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.