Book Review: Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini
Published by Boss Fight Books, 2020
Ebook Cost: $4.95, Paperback Cost: $14.95,
Paperback + Ebook Bundle: $17.95
Originally published on 8/19/20 at willwritesablog.tumblr.com
This necessarily won’t be a comprehensive review of Matt Margini’s latest book, Red Dead Redemption, but rather an overview of my experience in reading it and descriptions of some parts that especially stood out to me (and why.)
At the beginning of the book, Margini makes a humble disclaimer that apart from two brief trips, he himself has not been to the west. He corrects the notion that this would immediately disqualify him from writing this book afterword by opening into his central idea; the book is about Easterners’ perceptions on the West, and is specifically about a videogame that brings these differences into the limelight, Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar Games.
I give all this exposition because I have never played Red Dead Redemption (or its sequel), I have never been west of Chicago, I’ve only read 4 western books and I’ve watched maybe one or two western movies. Beyond watching some beginning and ending cutscenes on YouTube, I went into this book fresh on the series. Besides playing through GTAV, I am still fresh to releases by Rockstar Games.
These factors should immediately disqualify me from writing a review, so I’ll amend the notion by stating that my review is largely on the merits of Red Dead Redemption (the book) as a standalone piece.
As a standalone piece Red Dead Redemption functions flawlessly; it’s written remarkably well. I was curious and a little skeptical going into this book on how Margini would approach this game, given Rockstar Games’ notoriety in being tight-lipped on their development process. This already puts him at a disadvantage, but Margini makes up for it–profoundly–by picking apart every detail in the game and citing it to similar works in film, literature, and in other games that most definitely served as inspiration. Any developer interviews or relevant community reactions towards the game are cited and implemented into the book as well.
Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini serves as a fascinating index over the western genre, and this is just one of the many things it accomplishes. It bears a strong amount of re-readability (as a small example, the first chapter begins with something the author was told 4 years ago. On the acknowledgements page, the first sentence states how he began scheming this book out four years ago) and contains a lengthy section of citations for extended reading (which also seems to be a feature in all publishings by Boss Fight Books.)
Matt Margini accomplishes multiple smaller things across writing this book–at its core he analyzes the western genre (and the death of the western genre), the mechanics of Red Dead Redemption, and the spirit of Red Dead Redemption (which is roughly a combination of the two.) But a number of related subjects and asides are discussed as well; personal connections to the game and Matt Margini’s father are frequent, historical connections being made are not uncommon, and comparisons to other video games and their storytelling are prevalent. One of my favorite sections of the book was when Margini referenced and explained the idea of a “map game,” the repeated pattern of modern video games to be open-world, expansive, and then inevitably claustrophobic as the player gathers his or her bearings. “Virtual tourism” is another term he uses here.
The most difficult portion of this book to read, I found, was the longest chapter, “Cowboy.” Large sections of this chapter I found myself disagreeing with. In this chapter Margini identifies Owen Wister and his novel The Virginian as what “gave the cowboy his shape as a quintessentially American icon” and proceeds to illustrate him and his novel in a less-than-flattering light. This is discussed to serve as a reference point, as many western works released after The Virginian, Margini argues, carry similar ideological flaws.
Margini follows on this by comparing Wister’s ideals to his friend Teddy Roosevelt’s ideology and the value he saw in individuals adopting this western ideal. Margini states that Roosevelt’s modification of the frontier thesis definitively transitioned its hero from the “humble yeoman farmer” into the chaotic “Daniel Boone, a Davy Crockett… a ‘man who knows Indians’ but takes their land by force,” a character, to paraphrase, who lives outside of society, whose actions serve society, but who does not value society or its rewards itself.
Margini states that Roosevelt’s ideals held “deeply racist implications” because his ideal man subjugated or was complicit in subjugating Indians, and also because it roots back to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. If his beliefs were this way, I didn’t find the book’s connection towards this to be very effective. Margini uses very racial language when describing Roosevelt’s beliefs, but from what is shown, it doesn’t seem like this virtue in subjugation was drawn across racial lines.
Later, in “Cowboy,” in closing off the same interlude and in making present-day connections, he alludes to the structure of the game of Red Dead as implicitly strengthening racial prejudices, in that your character, a white man, is able to function at a higher capacity than the other, robotic characters in the game. He concludes this in saying, “Everyone else [in the game] is just–to borrow a term weaponized by contemporary white supremacists–NPCs.” Although this is meant as a brief point, Matt Margini either fundamentally misunderstands, or is being disingenuous to, the “NPC” pop culture phenomenon. The idea of the “NPC” and using it as a derogative began by a broader right-wing dissident movement–it was significant for symbolizing an opposition to consumerism, hedonism and nihilism as opposed to anything racial. It’s a pretty egregious mischaracterization and show-of-the-hand on where Margini aligns his personal views–he uses a very serious subject (white supremacy) as a boogeyman in referencing a topic his audience is likely ignorant on.
In spite of that and even in other places in the book I feel prone to disagree with, Matt Margini makes his cases very well. Red Dead Redemption would make for an excellent book to read within a book club or even within a filmmaking class due to its wide scope, its excellent analyses and its thought-provoking subject material. The language used within it is stunning as well–such as in the following quote about the ideal of the cowboy, “The way he’s 'seen trouble’ that the East Coast man hasn’t seen, crystallizing a purer kind of virtue that lies beneath a life of vice,” the imagery Margini evokes here of an unmoving, bedrock virtue being forged under the pressures of vice is near-perfect. In reading Red Dead Redemption I ended up writing down close to a dozen new words that I had not heard before to look up. And Matt Margini accomplishes all of this in under 200 pages.
As I began with this review, this is in large part a discussion of my personal experience with this book. In keeping with that spirit, I’m rating this book a 4/5 here, however, I went ahead and left smaller reviews on Goodreads and on LibraryThing with full 5 star ratings just to help data analytics. It’s gripping, it’s seamless, and it’s a better book than I could write. It’s a book that deserves to be read.
EDIT, 10/17/20: Too little too late, but attempting to diagnose this book on a 5 point scale was petty and stupid of me. My disagreements with the book cover about half of my review, but only around 2% of its pages. From its discussion of map games to its identification of "every signifcant tourist attraction in Florida [being] the remnant of some early-20th-century megalomaniac’s quasi-utopian passion project," I've cited this book a number of times on other things ever since finishing it.
Rating: 9/10
Easy to Binge-Read?: I read it in three sittings (reading through the first four chapters, then reading chapters “Cowboy” and “Violence,” and then finally reading the remaining three chapters), although some might finish it in an afternoon.
Comments
Post a Comment