Score One For The Fat Man

7/15/2005


Sensing that I badly needed to get out of the rat race for awhile, last weekend my brother invited me out to the country, to stay at his house in Pennsylvania for a few days. We had no activities planned so, to escape reality for awhile, we spent much of the time playing a video game he just bought called “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.”

For those of you who are not aware, “Grand Theft Auto” is a series of ultra-violent video games created by Rockstar Games. The player controls a character with a criminal background through a series of “missions” set in a fictitious city. These missions usually involve murder and robbery and, upon their completion, the player is rewarded with cash and bonuses. (For example, in the previous Grand Theft game, “Vice City,” at one point you are told to kill a snitch with a chainsaw for $100.) You “win” the game by becoming the undisputed crime lord of the whole map.

What makes these games popular, besides the incredible amount of senseless violence and obscene language, are the laugh out loud funny scenarios as well as the sly comments on the culture of the time the game takes place.

Typical scene from GTA: San Andreas

Although the city is fictitious, “Vice City” is obviously supposed to be Miami of the cocaine fueled 1980s. The fashions, the soundtrack, the cars are all in period. The new one, “San Andreas,” is obviously supposed to be Los Angeles of the early 1990s. The soundtrack is loaded with “Gangsta Rap” and the screen is filled with “crack-heads.”

As I was playing the game, with its casual “drive-bys,” cop killings and the generous use of the words “Nigga” and “Bitch,” I thought of it as over the top offensive. I said to myself that the glorification of dopers, thugs and murderers is clear evidence that our culture is in the gutter. It speaks volumes on the decay of western civilization, etc. But, after awhile, I started to crack a smile.

I’ve changed.

Not that long ago, about five years, in fact right before January, 2001, Inauguration Day, I would have been saying all those things with conviction and passion. I look upon the popularity of “reality shows,” tabloid reporting and the debasing of thought with great sorrow, wondering just how far down are we going to go.

Hell, I remember one time in the 1990s ranting for an hour about how Adam Sandler represents the death of American intellectual expansion.

But, since the clampdown, I find great satisfaction in knowing that my brother was able to purchase this product over the counter. Not only is this game still legal, but it is incredibly popular which, I hate to admit, I say kudos.

Across the nation, films are being censored for being anti-creationist, the FCC is levying record-breaking monetary fines and penalties on broadcast outlets such as radio and television for airing “questionable” material, strip clubs are being deemed unlawful although all the patrons and employees are over 21 years of age and sodomy laws are being enforced.

Any regret I have about the moral and intellectual pollution this game is emanating is far outweighed by the hope I feel at the fact that, no matter how disagreeable it may be, there is still a chance at self expression in this country.

The current crop of righteous fools and über-mensch that are running this country, are trying very hard to destroy “obscene” or “vulgar” type entertainments all in an attempt to “bring back decency to our culture,” whatever the hell that means.

The irony, of course, is that they have had the exact opposite effect on me and, judging by the number of units of this product that have been sold, had the opposite effect on a whole lot of people as well.


So, yesterday, with all of these thoughts swimming in my head, I ran across a Roger Ebert review for a movie entitled Max (2003). I never saw it but I remember it being controversial because it “humanized” Hitler. Similar complaints were levied against the more recent film Downfall (2004).

It is a story about the fictional character, a one-armed Jewish art dealer named Max Rothman, who befriends struggling young artist Adolph Hitler in post WW I Bavaria. From Ebert’s review:

There is never, even for a moment, a glimmer of evidence to suggest that Hitler could have been a successful artist. His drawings look like the kind of cartoon caricatures that bored boys create in their notebooks in the back row of geometry class, playing with their protractors and dreaming of supermen. Hitler instinctively fails to see the point of abstract art; at one point he suggests that Rothman frame his diarrhea. We are reminded that, in power, both the Nazis and the Soviets banned and burned abstract art. Curious, that art which claimed to represent nothing nevertheless represented so much to them. Perhaps art is a threat to totalitarianism when it does not have a clear, censurable subject and is left to the musings of the citizen.

I have to admit I never thought of that.

Here is the final passage from Ebert's essay:

But what, we may ask, parroting Soviet realism, is the purpose of this movie? What is its message? It is not abstract but presents us with two central characters whose races have a rendezvous with destiny. I think the key is in Max Rothman, who is a kind liberal humanist, who cares for the unfortunate, who lives a life of the mind that blinds him to the ominous rising tide of Nazism. Can a man like this, with values like this, survive against a man like Hitler, who has no value except the will for power? It is the duty of the enlightened state to assure that he can. Dissent protects the body politic from the virus of totalitarianism.

It is not so obvious, but I think the Pullitzer Prize winning Ebert, once again, concisely wrote exactly what I was thinking.

Think about it
Sixth Army