The great character reveal in last week’s Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer wasn’t one of the seven masked figures thundering toward us during the dramatic climax, nor any of the townspeople hunching in the muddy streets of a ramshackle town.
Images like this lone rider emerging from over a ridge appeal to our common vocabulary of Western myths.
The West is the central, essential character, with its vibrant personality and complex traits revealed in every thoughtfully choreographed shot. Its harshness is meant to be felt in the ever-present breezes whipping the grass and the bite of cold coming down the mountain into the pale prairie sun, smelt in pine needles and rotting carcasses. Its kindness is reflected in the soft light of the rising sun as a rider crosses a plain, its wildness in the seeping contrast of mountain and plain across a lonesome valley.
Kevin Costner's Open Range: a protagonist framed against the seemingly endless horizon of the west.
Los Santos and Blaine County are a funhouse mirror of reality, distorting and accentuating our culture’s more grotesque indulgences. Red Dead Redemption isn’t about parody. It’s a clear reflection of a legend so deeply ingrained in the American mind that it has informed our storytelling for generations. What we see at work here is a franchise laying the groundwork of self-definition. Whatever open world and sandbox mechanics Red Dead borrows from Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead is intrinsically divided from GTA by virtue of the mythos it services.
The shadowed figure prepares to ride out into the great wide open.
Westerns defy parody. Even films that most successfully deconstruct the more legendary elements of Western life bow before the dwarfing scale that the wildness and openness the landscape and rough sparseness demand. Violent life and quick death on the frontier were matters not of glamour but of horror, but neither even attempts to deny the sense of wonder and impossible, otherworldly beauty and freedom in which the horror took place.
John Ford's The Searchers: the iconic antihero takes a last look and steps away from his family ind into the wild beyond.
The sheer, mind-boggling vastness of the Wyoming hills, the Kansas plains, and the New Mexico desert defy efforts to qualify their scope and grandeur. To this day, a visitor to the grasslands of South Dakota or the mesas of Arizona will likely be mind-boggled by the raw, impossible hugeness of the landscape, the seemingly endless sense of human insignificance against earth and sky, and an overarching wildness that inspired generations of writer and filmmakers.
The squalor, mud, and diverse personalities of a western town.
The West is a language, a grand preconception so universally ingrained that the simplest of icons evoke powerful emotions and associated imagery. We’ve known these images before: shadowed figures standing in doorways against a desert, great sweeping hills contrasted with a solitary human. We know a lone rider crossing a plain, and what possibilities he signifies, because we have in our collective cultural consciousness met this character many times before.
George Stevens' Shane: the muddy town and loitering characters share a lot in common with a shot from the RDR2 reveal.
Everywhere, settlement is dwarfed by the natural and uncontrollable elements: wind, weather, vast mountains, muddy streets, quick death. It’s a painting brushed in the palette of Shane, The Searchers, and Open Range, a palpable iconography felt in the ever-present breezes whipping the grass and the bite of cold coming down the mountain into the pale prairie sun. Every scene of the Redemption 2 trailer teems with life, but that life is dwarfed in the face of a vastness that stretches from the windswept fields and shadowed forests to the canopy of stars.
The blazing sky of a clear western night. A distant figure huddles near the campfire.
The contrasting vistas represent the extraordinarily diversity of the American West’s natural splendor: dense forests, endless skies, cold mountains, and dusty, rolling fields. And among these, great symbols, the railroad, the mounting rider, the dreamcatcher in a tree, evoking the manifold people who give humanity to the West’s largely untamed character. cowboys and caballeros, Chinese immigrants, freed slaves serving as frontier soldiers, poor farmers, men and women of native nations each sovereign and distinct, itinerant preachers, school teachers, missionaries, gold-rushing miners, wilderness scouts, laconic mountain men, ranchers, robber barons, oil boomers, a peppering of humanity’s rich and poor, desperate, foolish, exploitative, and adventurous elements brought together under an endless sky.
John Ford's The Searchers: Two riders against the elements.
All of these people are part of the great character of the West so splendidly presented in this trailer. We see them as wandering riders or loitering townspeople, as paddlers silhouetted on a sun-drenched river. They are the humanizing element of the West’s great character, faces set against a great unconquered land, and their stories will become yours.
John Ford's The Searchers: The iconic opening frames Dorothy Jordan against the desert landscape as John Wayne approaches on horseback.
The message of the trailer is clear: you will come to know this character. You will walk these forests, ford these rivers, cross these plains. You will be the lone rider on the vast frontier. The West is a great character, and it beckons you to come and meet it, challenge it, face it, befriend it or defeat it, but never conquer it.
Jared Petty is a Senior Editor at IGN. Chat with him on twitter@pettycommajared.
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