These Violent Delights: Navigating Westworld as 'Quality' Television

Westworld’s puzzle-plot narrative, high degree of intertextuality, subversions of genre convention and posthumanist themes, combined with the presence of acclaimed actors and the authorial imprint of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, mark the show as clearly within the bounds of prestige television. Westworld’s narrative tactics and thematic concerns emphasise a shift away from the perceived passivity of mass-appeal television towards a mode of viewership that requires an elevated level of cultural capital and intellectual engagement. By focusing on Westworld’s intertextual play and analysing its narrative structure in relation to what Warren Buckland refers to as the puzzle plot—where narrative events are “not simply interwoven, but entangled” (Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, p. 3, 2009)—this chapter interrogates the intersections between the strategies of “prestige” employed in Westworld and its thematic and ideological underpinnings. This chapter asks, how do Westworld’s formal and aesthetic tactics function in relation to the questions that the show raises about human nature—particularly issues of masculinity, trauma, and violence?