Niko Bellic is pissed. His cousin Roman hasn’t exactly been telling him the truth about America: the sports cars, the penthouse, and the women which he mentioned in his letters are nothing but a beat-up cab, a roach-infested walkup in Brighton Beach, and tattered centerfolds tacked to the wall around a stained sofa bed. So much for his fantasies of America.
“What does the American Dream mean today?” is the tag line for Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV, probably the most-awaited videogame release of the year. Niko is its anti-hero, a small-time gangster coming literally fresh off the boat from Eastern Europe and aghast at the squalor of his surroundings. It’s a stereotypical recent-immigrant scene — the deflating realization that there isn’t really gold to be picked up in the streets — but cliche aside, it’s one that also seems deeply, familiarly American. In Daly City, for instance, I interviewed newly-arrived Filipino immigrants who told me that they honestly thought that all of California would look like Baywatch — not just because they saw the television series, but because they heard from their cousins and siblings who would write, perhaps in wishful half-truths, about what life will be like for them in the United States.
Perhaps the idea of “keeping up appearances” — both to one’s neighbors, and to one’s family overseas — is also quintessentially American. In turn, this view of “American-ness” is inextricably tied to money; this is, after all, what fuels the dark heart of Grand Theft Auto IV. One only has to look at the advertisements for widescreen TV sets and SUVs in the pages of immigrant newspapers, and understand that the purchase and consumption of such items are seen (and marketed) as a way of buying into America. as part of an unquestioned American Dream.
[to be continued]