Abstract

If the innumerable objects, culture strata, commerce and sign referents in Westworld could be disentangled, a many layered thing would emerge. Westworld, allows an audience to watch “our” future travel back to “the past” in order to make sense of what it means to be conscious, sentient or human. What hyperreality does with this many layered product is to collapse “the distance between sign and referent enmeshing the two and making their independent existence impossible”, this flattening—mingling of knowledge icons to peddle “truths” —in Westworld’s case; a familiar or more real than real American history and a Cassandra like look into the future. Westworld, by not enabling a separation of the images and objects, or ingredients, used to render this flattening, produces a concertina effect; a collapsing of folds with few individual truths and a resulting end truth collapsed of meaning. The knock-on effect of the hyperreality utilised by the television show is for the audience, time travel.