HBO has some fantastic original programming – Game of Thrones comes immediately to mind. Rob and I have watched 6 of 10 episodes of WestWorld, a series built on Michael Crichton’s screenplay for a movie of the same name, released in 1973. It’s phenomenal.
Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris…these two actors alone give the show an indescribable quality. Some of the same Crichton themes are evident – WestWorld is a theme park, like Jurassic Park, but a far more sophisticated version in that the robots in the park are discovering their own consciousness. Think of it as a cross between The Matrix and Jurassic Park, haunting and strange. Like The Matrix, it urges you to question the nature of reality, the ultimate question in quantum physics and in metaphysics.
I love shows that urge you, the viewer, to ask yourself: “Uh-oh. How much of what I perceive is real?”
Interestingly, it parallels some of the themes in Rob’s novel, Tulpas, now being submitted to publishers. In his novel, the dream world becomes the physical world and this is brought about by the manipulation of reality by one particular tulpa, a thought form created by Tibetan monks centuries ago. This tulpa created other thought forms and they have evolved throughout the centuries and attained a kind of consciousness, just like the robots in WestWorld. The parallels are eerie and Rob started writing this novel long before WestWorld showed up on TV.
The irony, at least for me, is that Crichton was such a brilliant storyteller, who wrote an incredible non-fiction book, Travels, about his metaphysical quest to understand reality, but who, at the end of his life, ended up to the far right politically. The dichotomy has puzzled me for years. I’m not saying that the right wing lacks creative impulses, but that for a man who wrote Travels, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
JJ Abrams- LOST – directed WestWorld. And that makes perfect sense.
This certainly piques my interest; I’ll check out the show. And the point you raise about Crichton is one that always makes me wonder, too. How does someone who can imagine beyond the rigid borders of outworn paradigms end up embracing them at the end?
Me, too. My hit is that, although he was brilliant, creative, and had quite a bit of psi ability, he was highly technically-oriented. He was a puer aeternis in terms of relationships — like how George Lucas can’t write complex character and relationship. Crichton married many times. I’m guessing he got caught up in obsessive technical detail, and missed the forest for the trees when it came social relationships or the *relationship* with nature.
He should have gone to you for counseling!
Ha ha! Or he could probably have gotten the same help if you did his birth chart for him…I *just* re-read Congo for the first time in like 30 years, and it’s *a lot* of technical detail, and zero development of the female protagonist. Zero. Hmmm…..
His chart is interesting- never did it for him, but just to see. He was born on the cusp of libra/scorpio and had attributes of both signs.
I vaguely recall Congo – and zero development of the female protagonist. Hmm, indeed.