Professors from the CINEMA research group Glòria Salvadó-Corretger and Fran Benavente published the article ‘Time to Dream, Time to Remember: Patterns of Time and Metaphysics in Westworld’ on SAGE Publications’ academic journal Television & New Media.

With fiction TV show Westworld (2016-) as an object of study, the researchers analyzed the narrative, mise en scène resources in what they call ‘fables about time’, a concept adopted from Paul Ricoeur’s thinking. On their article, Westworld is identified as a paradigmatic example of this classification, since it highlights matters of time and identity through resources like confusion between reality and dreams, character-building through different temporal identities and the importance of memories when it comes to tell the difference between reality and dreams.

Westworld —created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and produced by HBO— takes place at a theme park bearing the same name and set in the former American West. There, visitors can carry out their fantasies with no retaliation from their hosts —androids that inhabit the place. By means of a labyrinth-like time structure, fiction allows to be experienced as a game where the spectator must find answers to identity matters that extend throughout the seasons.