Have you ever questioned the nature of your temporality? About Westworld and the meaning of time in TV series

Abstract

We will analyze Westworld (HBO, 2016), story that allow us to exemplify how current series are working on interesting temporal disintegrations. In a special way, this will be seen through recurrence to a cyclical time, a category developed by Yuri Lotman's semiotics in order to explain the iterative, imperfect and timeless character in certain mythical texts. However, cyclicity concern a deeper semiotic mechanics, logic productive to evaluate the way in which cultural and textual systems organize their memories and model an understanding of humanity. Therefore, we will try to sketch a theoretical proposal in order to approach a methodical application and to account for some reasons of its relevance to read productions of meaning in the temporal configurations of some recent series. In this sense, Westworld functions as a representative text, an effective narration to elucidate that, behind the formal and argumental inclusion of this temporality, there is a strong questioning about the nature of freedom and the human condition.