Big-budget video games—like big-budget films, big-budget television shows, or any other art form that requires the labor of hundreds or thousands of people—take years to create. So whenever a game arrives that seems particularly timely, luck and spin often play as much of a role as planning or prescience. No one (except maybe Dan O’Sullivan) could have predicted a Trump presidency back when Ubisoft made the decision to set Far Cry 5 in the white-supremacist wilds of rural Montana, but—like the producers of The Handmaid’s Tale—the creators are now in the position of having made something that sort of maybe comments on the current political moment. But while the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale initially bristled at anyone calling their obviously-feminist television show “feminist,” judging from the trailers Ubisoft released this week, they’re leaning in.
Or leaning in as much as possible. While it’s unclear exactly which potential Handmaid’s Tale viewers Hulu was afraid of offending, white supremacist gamers are commonplace, vocal, and vicious. So while the real Montana had Richard Spencer, the Montana Freemen, and the Militia of Montana, Far Cry 5’s cult seems designed not to be based on any of America’s actual white supremacist terrorist groups, in Montana or elsewhere. For one thing, as the trailer shows, it has black members! For another, the cult is called “the Project at Eden’s Gate,” which places it more in the tradition of California’s Heaven’s Gate than the white supremacist terrorists who’ve been murdering Americans in dribs, drabs, and downpours—one in Maryland, two in Oregon, and that’s just this week—for centuries. If there are Montana-accurate Confederate flags—the state has the dubious distinction of hosting the Northwest’s only Confederate Memorial—they’re not in the trailer, and the cult’s symbol owes more to the Scientology cross than the Celtic one. On the evidence of the trailer—and the marketing copy, which promises “no shortage of mayhem” and “adventure around every bend” instead of, say, “an encounter with the dark heart of the American experiment”—the game’s cult seems to have been designed not to offend too many potential players. But this is a fool’s errand, as the responses from white supremacists immediately demonstrated:
But there’s the thing you make and the thing you sell, and they’re not always the same thing. Whether or not Far Cry 5 makes any real attempt to wrestle with our country’s violent legacy, Ubisoft would certainly be happy for you to buy the game because you’re angry about Donald Trump. Try to read this voice-over from one of the character introduction trailers—which exhort you to “join the resistance”—without thinking of Trump, or at least J.D. Vance:
We were given so much. This land, this life, our freedom. What’s left of it now? Our people felt abandoned, grew weary. They needed our help. And we didn’t listen. But he did. Told them exactly what they wanted to hear. But those falsehoods, lies, his poison—it’s driven them from pasture. From the righteous path.
All that’s missing is a quote from a cautiously optimistic Trump voter who just can’t believe he’s going to lose his health care. There’s no better illustration of the way video games tend to smash powerful cultural signifiers together until they’re nothing but goo than the rest of that trailer—take a look:
We’ve got a black preacher, wearing Malcolm X–style browline glasses, quoting a Bible verse about sheep and shepherds like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, while ignoring the fact that Jackson ultimately wants to be the shepherd, not the wolf, because wolves are more badass. Want dust motes floating above piano keys over an Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford–style score? Got that, too. How about a reveal that the entire trailer has been taking place in what seems to be a burned-out black church? Sorry, but yes. The game looks like an astonishing technical achievement—check out the wild hairs in the preacher’s goatee or the dirt on his eyeglasses—but so far there’s very little to indicate that Far Cry 5 is going to be as detail-oriented when it comes to its milieu. Evoking the Sovereign Citizen and Christian Dominionist movements while severing them from the white supremacy that fuels them isn’t just ahistorical, it’s irresponsible. It’s certainly possible Far Cry 5 will treat its subject with more subtlety than the trailers show—it doesn’t come out until February 27, 2018, by which point we may be hailing it as a prophetic warning about President Pence’s embrace of the Northwest Territorial Imperative. In the meantime, why not kick back and relax with a sermon from a genuine Montana doomsday cult, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant?
As you can see, despite doing things like stockpiling weapons and building underground shelters, their aesthetic, like their theology, was more Southern California Theosophist than Montana Christian (not that surprising, given that they were Theosophists from Southern California). Just like the Project at Eden’s Gate, however, they were racially egalitarian—in fact, their Royal Teton Ranch compound was reportedly “the most diverse racial community in Montana.” One of their problems, besides the whole doomsday cult thing? Threats from white supremacist locals unhappy about their congregation’s demographics. Maybe the finished version of Far Cry 5 will show some of the complicated and surprising ways race and religion intersect in America. Maybe it will offer “no shortage of mayhem” and “adventure around every bend,” as promised. It seems pretty unlikely it will do both.
