What is genre? Is it a collection of tropes that can be applied to any story? Is it an aesthetic covering that could be applied to any framework? In the third season of Westworld genre was a drug that altered the perceptions of its user. And in season four, episode three as Maeve and Caleb spend more time in mob world, some familiar patterns begin to arise. Hidden beneath the premium TV trappings, Westworld is making some pretty bold statements about genre, and we're going to explore those on this week's episode of The ImplausiPod. 

I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this podcast we explore the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture, and right now we're doing that through the lens of Westworld season four. This week we're going to start with a look at season four, episode three "Années Folles" had a deep and ongoing relationship with genres since its beginning and this has grown since season two. Westworld asks us if genre is an aesthetic can be transposed upon the structure of media that we've participated with.

We look at the larger genres that Westworld is situated in and tries to break out of, including the Western cyberpunk and others, and look at how genre is deployed in K.W. Jeter's novel Noir, and in the tabletop role playing game Shadowrun. Now genre we could say is an aspect of literature. This follows from Northrop Frye who tells us that genre is part of “the external relations of a literary form with other forms of that type”.  So poems within poems, novels within novels, et cetera. And we have to consider two things, the difference between convention and genre. So genres are analogies in form, so we can take a look at one particular form and look, then look at something that's analogous. Conventions are things particular to that form.  Nowadays, we might call them tropes, but we can think of it in other terms as well. 

When it comes to genre, Westworld lays its thesis out right in front of us. It's very prevalent. As Maeve and Caleb enter Mob World, we see the same story structures, replicated ones that we've seen endlessly since season one.  The main defining moment is the bank robbery, which was the peak moment of season one, and came about again in season two, and this isn't the only time it was used in season two with Shogun World as well, and there's other elements that we see repeated, replicated endlessly through the different genres, the can on the street and Dolores, and a version of Teddy that comes to pick it up.  The various quests and storylines that a new entrant to the park will find as they walk down that initial street into whatever world they've chosen, and we're seeing it here as well. 

Within Westworld genre is the continued replication of story elements showing up with a different aesthetic over top of the functional elements of that story.  The story dissociates the aesthetic details from the plot and structure, and this isn't necessarily how it works. We've had a Western story, a war story, a Shogun story, and the other theme parks as well, all implicitly situated within a cyberpunk or a sci-fi universe, our earth in the near future. But all these theme park worlds are telling stories with a similar structure, with similar characters who are effectively - when we look at the hosts - exactly the same underneath the skin.  Functionally identical save for the control sphere, the marble where resides the host's program and memories, ones that we've seen on a regular basis since season two. A white, formless kind of creature with a different coat of skin and clothing on top of it.  

One of the things that Joy and Nolan seemed to be commenting on is the general role of story within Hollywood.  We need look no further than John Truby’s seminal The Anatomy of Story and see what it says about what the mechanical view of what a story is. And I quote: 

“…just as many writers have a mechanical view of what a story is, they use a mechanical process for creating one. This is especially true of screenwriters whose mistaken notions of what makes scripts saleable lead them to write a script that is neither popular nor good. Screenwriters typically come up with a story idea that is a slight variation on a movie they saw six months previously, then they apply a genre like detective, love, or action and fill in the characters and plot beats that go with that form. The result, a hopelessly generic formulaic story, devoid of originality.” End quote. 

And this seems to be what Joy and Nolan are commenting on - what they are critiquing - in the particular repetitions of story, reframed endlessly with genre on top of it that a media company devoid of original ideas will continually recycle the hits of their past, putting a new skin on it season after season. Truby goes on to say that “a great story is organic, not a machine, but a living body that develops”. What that means for the subsequent role of story and the rest of the season four of Westworld, we'll have to wait to find out. So what does this endless re-skinning really say about genre? Well, we'll get to that in a little bit.

We can look at media as well because the showrunners, Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, are drawing from cyberpunk literature. They're drawing from westerns and all the media that these stories are based on, and they're using similar story structures. So even though there are story structures that may be more implicit within a given genre, like within the western genre, within a sci-fi story, or a cyberpunk story, or a samurai story or whatever. There may be other stories that are implicit or implied as well, but we're really not getting that question about genre because we have this overarching narrative that just kind of paves over everything.  So there's another idea going on here and that, and the re-skinning can be something that could be done in real time, and that's implicit in the cyberpunk literature. 

We have that within tabletop role playing games as well. Let's play with the role-playing game example first: tabletop role-play games that aren't Dungeons and Dragons. There's a few that have a strong cyberpunk influence like Shadowrun from FASA Corporation, and now Catalyst Game Labs are R Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2020, which is eventually licensed and used as the influence for the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. Within these games, hacking is a major component and often the player characters will find themselves transported into cyberspace at one point or another. And as is the way of tabletop role-playing games, the players will have a lot of agency and the ability to co-customize that experience. In the Virtual Realities source book for Shadowrun, published in 1991, the players had the option to put a filter over the default iconography that represented cyberspace as their characters would see it. Of course, the mega corporations in that setting also had the same opportunity and so could override your own presentation, and there'd be a war between the competing systems about which overlay would actually represent virtual reality. 

We'll look at two examples. The first one is almost part of the cyberpunk canon, but it doesn't get a lot of critical mention, and that's a novel by the name of Noir by K.W. Jeter, and in this novel, the main character has a particular filter, like an alternate reality goggle that is an overlay on the world that he sees through his cyber eyes. Cyber-eyes, of course, being a set of bionic implants which replace someone's natural vision with an electronic one. So with this altered reality framework on, the protagonist in Noir sees the entire world as if they were in a film.  It's in gray scale. It'll replace the clothing of anyone the protagonist happens to look at. You have a complete aesthetic overlay, replicating the 1930s visual aesthetic of a noir film, a filter that's applied on top of the viewer's experience in the same way that they might have a Snapchat filter or TikTok filter or Instagram or whatever, but to the extent that it's always on and continually acting, and it filters everything coming into the user. So this is a virtual genre filter, much like with an ARG or Altered Reality Game. It's something that happens at the level of input, but it doesn't necessarily have that tactile feel that you have when you engage in the actual streets, put on the actual costumes and walk around as you do in Westworld.  

It's interesting that K.W. Jeter chose noir as the filter for his novel because cyberpunk as a genre heavily is drawn on noir's influence. It can often be characterized as sci-fi noir, and that characterization comes from a couple places. One is from the Early Sprawl trilogy in cyberpunk novels of William Gibson mentioned again here when he was working on the early cyberpunk stories.  One of his influences was a book on the Victorian era: Criminals in the Victorian underworld. Basically, the influence from that era in the earlier gilded age. When you think about it, we think of things like the unregulated capitalism, the mass of class disparities, and wealth inequality. These things were generally not lauded, you know, as highlights of the Victorian era, even though they were ever-present.  While those elements of inequality carried through from the Victorian era all the way through to the earlier 20th century when the noir genre is, you know, tacitly set, they didn't really crumble until the pressures of the massive wars of the earliest 20th century shattered the existing social order.

The underlying structure of inequality, classism, and the like, was pervasive also and carried over into the noir, which dealt with that as in the United States where we saw similar things: wealth, inequality, classism, etcetera, and to the extent that those are still present today or they just never went away, but were subsumed into the background for a little period during the post-war era in the 20th century, (especially in the United States) says those elements kind of went outside of our memory hole, you know, out of sight, out of mind. But now they're coming back to our awareness as the wealth disparity and inequality has increased again here in the 21st century. So these are all things to keep in mind. There's a definite noir, more of an influence on early cyberpunk, and that noir can also be seen as a particular set of styles and tropes, whether it's in cinema or the pulp, fictional novels, it had a noir influence, the pot boilers that featured pilot detectives, whether it's James Elmore or Raymond Chandler or whoever. And that idea, that particular heroic structure that of the pot boiler, I think isn't really present. It's something we only get echoes of in Westworld. 

The question we may ask ourselves is if the showrunners, if the creators are choosing to use this particular genre, what is it that it brings to the table? Why choose a Western over a Samurai film or a noir, and maybe that's something we can answer by looking at the other element of genre that really came through in the episodes of Westworld: the music. It's long been noticed that the player piano in Westworld will often be playing modern or at least relatively recent songs, often from alternative music or metal from the 1990s or what have you, and its usually thematically appropriate songs that are chosen for the episode, but they're played in a style that's radically different. So whether you know, it's, uh, old West Ragtime or Player Piano style that we've seen within the story, but with the unmistakable strains of Metallica's Enter Sandman showing up as if played on a player piano in a Chicago Blues Club as the pivotal scene starts to unfold on the street.

(And given that this has largely gone unnoticed because of the other use of an old Metallica song in popular media in July of 2022, that being Master of Puppets on The Stranger Things season finale, which has gotten literally all the press, the use of Enter Sandman has largely gone unnoticed.)  

But what is the significance of the song's themes of dreams and nightmares? Given our topic, are the showrunners suggesting that music can be divorced from genre as well? There is a large, no, not large, but at least thriving industry of musicians that recuts songs in different styles, and whether that's Richard Cheese and his showtune versions of alternative music or a lot of the remix artists that are popular on YouTube and TikTok like DJ Cumberbund or Andy Rehnfeldt who take popular songs and switch 'em to a different genre, so Carly Rae Jepsen as Def Metal, or Marilyn Matson as a polka song or what have you. And the other brilliant things that these artists do, and I do wanna say brilliant, because the way they remix it is not easy, and their craftmanship is impeccable: full credit to the artists that are doing it. But what the remix artist's work is saying is that if you have a good song, it'll be a good song regardless of the genre.  As long as the structure, the melody is there, and in Westworld's case it is - Enter Sandman sounds fantastic as a metal song, a hard rock song, and probably a country song, or in this case, ragtime. Good songs can transcend the genre. But songs that are written within a genre may just be, you know, replicating the tropes and not necessarily having that good of a song structure or hook or whatever else makes a song popular or enjoyable.  So those songs can be good within the genre but may not be necessarily good overall. 

So what we're starting to see coalesce in this Westworld theory of genre is that we can have multiple points within the show where genre can be seen as an inflection point where the producers of the show are giving us that sign that the aesthetic functions of genre are just that that lays over that it, just the surface layer and everything else is underneath it, and that what's underneath the genre is what is quote unquote “True”. 

And I think that's really interesting to think about in that the showrunners are saying this is the real story, and then there's layers of, you know, fake story above that. And this goes to the other element in the show that pops up during the episode: the idea that the host uprising from the earlier season has since been commodified and turned into a deeper secret layer of knowledge, like the hidden knowledge, the gnosis that's there within the show as the influencers, the one couple that manages to find their way into the tunnels below the mob world theme park, and I have a sneaking suspicion, we're going to have to come back to this later on to see how it develops, but basically the idea that the corporation will commodify anything - including a tragedy - to increase the awareness and buy-in of the audience. And as they let these, you know, couple into the deeper secret and they'll post about it on whatever social media they have, wherever point of influence they may be using. 

You get the idea that the influencer is being led by the Delos Corporation to experience this, this particular experience, and then you know, report back on it. It's the same as if you know you're a movie reviewer and you get a preview copy of a movie, you get enhanced access, but that access comes at a cost. And this is an older idea: it goes back to at least Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which was published in 1985, wherein the columnist, the commentator, the newsman, the person with the opinion says “oh, I can, you know, say anything I want. There's no censorship here” without recognizing that they're self-censoring, that they're only granted access to speak to the audience because they've so embodied and incorporated the ideology and beliefs that the powers that be wish them to have, that that particular commentator is never going to go off script, right? That they're locked into the system and will repeatedly tow the party line. And this can be seen in any major media company that you look at that they may have commentators that they have brought on board, but those commentators are merely repeating the party line. So too with the influencers, those that Delos allows to find their way into the deeper tunnels to experience more of the story within a story, within a story that is Westworld in the ongoing narrative of the theme parks. These influences are a stand-in for the audience, and the degree at which they can see through and transcend the genre that they're caught within, allows them that glimpse of the deeper elements of the story. And that brings us full circle back to the user experience of genre within Westworld in season three, episode five. The episode aptly titled “Genre”.

We witnessed Caleb's experience as a user of the drug that directly modifies their sensory inputs, whether it's noir or horror or action. Caleb's experience matches that of being in a movie. And this links the episode directly back to KW Jeter's cyberpunk novel Noir and ShadowRun, where the users have the ability to shape the virtual world too, to appear in any particular way that they choose, and this has a longstanding tradition in cyberpunk literature. So perhaps we'll stop here for now and take a quick detour to explore that cyberpunk literature in a little bit more detail to provide a foundation for the episodes that we're watching here.

On the next episode of the ImplausiPod, which should be available shortly, we'll be stepping away from Westworld to look at one of the foundational science fiction sub-genres that really informed the series. We're gonna take a look at cyberpunk, some of its key texts and authors, and the historical antecedents that inform the genre.  Until the next time, if you wanna contact us, you can reach us at DrImplausible at Implausi.blog, or the email link in the show notes, or you can also find us at Dr. Implausible on Twitter or the other social media sites. Thanks for joining us, and we'll talk to you again soon.