'Westworld' Nude Scene Shows How the Park Changed
Much like its HBO brethren Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, Westworld never shied away from stark, graphic nudity. In Season 1, the hosts spent as much time in varying states of undress (often completely naked, seated on a metal chair in a cold laboratory) as they did costumed for their day jobs.
But Season 2 opens with the hosts controlling the park, and nothing illustrates quite how much they're enjoying their newfound power like Maeve forcing a defeated Lee Sizemore to strip to nothing.
Sizemore is at Maeve's mercy from the start of the episode, when she saves him from a cannibalistic host; she needs his help in tracking down her daughter inside the park. Since she's the only thing standing between him and certain death, who could blame her for taking the opportunity to have a little fun? "You wrote this game-high time you played a round," she remarks, tossing him a Westworld costume, his disguise inside the park.
"Strip," she commands. "Right now?" he asks, aghast. She's unmoved. "Yes. Now. "Fuck's sake," Sizemore mutters. He's humiliated.
Maeve's so pleased with herself:
But she's not done. When Sizemore stops at his underwear, she stops him. "No," she says, with a deadly pause. "All of it."
He's defeated.
And just like that, the power dynamics shift. After years-nay, decades-of silent humiliation, forced to sit naked in a glass-walled laboratory while strange humans poke and prod her flesh and innards, Maeve gets her revenge. Westworld will never be the same.
At the Westworld Season 2 New York premiere last week, creator Lisa Joy discussed the significance of the show's nude scenes-particularly in Season 1-and promised there would be less in Season 2:
I remember going to the Met as a kid and looking at these sculptures of all these forms, and it wasn't licentious, it wasn't sexual, it was just the idea of the human body as art, as perfection, as this mix of muscles and cells that moves and walks and changes and grows. It was also important to capture that nature of the gaze, which we really try to do not only in filming it, but also in cutting it, so that we’re not lingering on parts that are not essential to the story. What is essential to the story is that feeling of both perfection but also of tragedy, of the fact that they’re sitting there, being literally objectified, and treated like objects, like things to operate on and talk about while they’re sitting right there in the room. So you always know what you’re asking and the great trust that it takes for actors to go there with you. But the other thing is it’s an essential part of the story and it’s guided by what those characters are going through. So yeah, when the hosts get power, they’re not gonna spend a lot of time naked on a stool."
Westworld airs Sunday nights at 9 PM on HBO.
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