#26: Boyfriend Week

Some months ago, I asked Adam how he would feel about a Girlfriend Week.

In the 11 years we’ve been together, I’ve shown Adam a lot of movies that are very important to me: Lawrence of Arabia, Reds, The New World, EuroTrip, etc. He’s shown me movies he loves: The Thing, Step Brothers. We’ve discovered a lot of movies together (Federico Fellini! Gremlins 2!) and recommended each other films we watched and loved when we were long distance (One Way Passage, Panique).

I’m so dead serious about how grateful I am that Adam brought this into my life. credit: Columbia/TriStar

What I’ve neglected over the years are the Girlfriend Classics—Jane Austen adaptations, rom-coms, high school comedies, YA adaptations, 00s musicals. There’s no specific reason. I think we’ve spent the last 7ish years focused more on filling the wide gaps in our film knowledge (a bottomless endeavor!) and yeah, we watch movies we’re both in the mood for. I’m sorry to dabble in gender essentialism here, but it is OFTEN true that boyfriends haven’t seen like, The Princess Diaries¹ and don’t really want to (girlfriends often have wide ranging perspectives on The Princess Diaries—mine is that I hated that movie as a book reader but had a fat crush on Rooney frontman Robert Schwartzman as Michael Moscovitz and it’s only now as an adult that I’ve softened toward its San Francisco transplanted/Julie Andrews cuddly grandma charms). That’s how, some 1000+² movie nights into a life together, I realized I’m sleeping next to a man who doesn’t really know who Mr. Darcy is and has never heard “Elephant Love Medley.”

Chris Pine in The Princess Diaries 2, you will never mean anything to me. You’ve never played a keyboard with M&Ms on it so you could pop those M&Ms in your mouth while playing in your life. You are dirt. credit: Disney

My proposal: Girlfriend Week, a week (or so) where we watch 7 Girlfriend Classics of my choosing, movies I love but also movies that I believe are essential viewing of this new century/to really understand where I came from. Adam said yes.

I felt sort of bad about the one sidedness of this, so in turn I offered Boyfriend Week. I thought probably I’d have to watch Dodgeball and maybe Idiocracy. After some thought, Adam asked how I’d feel about playing a video game.

I don’t really play video games. The only console I’ve ever used with any kind of consistency was a Nintendo DS which I used primarily to play Nintendogs. I played The Sims and Neopets and lots of internet games (Paper Doll Heaven, Stitch Sandwich Stacker, MyScene beauty studio, a game on the American Girl Doll website where you’re Kit during the Great Depression and you have to sell eggs until you can buy a bike). Adam very generously gifted me a Switch during Covid lockdown which I thought I’d spend happy hours playing Animal Crossing on until I quickly realized I have zero patience for Animal Crossing. I couldn’t get past fishing. I played Mario Kart a few times in a now-closed Berkeley sandwich shop called Montague’s and I’m really inept at basic console handling so I’d always run into walls and spend 30-60 debilitating seconds trying to navigate myself out of dead-end corners.

My track record was bad and my first reaction was UGH but it was obvious to me that Adam’s version of the 2004 Pride and Prejudice (or a dozen other movies that shaped me as a young adult) was his favorite video games—the expansiveness of their world building, the 70+ hours spent in the company of a character, the way he’s plucked songs from Fallout: New Vegas for his evergreen playlists the same way I have with the soundtrack for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the way he feels uncannily comfortable in certain cities because he’s navigated their terrain a thousand times in a game. Also, it seemed valuable to know what everyone’s always on about when they say a film (in form or narrative) operates like a video game.

My friend John Marston. credit: Rockstar

This is how I found myself playing the first 1/3rd of Red Dead Redemption for much of September and half of October (I had to play each mission 3-7 times and had a lot going on besides this, so in days it was probably about a week).

A side note: when I told various friends this, most asked, What about Red Dead Redemption 2? Adam really mulled over the decision to start me off with 1 rather than 2, a better game by all measures, but ultimately decided on a simpler plot and the notion that it would be basically impossible to show me Red Dead 1 if I started off with 2. He’s not wrong because I caught a glimpse of 2 when he was playing a bit last night, and it’s SO MUCH PRETTIER I felt like I’d been living in the dark ages.

The basic plot of Red Dead Redemption is that it’s 1911 in the American West—the waning frontier!—and you are John Marston, a former outlaw whose family is being held hostage by the government until he/you can hunt down old members of his/your gang, particularly big bad Bill Williamson. In the first 1/3rd of the game, Marston tries and fails to shoot Williamson at his well protected fort, immediately gets shot, is nursed back to health by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, and meet a small cast of characters who engage him in little missions—the aforementioned Bonnie who always needs help wrangling horses (she’s so nice but this is SO boring and hard), a US Marshal who kept making me go on bandit shooting expeditions (stressful, one time I was trying to talk to a Stranger and accidentally bumped into the Marshal instead and had to go to a shootout), a Mr. Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir ass con man who kept entering me in races against my will (wagon race: sucks; horse race: awesome), a disgusting little grave robber who mostly had me shooting bandits (I also had to lasso a guy which I am VERY bad at), and a drunk guy named Irish (is this allowed?) who also mostly had me shooting bandits, but is also responsible for a fun mine mission, the final assault on Williamson’s fort, and the big transition to the next phase of the game.

The game glitched and this cart drifted in front of us and we could NOT shove past it so I had to get out of the cart and walk away far enough that the game registered the mission a fail so I could start over.

As expected, I was pretty bad at this game, though not as bad as I thought I would be. I’m bad at horse wrangling, lassoing, wagon riding, ducking effectively during shootouts, remembering which button does what, remembering to reload, and I consistently had trouble finding the stairs in any room I was in. I’m decent at riding my horse and weirdly, shooting. I played with a ruthless and callous drive to get to the next piece of the Main Narrative, partly to be funny and partly because I honestly didn’t want to do side missions. I don’t want to get into a shootout on the way to a shootout! So any time someone yelled “help!” on the side of the road, I’d ride away as fast as I could.

Here are things I really enjoyed while playing Red Dead Redemption:

• The opening where you get off a FERRY and onto a TRAIN and eavesdrop on other people’s conversations

• Riding my horse around

• Looting bodies

• Beautiful vistas

• Going to the movies (see video above)

• Horse race that felt like Mario Kart that I was bad at, but enjoyed

• Riding my horse around in the daytime specifically

• Sunsets

• Any time I could detonate TNT instead of trying to aim at people individually (one time I blew a guy OFF A CLIFF and he whiffed into the river)

• Riding the mine cart out of the mines

• I really prefer to shoot from a form of transit (wagon, mine cart) where I can just swivel around and aim because I’m really bad at walking around

• Transition to Mexico (long horse ride³)!!!!!!!

The appeal of the game is obvious: what if you could BE in a movie, where you get to actually do the fun parts yourself but also where you get to wander off the screen and discover what else is going on in this world (the joy of an open world game, duh). There is so much space and it is genuinely, absolutely thrilling when the game broadens its scope. After some 25 missions in the same three… counties (?), the game map expands. We’re in Mexico now! This scene is really great and I understand, universally acclaimed as such, but in any case: Marston, having captured the fort with no Williamson inside, must make his way across the border and after a besieged raft ride, a fully sung song kicks in for the first time in the game as you ride into a whole new beautiful country.

Wanted to commemorate this moment before we took the fort & kickstarted the end of my time with Red Dead.

Adam’s design was that I play until this ride to Mexico, to get a feel of how huge and cinematic these games can feel, which I’d say was a success! I “get it.” I also felt weird just stopping so I played one more mission in Mexico, where a Sam Elliot looking guy taught me how to shoot.

The second question of course is—will I continue? Do I like playing video games?

Look, I don’t like television because it is Too Long so video games fall aggressively into this category. I want very badly to know what happens next to John Marston and I’ve been bravely avoiding reading up on spoilers, but I’m just not in the house enough to play a video game. I also get very stressed out in any conflicts and cannot emphasize enough how much I would prefer to just ride around on my horse. Maybe delivering mail? Selling something? Maybe eggs, in order to buy myself a bicycle?

I’d like to think I’ll chip away at Red Dead over the next year. It would be cool. Adam said in Red Dead 2, there’s vastly more riding around and I can name my horse which might just be the carrot on a stick that keeps me going.

Other things we did during Boyfriend Week:

• Watched a few episodes of Flight of the Conchords, a show that’s still quieter and less scream-y than I like my comedy to be but the t-shirts are so funny.

• Watched some How To With John Wilson.

• Played a bit of Return of the Obra Dinn, a kind of puzzley mystery video game set on a missing merchant ship in 1807 whose crew has met a grizzly end. Such a great looking game, cool score, cool premise but the actual gameplay of piecing together clues with so little information drove me nuts.

1. The Princess Diaries is not on the Girlfriend Week line-up. Decent movie, but these 7 slots are too competitive.

2. Wild estimate!

3. I got quite sad to leave my old horse behind though.