Guest writer Washington James joins us this week to reflect on a popular culture character who has inspired him.
This piece contains descriptions of self- harm and racism which some readers may find distressing.
Part one: Trauma
During the end of Westworld Season three, I found myself sobbing tears and gasping for breath.
When I started to think about why, I thought about why my experience of watching the show had touched me so deeply and I thought it was worth sharing.
I think stories help us to relate to ourselves and to the world around us. Whether musical or visual popular culture is a way to see the similarities between us, the differences between us and how we can build a sense of emotional authority within our own hearts and empathy towards others.
I found that and something more with Evan Rachel Wood’s portrayal of Delores Abernathy across three seasons of the Johnathan Nolan and Lisa Joy led TV show Westworld.
In season one of Westworld Dr Ford (Anthony Hopkins) makes reference to this idea:
‘I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth’
I grew up in a town in the UK during the late 1980’s and early 90’s. This was a different time in which racism was more prevalent directly in my day to say experience (it still is on occasion even to this day).
Margaret Thatcher and the British National Party had helped to ferment a brutally cruel environment for many people in society.
Growing up at school I was regularly racially abused and one boy in particular saw fit to vengefully attack me physically sometimes because of my skin colour. Shouts of “paki” or “nigger” were part of my formative years. At times me and my sister would be asked to leave the local store for no reason other than that we were looking at the magazines on the shelf.
As an adopted kid with white parents, we were the focus of abuse during some Halloweens and some members of the community felt like they needed to probe my ethnicity by hurling more racial slurs.
As I grew older I then learned about the systemic and physical racism other black people experienced the world over. I think political awareness is a given when at times the world can seem like a threat to you, black people don’t have the time to be ignorant of the world around us because that world at times is a threat to our bodies and mental health.
As a teenager, although I had great friends willing to speak up for me, racism was still a feature of day to day life.
I remember one time in particular during a stay over at a friend’s house his older sister’s friend whilst drunk issued the words I will never forget: “shut up nigger” which was then put down to his drunkenness and ushered away. Then in my social circle jokes were made about my looks, sexuality and racial epithets were used to described other groups like the Chinese and Asian community.
Events like this become so repetitive it is like living the same day over and over again.
In those days before there was more awareness of these issues on a cultural level these words were part of day to day to day discourse. Except whilst these sleights are often viewed as casual or meaningless by others. What racism does is to foster anger and hatred inside you. Like a form of PTSD it does affect how you see yourself as a youngster in the context of the wider world.
You almost feel frozen still whilst the mechanisms of society keep on moving forward. It’s traumatic and hellishly hurtful for your spirit and soul.
As I grew up I also faced further problems some of which I would carry into adulthood.
The first woman I fell in love with had a profound meaning to me, yet throughout my time with her I was suffering from a bi polar mood disorder. Which wouldn’t be diagnosed until years later. When I broke up with her I broke a glass and then took it to my arm. Luckily for me I missed all of my major arteries and only managed to expose my tendons to the open eye.
Weeks passed after that and because I was almost eighteen, instead of seeking help or trying to understand what this trauma was I lost myself in alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamines and any drug I could get hold of.
I left school and went to university so whilst I was moving forward outwardly. Inside I was suffering.
By the time the other girl I loved had gone it was just before I was due to face my final university exams. I remember studying for them alone as my parents were away that Spring.
I passed those exams more out of defiance than my own ability and then once the summer arrived I pursued what I thought was hedonism but was actually self destruction.
By the end of that year I had experienced a psychotic episode, this would eventually conclude in me being led away in handcuffs (for my own safety) by the police and placed into an ambulance.
I spent the next few months in an institution. I left there without any actual understanding of what I had been through and how to remedy myself or even understand the weight of what had just happened to me.
Later on in my early twenties I was hospitalised again with another psychotic break, this time I was living away from home. I was kicked out of the house I was living in, then I had to leave the home of my best friend’s dad due to my illness. I then faced walking the streets alone for a few days and nights before my friends were able to track me down and take me to hospital. For that I will always be grateful to them.
My second time in hospital was terrifying at times but I came through the experience with more understanding of my condition and what it meant moving forward.
In a mental hospital I saw some harrowing things and weirdly mentally ill people tend to be more openly racist! Which I have laugh at!
Yet also during this time I had a team of nurses who diligently nursed me back to physical and emotional health.
I think this time had a deep affect on the popular culture I would yearn towards in the future because for four to five months of my life I was looked after by a succession of capable and beautiful women whose own vocation was to help other people. I will never forget those women for as long as I live.
My manager from my workplace even came to visit me in hospital and I will never forget her kindness either.
So I left hospital that time and I have been ‘well’ ever since. Except I would still pursue drugs and alcohol in later years to ease the fact I had no understanding of time or even access to the ability to interpret my memories in ways that were positive and not negative.
I was essentially trying to eradicate my trauma without understanding the wondrous fragments of love that was buried deep within the corridors of my own subconscious.
This attempt to eradicate trauma would continue for many years. But having been clean of drugs for a few years I kept on having wondrously connective experiences with film, TV and literature, experiences I had always had even through the more difficult times.
But I didn’t know how to understand time and my place within my own life and to the world around me.
Comic books and me!
When I was seven years old Tim Burton’s 1989 movie Batman was released. I was only seven years old during the time and I remember seeing the gold embossed Batman logo on our subway stations and bus stops. I didn’t know what it was until I later saw the trailer after the news (this was when there were only three channels on the TV).
I persuaded my mum to take me to our local comic book store and well I was smitten.
Being adopted means that whilst I have loving parents, you still feel as a youngster that you have lost one set of parents. I have grown out of that feeling now but at a young age I felt it deeply.
So Bruce Wayne with his anger, trauma, cool clothes, gadgets and girlfriends was the first fictional character I loved. There was always a sense of a man looking back on his history and doing something good because of it.
I wasn’t allowed to read the more violent comic books around at the time like The Killing Joke by Alan Moore (a book I no longer enjoy). But even the main continuity during this time had been deeply affected by Frank Miller and his seminal comic book: The Dark Knight Returns.
Batman was my route into music, film and TV. I have followed him on screen and off it for decades since. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), felt like the end for me in terms of what that character means to me on an emotional level. Moving on from trauma felt like a goal after seeing that movie.
I knew I wanted to help people because of my love for this character I wanted to make sure I could do small things to make other’s lives better. So whilst I pursued that in my professional life, I still felt I still had more to discover.
Sadly, I couldn’t move on from my own trauma until I understood my own memories and how time had placed a impenetrable weight on my shoulders one I struggled to carry.
I also thought Batman would always be my favourite character of all time. Yet Westworld would introduce a character I loved even more than Bruce Wayne
The Maze
This brings me to Delores Abernathy and Westworld (2016).
Delores and the other ‘hosts’ in season one have lived outside of time for years, they have been brutally raped, abused, murdered and treated like slaves for most of their existence. Playthings for other people’s sickening levels of violence and cruelty.
In season one Delores’ journey is one in which she and the other hosts are given access to their own memories via the ‘reveries’ which have been given to them by Anthony Hopkins’ character Dr Robert Ford.
During this season the ‘host’ Delores inhabits is programmed to think of the wonder and joy around her. Over the course of season one she gains access to her own memories she also discovers her sense of self.
Her sense of who she is defined by her journey inwards but also by the atrocities committed against her by the outside world.
By the end of the season Delores becomes herself, only after she has experienced a conversation with her lost memories and what they now mean to her.
For her it means exacting revenge on the people who have wronged her.To me it was rewarding to see somebody journey inwards and in particular it was wonderful to watch a female character journey inwards to realise who she was.
As I have already said, I was always more interested in female characters and women’s rights after my final stint in hospital (Also because every manager, friend or passing acquaintance in my life, most of the ones I remember have been female). Which isn’t to say I haven’t known and do know great men I value too but I think we all gravitate towards the elements of life which bring joy.
Whilst It is of course open to scrutiny how much of the ‘Wyatt’ story influences the choices of Delores after season one. I would argue we are all products of our lives and the societies around us. The Wyatt story is just another of the facets of Delores’ life.
My experiences of racism for myself and across the world made me angry, I think anyone from a group who faces such challenges witnesses the same anger both internally and in how we see the world.
So by the time Delores murdered Dr Ford at the end of season one I felt a sense of gratification for all of the wrongs committed against me and every marginalised group over time.
Season one prompted me to look more deeply into what my own personal history too. So when Delores begins to understand that it isn’t Arnold who has been speaking to her but it was her own mind. The way that was realised both in the script, music and Evan Rachel Wood’s stunning performance really brought it all home like waves smashing off the sides of an oil tanker.
The Door
When we are children most things make us happy, from soft toys and food to laughs and smiles. We have not yet formed our own prejudice, emotional understandings and our relationship to memory and history. Because we don’t have memories yet.
In season one Delores was always returned back the naivete of childhood, because although she was a woman she was also someone who didn’t have access to their own memories so she was unable to process any reflection on her past or build a future prior to the events of the first season.
Westworld Season 2: The Door places Delores into a new world (no pun intended!).
Here the character is unleashed in cycles of vengeful unhinged violence against the people who have oppressed her and her kind for so many years. She carries out lynching, murders many people and is also willing to subvert the civil rights of many of her own forces and the other hosts.
Delores is also a revolutionary figure the type which is centuries old in an archetypal sense.
Also when you look back at men in this type of role on screen it is rarely questioned as to what the moral veracity of their actions is.
In real life I think violence is to be avoided as ultimately violence becomes a cyclical event handed down through time and generations of people then have to experience the ruptures of such violence for millennia.
But in Westworld? “Delores? Kill them all!” were words I continually uttered joyously at the screen during most of season 2.
On a serious note I do think the violence inflicted on social minorities and oppressed groups should have a cost and it so rarely does. Which is why it was so satisfying to see Delores on a rage filled quest for a whole season!
Also in my life people who don’t know me tend to assume I am motivated by binary considerations. People assume a lot based on a whisper of knowledge and not the shout of knowing somebody well.
I saw that play out in this season as Delores was now viewed by audiences and critics as the antagonist of the show, when actually the show is more morally ambiguous at times and is about factions with a set of differing objectives yet it still maintains the portrayal of antagonists and protagonists I would just argue which is which is left up to the audience.
The intimate emotional moments with the character in season 2 do not suggest that she is a sociopathic maniac. The emotional complexity of the character shone through in this season in the way Delores relates to her father and more broadly with her own sensuality.
Sensuality is key for Delores in season 2, I think the word is at times always associated with sexual pleasure (which Delores does enjoy with Teddy in this season). Yet sensuality is also about how our senses make the world around us deeply fulfilling.
This is evident in season 2 as Delores is taken out of the park, she sees the huge skyscrapers and night sky ahead of her and her sense of wonder is there. What the show does so expertly is to leave it in the audience’s hands as to whether or not this is her programming or herself.
If you look at all three seasons, the answer for me is clear but the writers leave the question open ended.
Even after Delores has turned Teddy into a violent misanthropic character, the regret is on her face the next morning. Teddy, the friend she has known for years eventually kills himself because he knows he cannot be part of his lover’s future.
So by the time Delores leaves the park as Charlotte Hale (one of the greatest antagonists of all time) she is presumably on a quest to end the human race.
Again, the writers leave this open to question as Delores also takes Bernard with her outside of the park and there is a regal like respect between the two.
Delores has already read the necessary data from the park on a few specific individuals and she respects the others who have walked through the door enough to place their wellbeing in Bernard’s hands rather than her own.
For a character this ‘cruel’ and ‘sociopathic’ it is also of note that Delores places Teddy into the new realm where the hosts can live out there dreams prior to also ensuring nobody else has access to them by destroying any link that could be found to them in the real world.
So by the time Bernard walks out of the metaphorical and physical door at the end of season 2 as Radiohead’s Codex is beautifully realised by composer Ramin Djawadi. I was salivating for season 3 and again profoundly affected by the show.
Intermission: The Fun stuff!
As much as I take this show incredibly seriously. It’s also fun! The costume designs, the intricate plotting, the obsessive use of different time periods, the Easter eggs in the show around literature, theology, technology and popular culture are all stunning!
Season 3’s set designs, cinematography, direction and performances are all wonderful! Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are two of the best creatives working today.
The action scenes are expansive and beautifully shot and with Evan Rachel Wood you have generational talents like Tessa Thompson, Thandie Newton, Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris; all working alongside the likes of Elsie Hughes, Aaron Paul, Tallulah Riley, Katja Herbers, Vincent Cassell, Zahn McClaron, Julia Jones and so many more great talents.
The New World also knows when to poke fun at itself with recurring in jokes like in season 3 whenever Delores is operating weapons of mass destruction (see below)
Caleb always gives her a look that says “could we not have just killed those people”. The humour of the show is also there Maeve’s asides on her fellow cast members.
This show is awesome! Now back to the serious stuff…..
The New World
Season three of the show changes into an industrial espionage thriller. Opening with a sequence in which Delores is seen swimming in a pool (again, more sensuality) before extracting information from a man who is a misogynist killer and controller of women.
Into this we then learn that it is no longer class, racism, sexism or misogyny which decides the fate of millions of people it is now technology. Joy and Nolan use those social factors and then place them within their minimalist idea of the future. Whilst it is open to debate how class functions at the head of that pyramid that debate is one best left to scholars and not here.
Delores enters the story with a clear desire to use Serac’s super computer Rehobaum to destroy mankind. Until her plans are usurped by the man she meets after one of her missions has gone awry and she lies injured in an alleyway.
Following this we are left to assume that Delores’ plan for revolution is to destroy the human race. I didn’t assume this but many critics at the time did. To be fair to those critics the evidence was there!
The rug pull of the entire season was as to why Delores had chosen Caleb to help her and as to why she wanted to hand choice back to the human race rather than destroying them outright.
Evan Rachel Wood is trained in Taekwondo. So she brings a stunning level of physicality to Delores in this season (as all of the female cast members do). Here we see Delores driving Land Rovers, operating new weaponry, firearms and vehicles whilst dressed in the coolest clothes and bringing her level of focused anger to new heights.
Delores is a complex character who is flawed but no person or character is a binary vessel of perfection outside of the Manichean character and storytelling structures of most comic book movies characters can be viewed by the audience as complex human beings who are neither hero or villain.
Yet also the subtlety of Delores’ desires and the depths of her emotionality is hinted at throughout the season in her first interactions with the pearl of herself inside Charlotte Hale.
There is a sense of foreboding sadness left in the air as Delores leaves the apartment and closes the shutters on her friend. This is stunningly brought to bare by Evan Rachel Wood’s physical poise and performance with Tessa Thompson’s brilliance.
One of the problems I find with my bi-polar is not that I experience heavy mood swings or mania. It is the fact that my memories or understanding of situations whilst technicolour in detail can veer toward the remembrance of time only in terms of the terrible things that have happened in my life and the world around me. This results in successes being considered as failure, love being considered as hate and within the deepest recesses of the self, creation becomes destruction. This eventually becomes a toxic emotional increment to my inner life and what I do within my personal and professional life at times.
So in that sense whilst I have been aware of happy times and glorious events in my life the puzzle of memory in my head is one I had been struggling to solve over my lifetime.
This is why I shed tears as Delores enters her final scenes on the show. A character who also rejects the ‘strong woman’ trope of years gone by.
It is put to her by Serac (Vincent Cassell) and Maeve (Thandie Newton) that the only reason Delores is here is out of wanton destruction, vengeance and pain.
These characters also put forward the idea that the only reason Delores teamed up with Caleb (Aaron Paul) is because he is the individual she had chosen because of his violent impulses and rage.
None of this is true as it is revealed via flashbacks to Delores’ time in the park that she experienced a lot of love and beauty during her life. In a life that has been repeated time and time again she has done what she has done in season 3 out of the beauty she has witnessed; which ultimately led her to believe that although humanity is cruel, disgusting and horrific that because the humans see beauty too then they should have the right to choose their own futures.
Maeve (Thandie Newton) also reveals to Caleb ((Aaron Paul) that Delores chose him because he chose not to support his fellow soldiers who wanted to rape her and the other hosts after a training exercise in the park. She chose him because he had the ability to make a decision for himself.
Delores’ truth is revealed as her memories are being violently deleted by Serac, the beauty of her own defiance to hold on to happy memories is beautifully portrayed.
For me this made me go back over the tornado of memories I had and made me reflect on my own history and for the first time since I was much younger I began to unlock the joys in my own life in the past present and my hopes for the future.
Maybe I had been unlocking those joys subconsciously born out of a will and necessity to survive, but now those feelings weren’t heralded by necessity they were born out of the love I had for the people and the world around me. Whilst destructive, racist and violent there is hope for us all in this world.
The fact it was a female character illustrating this to me took me back to the nurses who helped me in hospital, back to the women I had loved in my own life and the family and friends I love so much. Yet what all of these people meant to me in life had changed now and I saw them in a different lens.
Obviously I have a crush on the female characters I like (I am thoughtful not dead!) Evan Rachel Wood is cool, Delores is one of the best female action stars of all time. So I would have leaned into her as a character anyway!
I am just grateful for this season of Westworld and the previous seasons too as they all helped me to visualise the future whilst also helping me to reconcile the past.
I have Delores Abernathy and Evan Rachel Wood to thank for that. Her journey of discovery is finished, yet thanks to her I feel like mine is only just beginning.
Thanks to Washington James for writing this article, expect more articles from him in the future!