All the (West)World’s a Stage: HBO’s Westworld as Metatext—Intertextuality, Genre, Seriality, Format

Abstract

With roots in an earlier film about well-heeled human guests in an android-populated theme park modeled after an Old West experience, Westworld is a recent offering in HBO’s ongoing pursuit of quality television. Combining Western and science-fiction elements, its intertextual relationship to genre is unusually foregrounded. This intertextuality takes on added dimensions in its more recent adaptation. Furthermore, as an ongoing television program, it adds considerations of seriality and format. This article examines how these elements of intertextuality, seriality, format, and the specific embodiments of genre reveal the series’s function as a metatext, as a series commenting on and critiquing the narrative television series. Westworld’s overdetermined genre performance reveals a postmodern parody of genre itself. By simultaneously performing and playing with notions of genre, Westworld embodies the doubly-conscious, neo-baroque text. It goes well beyond its relationship to genre, including self-conscious seriality. The host loops offer a conspicuous site of repetition and difference, an aspect necessary to the aesthetic experience and pleasures of the postmodern audience. Ultimately, Westworld’s central conceit of a genre-based theme park offers a pointed critique of the television format as both a culturally specific and fungible commodity in the globalized media space.

Keywords:

• format
• genre
• intertext
• seriality
• Westworld

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Dr. Sharon Shahaf provided helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 To give a sense of how the language around computers has changed since 1973, when a technician in the original film suggests that what is happening to the robots is like a viral contagion, he is scoffed at by his supervisor. Now the term computer virus is ubiquitous in discussing device issues.

2 In Greek mythology, Delos is the island birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. Depending on how it is spelled in Greek (δηλως), Delos can also mean “signify” or “declare.”

3 The initials visible on the door in this sequence are “SW,” which could also stand for “Shogun World.” More importantly, like the other parks in Crichton’s original, Samurai films, whether jidaigeki or, more specifically, chanbara, have a rich history cinematically in Japan.

4 A commonly cited theory, viewed by the Oxford English Dictionary as “plausible,” is that it was coined by Boston comedic actor William Warren, Jr., quoting from the 1816 English melodrama The Broken Sword by William Dimond. One of the characters in the play is a boor, and when once recounting a tale, he mentions a cork tree, which is corrected by the character Pablo as “A chestnut. I have heard you tell the tale these 27 times.”

5 In Genre and Television, Jason Mittell refers to serialization alongside industrial concerns like scheduling and programming as a defining feature of the medium. See also Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition.”

6 In Japanese, jidaigeki is the supergenre associated with Japanese period films set predominately in the feudal era, whereas chanbara is an onomatopoetic term assigned to cinematic and televisual representations of swordplay, with the word describing the sound made by clashing steel blades.

7 On the cinematic side, films as diverse as The Last Samurai (Dir. Edward Zwick, 2003), Memoirs of a Geisha (Dir. Rob Marshall, 2005), and 47 Ronin (Dir. Carl Rinsch, 2013) offer variations on the kinds of exoticizing and essentializing of the Japanese and their culture that continue to characterize American films set in and about Japan, its culture, and its people.

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S. A. Wilder

S. A. Wilder is a doctoral student in moving image studies at the School of Film, Media, and Theater at Georgia State University. His research focuses principally on late cinematic style and its relationship to auteurism. He has published research articles in Asian Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film & History, Porn Studies, and Global Hip Hop Studies, among others. Authored chapters are scheduled to appear in the upcoming edited volumes Serial Killers and Serial Spectators (Brill, 2024) and Screening Controversy (Routledge, 2025).