How
The West
Was Remixed:
By Dylan Schrader
The West
The West
the New Frontier
According to Paul Varner, one of the first narrative films was a Western called The Great Train Robbery (102). Directed by Edwin S. Porter in 1903, the film has been called the "first dramatically creative American film, which was also to set the pattern—of crime, pursuit, and retribution—for the Western as a film genre" (Fenin and Everson 41).
The iconic ending of the film, where a surly cowboy points his pistol at the camera and fires at the audience, has been used in Western movies that followed like Tombstone (1993), and Martin Scorsese paid homage to it in a the end of his 1990 gangster film Goodfellas.
As the influence of this early silent film illustrates, the Western film and the myths of the frontier that it both draws from and produces itself, have never left the American (and the world's) psyche. As a genre of film, the popularity of the Western has dwindled thanks to the increase in popularity of other film genres, but according to Michael Agresta of The Atlantic, there are things the Western can do that nothing else can:
The genres that currently rule the box office do other things well—sci-fi movies can address the ecological crisis and challenges of new technology, for instance, and superhero movies can provide never-ending glosses on the core myth of American exceptionalism—but none are particularly engaged with history, especially pre-World War II. And none can boast the richness of symbolic language developed by Westerns over the course of a century at the heart of film culture.
This article, however, was written in 2013 after the critically and commercially panned remake of the classic TV show The Lone Ranger (2013) was released. Had Agresta waited five more years for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), which made $725 million in its opening weekend and was universally critically acclaimed, he might have come to a different conclusion. Red Dead Redemption 2 celebrates the "richness of symbolic language" at the heart of the Western, and it tackles some of the important themes at the heart of the best Westerns: corruption, the violent heart of the American way, the cruel maltreatment of the American Indian at the hands of the American government, and the dwindling freedom that comes as a consequence of technological innovation and progress. Red Dead Redemption 2 and its predecessor Red Dead Redemption do not just work within the genre of the Western—the remix it, borrowing what is essential, timely, and entertaining from the expansive canon of the Western to fit a new medium in new and exciting ways.
According to Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, "Remixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice." This idea is central to both the aims of this website and to the critical importance of Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2. What I aim to do with this site is create a network of tropes, films, scholarship, journalism, and images to show how “…meaning exists not just in the thing itself but in the various relationships that connect with or disconnect from a given space” (Rice 53). I believe that Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 are good examples of this not just because of the inherent practice of remix that must occur when a corpus of texts is remediated from one genre to another, but because those games achieve "persuasive, creative, and parodic" effects that are not possible in other mediums. By creating an immersive experience in which players must walk through and ride through on horseback, live in, fight through, and, ultimately, die through, the games create for a new generation of gamers a central node to access the myths, tropes, and narratives at the heart of the Western genre and the American experience that are not readily available in other genres.
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the Red Dead Series
It is not possible to look at the evolution of the Red Dead series without noticing the direct influences from film. In Red Dead Revolver, the main character, Red Harlow, is a facsimile of Clint Eastwood's character in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Red Harlow squints through the desert dust in his dark clothes and cowboy hat. He has the same taciturn manner, and he sounds just like Eastwood's Man with No Name. The game itself is not as critically important as its two loosely connected successors—it's an arcade-like appropriation of tropes from the Western: there are desert landscapes, corrupt government officials, damsels in distress, shootouts, saloons, women of ill repute, big hats, quickdraws, and, of course, plenty of revenge. Whereas the successors remix these tropes to create a novel, creatively adventurous and rewarding experience, Red Dead Revolver simply revels in these tropes (and, possibly, the tropes established in arcade games) because the genre of the Western game was still relatively unexplored. But as Rockstar Games did with the crime game with their Grand Theft Auto series, they would take the genre of the Western game into ambitious new territory in terms of narrative, scope, and gameplay.
With Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar wanted to tell a more nuanced Western narrative. They had unprecedented success with their first four 3D open-world crime games in the Grand Theft Auto series. Rockstar could not settle for recycling the same superficial tropes of the Western genre—instead, they drew heavily from film without plagiarizing or relying on the superficial edifice of the Western. The narrative for Red Dead Redemption draws from The Wild Bunch (1969)—the main character is forced into hunting down his old gang by his (or, in the Red Dead Redemption, his family's) freedom. The setting is the early 1900s at the tail end of the Wild West. There is tremendous brutality, a corrupt general, and Mexican rebels. That is where the similarities end, however. Red Dead Redemption tells its own story and remixes the tropes in the genre to make them work in a compelling way. It is clear when looking at Red Dead Redemption that Rockstar did not want to simply create "Grand Theft Horse" as some in the press called it at the time (Frushtick). They wanted to create a new form of Western storytelling that existed both apart from the Western film and was a part of the Western mythos.
This has continued to an even greater extent with Red Dead Redemption 2. Peter Suderman of The New York Times had this to say about Red Dead Redemption 2:
Yes, many video games are violent and frivolous, and the most devoted players still tend to be young and male. But the best games reveal a mass cultural medium that has come fully into its own, artistically flourishing in ways that resemble the movie industry during its 20th-century peak and television over the past 20 years. From “The Searchers” to “The Godfather,” from “The Sopranos” to “The Americans,” what connects these eras, and their most outstanding works, is a shared ambition, a desire to be both grand and granular, telling individual stories against the backdrop of national and cultural identity, deconstructing their genres while advancing the form.
I shared this quote because Suderman makes the exact connection I am trying to make: Red Dead Redemption 2 tells an individual (or two individuals to be more accurate) against the backdrop of national and cultural identity while deconstructing the Western genre and also advancing the form. But Red Dead Redemption 2 does more than the previous film and television examples he gives—in RDR2, you hunt, fish, survive, interact with your outlaw buddies in your camp and watch them interract with each other, rob trains, decide to be good/bad, bond with your horse, name your horse, play poker in the saloons, watch the life you (your character) worked for rise and fall in a narrative that rivals the best films, improve and clean your guns, murder, help people, get ambushed by gangs that you have attacked, and go shopping. In other words, you control your character's actions (to a certain extent) through a massive, beautiful world that tests the limits of its console. The Wild Bunch is a masterpiece—a marvelous achievement in film and narrative and one of my favorite movies of all time—but I have not spent 250 hours involved in its world. Red Dead Redemption 2, like Porter's The Great Train Robbery, announces the possibilities present in the new world, in remixing the old into the context of the new, and brings with it a hail of bullets and the announcement of a genre that can, in many ways, supplant its main influence. From books and oral storytelling came film, and from film and books, we get the best of our video game narratives. In the other section of this site, I will analyze how the Red Dead series remixes some of the popular tropes present in film, and, through a close reading of film and game clips, I will show through multiple mediums how the films and games interact in a network of the Western genre.