by Westworld and the Good Place are as tied into trauma as they are into ethics.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I’m pretty sure I know what I need to add to my dissertation to make it into a book. Primary case studies: Maeve Millay and Chidi Anagonye. Almost makes me want to be an academic again.
