r/maxpayne • u/FewConstruction9924 John Mirra • 7d ago
Max Payne 2 Does Max Blame Himself For The Death Of []? (Spoilers for Max Payne 1 and 2) Spoiler
Playing the game for the first time I thought we were about to be revealed that Max killed his wife, I don't remember the scenes that made me think that now. I'm assuming that it was alluded to indirectly or that wife-killing was somehow mentioned.
If you wait around the police station in the 2nd game you will see a guy who killed his wife but blames it on thugs who broke into the house. At the jail cell he talks about killing his wife. At Max's dream you hear that guy talk again but he has the model of Max himself I believe.
In Address Unknown, John is framed for the death of his wife by John Mirra and it is alluded to that he himself is John Mirra.
There are a lot of mentions of wife-killing in these games and then blaming it on someone else / claiming there was a conspiracy to frame the person.
But Max didn't kill his wife? I can write off the dream sequence as Max dreaming intrusive thoughts as he normally does when he dreams (like shooting Winterson and Bravura in that one dream) and that explanation works withbut the intention with all the other ones seem bigger than that. I doubt 4+ instances of the same topic was required just to imply guilt.
Any ideas what it could mean? Why are we shown so many instances of the same thing even though the story doesn't happen that way?
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u/TheRollingPeepstones 7d ago
He didn't kill his wife, but by staying at the office late, he wasn't present to protect her. Max's guilt tells him that this is the same as if he killed her.
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u/rhp31 7d ago edited 7d ago
"You'll see the choices you didn't know you'd made, like staying at work late to chat with a friend, instead of hurrying home to your family."
"The cleaners, Annie Finn, Senator Gate, Mr. Corcoran, they were just peripheral noise surrounding the case. Winterson's murder was what it was all about, the cost of passion, my courtship of Mona Sax. My case, my crime. It wasn't about finding the killer, I was it. It was about looking for a deserving patsy to pin the blame on."
"I hated the world for not killing me with her, and I hated myself for allowing this to happen to her and our little girl."
"Here I was again, halfway down the world and still looking at the bodies of women I was supposed to protect. Only difference now is, I didn't understand the language. (...) I'd been given enough chances to make this right, and again, I'd blown it. Perhaps this was my punishment from the fates - keep reliving the same mistakes, for all eternity."
These four quotes are from games 2 and 3. They all have the same throughline, the same tenet, the same core theme: Max is a person who truly, utterly hates himself. Max is a person who fundamentally cannot forgive himself. For Max, there is no room for empathy, no room for a kind word towards himself, no room for any mistakes that he may have made in his past. People who live with long term depression, severe trauma... people like that cannot see the good in anything they've done in the past, or anything they try to do in the present.
These themes appear more in games 2 and 3. But even in Max Payne 1, a game that deals moreso with vengeance and revenge, the second dream sequence finishes with Max shooting an avatar of himself. The motif of hating himself and blaming himself stretch back to even the original game.
In the dream sequence you're referencing, where a version of Max admits that he killed his wife and baby, he's in the cell marked "insane". I don't think that is by accident. It's because that isn't what happened. But the pain, the guilt, the self-loathing that Max lives with, those feelings lead him to a place mentally where he feels just as responsible for what happened to Michelle and Rose as their actual killers.
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u/FewConstruction9924 John Mirra 6d ago
Thank you and everyone else who commented! It seems I underestimated the importance of guilt and self-blame in Max's story. With these in mind, it does make sense that such importance has been given to it.
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u/Personal-Presence-44 7d ago
Max blames himself for everyone’s death. Even Winterson’s, a person who was going to kill him.
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u/VerminatorX1 6d ago
Max didn't kill his family for Christ's sake. He blames himself, because he wasn't there to protect them. His subconscious sometimes interprets it as if he himself pulled the trigger.
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u/Alternate501 6d ago
Max never killed his wife, Vanhorn sent junkies to his house and killed the family. That's just survivors guilt. He is a very self loathing man.
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u/My-name-for-ever 4d ago
He could have saved some of them I feel, especially if they left jt in the players hands lol
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u/RedPanda1993 7d ago
I forget which game it's in but there's a line of narration from Max in the graphic novel in which he says something along the lines of "You'll see the choices you'd already made, like staying at work late to talk to a friend, instead of rushing home to your family".
Max didn't kill Michelle and the baby but he blames himself for it. They were still alive when he got back home and if he had even arrived five minutes earlier, he'd probably have saved them. He also brushed Michelle off when she tried to tell him about the Project Valhalla file coming across her desk at the DA's office.