In the 1980s there was a line of video games centered on a character named Leisure Suit Larry, a balding, 40-something loser clad entirely head-to-toe with synthetic fibers.
The Leisure Suit Larry games represented a noble departure from the typical shoot ‘em up fare of most video games, which tended to require no more creativity than blasting pixilated aliens to smithereens. These games, on the other hand, offered a challenge infinitely more complex: Using his (and I mean “his”) creativity, the player negotiated Larry through a world of beautiful women armed with frustratingly good taste.
I’d argue that video games work, in part, as metaphors for the, uh, romantic ambitions of certain types of adolescent boy—a way of directing the excess drive bestowed upon pathetic teenage boys towards something more tractable than live female girls. It was encouraging that, with his bald spot and cheesy manner, Larry was the one creature in the universe less likely than a gawky teen boy to find romantic bliss.
(Ironically, I became familiar with the game while watching John, my sister’s future husband—and future ex-husband—play it for hour on end. It seemed to set the stage for him to become twenty years later a balding, 40-something loser on the prowl.)
As a grown man, I can’t help but think with utter amusement (and contempt) about the Leisure Suit Larry archetype, a relic from the Disco-and-sexual-liberation-movement 1970s utterly adrift in our more judicious times.
Like many horrible cultural trends of the 70s, the leisure suit phenomenon was a reminder that freedom isn’t free—but can be ridiculously cheap. As the anarchist tendencies of the late 60s counterculture morphed into a corporate repackaging of the ideal of liberation, it became easy in the 70s to “do your own thing” at an entirely hedonistic level.
The Leisure Suit phenomenon was what happens when the idea of “liberation” detaches from the idea of political awareness: In the end, you’re left with a bunch of synthetic fibers and gold chains—and a boundless, unsatisfiable libido.
