Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Grand Theft Auto III, and I'd like to observe this momentous date by talking a bit about the Grand Theft Auto series' contributions to film criticism. Not exclusively, of course; talking about GTA III without touching on gaming would (obviously) be amiss, and its impact on the culture at large was not insignificant either. But one cannot talk about GTA III, or any of the subsequent games in the franchise without talking about movies (at some point).
This was what initially drew me to it. I had topped out with the original NES, being annoyed that the SNES had no way of playing the old games—and not having any money to get a whole new system and a whole array of new games—and spent the majority of my teenage years immersed in art cinema and centuries-old novels. But my tweediness had limits; I still liked loud music, sports, and both movies and books where shit blows up and people get killed. And so it was that I read an article about GTA III when it came out for the PC and thought, “That sounds awesome.”
I'd first encountered the original Grand Theft Auto when I was in college and decidedly not playing video games. A friend of mine with a computer fancy enough to actually do stuff (not the given in the late 90s that it is today) showed me the game while I packed a bowl and gave a very excited, only partially embarrassed account of the game's wonders, involving the ability to run people over with cars and fuck them up with no lasting consequences. This was all fine, and I was interested, but we had limited time for some reason that now escapes me, and had to smoke that bowl else Western civilization collapse, so that was it for the GTA talk. But the memory of my friend's total geek-out over the game came back to me as I read the review of the new game, where the writer repeatedly assured anyone who might be worried that one could jump in with GTA III without missing anything. I was sold. Bought the game, installed it on my PC, let 'er rip, and haven't looked back since. I bought a PS2 with my '03 tax refund for the express purpose of buying GTA: Vice City. I ran all over lower Manhattan looking for a store that had GTA: San Andreas on the morning of my 26th birthday (the day the game was released, by happy coincidence), eventually finding one. And, once again, when GTA IV came out, I bought a PS3 for the sole (initial) purpose of playing it. To a very real extent, my playing other video games arose more from a feeling of “damn, I dropped a couple/few hundred bucks on this fucking game system, I should probably take advantage of that by playing some other games instead of just gluing GTA into the fucker.”
It was like games had caught up to what I wanted them to be. While I loved Super Mario Brothers back in the day, I could never beat it. I could beat Zelda, but swords and magic and shit was never my thing. My dad, an enthusiastic if not terribly good PC gamer, got one of the Police Quest games and we played through it together on the weekends I'd be over at his place, but still, there was something missing. “I want to design a game called Criminal Quest,” I said, causing my dad great emotional anguish (so easy to do, so much fun), “where you're the guy selling drugs, stealing shit, fucking shit up.” Dad grudgingly admitted that that might be fun given sufficient narrative quality that it wasn't just a bunch of nihilistic bullshit. And lo and fucking behold, Grand Theft Auto III: that very thing.
While it permitted the player freedom to screw around and do whatever s/he chose, the story of GTA III was a total quest narrative. Your guy who you control (not named in the game, but later confirmed by both fan communities and GTA: San Andreas to be named Claude) doesn't speak, and never changes out of his dark earth-toned clothes the whole game, because he has other priorities, to wit killing the living shit out of anything and everything he sees. Most of this is done in cars, hence the title.
The most attention-grabbing aspects of GTA III were things like the fact that you could kill as many cops as you like until they get their shit together and kill you, that one of the easiest ways to replenish your health meter was by picking up a prostitute, driving her to a quiet locale, and fucking her, and perhaps most notoriously that when the deed was done you could kill the prostitute and get your money back. Because of these elements, the GTA games have long been the target of moral watchdog groups up in arms over the desensitization of modern youth to sex, violence, and sexual violence—not to mention cop killing—and even the games' fans will say things like “it's indefensible,” even though they like and play them.
I never bought into this. For one thing, I maintain the best use for the kind of people who want to ban video games or music (or any art) is at the bottom of an oubliette serving as the appetizer course for hungry alligators before the main course of religious demagogues and evil white guys in suits (oh, how I do long for that day. . . .) For another, these moral objections ignore the fact that it's possible to play through the entire game without killing one cop or prostitute, or even patronizing prostitutes. And finally, even if one counters the previous objection with, “Well, the writers and designers put that in the game, so they're still sick fucks,” the nature of the medium is such that the game only exists in the way a given player plays that game. Ergo, if a player spends his/her (I'm not being PC, I knew a girl who absolutely adored killing cops and hookers in GTA III; she was out of her fucking mind, clearly, but she was awesome) time killing cops and hookers in GTA III, it's on the player for doing so. Quod erat demonstrandum.
(Caution: the discussion of the plot of GTA III contains spoilers)
The story of GTA III owes a fair bit to gangster pictures like Goodfellas and Scarface—one radio station is entirely devoted to songs from the Scarface soundtrack; the rest establishes the reputation the GTA games would continue to earn in spades for having outstanding soundtracks—as well as to a myriad other cops-and-robbers movies and TV shows. In an opening expository sequence Claude is shot and left for dead by his treacherous girlfriend Catalina during a bank heist, and is subsequently sprung from police custody along with a fellow criminal, bomb specialist 8-Ball, by means of a bomb that temporarily destroys the only bridge off the island on which the game's lengthy first act takes place. Confined to one third of Liberty City, a fictional American east coast metropolis that resembles each and all to varying degrees, Claude is introduced by 8-Ball to a low-level local Mafioso and begins to work his way up the ladder with his useful driving and murder skills. Over the course of this upward mobility, Claude meets the Don and the Don's younger girlfriend Maria, who takes a shine to Claude and even goes as far as to tell the Don that she's fucking him. (All this without his ever having said a word to her. . . .) The Don, pissed, puts a hit on Claude, but Maria hustles Claude off the island by boat, unlocking Liberty City's second island, roughly analogous to Manhattan.
This was the first point where the game threw me for a loop. I'd assumed the whole game would be Claude working for the Mafia, maybe working his way up to a position of power within the organization. Then, once he was on the run from the Mafia, I assumed the whole rest of the game would be Claude on the run from and in opposition to the Mafia. But just about the first thing he does for his new friend, Maria's S&M lesbian Yakuza girlfriend (doesn't everyone have one of those?) is go back to the Mafia neighborhood on the first island and whack the Don.
From there, Claude becomes the Yakuza's main gaijin, and gets involved with an array of rich and powerful scumbags, including media titan—and proof of the GTA games' firm grasp of the Evil White Guys In Suits Theory—Donald Love, who has Claude start a gang war between the Yakuza and the Colombian cartel (an organization of which Claude's treacherous ex-girlfriend is not only the president, but also a member), among other nasties, notably a bunch of Jamaicans like the kind Steven Seagal fucks up in Marked For Death except more competent.
Things come to a head, after the third and final island has been unlocked and a whole lot more crazy shit happens, when the Cartel kidnaps Maria and Claude has to go rescue her and ice his ex. This is something I've never been able to do on the PS2 version without cheat codes (there are a few other missions I found similarly impossible), but when you kill everyone and save the day, after all that shit Maria jabbers your ear off over the closing credits and the last thing you hear is a gunshot, signifying, one is left to assume, the last nerve of the almost comically taciturn Claude.
Everything that happens in GTA III does so in a manner that can only be described paradoxically as both utterly convincing and yet complete bullshit. Liberty City is so meticulously and skillfully rendered that I spent hours upon hours just getting in one of the faster, more luxurious cars among the dozens the game offers and driving around the city listening to the in-game radio, and it felt very much like driving around a real city. Of course there are differences, Liberty City being a place so thoroughly designed for violence that it has department-store sized gun stores called Ammu-Nation where you can tool up and go wreak havoc. And, most impressively, Liberty City has such astonishingly good healthcare that you can get shot with a bazooka that obliterates your car and the four others closest, and the only thing that happens is you wake up in the hospital a few hours later and a few thousand dollars light in the pocket. Seriously, GTAcare is the most amazing shit in this or any universe.
If the design of the city and the nature of so many of the game's missions—drive here, kill that guy, outrun the cops, etc—weren't enough to make GTA III feel like a playable action movie, the voice cast sealed the deal. The Mafia Don in the early part of the game was voiced by Billy Bats from Goodfellas. His lieutenants were Michael Madsen, Joe Pantoliano, and Michael Rapaport. When you get to the Manhattanish island, necrophiliac media baron Donald Love is Kyle MacLachlan (fucking great casting: if you need an evil white guy in a suit who fucks dead people and yet is still kind of charming, accept no substitutes). The crazy undercover cop you get a bunch of crazy missions from is Robert Loggia, and ho boy does he ever put in some awesome voice work (it's the greatest Robert Loggia part Robert Loggia never quite got the chance to play). And of course the hip-hop nerd in me loved that Guru from Gangstarr voiced 8-Ball.
The GTA series has taken many radical, ambitious steps forward since then. Vice City made the Scarface/Miami Vice 80s come alive (and has the greatest soundtrack in the history of soundtracks), San Andreas was a staggeringly vast narrative, using the early 90s “hood” movies like Boyz N The Hood and Menace II Society as a jumping-off point to explore the entirety of the American experience (even incorporating science fiction without breaking the spell). And GTA IV—Vice City and San Andreas were extended narratives that overlapped partially with the GTA III storyline, all set in the same universe, all built for the PS2, and thus not GTAs IV and V; the game called GTA IV was set in a separate universe, indicative of its having been designed for the next-gen PS3 console—is as special to me as GTA III once was, set in an only-slightly paraphrased New York City, a new Liberty City, that's just as fascinating to me now to drive around in as GTA III's Liberty City once was.
I started to mention at the beginning that the GTA games were, in a sense, elaborate exercises in film criticism, and after itemizing all the other countless glories contained within, it's time to address that. Each game takes its cinematic influences and manages to simultaneously pay deeply respectful homage while still deconstructing and satirizing. The method of the deconstruction is a particularly ingenious one, leaving it entirely up to the player to do all the heavy lifting, as it's the player's choices that ultimately make the game what it is. If all you do in a GTA game is drive around killing cops until you get your ass handed to you, that's the sum of the value that player creates. Someone like me who repeatedly and almost exclusively plays through the story mode of each game is clearly more interested in pulp narrative. And a player primarily concerned with creating video clips of them doing all kinds of cool, unique car stunts is concerned with the visuals and the cinematic aspect of each game, and by extension the movies from which the games draw.
It may seem like a stretch to ascribe this level of depth to the GTA games, and maybe it is, but I can say that GTA III made me look at gangster movies differently, with a more critical eye. Vice City gave me an entirely new and more vivid love for Scarface, as well as defining how I watched Miami Vice (a show I was too young to watch in its initial run, but managed to catch up with thanks to reruns, DVD, and online streaming). San Andreas gave me more of an appreciation for the “hood” movies upon further reflection—I could barely watch John Singleton's Boyz N The Hood after playing San Andreas, though it made me love Menace II Society all the more—as well as spurring all kinds of unexpected thoughts about race, ethnic and social isolation, and the importance of remembering one's roots even if ultimately one doesn't stay in the same physical or social place. I swear, I'm not doin' it wrong and reading too much into these games, this shit's all there. (Along with just about every conceivable dick joke the human mind can concoct . . . except that one. Con-cocked? You're welcome).
That, I submit, is the greatest legacy of the Grand Theft Auto games, all of which started with the massive and ambitious step forward that was GTA III: a massively sophisticated deconstruction of the violent impulses of the American people as wrought not only by games, but by gangster and action cinema. Actually, the greatest legacy of the GTA games is that they managed to do all that and still create ridiculously awesome and fun video games. That's my favorite kind of popular entertainment: as stimulating intellectually as it is viscerally. Happy 10th anniversary, GTA III.
No comments:
Post a Comment