Ovidian Threads in the Maze of Westworld

the Multiple Ways of ‘weaving the old into the new’

Abstract

Mixing science fiction and western, the HBO series Westworld was created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and premiered in 2016. It presents a theme park inhabited by human-looking androids, the so-called ‘hosts’, who were built with the aim of participating in a fictional world ruled by different narratives invented by the park’s creators, and intended for the amusement of human visitors. The series approaches contemporary issues concerning artificial intelligence, in a way that problematizes the boundaries between fiction and reality, human and machine, in order to raise questions involving consciousness, memory, and the act of creation itself (whether of narratives, or androids). This study investigates the reception of Greek and Roman mythology in the first season of the series, “The Maze”, establishing dialogues with two works by the Latin poet Ovid: the Metamorphoses (the narratives about Daedalus and the labyrinth, and that-one about Pygmalion) and the Heroides. The main focus of my approach is the meta-poetic nature of the creations and the prominence given to two female characters in Westworld. This way, the paper highlights the presence of elements from Classical literature in a current TV series, as well as provides new interpretations of the Ovidian mythological episodes in the light of the series. In addition, the paper presents theoretical reflections on Classical reception, on the importance of analyzing works of mass culture, and on the possibility of reinterpreting Ovidian works based on the structure of streaming series.