Grand Theft Golamco

April 25th, 2008Blog0 comments

So I have a Washington Monument in my pants for Grand Theft Auto 4 which is coming out on Tuesday. I pre-ordered it and have the sales slip safely nestled in my wallet. The store will be open on Monday at midnight, but I’m going to casually sashay in there on Tuesday to pick it up. I don’t like lines.

What do I love about it? The violence. The free-roaming aspect of it. The free-roaming violence. Last night at rehearsal we were talking about the differences between men and women, and how boys always want to play with guns. “Pew pew!” Before that, swords. Before that, rocks.

Rehearsal consists of me working in a roomful of ladies — I’m the only guy there since the cast of the piece is all women and the piece itself is all about women. So I told them my theory about guns/swords/rocks — men naturally gravitate toward phallic symbols, symbols of conquest and destruction. It’s natural and has a genetic foundation.

GTA has been described as a “murder simulator” by its detractors. I won’t go that far, but it fulfills a certain psychological fantasy: Committing crimes and getting away with them. Shoot-outs. Car chases. Funny, dick-joke dialogue spoken and heard. GTA puts you into the testosterone-injected core of the male mind, and that’s often a very fun place to be.

Men have a natural desire and need to destroy our enemies. In a time of law and nations, our enemies are a lot less clear than they used to be. In fact, when it comes down to it, we encounter no real enemies or predators to take down in our everyday lives. After millions of years of running and fighting for our lives, we’re suddenly fat and safe. So we have to find some other outlet to fulfill that need.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for embracing the feminine as well. The anima. I read this somewhere and I believe it: Like a marriage is a union between two people, an individual needs to go through a series of psychic, internal marriages between the male and female psyches inside himself. The male mind inside a person needs to be joined with its female aspects. Planning and problem solving needs to combine with emotional understanding and catharsis; Mars needs to join Venus. That is how you become a more complete person.

But to enable that psychic marriage to occur, a person needs to understand the male and the female parts of themselves.

And the best way to understand the male part is by blasting the fuck out of shit in GTA.