John has killed a thousand men
Isomorphic is David McNeill's column about adaptations and the infectious influence of memory.
John Marston has killed a thousand men. Ten thousand. Ten million, perhaps, in the digital aggregate, by the time we find him in Red Dead Redemption. He occupies a half-light of the closing west, a sort of facsimile of a country that was, and a country that will be. The sparse art design and airy score deliver John across empty planes riding a vacant tone/astride a nameless horse. The influence of "government" on New Austin ricochets against the sense that John's life is already over. The lushness of John’s time in Dutch’s gang is entirely emptied from the west. Possibilities close.
A question outstanding from Grand Theft Auto V is whether Rockstar are capable of satire anymore, and in retrospect Red Dead Redemption provides a resounding "catch us in the right light". Where Red Dead Redemption II is a tragedy to its core, the first story is a portrait of a world already ended. John owns nothing. Not really. Every dollar to his name is accounted for on a mortgage balance sheet with the bank. Every piece of his heart is owned by his son and wife. Every ounce of his soul resides within a government ledger with esoteric and unpredictable inflation.
We open with John and Bonnie musing over the meaning of life on horseback in between mundane tasks, and even Bonnie accuses John of being deliberately bleak and obtuse. John can’t believe in any sort of god, nor does belief serve him, he tells Bonnie. He is an empty arm of the state, waiting to return home to resume himself. He has the soul of a poet, a man out of time (in both meanings), frustrated by law enforcement even as he is warped into equally insufficient law enforcement. He allies with the every-men he used to rob for a living. But as Bonnie points out "you don't talk about your wife" - his motivation is not something he can easily speak about because John cannot resolve himself, because he too has become a vacancy. A tool deployed the state, only valuable because of a past that has been erased and is being erased by him.
Part of what makes John challenging to think through as a protagonist now is the sheer gravity of Arthur Morgan. Arthur is, perhaps, the most expansively rendered video game protagonist ever portrayed. The sheer volume of casual interactions and micro moments available to to the player with Arthur are staggering, and the quality of all are, largely, even. And John is a replication of this man in so many ways. Loyal, and tortured by his loyalty. Violent, and conflicted by his enjoyment of bloodshed. But John is every father’s son, cursed to grapple with seeing what his forebearer was, and realising that did not get the job done. Arthur dies with maybe five friends in total, all counted. If Arthur is the modern man then, John is the postmodern man. His relationships, beyond his son and wife, are virtual, all in service of some other. Bonnie is a debt he owes. Bill is a target to please the government. Even the Mexican revolutionary he allies with is an avenue to find Javier. This is where the after shadow of Red Dead Redemption II sinks the shot so well in recontextualising the story: John has to do this, is physically driven to do this, because he carries the weight of Arthur's sacrifice. "Where's my hat" is the first thing he asks after waking in Bonnie's shack, the question now pregnant with specific meaning. The second game’s existence only adds pressure to the artificial reality of John’s new existence. The only truth resides back at his farm, all else is simulation. Clear a bandit camp during a mission? Tough shit, those bad guys respawned when you next come upon it. Killed all the rabbits in an area? They’re back, pal. Won everyone’s money in poker (okay this never happens to me I’m bad at poker), there’s five new strangers there once you turn your back.
Throughout the initial phase of the game, John passes through a world of weirdos and grifters, and he just shrugs and gets on with it because the world has already ended for John, hasn’t it? This question of what he will sacrifice isn't a question: he's lost everything except his wife and child. John’s west has already died, consumed by government and corporate interest, only the west has not realised things are already over. This is presented by the systems of capital that govern the west: the best way to make a buck is to take on a bounty or slay an animal with weapons that sling deadly ammunition. Bonnie’s farm lives on a knife’s edge by comparison, a single bad storm threatens their entire survival and would doom all twenty or so farmers if not for John’s help. Most remarkable about the ageing of this writing is that the detached irony of Grand Theft Auto V is almost nowhere to be seen save the game’s later contention with the Pinkerton agents. Looking back at this text across a decade where all of the little jokes and avatars on the computer emerged through the screen into reality as actual forces, I can’t be anything but impressed by the restraint present throughout most of the game’s writing. The resistance to portray John’s cynicism as a correct understanding of reality is sustained more or less until his temporary victory at the end of the game. The meanest writing is leveled toward the institutions of the state, and, naturally, the peons of the church. Gently (for Rockstar) in the latter instance.
The game is inexorably about “itself” - John is constantly irritated that people who promised to help need yet another favour. He’s forever threatening violence to get what he wants, and performing tremendous acts of murder to help the people around him. He is “in” a video game about, well, Rockstar video games. He switches sides to help the Mexican revolution for a young woman he feels some accountability over, but also because it serves his ends. This selfish barbarism within John is tempered by the endless philosophical discussions John has on horseback. He is us, sitting on the couch, turning to our buddy and saying, “hey, that was kind of fucked up, someone should say something about that” - John is an avatar, after a fashion, animated by his past exclusively in search of a maybe future that mostly involves clicking on heads and riding from here to there, jamming the A button in a rhythm.
He is disposable to the government, yes, but in a way this frees him to be the man he always was: the Arthur that lives in his mind for moments a piece. And he cannot stand that he enjoys this resumption as he hunts down holograms from his past. This sensation is only amplified by playing the game at a buttery smooth sixty frames a second while the graphics and physics engine remain identical to the original deployment of the game. The guns still sound snappy and explosive. The joy of shooting someone’s hat off or blasting a gun away during a duel is there, but feels even more inorganic than before. The delusional quality of the world is brought into sharp relief in the absence of the sequel’s lushness and the presence of this renewed frame rate. New Austin feels cold and infertile, rendered in stunning, empty 4K resolution, a land filled with corpses ready to be birthed by John’s arsenal of firearms. John has already killed a thousand men, his own soul the very first and the very last victim, and he lives among their artificial phantoms.
