The case of Spaulding vs. Zimmerman is used in a lot of law schools to teach legal ethics, and touches on some medical ones too. David Spaulding was a passenger in a car struck by another driver, leading to serious medical harm. Pursuant to a civil suit for damages, doctors for Spaulding’s and the defendant’s insurance companies performed examinations of David to see the extent of his injuries. The doctor hired by the defendant’s insurance company detected in the scans a potentially life-threatening aortic aneurysm in David’s chest—possibly caused by the accident—while David’s and his insurance company’s doctors had totally missed it. The question then becomes whether the defense has an obligation to disclose the medical condition, especially with a person’s life possibly in danger, or does a lawyer’s duty to their client’s interests supersede?
The lawyers for the defense, as well as the defense’s examining physician, chose not to disclose the information to either David, his parents, the court or the opposing attorneys, and the case was settled, with the aneurysm ultimately detected years later when Spaulding was in the military. When the case and the circumstances were reviewed by later courts, while the settlement was vacated and renegotiated, the opinions found the defense had acted ethically and legally. And if there was any fault, it was with Spaulding’s own lawyers and doctors for not doing their own due diligence.
There are many issues and aspects to the case, which ethicists read into the situation, but one interpretation is the idea that as a society we can rationalize the value of a life down based on competing interests. Whether those interests are for what’s deemed a greater principle, the need for order in respecting institutional process, or the love of money, there are times where the value of an individual’s life loses in the equation. And this is not only something lawyers and doctors confront, but the average person makes these choices every day in how they live their lives. Whether it’s a shirt from H&M, a bra from Victoria’s Secret, or a new iPhone made on the other side of the planet in some factory with not so nice conditions, there’s a certain amount of suffering that goes into it. And a large majority of the population, either through ignorance or indifference, values their luxuries more than the lives of the people who make those luxuries possible.
Loosely adapted from the 1973 movie of the same name written and directed by Michael Crichton, HBO’s Westworld confronts these ideas of value and what it means to be human and alive, and moreover what gives those words meaning.
As the first episode of Westworld begins, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is the picturesque representation of the damsel in distress in most Western stories. She begins each day with hope, and each day her family is murdered brutally. Dolores is a very lifelike machine who’s designed to be beaten, raped and killed in order to serve the fantasies of a bunch of rich assholes wanting to “shoot or fuck something” in the Wild West. When it’s over, she—like all other “host” robots—are treated like anything else that’s replaceable and less than. Dolores is repaired and reset in a lab, and sent back out into a futuristic theme park to be someone else’s plaything. Men in HAZMAT suits wipe all the blood, and things begin anew.
Among the big themes in a lot of Michael Crichton’s work are God complexes, the fallibility of supposedly infallible systems, and theme parks where human desires for an imagined decadent fantasy meet reality. And some or all of these themes apply whether it be doctors in an emergency room or resurrected dinosaurs. Husband-and-wife team Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy re-imagine Crichton’s original Westworld more along the lines of Blade Runner and Ex-Machina, where the question of how human-like does a machine have to be where the difference becomes indistinguishable, and Dolores is someone instead of something? What does it mean to be self-aware and to have consciousness? The series also touches on one of the worst aspects of human behavior. We have a tendency to devalue things, even when their value is self-evident, because we can rationalize being terrible to things that are devalued with little to no moral consequence.
The audience sympathizes with Dolores, seeing in the situation the sadistic impulses of the park’s guests, with the uncomfortable feeling that we might have too much in common with the exploiters.
The park’s creator, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), seems to have delusions of grandeur. Like a version of Walt Disney with a Petri dish and a circuit board, he sees a legacy in them as a new form of life in his own created world. The lead programmer of the robots, Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), is fascinated with the presentation of humanity and begins a search what the hell is happening when things take a turn. That turn comes in the form of the hosts beginning to remember past events, realizing the situation they’re caught in, and react with the very rational reaction of anger and fear. This begins spreading like a virus among the robots and leads to a rebelling against their programming. And behind all of it, seems to be a corporation that’s hiding something.
Among the rest of the cast is Teddy (James Marsden), a cowboy looking for an adventure. Maeve (Thandie Newton) is a hard-ass madam running her saloon with an iron fist. Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward) is the programmer responsible for the androids’ behavior, with the character reciting technobabble in order to provide exposition. Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is a quality assurance expert in a theme park that’s about to go to hell in a hand-basket. The series plays around with whether these characters are human or not, and there are some surprises.
For example, there’s a mysterious man in black (Ed Harris)—an analog to Yul Brynner’s character from the original— who’s killing his way through the park searching for answers. However, unlike Brynner’s gunslinger, this iteration is all-too-human, and seems to be searching for a deeper meaning in Westworld, which he sees as the equivalent of a real-life open world Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption video game.
- Genital-to-genital touching: Westworld got some headlines last month after some of the conditions for extras on the production came to light. Background actors were required to sign a nudity and sex consent form, which set off alarms with SAG-AFTRA officials.
The explicit consent form itself wouldn’t pass standards reviews at a broadcast network as it recites that the performer "may be required to perform genital-to-genital touching, simulate oral sex with hand-to-genital touching, contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude, pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back, [and] ride on someone's back while you are both fully nude."
Less strenuously, others might simply "have [their] genitals painted."
- Three Laws
UNSafe: The androids' "core code" prevents them from harming any living thing, even flies. The hosts don’t even react to animal life, and it’s one way to distinguish the robots from humans. However, Dolores' success in swatting a fly means she’s able to overcome her programming.
- Act 2, Scene 6: Dolores' father whispers "These violent delights have violent ends," which is a line straight out of Romeo and Juliet warning about the dangers of unchecked lust. It seems somewhat appropriate for a theme park designed to cater to depraved human cravings. And the line serves as grim foreshadowing, since it comes from one of the most tragic stories in Western culture.
- The road to this remake was a long one: Ideas for remaking Westworld went through various iterations before becoming a series on HBO.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became famous playing a character seemingly inspired by Brynner’s “Terminator-esque” Gunslinger, was set to play him in a remake at one point. Variety reported in 2002 that Schwarzenegger had been cast and the project was being fast-tracked by WB, but Ah-nuld’s political career got in the way. A couple years later, director Tarsem Singh (The Cell) was attached to the project briefly and Quentin Tarantino was allegedly approached, but a feature film remake never came to fruition.
WB legend Jerry Weintraub had been the man trying to get a remake off the ground for years, and his recent success at HBO with Behind the Candelabra made the network an interesting option. He took the project to co-writing couple Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who saw a chance to use Crichton’s film as a template for something far more ambitious in scope, closer to Game of Thrones. The pilot was announced in 2013. Nolan would direct and J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk’s Bad Robot would produce (as they do Nolan’s Person of Interest).