“What you call love was invented by someone like me to sell nylon stockings.” This magnificent line is delivered by Don Draper from Mad Men. A man who lives by and in a lie. A guy, literally, self-made. A liar and a salesman who tells the woman he’s dining with that love is nothing more than an advertising slogan. But if not even love is true, what is?
That question also hovers over Westworld, one of the most ambitious television fictions in history. Conceived as a replacement for Game of Thrones on HBO, the science fiction series by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy is a very expensive blockbuster to which the concept of “delusions of grandeur” falls short, since it deals precisely with that, of a world in the one in which the heirs of Don Draper find a way to be able to invent everything. Westworld talks about playing god because there is a technology that makes it possible.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Nolan and Joy’s series began by adapting the 1973 Westworld, a cult film written and directed by Michael Crichton. Its premise was very simple: the existence of a theme park in which the Wild West is recreated, through perfect sets and androids indistinguishable from human beings. Men come to the park to live out their wild wild west fantasy. That fantasy includes, for example, killing the farmer and raping his daughter. But that daughter, Dolores, although she is a robot, she has a name. And something like a soul. She also has Dolores, and that’s where the series really begins, something much more dangerous: a plan.
Then Westworld gets complicated. To extremes sometimes unmanageable. The series expands its narratives and ambitions at breakneck speed, forcing its viewers to follow along with their tongues hanging out. It is an exhausting experience, but tremendously rewarding. Few series reward their followers more. And few are more difficult to explain to those who don’t see them: its plot is extremely complex, its internal operating rules are permanently questioned and, as if all that weren’t enough, Nolan and Joy don’t shy away from adding elements of a classic thriller. . Twists and tricks, some quite tricky, that make watching Westworld almost a chore. The best job in the world without a doubt.
The series premieres its fourth season this week. In it he continues adding layers and layers to his extremely baroque proposal. Evan Rachel Wood has long been not just Dolores and we no longer know who controls whom. She is quite a mess, the most labyrinthine, prodigious and beautiful mess in the world. Westworld’s musings on free will, capitalism, fact and fiction are constantly on the run. However, they rarely stumble. And they never spare the viewer images of a beauty never seen on television. There, being the heir to Game of Thrones falls short of this series. Westworld is difficult, beautiful and unfathomable. And, like Dolores, he has a plan.
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