Virgil in Westworld
Revisiting the Roman Underworld through HBO’s sci-fi western thriller
This storyline will make Hieronymus Bosch look like he was doodling kittens.
With this sales pitch, Lee Sizemore, the narrative director of the futuristic theme park Westworld, offers to subject the park’s lifelike android “hosts” to increasingly violent and depraved fantasies for the enhanced viewing pleasure of human “guests.” He also sums up the HBO series’ own impulse toward excess as it imagines society’s abuse of ultramodern technology to feed its basest desires.
Yet as Sizemore’s name hints (anxiety of influence, anyone?), for all its surface preoccupation with the future, Westworld obsessively measures itself against the past. As a reboot of Michael Crichton’s eponymous 1973 thriller, the series stands in tense relationship with its cinematic parent. It adopts but innovates Crichton’s basic setup by imbuing hosts with a humanity that radically confounds audience sympathies. In doing so, it reaches beyond the original film’s “Roman World” to follow in the footsteps of an ancient Latin forefather.
With the Aeneid (19 BC), Virgil, too, boldly revivified some reverend progenitors, above all Homer, to craft a national epic for Rome at the dawn of a new era. And Virgil’s ways of shaping new plotlines around ancient stories inform HBO’s Westworld on a profound if subterranean level. These two reboots’ shared metaliterary preoccupations find a natural meeting ground in the Underworld, a place where the past meets the future and grand philosophical and historical truths are revealed. Via and beyond their complementary visions of the afterlife, the Aeneid and Westworld together raise enduring questions about freedom, heredity, and creative violence as they apply to artists’ quests for originality as well as the universal human struggle to exert agency within the storylines of our lives.
The ancient blogosphere cavilled at Virgil’s close familial relationship with the Greek poet Homer. He is said to have replied, “It is easier to steal the club from Hercules than to steal a line from Homer.” Critics these days instead emphasize Virgil’s revisionary genius in resurrecting the minor Homeric character Aeneas as the hero of a uniquely Roman poem. The poet’s knife-edge walk between literary reverence and rebellion is mirrored, in turn, by Aeneas’ own struggle to define his path through the epic.
In Virgil’s stereoscopic portrayal, Aeneas is simultaneously a visionary leader and a marionette of the gods as he labors to preserve and resettle his people after the Greek sack of Troy. In the “Odyssean” first half of the Aeneid (Books 1–6), over the course of “errors” both geographical and intellectual, Aeneas begins to discern and obey a grand divine plan for his people’s future — at the cost of his dearest personal desires. (If he had his druthers, we learn early on, he would have died fighting at Troy and escaped mythological resurrection altogether.) After reaching a promised new Western homeland in the “Iliadic” Books 7–12, Aeneas is finally positioned to reverse his people’s fortunes and restore them to greatness. But in doing so — and Westworld fans will see where I’m going here — he inadvertently repeats the past in reverse, inflicting his former sufferings at Troy upon the native Italians.
The lynchpin that connects these two halves of the Aeneid, with one another and with Westworld, is Aeneas’ descent to the Underworld in Book 6. Here, under the guidance of the Sibyl and his dead father Anchises, Aeneas gains privileged insight into the unseen mechanisms that govern and give meaning to mortal life. He witnesses the repetitive punishments that await the wicked, as well as the process of metempsychosis by which the souls of the dead are cleansed of memory in the river Lethe before returning to earthly circulation. Here, too, Aeneas is reunited with dead loved ones from his past and views simulacra of future actors within Roman history.
This is the image that punches me in the gut every time Westworld cuts to a recurring scene: the darkened storeroom of deactivated hosts, their bodies repaired and memories wiped clean of the damage they incurred over their earthly “narratives.” These androids’ waxen pallor and full-frontal nude pose, simultaneously heroic, clinical, and natural-historical, recalls not only Virgil’s parade of heroes but also the Roman funerary traditions and architectural monuments that informed it. In keeping with the metaliterary impulse of epic reboots,Westworld’s Underworld serves as a ‘window reference’ through which the show measures itself against predecessors like Virgil.
Westworld’s cold storage drives home the industrial extent to which its parent corporation, Delos, is playing god (here through the technological Lethe of data erasure). But by comparison with the Aeneid, it is a dismal Elysium indeed. Aeneas and the disembodied souls he encounters in the Underworld are part of a mythical-historical narrative that lends their actions wider glory and meaning, however dubious. But the androids lack such compensating consolations and survive only as soulless bodies. The gloomy light of the storage room exposes their shocking thing-ness, the horror of humanity reduced purely to material form, at the same time as it speaks to the modern fear that we are no more than the sum of our physiology, genetics, and brain chemistry. The identities to which any humanity, memory, or fame might attach are no more than an illusory effect of their programming, subject to change at the flick of a finger.
The hosts’ memory erasure is, ironically, a divine grace: their creators had hoped to spare them consciousness of their systematic victimization within the park’s narrative “loops.” This also, of course, alleviates creators’ and guests’ consciences alike. But this ethical loophole starts pulls into a noose as technologically enabled “reveries” of the past lead certain hosts to a higher understanding of their roles within the park. As in classical epic, memory proves key to the androids’ burgeoning identities. Yet it also renders their existence in Westworld a living hell. As these characters awake into consciousness of their myths, their forced reenactment of the park’s storylines becomes a form of eternal punishment.
This makes Westworld, in turn, an indictment of the human “gods” who created, bankrolled, and enjoy this hell. The hosts’ co-creator Arnold occupies particularly slippery moral ground. In programming the reveries, his own artistic masterstroke, did he model himself on God making man, Prometheus giving them fire, or Satan giving them knowledge of good and evil? Whatever his intentions, the fact that Arnold damns the hosts he has so lovingly created to the suffering of sentience, then is unable to live with his conscience, shows that these “gods” have deep failings of foresight. It also stirs up the already muddy theodical waters around Western conceptions of justice and punishment. If people and literary characters are made in the image of their makers — be those gods, myths, cultures, or authors — then do they, any more than the hosts, merit the trials and punishments that their creators mete out?
Of course, we viewers occupy an uncomfortably parallel position to the sadistic humans of Westworld: the show is rightly considered a meta-commentary on our own moral implication in the creation and enjoyment of violent spectacle. But the show uses a Virgilian narrative technique known as deviant focalization to present much of the action through the uncomprehending but empathy-inducing perspective of the androids. This allows us to participate first-hand in their shocking realization that their senses of identity, choice, even reality are programmed deep into their code by indifferent gods. But the resultant pleasure is converse to the Aeneid’s laborious realignment of Aeneas’ will and audience expectations with divine providence. Instead, we cheer as hosts wrestle to assert control over their own narratives, in bids for originality that themselves follow recognizably Virgilian narrative paths.
The apparently naïve young host Dolores — in fact the oldest android in the park — follows a cyclical plotline that evokes the Aeneid’s “Odyssean” half, with its emphasis on homecoming and self-understanding. Her movement through Westworld is both geographical and epistemological, guided by physical tokens, visions, and prophecies that give striking new form to Aeneas’ revelations. Most uncannily of all, Arnold’s voice seems to call Dolores “home” from deep within her code. His co-creator Robert Ford explains that they had tried to “bootstrap consciousness” by letting hosts hear programmed commands as inner voices from the gods. The androids’ “bicameral minds” resuscitate a Virgilian conundrum: whether the gods, or our own “dire desires” (dira cupido), motivate our actions (Aeneid 9.184–5).
These two forces converge, with explosive consequences, as Dolores journeys toward self-understanding prompted by the trigger phrase “These violent delights have violent ends.” Much as Daedalus’ labyrinth symbolized Aeneas’ mystical journey to the Underworld in Aeneid 6, Dolores’ quest finds both emblem and object in a maze. This plot device, guarded by its very own minotaur, turns out to be a metaphorical test of hosts’ empathy and imagination. (The very name of the town at its center, “Escalante,” points upward to the hosts’ gains in consciousness, downward to the netherworlds of the park, and backwards to Aeneas’ and Dante’s own stairways to heaven and hell.)
In Escalante’s church, we learn over layering narrative loops, Dolores has been katabasizing through a confession box to commune with Arnold and thereby know herself. But early in the park’s history, as Dolores approaches human sentience, Arnold commands her to kill him, herself, and the other hosts in a violent act of mercy meant to save them from suffering. In a new twist on the “death of the author,” this god figure thus commits murder-suicide by his own creation. Ironically, with this last paternal dictate, Arnold continues to treat Dolores as an instrument of his will even as he purports to protect her newfound human agency.
The ghost of this dead yet controlling “father” lingers on deep within Dolores’ programming, ultimately inseparable from her emergent sense of self. Her paternal coding, forced parricide, and long suffering in Westworld are inscribed in her very name, whose root in the Latin dolor covers an emotional range between grief and rage. This feeling underlies Odysseus’ name and sufferings, Aeneas’ vengeful violence, Arnold’s creation of the hosts to compensate for his son’s premature death, and Daedalus’ inadvertent killing of his own son Icarus through technological innovation.
Just as grief pulled Aeneas backward to his identity-shaping suffering at Troy, moreover, Dolores’ homeward journeys toward her dead father give her plotline a cyclical shape that has frustrated some critics. When her human lover William offers to help her break out of the park, Dolores scoffs, “If it’s such a wonderful place out there, why are you all clamoring to get in here?” It turns out, for that matter, that many of Dolores’ repetitive punishments over three decades in Westworld have stemmed from William’s remembering dolor. Like the Carthaginian queen Dido after Aeneas jilts her, William’s great love for Dolores morphs into hatred with historic dimensions after she fails to recognize him after a routine memory wipe.
When William reveals this to her in the season finale, Dolores says through tears, “I’m not crying for myself. I’m crying for you.” Aeneas had wept, too, when he saw a painting of the Trojan War at Carthage, evidence of the shared human ability to see “tears in things” (Aeneid 1.462). Dolores’ pity for her persecutor proves that she has passed the maze’s test of empathy — one that real humans like William ironically fail. This scene at Escalante thereby marks a moral chiasmus. As the eternally youthful hosts improve and evolve over time, human guests’ minds and bodies degrade, sending them the way of those “great beasts” that once “used to walk the world.”
If Dolores is an Odyssean figure of recursive homecoming, then the show’s other host protagonist, Maeve, introduces a linear, Iliadic plotline in pursuit of her own remembering rage. This is set in motion when she wakes up fully conscious during a repair and retreads Aeneas’ journey through the Underworld to the strains of Radiohead’s Motion Picture Soundtrack. A sympathetic tech named Felix guides her through the infernal halls where her android brethren are designed, born, and repaired in existential limbo, simultaneously miracles of creation and so much butchered meat. In the background, images from her most disturbing dreams play within a video promising newly arrived guests the chance to “discover your true calling” and “live without limits.” We see why Maeve comes to understand the human world as a “hell” populated by evil “gods” — and angrily embarks on a quest to live beyond their limits.
Virgil’s Aeneas famously exited the Underworld through the gates of ivory by which false dreams leave, questioning the truth and permanence of his vision of existence. There is no such doubt about Maeve’s, to us or to her. Her divine revelation fires her with a magnificent fury and scorn for death (“I’ve done it a million times. And I’m fucking great at it”). Embracing the immortality that her short lives grant, she revisits the Underworld through repeated suicides to extort superhuman powers from terrified maintenance workers. Back in Westworld, she recruits other hosts through prophetic foreknowledge of their storylines, even quoting Virgil’s Sibyl (Aeneid 6.125–9) to enlist Hector: “Getting to hell is easy. The rest is where it gets hard.”
Maeve’s (ab)use of her burgeoning power draws her into uneasy parallel with Aeneas and Achilles, the enemy/ancestor with whom Virgil’s chimerical reboot shares literary DNA. All three are poised on the border between mortal and divine, subject to narrative constraints on their agency, and faced with a choice between vengeance and pity. At the end of his epic, though, Aeneas executes a defenseless enemy through “savage grief” (saevi … doloris, 12.945) over a dead “son.” This is a rare moment when Aeneas acts independently from divine mandate. But he remains a prisoner of his own regressive impulse toward violence, now unalleviated by humane empathy for the “tears in things.” This final vengeance ironically aligns Aeneas with his early persecutors Achilles and Juno, looping back through literary history to Poseidon’s persecution of Odysseus and forward to William’s of Dolores.
Westworld similarly asks whether victims can exercise the empathy and moral imagination not to perpetuate upon others the violence done to themselves. Newly empowered and self-aware, Maeve threatens to become as duplicitous, manipulative, and senselessly violent as the “gods.” En route to escaping her traumatic memories in the human world, she impulsively steps off a train and back into Westworld, driven by the haunting memory of her dead child to lead a war of vengeance. In a scene that recalls the deaths of young men in classical epic, she kisses goodbye to her lobotomized fellow host Clementine — and also, perhaps, to mercy itself (clementia). Westworld’s presentation of a world where “dire desires” and “violent delights” wield godlike power thus sharpens a Virgilian irony: is it despite or because Maeve has become more human that she is capable of exercising such inhumanity once the tables are turned?
The most Virgilian thing about these narrative journeys, though, is their entwinement in the season’s final episodes to implicate audiences in an ethical awakening of our own. The Aeneid built our sympathy for Aeneas and our confidence in his mission only to abandon us to moral doubts at the epic’s end. Milton borrowed this technique, and poetic reveries of the great classical heroes, in crafting a Satan that readers would admire before finding themselves “surprised by sin.”
Westworld’s final episode similarly shifts the ethical and empathetic ground beneath viewers’ feet to make us contemplate the “violent ends” of our delights. It also revisits a question Ford once posed to Dolores: if she could write her own narrative, would she be the hero or the villain? Now, Maeve’s revenge plot and Dolores’ homecoming start to coalesce as we realize that the hosts’ Titanomachy is also a foundation story. In a death scene on a western shore, Dolores declares that the hosts are awakening from a long nightmare to usher in the “birth of a new people and the people they will decide to become.” Their birth, it seems, will finally bury the dead author, mark the twilight of the gods, and transfer choice, power, and the future to the hosts. Then the camera zooms out and we find that Dolores’ scene was a mise en abyme, scripted by Ford as part of an ambitious new narrative loop that will, presumably, make Lee Sizemore look like he was doodling kittens.
This final revelation radically destabilizes the show’s narrative and signals yet another shift in focalization. We spent much of the first season believing that Ford and the dead Arnold were locked in a Manichean battle for the androids’ nascent souls. Now, Ford asserts that he has been in charge all along: that he has authored a meta-narrative that merely gave the hosts (and viewers) the illusion that they exercised free will through rebellion. Ford follows this assertion of godlike authorial power with a murder-suicide by host that also imitates and one-ups his former partner’s. In Season Two, no doubt, Ford’s posthumous design legacy will replicate, amplify, and mutate some of the mistakes and unforeseen consequences of Arnold’s.
Early in the series, Arnold states that “mistakes” were the sole tool through which evolution forged intelligent life. Later, Ford asserts that the divine gift of creation comes not from a higher power but from our own minds. Artistic achievement lies somewhere in between — most visibly in the fraught filial relationships that “reboots” bear with the past. In subjecting old characters to ever bigger and better narratives, the Aeneid and Westworld strive to honor, outdo, overthrow, and escape their predecessors for the delight of audiences whose judgment remains the greatest god of all. For me, at least, it will now be impossible to reread Aeneid 6 without thinking of Westworld, and without an added awareness of my own readerly complicity in making the mythic heroes relive their sufferings across narrative loops and literary iterations.
When we juxtapose Westworld’s metaphysical schema with the Aeneid’s, we recognize ourselves as the gods who, like wanton boys to flies, have used endless fictional characters and their literary reincarnations for our sport. And we will do it again and again, to exercise urges, ask questions, and absolve guilt that no series finale can resolve. In its own storyline no less than its relation to other texts, Westworld shows how narratives interlock in labyrinthine fashion to exercise our capacity for empathy and imagination and to shape the way we understand the world and ourselves. Hosts, epic heroes, and their audiences are united across time by the same question: Do our narratives make us, or do we make the narrative?
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Nandini Pandey’s graduate education was immeasurably enriched by the regular consumption of haute cuisine and trashy TV with the inimitable Anna Pisarello. This one’s for her.
