Miami dressed up as Vice City: humor or surrender?

Psychoanalytic countdown to GTA 6 · text 7 · 5 days to go
This is a special series on the blog, one piece a day up to the launch of GTA 6. Just arrived? Start with text 10 or read the previous one, text 8.

On September 22, a helicopter lifted giant pink and white letters, one by one, onto the roof of the Kaseya Center, home of the Miami Heat. Put together, they read "Welcome to Vice City." On November 18, the eve of GTA 6's launch, the Heat themselves will play as Vice City against the Milwaukee Bucks, in a new uniform, on a court built for that one night. Burger Shot and Cluckin' Bell, the game's fast-food chains, have counters in the arena, and the team's official page advises finding them "before somebody eats your order."

On the 21st, Rockstar and PlayStation are throwing a music festival at Mana Wynwood. Back in October, fans filmed replicas of the game's cars cruising around Miami behind a Vice City Police Department cruiser.

Vice City has been the series' fake Miami since the very first GTA, and it was never a flattering portrait. In the Florida Man post, the target didn't even know it had become the joke. Here, the target puts the joke on, name across the chest. Humor or surrender?

The city that volunteered

The pitch Miami-Dade County's mayor sent Rockstar in June describes Miami as "the real-world inspiration for Vice City." Ideas floated included wrapping the Metromover in the game's branding, putting the Vice City logo on manhole covers and temporarily rebranding parts of the international airport as "Vice City Airport."

In September came a deal worth almost a million dollars for the rooftop sign. According to WLRN, the money is meant to go toward a plot of land behind the Kaseya Center long promised for community use. The county commissioner whose district includes the arena summed up the case for it: "It's a video game."

Those who won't wear it

Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz was against it. In a joint statement with Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez, she said that "Grand Theft Auto is a video game franchise built around criminal activity," with murder, robbery, drug trafficking and violence against law enforcement, exactly what her deputies work every day to prevent. And Bermudez, at the meeting where the deal was announced, made a joke of his own: "Maybe they'll make us pedestrians."

Both positions have their arguments; what interests me is their shape. One says: that isn't us. The other: that's us, and it pays. Freud helps us see a third option.

The man on the gallows on a Monday

In his 1905 book on jokes, Freud had treated humor almost entirely from the economic point of view. In 1927, in the paper "Humour," he came back to it with the crudest example he had: the criminal led to the gallows on a Monday who remarks, in Joan Riviere's 1928 translation, "Well, this is a good beginning to the week." He spares himself the affects the situation calls for, and the listener feels the same satisfaction from a distance.

What is fine about it, Freud says, is "the triumph of narcissism, the ego's victorious assertion of its own invulnerability": it refuses to be hurt by reality and turns its blows into occasions for pleasure. Had the man said that it doesn't worry him, that the world won't end over a fellow like him, that would be wise, but without a trace of humor. "Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious."

What's new in 1927 is where that rebellion comes from. If wit is the unconscious's contribution to the comic, humor would be "a contribution to the comic made through the agency of the super-ego," heir to the parents and usually a stern master. In humor, it speaks to the intimidated ego like an adult smiling at a child's frights. Its meaning, Freud sums up: "Look here! This is all that this seemingly dangerous world amounts to." Child's play, "the very thing to jest about!"

Or pretend to be the ghost

In 1936, Anna Freud described a gesture that looks similar from outside and works differently inside. In chapter IX of The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, she tells of a little girl afraid of ghosts in her dark hallway at home, who began crossing it making peculiar gestures and then told her little brother the secret: "you just have to pretend that you're the ghost who might meet you."

The mechanism is identification with the aggressor: "By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat." Many children's games, she notes, work this way: through the subject's metamorphosis into the dreaded object, anxiety is converted into pleasurable security.

Both gestures are play. The difference lies in who is left. In humor, the condemned man is still condemned: he knows about the gallows and takes comfort anyway. In identification with the aggressor, the threatened one leaves the stage, and only the ghost remains.

A joke with a contract

My reading: Miami in Vice City costume has a bit of each, and the sponsorship complicates the math. Freud says that in humor the jest "has only the value of a proof"; the principal thing is the intention. The condemned man's intention is his own; nobody paid for his line. Miami's comes with a contract, a plot of land and a $55 T-shirt at the Heat store.

In New York, the contract showed up from the other side: early this month, a huge mural of Jason and Lucia that Rockstar commissioned in Brooklyn woke up with a graffiti writer's tag on it. Many fans complained; others said it was just a giant ad, and therefore fair game. I'll only note that when a joke has a sponsor, someone always asks whether it is still a joke or has already become advertising.

Freud concedes that in humor the super-ego is "repudiating reality and serving an illusion," yet without quitting the ground of mental sanity. Maybe that is what Miami is negotiating: how much of the fantasy it can wear without forgetting who stays on the street when the party ends. The question holds well beyond Miami. When you laugh at the nickname someone gave you, are you taking its power away or signing off on it? And if someone paid you to wear it, would it still be your humor?

Tomorrow, in text 6 of the countdown: how much the most expensive edition of GTA 6 costs.