Nothing Gets Forgiven: RDR2’s Last Word

How RDR2 takes the wrong lessons from Warlock.

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a paradox: despite justifiably being called one of the greatest games ever made, as a work of narrative art, it falls short of greatness. In aspects — the standout performances, the rendition of characters’ facial expressions, the golden choruses of the sunsets — it is superb. However, despite the story’s powerful effects, RDR2′s reputation as a superlative work is undeserved. Some of its formal problems are, perhaps, inevitable in a narrative form as nascent as the video game. Plot holes break the fabric of the story here and there. The pacing is poor: Chapter 6 is interminable and depressing; the epilogue is interminable and boring. The most important character development unfolds in side missions — some might mistake the story’s heartwood for material as trivial as an easter egg. These flaws are irksome, but relatively minor.

RDR2‘s biggest problems are born from the kind of ideological fault lines you’d expect from a company that sells itself as rebellious and progressive when it is, in fact, Cornwall Kerosene & Tar. The game wants everything both ways: to revel in its white male privilege and to state (although not demonstrate) that race and gender don’t determine a person’s worth. It condemns Arthur Morgan to die for beating Thomas Downes; the traumatic brain injury Arthur gives Tommy — apparently resulting in permanent mental incapacity — is played for laughs¹. It smugly mocks racists, but is sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic, and, for good measure, also racist itself. It mourns environmental destruction, but encourages the player to kill the Legendary Animals and Legendary Fish. It claims that Arthur is both good and evil, but routes the player toward high-honor choices. It tries to subvert the Christian creation myth, but its concepts of sin and punishment embrace a Christian worldview. It wants the cool detachment of irony and it wants to evoke the tragedy of a lost golden age. It offers the player choices, but makes them have no real consequence. It presents different endings, but they’re all variants of the same ending, each brutally devoid of catharsis.

Catharsis is the purgation of repressed emotion. It’s what grants stories their unique power to heal. Cathartic stories don’t have to be happy to do that; in fact, they generally aren’t. Cathartic stories debride wounds; they set bones. They acknowledge painful truths we’ve been denying. None of that is exactly pleasant, but it is essential to the healing process. Instead of offering catharsis, RDR2 induces pain that never finds appropriate release. Players are often depressed, persistently troubled, or even confused by the ending.

Although it’s impossible to say whether the writers consciously aimed for this effect, the idea of denying catharsis comes from Warlock. In the novel, Curley Burne is banned from town after the death of Deputy Sheriff Carl Schroeder. In attempting to disarm Burne, Schroeder pulled on his gun while Burne’s finger was on the trigger, causing it to fire. As he’s dying, Schroeder tells John Gannon that the shooting wasn’t Curley’s fault, but due to Gannon’s past association with Burne, people don’t believe him. After Burne goes into town despite the ban and Clay Blaisedell kills him, Henry Holmes Goodpasture writes in his journal:

I think we felt cheated. There should have been some catharsis, for Carl Schroeder had been avenged, and an evil man had received his just deserts. There was no catharsis, there was only revulsion and each man afraid, suddenly, to look into the face of the one next to him. And there was the realization that Curley Burne had not been an evil man, the remembrance that we had once, all of us, liked and enjoyed him to some degree; and there was the cancerous suspicion spreading among us that Gannon might not, after all, have been lying.

I feel drained by an over-violent purge to my emotions, that has taken from me part of my manhood, or my humanity. I feel scraped raw in some inner and most precious part. The earth is an ugly place, senseless, brutal, cruel, and ruthlessly bent only upon the destruction of men’s souls. The God of the Old Testament rules a world not worth His trouble, and He is more violent, more jealous, more terrible with the years. We are only those poor, bare, forked animals Lear saw upon his dismal heath, in pursuit of death, pursued by death.

Hall 251

RDR2’s most vital failure is denying Arthur, and the player, catharsis. It’s not the fact that Arthur dies, but the state in which he dies: holding enormous psychic pain that he can barely acknowledge, let alone release. He has forgiven himself nothing — the game’s most brutal irony, given that Arthur is a Christ figure, and forgiveness Christ’s purpose.

What the narrative pursues instead is punishment. Arthur certainly thinks he deserves it. “You can’t expect to live a bad life and have good things to happen to you,” he tells Rains Fall. He’s talking about the death of his son, Isaac. This is the essential pain of Arthur’s life that’s never resolved. Arthur treats that pain like a hot stove. The mention of fatherhood makes him leave the room; he sees sons and tries to drive them off, or turns his face away.

Although he never admits it, much of the tension between Arthur and John Marston is over John abandoning his son, Jack. In “Exit, Pursued by a Bruised Ego” — a mission title that alludes to a play in which a son dies as a direct punishment for his father’s sins — Hosea Matthews tries to get Arthur to let go of his anger at John. “Running off on that kid is one thing, but there’s a code,” Arthur tells him. In “The Sheep and the Goats,” when John is affronted that Arthur took Jack fishing, Arthur says, “If you say the boy ain’t yours, what’s the difference? You’ll probably only run off again.” And in “A Strange Kindness,” when Charles asks what the problem is between them, Arthur says, “He disappeared on us for a while, when Jack was real young.” The pattern reveals the truth: mention John leaving, and Arthur brings up Jack. Mention Jack, and Arthur brings up John leaving. Mention the problems between John and Arthur, and Arthur brings up John leaving Jack.

Sister Calderón is right when she tells Arthur, “Forgive me, but … that’s the problem. You don’t know you” (“Of Men and Angels II”). Whatever Arthur may claim about his problems with John, at the heart of them is John abandoning Jack, which almost certainly happened after Arthur was devastated by the loss of his own child — as John would know. Arthur wasn’t there for the son he loved, and now he’s had to watch as John coldly and cruelly denies his own. It’s only when John starts to act something like a father in “The Battle of Shady Belle” that Arthur really seems to forgive him. But he cannot forgive himself.

One of the cheat codes, carved into the bottom of a drawer at Vetter’s Echo — the most memorable shack in the game — reads “You want punishment.” That attitude comes from Warlock. John Gannon’s brother, Billy, was killed in Warlock‘s version of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. He explains to his friend, Kate Dollar:

“I was thinking about Billy, and how my father used to whip him. He had to whip Billy a lot, for Billy was always wild. And he’d never cover up a thing he’d done.” He touched his nose, remembering that time. “He would always tell right off, like he was proud of it. And it seemed like he got whipped for things he hadn’t done when he could have got off by speaking up.
“So I’ve got to wondering if he wasn’t just taking the whippings to clear off things he’d done, inside himself. I mean things he felt guilty about. So that if he got whipped it paid him up for a while. I wonder— I wonder if—” He could not quite say it.
“Killed?” Kate said.
“Maybe it would pay for everything.”
“Killed?” Kate whispered.
“Why, yes.” He tried painfully to grin. “Maybe you haven’t ever felt that way, being a religious woman. If a person hasn’t got any religion there’s some things he can’t get forgiven for because he can’t forgive himself. I wonder if it wasn’t partly that way with Billy.”
“Killed for it?” Kate said, and he was pleased to see there were things about men she did not know, after all her bragging that she knew them so well.

Hall 255

Punishment, perversely, can feel good. It allows us to feel we’ve paid for a bad thing we did without actually doing the painful work of understanding our motivations. If Arthur did that work about the incident that caused his death, it would sound something like this: “I hurt a good and innocent person because I desperately need the love of my surrogate father. I need it because I’m afraid my biological father didn’t love me and that I am fundamentally unlovable. And the fact that my surrogate father uses his love, bestowing and withholding it, to control me means that he is unworthy of my regard, so I’ve done this awful thing that went against my conscience for nothing, for worse than nothing, and I’m afraid most of my choices have been the wrong ones and the meaning I thought my life had doesn’t exist.”

No one wants to undergo all that. That fucking sucks. Being beaten by your worst enemy sounds preferable. Unfortunately, Arthur’s choices meant that this work was necessary in order for him to be able to live as a whole person. He begins to gain this self-knowledge, but he doesn’t complete the process. To do that, he would have to forgive himself. Not just for Thomas Downes’s death: that isn’t his primary wound. He would have to accept that while he might have prevented Isaac’s death, it wasn’t his fault.

“Do Not Seek Absolution,” the mission title orders. But Arthur was never going to: “I don’t want saving. I don’t deserve it,” he writes in his journal. The guilt that he feels is because, at his core, he cares about other people a great deal. The people he’s hurt and his failures to honor his better feelings haunt him. Sometimes when we hurt people, we do, in fact, want to lie down on a rock and die. But that impulse is not a correct one. It doesn’t help anyone.

RDR2, however, reifies the idea that Arthur deserves punishment. It’s only three words, but that Vetter’s Echo cheat code means two things: “want,” in British English, can also mean “in want of; need.” You, Arthur, desire to be punished; you also need to be punished. In “Brothers and Sisters, One and All,” Arthur picks up Sister Calderón’s crucifix — the ultimate symbol of punishment — and glances down at it. When he looks up, he sees Edith Downes, widowed, impoverished, forced to take up the sex trade. Arthur is a Christ figure, Thomas Downes the sin he dies to redeem. The concept of karma appears to have had its influence as well: Arthur dies the same way Thomas did, from the combined effects of his illness and being beaten. Susan Grimshaw dies in exactly the same way she killed Molly O’Shea: shot under the left breast when she isn’t looking, feet from where Molly died. They get what they’ve given to a brutal and exacting degree.

“I think you’re being hard on yourself,” Rains Fall tells Arthur when he suggests that Isaac’s death was his fault. Again, RDR2 is divided against itself: Rains Fall is one of the two wisest characters in the game, but elsewhere, the text implies that Isaac’s death was Arthur’s fault, some sort of cosmic punishment. In the cabin called Clawson’s Rest are the bodies of two little boys, along with a note from their mother that tells them she’s gone to find the men who stole the family’s money. Presumably those men killed her. She locked the boys in when she left; in her absence, they starved to death. In the newspaper article “Family Murdered,” a little boy named Isaac is killed by bandits. Arthur goes to collect on the debt of Arthur Londonderry, who has died trying to earn the money to pay back Herr Strauss. When Mrs. Londonderry learns who Arthur is, she protectively pushes her young son — “Arthur’s” son — away from him, back into the shadows; he disappears into darkness as if into death. Thieves like Arthur are responsible for the deaths of little boys.

Read Dead has identified dozens of sources that contributed to the creation of Red Dead Redemption 2. Where those sources metaphorically meet, in theme, event, and character, they mostly dovetail together, echoing, amplifying, locking into place like puzzle pieces. Here, however, they snag on each other, creating a hopeless snarl. Pairing the psychological explorations of Warlock with the religious nature of Paradise Lost makes a moral lesson of the wrong conclusions. Warlock is a thoughtful consideration of people struggling to live with crushing guilt. Paradise Lost is more concerned with judging its characters — but crucially, it also deeply contemplates the idea of redemption. When RDR2 brings these works together, it creates the illusion that life punishes guilt in exactly the way people deserve. Title aside, it has little interest in redemption.

The feeling of catharsis and meaning of redemption are both absent because Arthur never heals from his son’s death. He can’t, because he can’t deal honestly with painful emotions. “I don’t talk about him much,” he tells Rains Fall — words John will later unknowingly repeat to Mary-Beth Gaskell about Arthur himself. “But I think about him,” John goes on. Perhaps that’s why John goes after Micah Bell, despite Abigail Marston’s pleas, despite Arthur’s requests: he doesn’t know how else to release the pain and survivor’s guilt he feels over Arthur’s death, just as Arthur is unable to cope with Isaac’s death.

Arthur and John’s failures wouldn’t be an aesthetic issue if the narrative dealt with them as the fundamental problems that they are. This is exactly the challenge that Warlock takes on; Tom Morgan’s death is cathartic. Rockstar hesitates and fumbles. Chapter 6 stagnates. As painfully long and apparently eventful as it is, at an emotional and psychological level it’s the same thing again and again: Dutch betrays John and he almost dies. Dutch betrays Arthur and he almost dies. Dutch betrays Eagle Flies and he dies. Dutch betrays John and he almost dies. Dutch betrays Abigail and she almost dies. If the story appears to be moving, it’s because we’re spinning in circles. Insofar as there are rules for writing fiction, the most important one is that plot grows from character. Here, the writers are shackling their character to a plot. Arthur’s growth is arrested at a certain point, though they would seem to give him the opportunity to change. Arthur is able to see that Dutch is wrong and to stand up to him at the very beginning of Chapter 6. He then goes on to speak to several people who help him see himself and his life more clearly. We can see him change through those optional missions, but those changes are never reflected in the main story. His stasis isn’t plausible.

Tragedy and sadness color the deaths that most inform Arthur’s: King Arthur’s and Tom Morgan’s. The crucial difference is that those deaths are cathartic: King Arthur repents his mistakes and is carried away to a magical land by people who care for him. Tom, dying, finds that “still he could laugh, but now he could weep as well” (445, emphasis mine). Oakley Hall understands that the mythological cowboy is a tragic figure because he has closed himself off, made himself an unfeeling, unspeaking thing. As Jane Tompkins writes, “To be a man is not only to be monolithic, silent, mysterious, impenetrable as a desert butte, it is to be the desert butte. By becoming a solid object, not only is a man relieved of the burden of relatedness and responsiveness to others, he is relieved of consciousness itself, which is to say, primarily, consciousness of self” (56-57). Warlock demonstrates that this stance poisons those who assume it: certain attitudes and behaviors are called toxic masculinity not just because the actor is harmful to those around him, but because they are themselves intoxicated. Tom’s release is not death; it’s being able, finally, to cry, to express real human emotion. Releasing his pain brings him some measure of peace — and it brings it to the reader, too. Arthur and the player aren’t given that. He dies still trying to justify himself to a man who has used him foully and persistently betrayed him: “I gave you all I had. I did,” he rasps to Dutch.

Punishment is what Arthur wanted, and what he thought he deserved. But punishment answers nothing. Nothing can grow from it, and nothing can be realized. Why forgiveness should be impossible for Arthur is never clear. Perhaps the writers had no model for it, and no ability to create beyond collaging other people’s work together. Maybe John Marston’s line, repeated from Red Dead Redemption, is a clue. Not just what he says, but the way he says it: “Nothing gets forgiven.” Written in passive voice, the sentence has no true subject: there is no God, so there’s no one who can forgive us. Somehow, sin and punishment remain: “God is dead,” Micah quotes — but Nietzsche does not say that there never was a God. Of the first game, Matt Margini writes, “It doesn’t want you to believe in anything” (160). Red Dead Redemption 2 wants you to have believed in something. It wants to break your heart.

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1. You can meet Tommy again during “A Quiet Time.” He is unable to speak and seems mostly unaware of his surroundings. ↩︎

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