Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole turns to murder tourism to beat lockdown
Animal Crossing: New Horizons may have been the game of the first national COVID lockdown, but the game of lockdown three is, surely, Hitman 3. Even murder tourism might seem an attractive alternative to the present reality of seemingly interminable house arrest.
The fact that the gleefully brutal culmination of IO’s trilogy is released into a world of enforced quarantines, where casual foreign travel seems like a science-fictional mass consensual hallucination, makes the game read more richly than its predecessors from merely normal times. It arrives as a kind of time capsule of a world that once was. As one’s besuited avatar wanders calmly through a swish cocktail reception on the upper floors of the Burj Al-Ghazali (standing in for the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa) in Dubai, it is hard not to be shocked at the fact that none of these people is wearing a face mask. And the Berlin mission’s vision of well-dressed people leaning against concrete pillars, glamorously illuminated by neon art installations in a massive underground techno club, initially has you looking out for the police who are about to come in and issue fines all around for an illegal lockdown-breaking rave. If you are out for your socially distanced daily walk, you might find yourself dearly wanting to press the Subdue button on any heavily panting jogger who passes by too close.
The Burj Al-Ghazali itself, of course, represents the literal ascendancy of a globalised petrodollar geopolitics that might itself be coming to an end, albeit on a timescale slower (one hopes) than the pandemic. A couple of the security guards have Cockney accents, the better to represent the concomitant globalism of the privatised military complex. (One is overheard telling his colleague about how he threatened his neighbour back home at gunpoint, so you don’t need to feel too much compunction about shooting him in the face if need be, while another gives a room code over the radio, adding with a chuckle: “Just don’t tell your mother or I’ll ’ave to shoot her.”)
If the oil-war era does end, though, it will be no thanks to the efforts, heroically homicidal though they are, of Agent 47 himself. It will be a systemic change caused by impersonal market forces, as the price of solar and other renewable energies continues to fall and activism continues to drive the divestment of large funds from fossil-fuel equities. Simply murdering a few oil executives wouldn’t do the trick. It is, indeed, the fantasy of conspiracy theories – of which Hitman’s world itself is a grandiose, knowing satire – that global events can be controlled by a secret cabal of individuals.
On the other hand, the systems analysis of events doesn’t tell the whole story either: for some observers, at least, the tenure of Donald Trump as US president revived the pertinence of the idea that some bad individuals truly can make a difference, for instance by inciting violent assaults on state institutions. And – mild spoilers coming – the ending of Hitman 3 shows that things have changed to some degree once the heads of Providence have all been murdered, comically or otherwise. But not that much. As 47 says: “There will always be people like them. So there will always be people like us.” You might think this assassin’s creed quite self-serving: there will always be people who need to be murdered, so there will always be murderers to do the necessary thing! It’s somewhat less convincing than the excuse offered by the corrupt cop played by JK Simmons in the movie 21 Bridges, when he says that drugs will always be around, so why shouldn’t his guys make some money from them on the side? (His antagonist, the late, great Chadwick Boseman, does not agree.)
One wonders, still, how many young people these days harbour ambitions to grow up to become assassins, a job description that for a while looked rather old-fashioned, recalling the stylish historicity of something like The Day Of The Jackal (1973), before being revived by the Bourne movies in the 2000s. Modern-day assassin fiction has always played on a piquant ambivalence in the audience’s emotional response: we know killing is bad, but this hero is cool, and surely there are some people who really have to die? The truth is that there’s no one individual Agent 47 could kill – whether by exploding golf ball or wine press – in order to stop a global pandemic. But as long as it lasts, we can take refuge in the fantasy of a world in which lone wolves rescue the whole species.
Murder tourism might seem an attractive alternative to the present reality of seemingly interminable house arrest