Back from Mexico, you go up to your employers for what you hope is one final job. A final stop before you can reunite with your family. You didn’t expect them to want you to ride in a car to get there.
Red Dead Redemption II is out in two days and I wanted to get this
post out before then, so here goes. This is about one of my favourite
moments in Red Dead Redemption: The Car Ride.
Red Dead Redemption is a
western game developed by Rockstar and released in 2010, about a man
trying to reunite with his family. And it was a game with its fair share
of quiet moments that all feel right at home in a feature like this,
and I did consider some others of them, like the actual reunification
with the family and the ensuing farm-work, or the entrance into Mexico
which many remember fondly, or just the many quiet moments out in the
wilderness with nothing but your horse and a beautiful skyline and
tremendous music.
But what I want to talk about is a moment I’ve heard no one mention,
and it’s a moment that left a huge impact on me because of how starkly
it told the themes of Red Dead Redemption in a single moment:
It’s mission 42 and it’s called Bear One Another’s Burdens, and it’s about riding in a car.
Yes.
Riding a car. In a western. Not the thing you’d immediately associate
with a cowboying and rootin’n’tootin’. And also not the thing you’d
associate with a quiet moment. But the reason this moment works so well
is exactly because it is uneventful.
See, cars in the wild west… sucked.
They were bad. And slow. And impractical. And noisy. And prone to breaking.
Let me set it all up:
As mentioned, Red Dead (I’m shortening the title from here on) is a
game about John Marston and his quest to find his family. He’s an old
bandit, retired and jailed and now on the path to leading a better life.
But before he can do that he wants to reunite with his family, but the
government, those who imprisoned John, who knows where his family is,
won’t tell him until he’s helped round up his old gang-members who are
still present and dangerous in the world. And that’s most of the game,
roaming the land to find the ghosts you left behind, and it’s a long
journey that takes you across the west, to Mexico and back, to where we
are now: The Car.
John Marston has just returned to America from a
trip to Mexico with two of the gang-members as promised, and now hopes
the government will deliver what they promised. The government is here
personified through Edgar Ross, a real scumbag of an official who thinks
nothing of John except as a lousy criminal and a tool to find more of
them.
He has no intent on delivering John his family until he’s
helped find the leader of the gang, and so, John must go at it again,
and find an informant they think knows where the gang leader is.
The game takes place in 1911, at the tail end of the “Wild West” and
the story takes us around to see how this old, dying way of life is
overtaken by civilization, by cities and trains and telegrams and
government. And the utmost American of technologies: The car.
Edgar
and his lackey decide to take John in this latest fashion, the car, to
the place, instead of riding on horseback as is John’s—and the
player’s—preferred method.
The player has spent the entire game on
horseback. When not on foot, they called their horse and rode across the
land. And this game has some great horse mechanics, and they are fun to
ride, fast, nimble, and the complete opposite of the car John is about
to step into.
Look at that monstrosity.
It’s big and black and clunky and
stutters and is uncomfortable (John says so, at least). And most
importantly, it’s slow. It jaunts along the road in a bumbly pace that
we cannot stop comparing to the walking of a horse, rather than the running.
And
John sits in the back, with no control (important!), with nothing to do
than sit and stare at this piece of metal grinding across the dirt.
It… sucks. It’s not fun. John is sitting with people he despises in
this awful piece of equipment he doesn’t like and the player feels every
inch of that because we have no desire to be there. If the Edgar Ross
would let us, we’d take our horse and be done in half the time and it’d
be far more enjoyable. We’d have control.
And we know this. And can do nothing about the fact that there are only more cars coming.
And
this is why the car moment works so well. It shows us the end of the
west as John knows it in a single moment. John is, as Edgar Ross says “a
dying breed” of a cowboy, someone who’s no longer needed in an
increasingly civilising society. In a society with cars, cowboys have
nothing to do. In a country with cross-country highways, horses are
useless.
But we see the ending of the west from that which is made
obsolete. We follow John Marston as he sees himself being made
superfluous. He sees a world he doesn’t understand.
Here's the full mission. Anchored the video from when the car fun begins.
On the way back from getting the informant (which goes wrong, but
that’s beside the point), the car breaks down. It sputters and oozes
black smoke and stalls on the road.
The player has never, despite difficulties taming horses, never had one break
(which, granted, is a video-gamey-trick-solution, but it works for the
story) (to be fair, they can die). Yet now, at the very peak of modern
invention, he’s sitting like a duck in a metal box that the government
lackey must go out and repair before they can move on.
And remember, we, the player, have no control over any of this. We
don’t ride the car (the way we do in Rockstar’s modern games, to draw
that very direct parallel), we don’t fix it when it breaks, and we don’t
choose where it goes.
Compared to the freedom we feel when we’re on a
horse, out in the wilderness, with mountains to explore and a large
world to inhabit, this is so stark a contrast.
It’s story through
loss of control. A trick games have pulled many times, but here I think
it works well. The player just can’t wait to get out of this damn
machine and back out into the wilds and live like the dying breed they
are.
And while it is not handled with subtlety (it is a Rockstar game), it is a remarkable idea to use a car for this purpose.
I mentioned before how the car is a most American of technology. It’s
freedom. It’s driving across the empty Nevada desert with nothing on
your mind other than the road and the endless space (read: opportunity)
around you. This is the car the way it was sold after the Wild West.
This is the American Dream of the car.
So here, we have the actual cowboy (which is where that ideal of American freedom comes from)
and they flip the car on its head: It is not freedom here, but a cage.
An execution of all that we hold dear. To those who were truly free, the
game says, the car was poison. Civilization is a death sentence.
I
doubt the game is being nostalgic here. I don’t think they’re advocating
that it was “better” back in the Wild West—plenty of bad happened back
then too, and the game doesn’t shy away from the problems of absolute
freedom. But by criticizing the progression as well, it stands with
scathing criticism, as if saying “you’re both wrong”. John Marston
want’s nothing to do with the future and the government wants to clean
up the past and make it look like it never happened.
This game doesn’t end well for John Marston. It doesn’t end with
the world a lawless place. It doesn’t end with John Marston not paying
for his crimes.
“So much for this automobile of yours. If this is the future, God help us all,” John Marston says after they’ve repaired the car.
The
car was the future. We don’t ride horses anymore. We don’t have cowboys
anymore (in that sense). John Marston was the dying breed, indeed. And
so, I guess, God help us all, indeed.
Hope you enjoyed reading it! If you want more of this kind of stuff, I wrote a piece about the Quietest Moment In Persona 4, a Children's Song in The Witcher 3, That Time Aloy Shivered and The Last Word in the Last of Us. (This list is becoming long)