How
The West
Was Remixed:
By Dylan Schrader
The West
The West
The Frontier
Every story has a setting, but in the Western, the setting is essential to the genre of the film. John Ford's Westerns are essential examples of this (the picture shown above is from his movie, The Searchers (1956). According to Ephraim Katz in The Film Encyclopedia, "His (John Ford's) compositions have a classic strength in which masses of people and their natural surroundings are beautifully juxtaposed, often in breathtaking long shots, many times in Monument Valley, the setting for several of his films (471). In the closing scene from The Searchers below, the small domestic scene that Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is returning his niece to is juxtaposed against the immense frontier the characters are riding in from. He stands for a moment gazing in at the scene inside before the door is closed to him and he is left out in the frontier.
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Many contemporary movies that draw on Western tropes like Django Unchained (2012) take place outside of the Western frontier or outside of the Wild West time period, but Westerns must at least take place in the frontier (even if the frontier is Southern or Northwestern) and draw on the networked tropes of the Western. Again, Django Unchained is an example of the remixed Western, with a soundtrack that includes Ennio Morricone, Rick Ross, Jim Croce, and James Brown (Bahr). Below is a scene in which director Quentin Tarantino draws on the vast landscapes of the John Ford films, but here the characters are dwarfed by the snow-covered mountains that represent Django's (Jamie Fox) new freedom:
Like Django Unchained, Red Dead Redemption 2 largely takes place outside of the West, but it still mostly takes place in the Midwestern plains and Southern frontier. Not only is the setting visually important and an impressive feat of game design (see the video below of two hours of scenery from the game), the setting actually affects the player. If Arthur Morgan goes into the snowy mountains wearing the wrong clothes, he can lose health and eventually die. The same is true if he wears his winter clothes in the hot and muggy South.
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With Red Dead Redemption 2, not only do we see through character traits and camera shots how the setting affects the character, the player experiences the setting physically and benefits or suffers depending on his choice. By remixing the Western genre and combining with the possible affordances of a new digital medium, Red Dead Redemption 2 adds another level of immersive detail into the experience of the game.