Virtually Real

The depressing lack of comments on my last exclusive guest blog had me so depressed that I was knocked off my once-a-month routine.

That said I plan to be back with a vengeance…

And here I am...

How many of you remember Hollywood movies making jokes about masturbation before the movie “Something about Mary” came out? I can’t seem to think of any other movie making such a blatant reference to it – in fact, I remember thinking back in the day that the only reason people were so excited about that movie was that gag involving Cameron Diaz’s hair “gel”. Otherwise, was it really THAT funny?


iMDB says *drum roll* 7.2

That’s not really worth the hype generated about it in 1998, when the movie came out. I remember the sheer awkwardness of it all when the movie was chosen by people in their cousin get together movie-thons - when younger and even older family members would turn and ask the person laughing what the joke with her hair was about.

But just a year later, American Pie came out. Till then, summer movies about teens falling in love and all that shit was as American as American pie. By attempting to fornicate with the pie his mother made, Jason Schwartz’s character deliberately desecrated the clean-as-pie image of the summer movie.
Ten years later, EVERY summer movie, and every teen movie is just about getting laid and its associated pains and little else. (Look up Euro Trip, Road Trip, Superbad etc)

I’m not complaining, but I was trying here to trace out a path of the time mainstream entertainment felt it was ok to bring sexual misadventures into the non-taboo realm.

(Of course, it goes without saying that the original summer teen movie is “Dazed and Confused.” Don’t watch it now, because you’ll find it too boring. Why? Because every joke in that movie has been repeated ad fucking nauseam. Its iMDB rating is 7.5, which I think is reflective of people who heard about what a classic it was, and then were disappointed when they saw it. However, the fact that it came out six years before American Pie, and that everyone else expropriated all of its gags says a lot about how ahead of its time this movie really was.)

The point I am trying to make is that humor slowly brings that which is taboo towards acceptance. But equally importantly, that process doesn’t necessarily make things better. An avalanche of movies with jokes about semen and masturbation and messed up sex haven’t done much to change sexual behavior or make it more responsible. Some would argue that mainstreaming these things has actually allowed people to be more comfortable with disgusting and irresponsible attitudes towards sexual behavior.

But what do I know, I’m just a model.

But even if I don’t know much, I am aware of the long running debate over the amount of profanity, violence and perceived vulgarity in movies. The same argument has also been extended to video games, which also involve an unholy amount of sex, drugs and violence within their confines.

Few games however have gained the level of notoriety as that veritable series – Grand Theft Auto. Each installment of the game unleashes a tsunami of controversy. And each installment is so goddam good, so terribly addictive and enjoyable that even if you oppose the graphic content within the game on principle, once you play the game you can’t help but be hooked.

The first version I played was the one in which you had a bird’s eye view and could run over a line of jogging Hari Krishnas.
The last version I played involved the indefatigable CJ and his Grove Street bro’s. And playing GTA IV – San Andreas was literally a ritual while we were in college, with CJ’s endless adventures a continuous source of stress relief and humor in equal measures.
Ahh, the good old days.

Now an argument trotted out in defense of GTA (an argument made its most recent entry into our collective consciousness in the lead-up to the release of GTA-V, where you could beat up strippers and such) was that people who played such games were well aware that the whole thing was just a fantasy. Anyone who was inspired by a video game to commit such acts probably would have committed such acts anyway, and blaming the video games was just a convenient excuse.

In fact, the whole fun was the insanity it allowed you to propagate.

Imagine the fun when loaded up with weapons you managed to steal a police car. Immediate upgrade to two stars on the police radar. Now you can drive around the city, running over people at random and shooting them up all over the place.

They have stolen a police car and were driving around shooting, and the police took a taxi and were chasing them and they were shooting each other and as they were passing the main road a guy was sitting there watching and he was shot

Once you get bored with the police car situation, you can get off at some place, any place really - like a train station maybe -

and start mowing people down. Take out your big guns and just randomly kill all the people you see. Especially when those huge pools of blood splatter all over the place. You can literally waste hundreds without even pausing to think.
By this time, the heat would be really on. I mean this is the part the choppers start appearing, and the national guard is called out. The only way to survive is to hide inside some building or something. Once inside, its easier to take pot shots at all those trying to nab you and you can make your survival last much longer. Plus you can kill loads of civvies just to pump up the fun.
Of course, your health bar might be going down – so you can take food, or better yet, drugs.

That should allow you the superhuman strength needed to last for a really really long time. Because by now the cops and the commandos and the rest are gonna be all over you.

They’ll be storming from the roofs,
and they’ll be firing from all angles,
and they’ll be surrounding you from all ends. This is when the game gets most intense, when it’s really not about the game anymore but just firing your way to oblivion. If you get really lucky, and you keep up the intensity, you can actually make it last for really long. But of course, you know there’s no way out. Which induces an even greater sense of fatalism, a sense to fight it out until the bitter, bitter end.
But of course, all this only happens in video games.