At first glance, it’s hard to say that Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and HBO’s The Sopranos have much in common. It’s true that both deal with a cast of criminal characters, ebb and flow between drama and dark comedy, and were both met with critical acclaim. However, while they each draw heavily on a strong cinematic tradition despite being in different mediums, Red Dead looks to Westerns while The Sopranos takes much of its influence (and cast) from Scorsese mob movies.
Under the surface, however, the two works share the same thematic DNA. Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Sopranos may be set one-hundred years apart, but at the turn of their respective centuries, they both deal with personal decline through the eyes of criminal enterprise, asking what it means to exist after the prime they once inherited. There are even scenes which play out with very similar dialogue and staging, and both are immensely ambitious works that helped overcome mainstream questions about the artistic value of their mediums. Spoilers ahead for Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Sopranos.
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Dealing With Decline
Despite their surface level differences, it’s hard to deny that both Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Sopranos deal heavily with decline. In The Sopranos' very first therapy scene, Tony tries to explain the source of his anxiety attacks to his psychiatrist Dr Melfi: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi responds that “many Americans, I think, feel that way.” Arthur Morgan certainly does.
In one of Red Dead Redemption 2’s earliest camp interactions, right at the start of Chapter 2, Mary-Beth Gaskill calls Arthur over to talk about his feelings. Sitting on a crate across from her, Arthur tries to explain his worries: “Whole world’s changing. Even I see that now. Our time is pretty much passed. They don’t want folk like us no more.” It’s not the last time Arthur and Mary-Beth have a therapy-style aside where Arthur tries to open up about his fears.
In both cases, the audience is encouraged to question whether or not the golden era — the ideal time to be born that Tony and Arthur imagine — really existed at all. Tony Soprano himself admits that his father never had the wealth he has accumulated. Tony’s Uncle Junior is subject to humiliation after humiliation in the show, eventually succumbing to dementia and spending his final days in a nursing home with no memory of his past.
Many of the gunslingers of old mentioned in Red Dead Redemption 2 are either already long dead like Tony’s father, or drunken wrecks like Billy Midnight and Jim “Boy” Calloway, who Arthur meets in the stranger mission "The Noblest of Men, and a Woman." The fact that these older gunslingers have names so entrenched in their genre that they border on comical reflects just how ridiculously fictionalized that image of the golden age of gunslingers is. A similar use of names can be found in some of the slightly older, more comical characters in Tony’s crew like Silvio Dante and Paulie Walnuts.
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Genre And Nostalgia
The genres of both works stand in for a nostalgic yearning for a past that didn’t truly exist. The Sopranos is relentlessly self-aware of itself as a latecomer to the mob genre. Tony’s nephew Christopher desperately wants to write a semi-autobiographical mafia movie screenplay; a plot-point made even more meta by the fact that the actors behind Christopher, half of Tony’s crew, and his psychiatrist, had parts in Goodfellas.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is similarly self-aware. It explores characters whose stories are not only coming to an end, but who can only recreate the stories of other born-too-late Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie multiple Red Dead Redemption 2 scenes directly recreate.
In both Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Sopranos, the sense that the genre itself might not have many more stories left to tell works in tandem with the characters’ own beliefs that their era is coming to an end. In both cases, it also seems like there might not have been much of an “era” at all. The glimpses into the past that The Sopranos and Red Dead Redemption 2 characters do get reveal people who are just as miserable as they are. They either die young or live long enough to face their own humiliating personal declines.
Fictional Pasts And Unknowable Futures
Red Dead Redemption 2’s role as a prequel is a reminder that, even long before John Marston was forced to hunt down his old comrades, the specter of decline hung over the gang’s every waking moment. If The Sopranos’ upcoming prequel — The Many Saints Of Newark — is going to match the tone of the show, it seems very likely to explore how bleak the period Tony looks back to with nostalgia actually was.
It’s unlikely that the developers of Red Dead Redemption 2 were strongly focused on The Sopranos when developing the game’s story when the Western genre itself offered so many inspirations. However, it makes sense that both Red Dead Redemption 2 have such similar themes. As Melfi hints in The Sopranos' first episode, the sense that the best is over is an anxiety that reaches back through history, one guaranteed by people’s ability to fictionalize the past, and their inability to do the same for the future.
Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Sopranos hit on this fundamental fear and use their character’s relationships with their respective genres to explore how people warp the past. Those characters then compare their deeply simplified versions of that past with the undeniable complexity of their present and the unknowable nature of their futures.
The anxiety that comes from that unknowable future and its resistance to fictionalization is something The Sopranos’ famous cut-to-black ending realizes brilliantly. Red Dead Redemption 2 ends relatively happily for John Marston, but players know from the first game that John’s own destruction is imminent. Viewed in retrospect, the unstoppable march of change is always going to look like decline to those who long for the relative safety of a knowable past.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
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