Reality, alienation and emancipation in Westworld. A reading from critical theory

Abstract

The kind of content that a narrative work tacitly manifests to viewers is the historical moment of the creators from which cultural resources that latently explain juxtaposed collective processes are taken up. Contemporary narratives, television series on platforms, likewise produce it. This paper proposes, under this premise, an interpretation of the HBO series Westworld derived from some postulates of the Frankfurt Critical School, taking into account the central argument of the work: the structuration of reality, alienation, and emancipation; phenomena explained by the self-reliance of this school of thought. The method used is content analysis, consistent with the interpretive objective from concepts in order to produce an analytical metatext to elaborate a transformed sense of the work. It is concluded that the series can be understood as a metaphorical representation of the conditions of subjective oppression and naturalized asymmetries with little possibility of awareness unless you locate emancipatory normative remedies which in the series, as in theory, are noted.