Abstract

The relationship between the narrative—Westworld as a corporation which provides a park for wealthy guests to embrace their basest desires without consequence—and counter-narrative—hosts who are traumatized but unaware—highlights the importance of memory and dreams in normative sexual discourse. Thus, hosts’ dreams are actually reality in a different space while their nightmares are memories of actual events in another space. To complicate the counter-narrative even more, the hosts are not capable of resistance without their memories, and their memories, their reveries, only exist because of a programming code Arnold created. In this way, the plot of Westworld connects to Freud’s theory of wish-fulfillment and Focault’s theory of normative sexual discourse.