How Grand Theft Auto Defeated the Moralising Idiot Brigade

In 1980, Mary Whitehouse’s militia for the protection of British morals received an anonymous letter, warning them of the horrors of a new VHS. That was Cannibal Holocaust, a brains-eating slash-n-spray gorefest that instantly sent Whitehouse's gang of bored moral crusaders into overdrive, banging off letters to MPs, petitioning video wholesalers, organising church meetings.

Cannibal Holocaust became famous as the symbol of the new wave of amoral cinema: the Video Nasty. What Mary and her professionally outraged pals didn’t know, was that this anonymous letter had come to them straight from the desk of the producers of Cannibal Holocaust, who were looking for novel ways to drum up publicity for another otherwise tedious slasher flick. They got their wish, for a while: eventually, they pushed the accelerator too hard, sought too much outrage, and the film got banned.

Yesterday saw the release of Grand Theft Auto V. Nowadays, when the franchise's developers Rockstar North are putting a scene in their game where you torture an innocent Azerbaijani, you could argue that they’re pulling a bit of a Cannibal Holocaust on us. There’s something here, you think, as you strap jump leads to a man’s nipples and turn up the voltage to "maim", something that is daring me and society’s self-appointed moral guardians to be outraged. As you take a pair of pliers, and by repeated pressing of the keys, remove teeth from this "innocent" Azerbaijani’s head as he gargles in pain and his mouth floods with bubbles of blood, you might feel that your greatest crime is not the way that you’re about to waterboard him, it is your ongoing complicity in a marketing campaign that looks and feels a bit like the 2013 equivalent of the one that launched Cannibal Holocaust.

Yet suddenly you realise that we can’t even outrage ourselves any more. Pretty much everyone has joined in with the lauding of a game – of a franchise – that people seem to have deemed to be beyond questioning. GTA isn't just a sick game for weird people any more, which will be evidenced when the receipts are counted up at the end of its first week. It's a valid part of the mainstream culture. It might even be art.

Any tabloid reproaches of GTA V feel like footnotes. Times were, all you had to do was run over a few pedestrians and you’d be hailed as some kind of moral pariah. Once, just killing Hare Krishnas for bonus points was considered the sort of behaviour you could write 650 words in the Sunday Times about. But by the time we got to GTA IV, Rockstar had to get you to shoot a prostitute, then take back the money you’d given her for sex just to get a rise out of the self-appointed moral guardians. The taking back of the money seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back for that crowd. Murdering a prostitute: fine, well, whatever. These things happen, it would be churlish to suggest otherwise. But to then add insult to injury by not even letting her dead body keep the money it had rightfully earned via paid entry to the vaginal canal in the last few minutes of life? Unbelievable. Shocking. Have your dead pedestrians. By all means have your targeted assassinations. But if there was one societal principle we were going to have to uphold, it was that dead prostitutes should be allowed to keep all the money they’d been given. And if they died intestate (and let’s face it, prostitutes are not known for regularly updating their wills), then that money should go to the government, not the killer.

This time round, though… not so much. Eternal pixel-prostitute-avenging MP Keith Vaz has returned with one of his regular fulminations. But even the media outlets you’d expect don’t seem to have much fight in them any more. The Telegraph got so desperate they had to search as far as former Catholic Herald editor Cristina Odone before they found someone prepared to go head-to-head in a debate. Yesterday, we got news that a 23-year-old from Colindale was hit with a brick, stabbed and robbed as he returned clutching his holy copy, bought at ASDA in the early hours of Tuesday morning. You feel for him, but as the story has shot to the top of the web’s most-read boards, it's worth remembering that across a nation of 60 million, it’s statistically very likely that many people were mugged across Britain that night while carrying more interesting items. A stuffed animal, maybe? A Ninja Turtles costume? Perhaps even a copy of Call of Duty, which has been blamed for the recent Washington shootings, despite the mitigating factors that the shooter had psychiatric problems, arrests for violence and had joined the US Navy.

The GTA outrage-manufacturing machine has had to look farther afield, leading to hilarious paragraphs like this one from The Mirror: “Ms Sherratt added: ‘We’ve had children crashing into others in toy cars in the playground. When asked about it they say they have been watching Grand Theft Auto. They are quite open about it. And these are children of nine and ten.’” As everyone will recall, before GTA, kids used to drive their toy cars in rectilinear lines, obeying toy car signals where necessary, and checking toy car blind spots regularly. Now there's a new GTA out, and everything's a mangle of hot blood and cold steel. Chaos. And in a playground, of all places. The openness, though: that’s the kicker. It's just so fucking brazen.

Two things have been happening. One: GTA has risen to the status of unimpeachable cultural artefact. It’s simply too cool to be morally slewed. Just as we’ll all kneel at the altar of Walter White or Tony Soprano, we’ve all got together and decided that this is so culturally significant, such an apt signifier of the-way-we-live-now, that we couldn’t get rid of it even if we wanted to. GTA is kneeling before us today, and asking us to crown it Lord Of All Culture. And how could we refuse? There aren’t many moments where a thing comes along that is just manifestly better than everything else in its chosen artform. Even Guernica was up against some damn fine Magrites in 1937. With GTA V, the critics can all just go "that’s the one" without fear of history contradicting them.

We’re always being told that the latest GTA "has a budget dwarfing most Hollywood films", thus justifying its acceptance by sniffy news anchors into the community of "things that adults are into". This one is looking to rake in a billion dollars in revenue within the year, and as he prepares to take Scotland towards independence, it must weigh heavily on Alex Salmond’s mind that his country’s two largest exports are now oil and the simulated pistol-whipping of bitches. Likewise, it must be agony for all those nice flax-haired boys in expensive jumpers, worrying about how murdering the next prostitute will affect their feminism, in the same way that they agonise between their quite-liking of A$AP Rocky and the fact that they would never personally wish to "turn a dyke bitch out / have her fucking boys", unless she was into that sort of thing, and they had some kind of written consent to that effect. Right now, regardless of how much cognitive dissonance is fizzing up inside them like Mentos in a Coke bottle, culture has invested too much in GTA to go about openly questioning its right to exist. We can’t not celebrate it. And so celebrate it they will, along with thousands of others who are pulling sickies to stay at home playing the game this week.

The other thing that's happening is that we’re finally, at long last, just bored with rehearsing these arguments. In terms of taking you inside the mind of a murderer, is it better than Dostoevsky? In terms of motivelessly killing an Arab, is it less worthy than L’Étranger? Does actually having to do it yourself rather than just voyeuristically sitting inside the head of someone doing it make a difference? That, as ever, is what the argument comes back to. So once you establish that it’s a kind of art, and that the violence itself is still a lot more tastefully done than even much of the entry-level stuff in Casino, you’re back to the "Is it worse because there’s a tiny pilot-man in the head whom I can control?" argument, which becomes pretty dry pretty quickly.

The sorts of comment pages angry mob leaders and Fleet Street thunderers of the old school who used to try to draw the dagger on it have recognised this and moved on to other things. Today’s Robin Thicke is yesterday’s GTA is the day before that’s Video Nasty: the continuum of moral panic moves on. Not so much because arguments are won or lost. But because at some point things evolve beyond the argument. That and the fact that yesterday’s opinions don’t sell tomorrow’s papers.

Collage by Marta Parszeniew. Source material via / via.

Follow Gavin and Marta on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes / @MartaParszeniew

Previously – Trusting 'Aldi Mum' to Decide Our Future Would Be Catastrophic for Britain's Future