A Unified Color Theory of Westworld
Black and white hats are only the first level of the game
This post is part of Entry Points, an occasional and totally un-calendared series that will publish every other whenever, and which explores poetic and philosophical references, both large and teeny tiny, in HBO’s delightful new show Westworld. Previously: Buddhism and Bongard Problems, Infinite Regress and Modernist Poetry. Is a philosophical critique too serious an approach to TV criticism? Duh. But is it fun? Ibid.
The color is repellant, almost revolting ; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
— from the Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Stetson
Have you noticed the yellow haze in Westworld?
That dusty jaundice? That urea-colored filter that seeps into every scene in the park— but not in the cool, hi-tech confines of park headquarters?
There it is on Dolores, episode one, standing on the porch: yellow highlights on her cheeks complementing the blue of her dress, while every other color around her is bleached.
You can see it again, suffused in the air, as Teddy wakes up on the train. And again, in the overhead shot of the park — red buttes, patches of green scrub grass, a yellow river meandering besides.
And there’s that same yellow hanging over the trail when Teddy and Dolores first ride to the Abernathy ranch.
You’d think it were dust, maybe, swirling. Or just the the sun in the gloaming. Or maybe that’s just how the wild west looks, strangely faded in the slow-turning light. But it’s more than that.
Look at the golden orgy, undulating, in Pariah. Or follow the camera as it zooms in on Dolores in the first scene of the series. Her yellow hair frames her face.
Yellow—it represents madness.
Color in Westworld
I want to persuade you that color in Westworld is an integral part of the storytelling experience and that, if you pay finger-on-the-pause-button attention, or share your correspondent’s unhealthy-bordering-on-manic obsession with this show’s weird and pretty prism, you’ll discover another layer of symbolic insanity.
My job isn’t too difficult: the Nolans are no strangers to color play. Memento, after all, which Jonathan wrote and Christopher directed, had two types of scenes—color for regular chronology, black & white for the reverse.
And color in Westworld, like color in that film, obviously represents a deliberate choice. It sets atmosphere. It reveals character. It can tell us how we’re meant to feel, or direct our eye to what we’re meant to notice.
The color itself can have meaning—e.g., the pale blue of Dolores’ dress, for sadness, or the bright magenta of Maeve’s bodice, for lust. So, too, the saturation of those colors, and how light or dark they appear on screen.
But what’s eyebrow-raisingly neato is how Westworld uses color to comment on the duality of good vs. evil.
As a viewer, of course, we see first the blacks and the whites. And it’s tempting to view the world through that simple lens.
Dolores Abernathy wakes up in white — must be good!
The Man in Black wears the color of his name — all beer and skittles, that sumbitch.
And just before Billy enters Westworld in episode two, he’s given the most Klosterman of choices: do you wear the white hat, or the black?
The show baits you with set conceptions of color, as if the clothes that a person wears also defines who they are underneath. But the concepts of black/white and good/evil are interdependent. You can’t have one without the other.
The gunslinger Teddy Flood begins his train ride bathed in white sunlight, but wears the black hat. Bernard Lowe wears a white shirt in bed with Theresa — but wears all black when questioning Dolores in the office. But in Episode four, we see Bernard in bed covered by a colorful Indian blanket, checkered with whites and beiges and black—symbolic, perhaps, of a change within him.
In other words, color in Westworld doesn’t represent a set D&D-esque alignment. Colors represent emotions, desires, motivations, and intent. The conflict between who you think you are, and who you really are. The nuance between identity and agency.
Or as Dr. Ford said of the guests in episode two: “They already know who they are. They’re here for a glimpse of who they could be.”
It’s no coincidence the music that plays on the black and white bones of the player piano—Black Hole Sun, Paint It Black—reflects these internal conflicts.
And it’s no coincidence that you arrive to Westworld on a white train, but enter the park chugging along in something black.
(A brief, embarrassing note before we continue: I’m not a designer and I’m not a colorist, tho I did once own a 54-piece set of Crayola Crayons with the box that had the built-in sharpener. I’ve surely butchered several concepts below, or failed to express them with appropriate concision. Some of the screenshots were taken on a Macbook, which tend to have imperfect, too-warm tones. A deep bow and scuffle from me. Please see fit to bleach-bypass me in the comments.)
Side Lighting and Duality
Almost every scene in Westworld—both inside the park and the headquarters—is lit from the side.
Each character we meet is seen in a kind of chiaroscuro.
It’s no wonder of profundity to say that the lighting reveals the mixture of good and bad within the characters.
The language of shadows is also apparent in the landscape:
And in the movement of the Judas Steer and the cattle, an ominous blackness slowly covering the verdant green.
Everything, it seems, has a dark side.
That vertical shading is complemented by horizontal splits in framing.
See for example, in episode one, when Teddy and Dolores ride out to the ranch…
…and when Bernard finds Dr. Ford talking to Old Bill:
The show is communicating a very specific way of thinking through this visual language.
There is, firstly, a duality within each character.
But there is also a symmetry between what’s happening in the park and what’s happening in headquarters. Whatever’s happening on one level of reality is also happening on another.
“As above,” the Hermetics would say, “so below.”
“That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.”
—The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus
Red is for revelation
At first, reds and magentas play their traditional symbolic roles in Westworld: passion, lust, and violence.
As the series begins, those reds are relatively muted.
The scenes are desaturated and bleached dry, but red makes itself known on Hector’s cartoonish wanted poster…
…on a carriage outside the saloon, and the saloon sign itself…
…and on Maeve, who wears jewelry that’s bright magenta (a cheap kind of red, in the same way that Teddy’s grey is a cheap kind of black).
You begin to see red more prominently after Teddy dies the first time. “Perfect is boring,” says the guest, dressed in scarlet. “I’m more interested in the bad guys.”
It’s as if, in the park, the color red represents the lust and violence lurking underneath … and suffusing its way, slowly, through the good.
Of course, in headquarters, lust and violence is the rule. Hence the unapologetic, arterial red of the control room.
As the series continues, red begins to take a more prominent role—as if the violence at the heart of the park were erupting through.
We’re told in episode two that the Man in Black should follow the blood arroyo—the red blood—to where the snake lays its eggs. That snake is the bandit Armistice, who is covered in a faded red tattoo made from the blood of her enemies. Armistice leads the Man in Black to Hector Escaton, who’s beginning to show a little red himself.
But the episode really turns on Maeve—the first host, apparently, to fully realize the nature of her reality. This makes sense. Not only did she wake up inside headquarters, but the kernel of her programming is to see through the masks other people wear.
And so red becomes the color of revelation. In the next scene, we see Maeve basically taking the red pill of painful truth.
Clementine, of course, wears all blue. The wallpaper inside the saloon? Blue, too. The color of illusion.
At the end of episode four, we see Maeve coming to grips with reality. That reality comes in the form of the reddest blood yet.
“What does it mean?” asks Hector.
“That I’m not crazy after all,” says Maeve. “And that none of this matters.”
Blue is for Sadness and Illusion
The color blue also makes its presence felt throughout the park. The most prominent example, of course, is Dolores.
Dolores’ programmed fate is to be sad. To be forever alone. To take solace in the simple things—painting horses, where she wears white—but, at the end of the day, to be raped and cast aside.
Blue, too, figures prominently in Teddy. The camera dwells lovingly on his blue eyes in episode four, right before Dr. Ford tells him he’ll never be with Dolores, and then uploads entirely new memories. Blue is for illusion.
In episode three, The Stray, Bernard is dressed in blue tones throughout. The color is most prominent when he’s speaking about his son to a woman who is apparently his wife.
It’s worth noting, during Bernard’s reveries, that his dying son is wearing blue as well.
The stray woodcutter—the one that killed himself? He’s wearing blue, too.
Green is for Death
In Westworld, green doesn’t represent life. While we can see a dry and lifeless green in the park, the color appears more vibrant and most often as lighting in the lifeless environs of headquarters.
We see it most prominently on Ashley Stubbs, himself a kind of killing machine who sees the hosts as soulless automatons.
The livestock rooms, too, are defined by green…a kind of mildew or fungus.
The Goo, The Milk and The Rest
There are plenty of other color cues throughout Westworld. The yellow hay. The yellow dirt. The magenta flowers behind Theresa as Dr. Ford threatens her in episode four.
And, yes, the white, cum-colored goo in headquarters is an obvious one—the idea that regardless of how we act or what we wear, we all come from the same prime matter. That goes for hosts and for guest.
The milk is a recurring motif as well. It seems to symbolize purity or truth. Dolores drops a white can of milk. Her father only drinks milk. And Walter, the dim-witted host, goes insane while drinking milk and forcing it down the throat of Rebus.
“You can’t have none,” he says to two terrified guests, brandishing a bottle of milk. “It’s not for you.”
That phrasing mimics the little girl in episode two, who tells the Man in Black “the maze is not for you.”
As if to say: Any “truth” here isn’t intended for the park’s guests. The guests aren’t the point.
The truth? The maze? Those are for the hosts.
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p.s. A hi and hello to Larry Clause and Steve Sola, the propmaker and general foreman for episode one.
