‘They Don’t Make Anything Like They Used To’: Visual, Narrative, and Ideological Nostalgia for the West(ern) in Westworld (2016)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the first season of HBO’s TV show Westworld (2016-present) to analyse whether and how it imagines the American West nostalgically. From the perspective of (American) literary and cultural studies, we introduce a concept of nostalgia as a cultural style that understands nostalgia as situated on a continuum, as potentially located on a cultural artefact or text’s (audio)visual, narrative, and ideological levels, and as detectable in what we call that text’s ‘nostalgic affordances.’ This conceptualisation then allows us to argue for Westworld’s first season as visually more nostalgic and narratively less so, which culminates in an ideologically ambivalent sentiment towards nostalgia for the West(ern). Overall, our approach moves away from generalised, binary judgements of texts as either nostalgic or not and instead suggests a more complex perspective on the minute details of how exactly an artefact can exhibit (a specific kind of) nostalgia, a framework that can be extended to analyses of other pop-cultural imaginations of the West as well.