Ever since GTA 3’s protagonist (a stoic murder proxy allegedly named Claude) melted our hearts, every one of Rockstar’s rich and varied litany of leading men has reached iconic status. But there’s one that stands out as their most brilliant, subversive best.
That would be Niko Bellic, obviously.
Rockstar’s biggest triumph, though, is that their other greatest character isn’t subversive at all. In fact, he is Mr. GTA, absolutely everything you and your mum might associate with the series embodied in one gloriously nasty psychopath.
Trevor was created in part to solve the conundrum of what media wanks in the late ’00s liked to call “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, a phenomenon in games like this where the actions of the player in the open world are at odds with the motivations of the character.
It’s something that reached its most absurd extent in GTA 4, where you had a character whose Tinder profile would read “Sad About War” waging his own endless conflict against the LCPD, pigeons, bystanders, hot dog vendors, and anyone else. Depending on who was at the controls, of course. Essentially there are two Niko Bellics, two CJs, two Arthur Morgans: the character given voice by writers, and the avatar that exists only as a conduit for player agency. Usually to commit atrocities in the name of escapism.
GTA 5’s Trevor Philips is well understood to represent that sort of player. But he isn’t just a conduit, he almost is The Player made manifest in that universe. An ambassador for the user. A composite of playing styles given personality and an overactive sex drive, designed to evoke the way your wee brother plays GTA: that is, causing mayhem for the sake of it and achieving very little in the process. And imagining what happens when that specific GTA guy is given narrative agency.
His infamous introduction is as freeing as it is shocking: he enters the story of GTA 5 at perhaps his most vile. Motivated only by base desires. Brutally murdering a beloved former protagonist for merely speaking out of turn. At this point, GTA fans had spent dozens of hours playing as Johnny Klebitz in The Lost and Damned, a harrowing story of gangland betrayal that ends on a hopeful note, with Johnny cutting ties with the bad influences in his life and pledging to go straight. By the time we meet him again in GTA 5, he’s a sickly looking meth addict who has fallen right back into the world he’d managed to escape from.
But we barely got any time to think about that, because after swiftly kicking him to death, we as Trevor Philips had work to get on with. It’s a bold move to bring in a new character by diminishing an established one. It certainly can work, but it usually means the incoming character starts with an uphill battle to get the audience on their side.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Trevor isn’t supposed to be liked at all. Some readings of GTA 5 call him the true villain of the piece: and it’s not hard to see why. On paper there’s nothing especially likeable about him. He doesn’t stand for anything, is a hateful jerk, and as an idea he’s about as complex as the wee ship in Asteroids. The challenge, then, is how to make such a character compelling without betraying the deliberate lack of complexity at his core. Surely nothing would ruin Trevor more than that wretched cowardly device we call nuance. I know writers who use subtext, etc. Everything Trevor does has to be in service of his immediate wants or his personal enrichment.
But complexity doesn’t have to mean riddled with contradictions. Trevor has a moral code of sorts, he values loyalty, not just to himself but as a general virtue, which is what fuels his deep-seated rage at Michael during his first story act. But, despite this delineating betrayal, he displays an unwavering allegiance to Michael’s young family, caring for his children to whom he considers himself an uncle.
As his fraught backstory becomes fleshed out in drips and drabs over the course of the game, the writers are keen to give any tragic revelations some ballast so they don’t ever become excuses or justifications for his behaviour. On the one hand, we find out that he has a history of childhood abuse and abandonment. On the other, it’s heavily implied that he’s an infamous serial strangler and a cannibal. We know that he’s a gifted aviator, but that his career as a fighter pilot is cut short in the eighties when he fails a psyche evaluation. It’s sort of hard to take Trevor’s side over the Canadian military in that instance.
Canadian. Yes, no doubt inspired by his actor Steven Ogg hailing from up north, Trevor who is about as antithetical from the concept of politeness as any human being can be, is from Canada. That Trevor is one of the core American archetypes – a troubled forces veteran who has been utterly failed by the system – and yet isn’t even American might be one of the best jokes in the entire game.
The player is rarely asked to feel sorry for Trevor. Even at his lowest ebb, where we see him briefly start to build a relationship with his estranged mother only for her to abandon him again, triggering a regressive outburst of psychological anguish, we’re forcibly transferred to a different character while the consequences of that are played out off-screen.
The great parlour trick that Rockstar pulls off with Trevor is to give him dimensions and layers enough to rival that of Niko Bellic, but without falling into the same trap of Ludonarrative Dissonance. In fact, it achieves a state of ludonarrative harmony: one not seen since Vice City avoided all this nonsense by having you play as a coke fiend. But unlike Tommy Vercetti’s inspiration Scarface, Rockstar becomes truly untouchable in the process: creatively and morally untethered, exiting the media’s field of influence on a rocket ship powered by cash.
By building a character who unapologetically embodies all the degeneracy that GTA used to be stereotyped with, Rockstar made a big joke at the expense of all their critics. By imbuing him with such brilliant, emotive depth, they garnished that joke with a raised middle digit.
The character was conceived at a time when Grand Theft Auto had a deep and seemingly unshiftable reputation in mainstream circles for being a mindless crime simulator, one that has no artistic merit, and merely exists to reward and glorify depravity and atrocity. Obviously, as gamers who enjoy Rockstar’s worlds and characters we know that assessment is, at best, reductive. But only with the passage of time and the changing of the guard when it comes to what and who “the media” reflects and represents, e.g. millennials, has this reputation been buffed away.
I suspect, if you didn’t live through it, it’s difficult to appreciate just how ingrained this dismissive, derisive attitude was. And let’s be honest, the original GTA didn’t exactly make the most intellectual first impression, with its simplistic objectives, crude visual design, and literal bonus points for massacring Hare Krishnas.
And, yes, look, though I would call it borderline cartoonish, ultraviolence is a core part of GTA’s design. There’s no getting around it. The freedom to be an unapologetic criminal, to reject and frustrate societal norms with outlandish behaviour, without any significant consequences, is integral to the appeal of a Rockstar Game. Because they’re rad.
Still, all the fan favourite Rockstar guys have a layer of complexity that makes them relatable, and endears them to us despite their capacity for depravity. Whether it’s that they’re sad about war, missing mom, or dying of tuberculosis, Rockstar is with each successive game imbuing its characters with ever more humanity and, in turn, more reason to get invested in the parts of its world that aren’t just a playground. We can certainly see this in the brewing love story that is GTA 6: I will die on the hill that says depicting real, quiet moments of tenderness between its lead characters is perhaps the studio’s grandest evolution to date.
Because it’s about people. There’s no such thing as satire without humanity. You don’t satirise stuff, you satirise folk. You satirise human beings and the baffling things they do. And Trevor’s embodiment of angry chaos, videogamey as it is, is no less an expression of humanity than Niko Bellic’s yearning for a quiet life. For what is a human being but a confused ape, thrust into a bewildering information dystopia that evolution couldn’t possibly have prepared us for. A shaved Bonobo that has to do tax returns and renew its car insurance. A wretched, doomed creature that has to invent CSI Miami and SEGA Bass Fishing as a distraction from the boiling hell prison it has constructed for itself.
Increasingly, Rockstar’s games understand that the message hits much harder when there’s something fundamentally real to hang it from, whether that message is a depraved running gag about romancing a stuffed teddy in the eye socket, or a scathing treatise on how the powerful wield torture as a weapon of terror as orated by Trevor in the aftermath of his infamous torture scene, not that the instigators of the ensuing moral panic ever noticed.
Today, we barely remember the controversies surrounding GTA, because all the mainstream discussion of the series is laser-focused on how much money it has made (lots). All the noise and fury from such campaigns as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Jack Thompson’s entire career never mattered, because in the end, GTA won. And it won by being so good, so at the very top of its league, that it had F**k You money. And that’s the only way to win in America, where this battle was largely fought. As a series once so synonymous with controversy becomes celebrated as a cultural juggernaut and admired as a business venture by outlets like the BBC, GTA is arguably now as mainstream as it gets.
The freeform gameplay of Grand Theft Auto, the playground of mindless atrocity that it offers, is a darkly comic and expertly crafted creation that in itself is far from mindless. And I think we need it now more than we ever have.
Trevor is the bit of us that wants to burn it all down, and through him we can taste a life of true animalistic freedom. In the continuum of Rockstar’s character experimentation, he represents a crucial link between the likes of Niko Bellic and Arthur Morgan, tragic men who wasted every chance to be decent, and Jason and Lucia, whose story will for the first time in Grand Theft Auto be one of affectionate love. Trevor unabashedly living his truth sets the stage for Jason and Lucia to live theirs, bringing something entirely new to the table in defiance of player expectations.
Trevor’s story is GTA’s original love story: because in every sense, he does what he does for the love of the game.
