Jason Duval on the couch: crime as a call for help in GTA 6

The GTA 6 launch trailer, which Rockstar dropped without warning on October 15, opens with Jason Duval's voice. He says he got into trouble in the army and "didn't leave on the best of terms." A little later comes the line that sums up the character better than any car chase: "They don't give loans or anything to people like me."

It is said without drama, and that is what makes it interesting. Jason isn't bragging about crime or apologizing for it. He is stating a closed door.

What Rockstar has told us so far

The official character description is spare. Jason wants an easy life, but things just keep getting harder. He grew up around grifters and crooks, did a stint in the Army trying to shake off his troubled teens, and ended up in the Keys doing what he knows best: working for local drug runners. Meeting Lucia, the text says, could be the best or worst thing ever to happen to him.

That is not much, and it is wise not to invent the rest, since the game only arrives on November 19. But what little there is has a recognizable shape. It is a sequence of places that should have held a young man and didn't: the crowd of grifters he grew up in, the army, the bank.

Winnicott and delinquency as hope

In 1967 the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spoke to the assistant governors of the borstals, Britain's institutions for young offenders. The talk was published the following year in the Prison Service Journal under a title that still sounds provocative: "Delinquency as a Sign of Hope".

His central argument is that "the antisocial tendency relates not to privation, but to a deprivation." There was a before, and something in it broke. What characterizes the antisocial tendency, Winnicott says, is the drive it gives the boy or girl "to get back behind the deprivation moment or condition." He also describes a curious sequence. After the break, the child first suffers unthinkable anxiety and then reorganizes into a fairly neutral, compliant state, because there is nothing else the child is strong enough to do. It is when conditions give the child a certain degree of new hope that the antisocial tendency shows up and the child becomes difficult.

Hence the most disconcerting sentence in the talk: "At the moment of hope the child reaches out and steals an object." And what the child is after, according to Winnicott, is not the object but the capacity to find. The antisocial act contains an SOS, a sign that something is still expected from the environment.

"People like me": who are "they"?

Now look at the pronoun in the trailer line. Jason doesn't say that a particular bank turned down a particular loan. He says "they". A faceless "they" that has already decided what is available to "people like me". It is how someone talks after hearing no so many times that he has stopped expecting an answer from anyone in particular. The environment has become a single entity, and it always answers the same way.

Winnicott makes a hard observation about the other side of that conversation. Faced with the antisocial act, society "is liable not only to fail to get the message" but to feel stimulated to respond moralistically. The record, the lecture, the door that shuts again. Punishment may be necessary, but punishment alone does not hear the request that was there.

None of this absolves Jason, and the reading does not try to. It says something else: that crime, in this case, is also a form of communication, and that a communication nobody listens to tends to get louder.

A city that can take it

There is a second idea in the talk that helps explain GTA itself, not just the character. In order to bring his destructive impulses together with the loving ones, Winnicott writes, "the child absolutely requires an environment that is indestructible in essential respects": carpets get dirtied, walls have to be re-papered, an occasional window gets broken, but somehow the home sticks together.

An open world is that idea taken to excess. You crash the car, knock down the lamppost, cause chaos, and the city puts itself back together. Vice City holds no grudge. Perhaps part of the pleasure the series has offered for so long lies right there: an environment that survives everything you do to it. For a character surrounded by closing doors, and for many players too, that is a rare experience.

That is why the doubt Rockstar leaves in the official text weighs so much. Lucia could be the best or worst thing in Jason's life. In Winnicott's terms, the question is whether she will be solid ground or one more loss on the list. The whole game may well turn on that.

Outside Leonida

We tend to hear the noise of the antisocial act and miss the message. The teenager who breaks the rules at home, the colleague who sabotages his own work, the friend who disappears and comes back asking for help. There isn't always a hidden request, and not every request should be granted in the form it arrives. But sometimes there is one, and the moralistic reflex usually gets there before listening does.

Jason is still a trailer character, and what he will make of his own story we only find out in November. The question he already leaves, though, works outside the game: when someone close to you makes noise, what do you hear first, the damage or the request?