Retour vers la matrice : le Westworld (Mondwest) de Michael Crichton (1973)

Abstract

This paper focuses on Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973), which is the starting point of the HBO series Westworld (2016-). The film needs to be considered against the backdrop of the US counter- culture of the 1970s. As a product of the new Hollywood era, it plays unashamedly on different film genres, primarily science-fiction and Western, but also the horror film and the thriller. The presence of Yul Brynner acting as a robot gunslinger villain adds to the ironical stance of the film, which debunks Western masculinity and the consumer society, together with (already!) a critique of the intermingling of the real and the simulacrum. Although the series uses the main narrative line of Crichton’s film – an amusement park in which very real-looking robots rebel – it does not follow the film’s distanced point of view and its campy dimension, as it focuses on the androids and puts forward other philosophical and technological issues.

Keywords

• Westworld
• science fiction
• 1970s
• US counterculture
• generic hybridity
• camp