Why is Grand Theft Auto V So Conservative?

this cage is worms

This post doesn’t have any spoilers that I am aware of.

I.

I’ve played something like ten hours of Grand Theft Auto V and while I don’t feel like I have a good read on the structure of the game, where it is going, etc., I do have another feel: boredom. I have mostly been bored.

There have been some great moments–switching between characters on a mission, the heists, riding an ATV, playing tennis. Mostly, though, it has been a great morass of driving around and doing very predictable, dare I say GTA-style, missions. Most have lacked excitement. “Go here,” the game says, “and kill this guy.” Or even worse: “Go here and do a fine-grained and intensive yet utterly unexciting task like towing or dockworking.” This isn’t how I want to be spending my stimulation simulation time.

II.

This past summer I played some Grand Theft Auto…

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Women of Weirdness

This is awesome! I love your art style, and I think it is brilliant to combine these two movies (which are two of my favorites, by the way).

Louisa Giffard

For an upcoming post on Mulholland Drive versus Black Swan, I decided to try my hardest to invoke the weird imagery of both movies (well, mostly Mulholland Drive because it’s just…way better.) Unlike most of my works, this one is purely paint, no pencil. Doing really dark works traditionally isn’t terribly fun, since you have to do about five thousand layers of whatever media you use just to get the required density.

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Paintings to Celebrate Queer Identity (because saying Gay Paintings sounds weird)

I love these, and how these are vibrant, but also complex and incredibly skillful.

urban art; an art statement of byroglyphic

His work is amazing. It almost reminds me of a Murakami novel, with his surrealistic interpretations of the human form– and with his fixation on Japanese popular culture.

agnyana

BYROGLYPHICS aka Russ Mills is riding high and has an enormous following. Describing his work as ‘Kitchen Sink Surrealism’ he has, for a long while, been quietly obsessed with Japanese pop culture, especially the Harajuku phenomenon.

‘I love the way that every piece of popular culture from the recent past is smashed together into a garish soup and regurgitated into real life with absolutely no boundaries’
His hybrid of traditional media and digital imaging, focusing on human idiosyncrasies both physical and emotional result in distorted forms both subtle and extreme.

Russ’s recent work has taken a monumental leap forward in both technique and subject matter. An extraordinary body of work is emerging displaying a kaliedoscopic range of drawing and painting skills combined with collage and mixed media in a totally homogenised way.

(image source via http://www.byroglyphics.com/)

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Oh, Goya

I bet it’s hard, when you’re deaf, to know the wrath

Of Saturn. You couldn’t hear it when he brought

You before him, firing spirals of sound from his

Ghastly tongue, his body perpetually half-covered 

By shadow, his eyes wide like an old cartoon. Hands

Dripping. You fall before him, you mortal, ignorant

Of what you have wrought, and you stare, paralyzed,

Praying that you do not have to witness what you 

Painted on your own walls. 

 

He has called you here to answer his questions, but

You can barely answer your own. Why was it all taken

From you? Just to end up here, in a house alone, to take

Up a brush and paint your downfall? Paintings not

Inspired by music, but by the overwhelming silence,

By the sound produced after a body has fallen. After 

The clock stops. He wants to know which child he was 

Eating. You remember how well you drew his hands, 

How they seemed to be squishing so realistically 

Into the flesh, like nails sinking into a lemon. He

Wants to know, as he reaches for a rock wrapped in

Blankets:

 

Why did you not stop me?

 

(Inspired by the above painting, Francisco de Goya’s “Saturn Devouring his Son”)

That pesky fourth wall…

Breaking the fourth wall in film is always incredibly risky, and often doesn’t really work. But when it’s successful, it makes for some of the best moments in film.

This is a really good video that captures some of those film moments. Before this I never knew that the fourth wall was broken whenever the character looks directly at the camera, and this video made me think a lot more about that fun audience-character relationship.

Although for a few minutes I foolishly thought they had forgotten Monty Python. Spoiler alert: they didn’t, of course.

You can never have too much David Lynch… right?

This entire week at school, all I’ve wanted to do is go home, curl up, and watch David Lynch movies. And all I’ve been listening to is his and Angelo Badalamenti’s music on repeat. That has probably contributed to why this week felt so surreal.

A friend of mine has recently confirmed something I have felt about his movies. I feel that too many people watch his films and dismiss them, or get angry because they are confused about their meaning. I don’t always understand them in a concrete way either, especially when you get to movies like Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire. It sort of sometimes seems like you could construct a chronology from these labyrinthine films… but I don’t want to. I don’t really have an honest clue about what physically happens and in what order, and that’s all right. I come away with a more emotional understanding of the events, I come away with powerful images and symbols, and I sometimes even come away with a true representation of what it is like to experience a nightmare in broad daylight. My friend, too, concedes that he dislikes when people treat Lynch’s films as “Rubik’s cubes,” or as something that they have to piece together and solve. Lynch left them fragmented for a reason, and to try to work them out in that way is to entirely miss the point of what he was trying to convey, in my opinion.

I mean, I’m the kind of person who loves analyzing things and picking them apart. There are even other Lynch films you could probably do that with… Blue Velvet, for example, is much more straightforward than the aforementioned films, and is a film you could do more that kind of analysis on. And you can in fact (and I do) analyze Mulholland Drive in terms of its symbolism, but not in terms of what actually happens. There is a reason you don’t know what is the dream and what is the reality: it doesn’t matter which is which. And I love that.

So now I really, really want to re-watch Mulholland Drive. This is going to be a David Lynch night… maybe I’ll watch Lost Highway after this.

Soundtrack to my life

Well, this happened a while ago, but the official soundtrack to one of my favorite games ever, The Cat Lady, has arrived. And it is just as beautiful as I remember it. It is subtle yet poignant, just like the game itself.

This particular track– Early Winter– stood out to me as an excellent example of a tense, psychological piece of music. My other favorites are Lily of the Valley, Sometimes, I have a mouth but I can’t scream, Soundtrack to an empty life, Edge, Fast Drive, and Storytelling. Basically, every track is my favorite, come to think of it. During some of the tracks I will occasionally stop and wonder what part of the game a particular piece was. But I think I can’t remember because of the cohesive unity of the game– I think some pieces of music (like Fast Drive, perhaps) are repeated–and because the music is so well integrated that it contributed to my experience of the game on a more unconscious level. What can I say, I’m a sucker for atmosphere.

But anyway, this is one of my new favorite soundtracks, and not just for video games. It is reminiscent of Martin Stig Andersen’s Limbo soundtrack, but also of Trent Reznor’s and Atticus Ross’ brilliant Social Network soundtrack. It is beautiful as well as inspiring, as it also makes for great writing music.

(And by the way, the music in the game that had lyrics is not on this soundtrack: those can be found at http://warmer.bandcamp.com/ and http://5iah.bandcamp.com)

Horror:

It is when you are walking. Your neighborhood is silent under the overcast day, and you hardly notice the music on your iPod because you are extra alert today– you always glance over your shoulder a lot when you walk, but you do it more often now, and you are hyperaware of your surroundings as you continue briskly up the hill on a side street. You look to the houses on your left; they are mundane, ordered in the typical suburban fashion. 

There is a window on the side of the second-to-last house on the street. Most of the houses have this. This window is dark, but as you approach, the unnerving realization gradually dawns. There is a face in the window. You can hardly tell because of the grey tint of the background, but this becomes more apparent the closer and closer you get. 

You stop for a moment. You collect yourself as you then realize that it is just the face of a doll or stuffed animal. That momentary jolt of comprehension fades away as you stare intently back into the object’s eyes for a few seconds. Looking around yourself again, you continue walking.

Horror: this is when, as you are walking away, and the window is just about to be on the edge of your vision, it moves. It is when the face pulls away at the last remaining moment before you exit the street. It is that second tidal wave of panicked apprehension as you remember how that still, human face had stared back at you on that oppressively silent day.

For me, horror is not senseless blood and gore. It is not even just violence. It is about a painting askew on the wall, about the slightly opened door, about the flash behind a window. It is the slow, dawning comprehension of something being out of place, and having it linger long afterwards at the edge of your vision. It is the subtle craft of psychological manipulation.

Because you don’t go insane because you are missing half of the jigsaw puzzle. It’s annoying, sure. No, you go insane when you are missing only one tiny piece out of a thousand.