Red Dead Redemption

There are now enough open-world games set in different periods to tell an entire history of Western civilization, from prehistory to the present. Inevitably, the kind of history they tell is fragmented, ideologically inconsistent: focused narratively on Great Men and Great Deeds; focused experientially on objects, ordinary citizens, city life. Unique among its genre peers, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption marshals the openness and expansiveness of its structure to make a historical argument of a different kind—an argument about enclosure, disempowerment, and the inescapable death march of American expansionism. John Marston is “living in history”; he never steps outside it, despite the freedom of his movements. To play as him is to experience a power fantasy in the truest sense.

In 2003, HBO released And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, a lavish TV movie about a Mexican revolutionary who makes a deal with Hollywood to film, and star in, his own battle. Antonio Banderas plays Pancho Villa full of preening swagger, yet a strange kind of naivete—the naivete of someone already trying on the gilded robes of myth, already saving a parking spot on Olympus, boasting like Beowulf before the fact. The battle does not go as he intended; what was supposed to be a decisive skirmish becomes a prolonged siege. But the camera is there to watch him as he smiles for it between gunshots—as he carries around an idea of the present moment, an idea of what the past will look like to an appreciative future, without much care for the present itself. The camera is there to watch him as he executes the widow of one of his enemies, point-blank, in cold blood.