Westworld (1973) 8/10
In the resort of Delos, vacationers can live out their fantasies in Roman World, Medieval World, or West World (sometimes called Western World). It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or gets killed.
What is it that maintains Westworld‘s cult status? Neither Richard Benjamin (whom I never could stand) nor James Brolin have much star appeal as the embattled tourists. Yul Brynner is always sexy and sort of chilling, and it’s images of him, as the robotic gunslinger gone wild, that are most iconic.
But I’d argue that the real appeal is Westworld itself, or, more particularly, Delos. The movie spends most of its 88 minutes hovering just this side of soft porn, showing little and suggesting everything. And I do mean everything. ‘Come to Roman World and participate in a real Roman orgy!’ promise the ads. Come to ‘Western World, kill as many people as you want, and then romp in the whorehouse.’ ‘Come to Medieval World, and have your way with a serving wench.’ The ads for Delos entice the real audience as much as they entice the fictional one.
Underneath the sort of straightforward science-plus-horror for which Michael Crichton is famous hovers a good deal of interesting moral questions. Is killing really okay if you know it’s fake? Are you cheating on your partner if you do it with a robot? The movie definitely points at these questions, but mostly enjoys titillating the audience’s own forbidden desires. The script has fun laughing at how childish our fantasies really are, and so we get a nebbishy Dick Van Patten playing at sheriff, while Benjamin and Brolin act the part of little boys gone pranking together.
Like Crichton’s other famous amusement park gone wrong, it seems the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves; in this case, in our desire to have fantasy unfettered by consequences. But far from being preachy, the movie mostly stretches out the fantasy, giving much more mileage to the fun than the fault.
This week was the first time I saw Westworld straight through, unless memory eludes me. But I remember it from when it was first released, and even as a little kid, it inspired intense fantasies. To live in a Medieval castle for a week, and then come home as if nothing had happened? Wow. I think Westworld was one of the first things I was exposed to that told me how powerful my own fantasies could be. In looking at it now, I find something incredibly bold in how it tells us that we all share many of those fantasies in common. It takes the secret self, and makes it public. Looking at it now, the part that surprises me is not that people would pay a fortune for such a vacation, but that they’d be willing (as they are in the film) to appear as themselves in a commercial, stating publically that they’d enjoyed such a trip. My feeling is more like, yeah, I’ll go to Roman World for a week, but tell everyone? Heck no.
They’ve been talking about a remake of Westworld for years, but noise seems to have died down. And it’s a shame, really, because I think this is a subject that can be remade, and be a lot of fun, without debasing the original.
