Oppenheimer has a scene of a very beautiful naked woman fucking a very beautiful naked man and there is zero sexual energy displayed on screen. Zero. Said woman stops halfway through it and makes the man (Oppenheimer himself) read a poem in Sanskrit about death, which the audience is supposed to associate with the atomic bomb. There is a second attempt at romance: Oppenheimer flirts while explaining quantum mechanics. Looking into his future wife's eyes under his big eyelashes, he says that matter is mostly empty, negative space; it's the bond between atoms that creates the illusion of matter being solid. What we experience as touch, he says while holding her hand, is the repulsion of this bond that stops one body from going through the other. It was in fact appealing to me, but then by the end of the movie Oppenheimer has visions of carbonized bodies laid before him: his invention destroyed matter in such a brutal way that he steps not onto them but through them. So basically. All scenes about sex are not about sex; they are about death. What is about sex in fact, the climax, if you will, is death: the most erotic scene in the movie, the high point of tension that takes your breath away, is a scene of people watching an atomic bomb explode. And that really says all you need to know about how Nolan's mind operates
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"We wanted to make a show about consciousness; the kind of boastful ambition that works when you're pitching--and then falls apart when you find yourself trying to figure it out. There were few guides. Philosophers who'd lost their tenure. Computer scientists who'd lost their stock options. Guesses. Expletives. Crackpot theories. Hands wrung or simply thrown in the air. Even now, humans know more about what lies at the bottom of a supermassive black hole than the dark center of our minds.
But there are clues: language, semiotics; the distance between the notions rattling around in our minds and the ways in which we share them, and the ways in which humans share ideas between each other.
There's a language older than language, though. One that predates the written word or even the spoken one. Music. Its effects on people are fascinating--raw, direct, like an older interface that bypasses the newer, clunkier inputs. What music may lack in nuance versus spoken language, it more than gains in emotive power, as if transmitting emotion directly into the brain. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the right chord progression might reach nine figures.
So for our series about consciousness, we knew the music would be vital--and that we had the man for the job. Fittingly, Ramin's journey as a composer had been launched, in part, by Elmer Bernstein's achingly brilliant theme for The Magnificent Seven. Here he got to take a detour into the future in order to find his way back to the West.
He wanted to use guitars. We wanted piano (because the player piano had been the original western robot) and he gamely went along. I remember the themes as they came alive, anointing each character, imbuing them with even more depth and power. The craft and performances that came together for the series were all hard won--Ramin's music hooked everything to an undertoe of menace, melancholy and beauty.
As for Ramin's arrangements of contemporary music, they served two purposes; first, as a gentle reminder that our story was being told in the future tense, not the past. And second, as manipulation. If music is evocative, then music you've heard before takes on another dimension, dipping into circuits of lived experience and harnessing their power. A song you've listened to after a triumph or a breakup--even one rendered in a different timbre or arrangement--still has a grip on you. One that Ramin could pluck at, like the strings on his guitar. We spent four seasons exploring these questions and the closest we came to understanding consciousness--at least the variety that afflicts humans--is that any attempt to explain it without incorporating emotion is pointless.
The show is long since over. But I find myself whistling Ramin's timeless theme. Often. And I smile. That's the power of this music: that the indelible experiences of making Westworld, all of the incredible people who were part of it, all the days spent chasing the sun and capturing it on film, can all be conjured, instantly, in 8 perfectly chosen notes.
Westworld never died. It simply became music."
Jonathan Nolan, Executive Producer
Liner Notes from Westworld: Season 4 (Music from the HBO Series) Vinyl
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