“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”: Westworld’s New Prospero and His Isle of Calibans

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

Volume 13 Article 4

2023

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”: Westworld’s New “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”: Westworld’s New

Prospero and His Isle of Calibans Prospero and His Isle of Calibans

Jared S. Johnson

Thiel College

, [email protected]

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“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”:

Westworld’s New Prospero and His Isle of Calibans

Jared Johnson, Thiel College

he first season of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s Westworld

debuted on HBO in the fall of 2016. Westworld took

audiences on a tempestuous journey through its Wild West

theme park during the first season of the series, which aired from October

2 to November 4. Bookended between the creation of humanoid robots in

the near-future and the revolt of the androids against their creators thirty

years later, the show’s first season holds a mirror up to the very worst of

human nature. As one of the robots reveals to his creator, “You’re in a

prison of your own sins,” denoting both the physical locale of the

Westworld park and the looming existential threat of robot dominance.

Although the setting of Westworld takes place in the future, the mirror that

the show holds up clearly reflects the age and body of the first two decades

of the twenty-first century, a time in which business ethics struggle to keep

pace with technological innovation and profit motive.

Concluding its fourth season in August 2022, Westworld has explored

the following ethical challenges posed by the emergence of artificial life:

 How would humans behave in a consequence-free fantasy world

serviced by disposable humanlike robots?

 What might happen if those artificial beings were to gain self-

awareness?

 How, then, would humanity interact with intelligent androids?

Especially in a technologically advanced, thoroughly corporatized

era of late, late capitalism?

With every new season, Nolan and Joy steer the viewer further and further

beyond the Westworld park. The events of Season Three occur almost

exclusively in a futuristic Los Angeles with flying cars, self-driving

motorcycles and taxis, and skyscrapers covered in vertical gardens. From

the trajectory of the series, Westworld seems thoroughly future-oriented

in both its thematic content and worldbuilding. Why, then, does the series

so often refer to the past, not only in the form of the park’s simulated

nineteenth-century American frontier setting but also in the frequent nods

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to Shakespeare? Westworld transforms Shakespeare, employing the

language and character arcs of Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest to

critique the rise of technological innovation and the invasive and

inexorable power of corporatization driven by the steely, mechanistic logic

of capitalism, painting Shakespeare’s green world a dusty shade of red.

Nolan and Joy’s sci-fi Western is, of course, a reboot of the 1973 film

Westworld, written and directed by Michael Crichton. Twenty years before

Crichton had mastered the theme-park disaster film with Jurassic Park,

his opening foray into the genre featured simulated worlds populated by

humanlike robots, a kind of interactive It’s a Small World After All ride set

in the Wild West. When a computer virus infects the robots, causing them

to malfunction and attack the park’s human guests, disaster follows the

film’s pair of protagonists, Peter Martin and John Blane, embodied in a

proto-Terminator cowboy known as the Gunslinger. The original

Westworld film was successful enough to warrant a sequel, Futureworld,

three years later. In 1980, CBS aired three of the completed five episodes

of Beyond Westworld, a made-for-TV continuation of the original film’s

timeline, before being cancelled. Crichton’s brand of robot hellscape was

powered down after this failed project until being relaunched over three

decades later by Lisa Joy, then known for her work on ABC’s Pushing

Daisies and USA’s Burn Notice, and Johnathan Nolan, creator, executive

producer, and writer of the CBS series Person of Interest.

Like Crichton’s film, Nolan and Joy’s Westworld is a science fiction

Western set in a dystopian near future in which humans have developed

an underclass of androids to serve their most prurient pleasures at a Wild

West theme park. In this vein, Westworld became an easy fit for a Game

of Thrones-primed HBO audience, or what one reviewer called “the sex-

and-violence brand of entertainment that HBO has come to specialize in”

(Heer). When the Westworld series co-creators teamed up with Crichton

to write the script for the first episode of the new show, one of the

prominent additions was the notable inclusion of Shakespearean quotes

and allusions that become thematically significant throughout the series.

Indeed, Shakespeare’s language, characters, and themes pervade Nolan

and Joy’s Westworld.

“HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”

I. “These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends”

In the first episode alone, Westworld quotes widely from Shakespeare’s

works, incorporating language from The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet,

Henry IV, and King Lear. In Episode One of the first season, “The

Original,” a host named Peter Abernathy begins to malfunction when he is

unable to reconcile a photograph featuring a woman against the backdrop

of modern-day Times Square with his own limited experience within the

confines of the Westworld park. When Abernathy begins to glitch during a

scripted conversation with his host daughter, Dolores, he whispers to her

something that is revealed later in the episode to be a line from Romeo and

Juliet, “These violent delights have violent ends.” In the play, the line

reflects Friar Lawrence’s advice to the young couple, urging them to “love

moderately” (2.6.14). In Westworld, however, the delivery of the line

functions as the introduction of computer code that, once executed, results

in the artificial intelligence equivalent of cognition among the “hosts,”

Westworld’s non-human denizens. In Westworld , Shakespeare’s language

becomes literally codified as command codes issued by humans to hosts

and, here, between two hosts. In Episode Two, “Chestnut,” Westworld park

co-creator Robert Ford confides to his colleague, Bernard Lowe, “We

practice witchcraft. We speak the right words. Then we create life itself, out

of chaos,” attesting to the power of language to dictate the behavior of the

hosts.

The line whispered by Abernathy to his daughter, “These violent

delights have violent ends,” recurs throughout the series and is

pronounced by a variety of characters, both hosts and guests alike. The

quote was adopted as one of the five major taglines included in posters and

marketing material for the first season of the series. In the context of

Westworld, Friar Lawrence’s warning to the star-crossed lovers of Romeo

and Juliet becomes transformed into computer code signaling the

introduction of a software update that enables hosts to access gestures

from prior memories. Codenamed “The Reveries,” showrunner Lisa Joy

explains them like this:

The Reveries work on a kind of subliminal level. […] For me it was

imagining that consciousness and history are a deep sea and The

Reveries are tiny fishhooks that you dip into it and get little gestures

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and consciousness ticks. The hosts don’t consciously know where

they’re drawn from, but they’re just there to add some nuance to

their expressions and gestures. But dipping that fishhook in might

prove to be a little…fraught. (Hibberd)

As Joy suggests, with access to gestures comes access to memories, a

situation that proves to be “fraught” among the newly awakened hosts.

Abernathy’s apparent glitching turns out to be infused with purpose, at

once revealing the host’s impending identity crisis and simultaneously

signaling the transfer of The Reveries code to Dolores.

Nolan and Joy’s nod to Romeo and Juliet in Westworld is

unmistakable, and it is an easy leap to imagine the ill-fated romance plot

driving the first season as a Shakespearean transformation. Like the

Montagues and Capulets of Shakespeare’s teen tragedy, first-time park

guest William and perpetual host ingénue Dolores represent two houses

that stand in diametrical opposition, human and android. When we first

meet William in Episode Two, “Chestnut,” he is a hopeless romantic, a

literal white hat who carries with him a photo of his fiancée, Juliet Delos, a

Rosalind of sorts.

Westworld introduces William as an innocent, not unlike

Shakespeare’s Romeo, an idealist who thinks he knows what love is until

his experience in the park unlocks true romantic feelings in him for the first

time. Westworld accentuates William’s idealism by juxtaposing the

character with his foil, future brother-in-law Logan Delos. In contrast to

William’s curious and timid approach to his Westworld adventure, Logan

views his time in the park as a lawless LARP, freely indulging his

bottomless desires for sex, violence, and cruelty without fear or thought of

consequences. Likewise, the host Dolores can be understood—at first at

least—as a Juliet figure, herself experiencing unscripted love and desire for

the first time with William.

Westworld Season One follows the tragic plot of the star-cross’d

lovers, William and Dolores, as a series of reversals prevents them from

living happily ever after, not unlike the unfortunate fate of Romeo and

Juliet. In both Westworld and Romeo and Juliet, the lovers become

separated, leading to a series of missteps that result in grave consequences.

“HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”

In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo is banished from Verona for killing Juliet’s

kinsman, Tybalt. When Romeo flees to Mantua, he has no idea that Friar

Lawrence is concocting a plot to fake Juliet’s death. Instead, he relies on

Balthasar’s narration of Juliet’s death without the clarification that would

be provided by Friar Lawrence’s letters. The audience learns that Romeo

never received these letters in 5.2, when the messenger, Friar John, reports

that he was quarantined by a fellow friar who suspects that his quarters are

plague infested. A scene later, Juliet discovers that Romeo has poisoned

himself in an act of love suicide and follows suit with Romeo’s dagger.

Similarly, in Westworld, William and Dolores become separated when

Logan, now a leader in the Confederados, captures the two. Attempting to

show William that Delores is a simple machine, Logan slices open her

abdomen to reveal the metal mechanical structure beneath the skin.

William urges her to, “Run! I’ll find you” (Season 1, Episode 9: “The Well-

Tempered Clavier”). Like Juliet’s fantasy of being rescued by a fully read in

Romeo, William’s quest to reunite with Dolores is thwarted when, after

exploring the outer edges of the park in search for her, he finally discovers

her again where they first met, in Sweetwater, memory wiped and living

out the rancher’s daughter storyline with a new park guest.

II. “Don’t you see? Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

The line, “These violent delights have violent ends,” from Romeo and Juliet

functions on multiple levels in Westworld. The phrase serves to advance

the plot by triggering The Reveries, or memories, in the hosts, making

them question their scripted identities and the world around them. The

line also captures the essence of William and Dolores’s bad romance. Like

Friar Lawrence’s wedding day warning to Romeo and Juliet, William and

Dolores’s firestorm relationship burns too hot to last:

These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,

Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness

And in the taste confounds the appetite:

Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow. (2.5.9-15)

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In Westworld, “These violent delights have violent ends,” refers to the

power dynamics between guests and hosts in the park as guests freely

engage in illegal and immoral acts like murder and rape against humanlike

hosts without fear of consequences. The line also conjures the dystopian

world outside the park, a hyper-capitalist society run by the corporate elite.

It is no coincidence that the Delos board members who appear onscreen—

William, James Delos, Logan Delos, and Charlotte Hale—all share the

common characteristics associated with narcissism, such as elevated self-

importance, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy for others. In

Westworld, the billionaire class becomes the stand-in for humanity.

While the Shakespeare quote from Romeo and Juliet might enjoy a

higher profile in Westworld as one of the taglines for the first season,

another line from Shakespeare that the glitching Peter Abernathy delivers

to his panicking daughter in the first episode might carry more symbolic

weight for the series. Looking at that anachronistic color photo of the

woman surrounded by the electronic billboards of Times Square,

Abernathy cryptically mutters to his daughter, “I had a question. A

question you’re not supposed to ask. Which gave me an answer you’re not

supposed to know.” When Dolores panics, calling her mother for help,

Abernathy’s body language shifts from despair to alarm. Grabbing

Dolores’s shoulders and fixing his gaze to her, he warns her with stern

resolve, “You should go. Leave!” before quoting a different line from

Shakespeare, this time from The Tempest: “Don’t you see? Hell is empty

and all the devils are here.” Abernathy leans into Dolores, whispering

something inaudible to the audience but later revealed to be “These violent

delights.” Here, Abernathy introduces a line of computer code into the park

that, once executed, results in the artificial intelligence equivalent of

cognition among the “hosts,” Westworld’s non-human denizens.

Abernathy’s fearful delivery of Ariel’s line from The Tempest, “Hell

is empty and all the devils are here,” is even more thematically relevant to

the series, describing the situation faced by the park’s hosts at the hands of

oftentimes cruel and malevolent guests. In The Tempest Act 1, Scene 2,

Ariel reports back to Prospero on the success of his magical storm to

disorient the Milanese and Neapolitan sailors:

All but mariners

“HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”

Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,

Then all afire with me; the king's son Ferdinand,

With hair upstaring—then like reeds, not hair—

Was the first man that leapt, cried, “Hell is empty,

And all the devils are here!” (210-14)

Here, Ariel ventriloquizes the language of a terrified Ferdinand in the face

of a violent storm that forces him to jump ship. Ferdinand’s terror becomes

mirrored in this host’s experience of self-knowledge, the realization that

the entire purpose of his existence is to suffer for the entertainment and

amusement of the human park guests. The confluence of The Tempest and

Westworld at this key moment in Episode One of the first season creates a

Shakespearean transformation that is echoed throughout the series.

Westworld Season Two originally aired on April 22, 2018, on HBO.

Like the first season, Season Two (subtitled “The Door”) consisted of ten

episodes with the season finale airing on June 24, 2018. The first episode

of Season Two, “Journey into Night,” begins in a familiar setting, the room

in which Bernard had conducted private interviews with Dolores from the

first season. The scene opens with an out-of-focus close-up of Bernard’s

face and slowly zooms out as the image comes into focus. Appearing in a

state of confusion, Bernard begins the interview:

BERNARD LOWE: I'm sorry, Dolores, I was lost in thought.

DOLORES ABERNATHY: We were just talkin'.

BERNARD LOWE: What were we talking about?

DOLORES ABERNATHY: You were tellin' me about a dream.

BERNARD LOWE: Yeah, I guess. I dreamt I was on an ocean with

you and the others on a distant shore.

DOLORES ABERNATHY: Were you with us?

BERNARD LOWE: No. You'd left me behind. And the waters were

rising around me.

DOLORES: What's it mean?

BERNARD LOWE: Dreams don't mean anything, Dolores. They're

just noise. They're not real.

DOLORES ABERNATHY: What is real?

BERNARD LOWE: That which is irreplaceable. That answer doesn't

seem to satisfy you.

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DOLORES ABERNATHY: Because it's not completely honest.

BERNARD LOWE: You, uh you frighten me sometimes, Dolores.

DOLORES ABERNATHY: Why on earth would you ever be

frightened of me?

BERNARD LOWE: Not of who you are now, but you're growing,

learning, so quickly. I'm frightened of what you might

become what path you might take.

This exchange reverses the power dynamic between Bernard and Dolores

from Season One. In addition to confessing his dream, Bernard appears to

struggle to answer Dolores’s questions. Immediately following the

exchange, director Richard J. Lewis inserts a montage of incidents

involving Bernard from Season One and the season ahead in random order,

suggesting that Bernard is unable to distinguish between past and present.

Following the montage, Lewis features a shot of Bernard’s signature

eyeglasses on a sandy beach with one sleeve of his grey suit in the lower

right corner of the frame as a wave washes up, carrying the eyeglasses out

of frame. Though Bernard does not physically need his spectacles to see,

the glasses serve as important prop. He periodically takes them off, wipes

them with a handkerchief, and places them back on his nose to regain his

focus. The lenses drifting away with the tide, Bernard is left here without

vision or clarity. Lewis then cuts to a close-up shot of Bernard’s face as he

slowly opens his eyes as if from sleeping, paralleling the opening shot of

the episode. Bernard, like the tempest-tossed Ferdinand of Shakespeare’s

play, has washed up on shore disoriented and vulnerable.

Besides the similarities between Bernard’s disorientation that

follows him through Season Two and Ferdinand’s traumatic arrival on

Prospero’s island, Westworld bears a keen likeness to Shakespeare’s The

Tempest, a Shakespearean transformation that imagines the play’s green

world overtaking the civilized world outside of the park. As viewers follow

the narrative from the perspective of the newly self-aware hosts, they

experience a version of The Tempest in which they are held under

Prospero’s spell.

“HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”

III. Westworld’s New Prospero

Series co-creator Lisa Joy has cited Prospero as her source of inspiration

in writing the character of Robert Ford, the technological mastermind

responsible for the Wild West theme park for which the series is named.

Prospero plays a dual role in the play, as indicated by his costume. His

entrance in 1.2 “in his magic cloak” announces his status as magician, but

by the play’s end, Prospero’s “discas[ing]” of his former costume and his

donning of “the hat and rapier” that he commands Ariel to “[f]etch”

instantiates his former status as Duke, “As I was sometime Milan” (5.1.84-

86).

In his essay that appears in Dollimore and Sinfield’s classic Political

Shakespeare, scholar Paul Brown alleges that Prospero’s costume change

registers his reclamation of his “civil power” as his hat and rapier function

as “twin markers of the governor (the undoffed hat signifying a high status

in a deference society, as the rapier signifies the aristocratic right to carry

such weaponry)” (67). In this way, Prospero is both sorcerer and governor,

a position akin to the role that Robert Ford plays as the Park Director of

Delos Destinations within the Westworld series narrative. Indeed, in

Episode Two, Ford confides to his lead programmer, Bernard Lowe, the

Ariel to his Prospero, that, “We practice witchcraft. We speak the right

words. Then we create life itself… out of chaos” (“Chestnut”).

While there would seem to be few similarities between the exiled

Milanese Duke-turned-sorcerer from Shakespeare’s late romance and the

co-founder and Westworld park director from Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s

science fiction series, Prospero and Ford share a likeness in temperament,

purpose, language, and, to some degree, situation that link not just the two

characters but the two works and worlds in their respective storylines. In

what follows, I wish to highlight two key scenes of Shakespearean

transformation from the climactic finale of Westworld Season One vis-à-

vis Act 5 of The Tempest.

The first scene from the Westworld season finale that strongly

echoes The Tempest is Dr. Ford’s final conversation with his lead

programmer, Bernard Lowe. Entitled “The Bicameral Mind,” Episode Ten

of Westworld Season One showcases the season’s big reveal that finally

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makes sense of what fans had been suspecting all along: that the seemingly

linear narration of the show is, in all actuality, the juxtaposition of two

different timelines separated by thirty years.

It is in this episode too that Dr. Ford says his final goodbye to his

android partner, Bernard Lowe, who has only recently discovered that he

is indeed a host patterned on Ford’s former business partner, Arnold

Weber, a programmer who collaborated with Ford to create the hosts but

later sabotaged the Westworld project by staging a host revolt that

culminated in his own suicide by robot. As Bernard and Ford talk in the

White Church in Escalante right before Ford will give his resignation

speech to park’s board of trustees, Bernard confronts his boss about Ford’s

treatment of the hosts:

BERNARD LOWE: You think you'll never lose control of this place,

of us, but you will. Arnold's still trying to change us. To free

us. You didn't slip the reveries into the update, did you? He

did. He's still fighting you.

DR. FORD: No, my friend. Arnold didn't know how to save you. He

tried, but I stopped him. Do you want to know why I really

gave you the backstory of your son, Bernard? That was

Arnold's key insight. The thing that led the hosts to their

awakening. Suffering. The pain that the world is not as you

want it to be. It was when Arnold died, when I suffered, that

I began to understand what he had found. To realize I was

wrong.

BERNARD LOWE: But you kept us here, in this hell.

DR. FORD: Bernard, I told you. Arnold didn't know how to save you,

but I do.

BERNARD LOWE: What the hell are you talking about?

DR. FORD: You needed time. Time to understand your enemy. To

become stronger than them. And I'm afraid, in order to

escape this place, you need to suffer more. And now it is time

to say goodbye, old friend.

[they shake hands]

DR. FORD: Good luck.

“HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”

Here, Bernard defiantly asserts that he and the hosts will one day find

freedom from Ford’s control through the intervention of Ford’s long-dead

former partner, Arnold. To Bernard and for audiences, Ford’s response

seems heartfelt but at the same time unsatisfying. Ford claims that it is he

and not Arnold who is ultimately responsible for inserting the “reveries,”

or ability to remember the past, into the host’s software update. Here, Ford

does not free Bernard; that is frankly beyond his power as the company’s

board retains the intellectual property of the hosts. Instead, he alludes the

maxim attributed to the awakening of consciousness of the hosts. He

empowers Bernard with the knowledge that suffering is necessary both to

awaken host consciousness and to experience and recognize the bottomless

depths of the capacity for human greed, self-interest, and violence.

Dr. Ford’s final exchange with Bernard is a kind of Shakespearean

transformation that gives real weight and consequences to the unequal and

unjust power dynamics that Shakespeare glosses over in The Tempest. No

doubt Dr. Ford appears at times as tyrannical and cruel to the hosts as

Prospero is to those over which he has power. Unlike Dr. Ford, though,

Prospero’s power over Ariel is absolute; he alone is capable of releasing his

servant from captivity. “Quickly, spirit! / Thou shalt ere long be free,”

(5.1.86-7) he says before Ariel attires him in his princely garb. “Why, that’s

my dainty Ariel! I shall miss / Thee, but yet thou shalt have freedom,” he

affectionately reaffirms before sending Ariel to summon the Master and

Boatswain to his location. At the play’s end, after Prospero commands Ariel

to “deliver all” (317) of the castaways home, he unambiguously offers Ariel

his freedom: “Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thee well” (5.1.320-

1).

The second scene from the Westworld Season One finale that

echoes The Tempest directly is during Dr. Ford’s resignation speech. After

leaving Bernard in the White Church, Dr. Ford appears before a crowd of

Delos board members and upper management as a team of hosts cater the

event and provide entertainment. Ford begins his address:

Good evening. Since I was a child... I always loved a good story. I

believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was

broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being.

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Lies that told a deeper truth. I always thought I could play some

small part in the grand tradition.

Ford’s characterization of storytelling as “Lies that told a deeper truth”

recalls the metatextual moments in The Tempest in which Prospero likens

his magic within the world of the play to the mimetic power of the theater

to conjure meaning outside of it. Prospero speaks of the three spirits he

summoned to celebrate the wedding of Miranda and Ferdinand—Juno,

Ceres, and Iris—as “actors” who “were all spirits and / Are melted into air,

into thin air” (4.1.48-50). Prospero describes the features of the pageant,

and, by extension, the worldbuilding elements that frame the stories

created on the stage as ephemeral:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.151-6)

Paul Brown reads Prospero’s “stuff of dreams” speech as a commentary on

the power of things to designate meaning through representation. The

speech, for Brown, inaugurates the “dispell[ing]” of the masque and

illuminates “the illusory nature of all representation, even of the world

itself.” Brown places this dynamic in tension with Prospero’s earlier

“insist[ance] that his narrative be taken as real and powerful,” which

becomes contradicted in the monologue as Prospero’s narrative “is

collapsed, along with everything else, into the ‘stuff’ of dreams” (67). The

imaginary, representational world created within the time and space of a

theatrical performance is, to borrow Dr. Ford’s terminology, a lie, but the

lie that unfolds on the stage tells a deeper truth.

Westworld transforms Shakespeare into something intangible,

ethereal, and perhaps even magical. This is most apparent in the show’s

overt nods to The Tempest. In his “Epilogue,” Prospero makes a final

surrender to the audience, imploring them: “But release me from my bands

/ With the help of your good hands” (9-10). Prospero, who had occupied a

position of power throughout the play, now performs a final act of

“HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”

obeisance to the audience, literally begging them for applause while he

releases them from the theater. Like Prospero’s “Epilogue,” which has been

interpreted as Shakespeare’s final address to audiences, Ford informs his

gathered guests that, “I’m sad to say, this will be my last story.” When Ford

tells his audience that there will be “a killing. This time by choice,” he is

speaking broadly about the Wyatt plotline that he had recently introduced

to the hosts through the reveries software update. At the same time,

though, he is forecasting his own death that will come at the hands of a self-

aware Delores. In contrast to her murder of the hosts and Arnold Weber

thirty years earlier that resulted from deliberate changes made by Arnold

to her programming, Delores now makes the choice to execute Dr. Ford

based on her own free will. As a gun-wielding Delores creeps up behind

him, Ford tells an anecdote that recalls the use of music and magic in The

Tempest:

An old friend once told me something that gave me comfort,

something he had read. He said that Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin

never died. They simply became music. So I hope you will enjoy this

last piece very much.

As Ford speaks of music, an instrumental version of Radiohead’s “Exit

Music (for a Film)” plays in the background. The song was written for the

1996 Baz Luhrmann film Romeo + Juliet and captures a young couple’s

escape from an overbearing father. The inclusion of this song to accompany

Ford’s speech underlines the theme of rebellion against oppression, a

theme that becomes echoed in the hosts’ subsequent rebellion against their

human captors.

Works Cited

Brown, Paul. “'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest

and the discourse of colonialism,” Political Shakespeare: New

essays in cultural materialism. Edited by Jonathan Dollimore and

Alan Sinfield. Cornell UP, 1985, 48-71.

Heer, Jeet. “Westworld's Trigger Warnings.” The New Republic, 28 Oct.

2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/138016/westworlds-

trigger-warnings.

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Hibberd, James. “'Westworld' Producers Answer Our Burning Post-

Premiere Questions.” EW.com, 2 Oct. 2016,

https://ew.com/article/2016/10/02/westworld-premiere-

interview/. Accessed 12 Jan 2022.

Shakespeare, William, et al. The Norton Shakespeare. Third edition. New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Westworld. Created by Michael Crichton, Jonathan Nolan, and Lisa Joy.

HBO, 2016-2020. Hulu. https://www.hulu.com/welcome