HomeFeaturesIndiana Jones and the Great Circle
I have rarely hated a bad guy as much as I hate Voss in Indiana Jones And The Great CircleVoss ist das?
Voss ist das?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda
Warning:Here be spoilers.
Official Launch Trailer: Indiana Jones and the Great CircleWatch on YouTube
Official Launch Trailer: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
This becomes clear when he’s forced to work with Gantz, fellow Adolf stan and officer of the Wermacht. The two are at loggerheads, and Voss intentionally riles up his counterpart, telling an associate that this is all part of his method of control: “Nothing is quite so easy to manipulate as an insecure male”. Gantz, for his part, is a hothead and a zealot for the Reich. He cannot see that Voss is simply saying whatever will most get him angry.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda
So, Voss is psychologically manipulative. This is run-of-the-mill villainous behaviour, but nothing new in the grand scheme of things, true. Yet it is the quality and style of his manipulation that makes him so recognisably repugnant. He is a shit-stirrertransparently. He doesn’t attempt to hide what he is doing, and laughs as he goes about it. While Indy and Gina have him kneeling at gunpoint, he chuckles as he needles Jones about his past relationships. “Were you afraid of becoming a father?” he asks, then, with that sleazeball smile. “No, you were afraid of becomingyourfather.”
There is absolutely no half-throttle with this guy, he just goes straight for whatever will make you uneasy. He’s not Walter White, he manipulates emotions in the same way an internet troll does. Openly, in plain sight, with a shit-eating grin. There is, I suspect, a reason his face has all the folds and wrinkles ofa famous meme. He is constantly smiling at the annoyance, anger, and anxiety he induces. What a fantastic shitheel.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda
Voss is a powerful figure in the story - and the best written character in it, for my money - because he morphs a classic figure of hate into a form we can easily recognise today. The Nazis of the mid-twentieth century grow more distant as the decades pass, and in becoming the endlessly killable bogeymen of video games they are turned into a kind of warning myth that we can shoot, but never see close-up. Like a marble statue of antiquity, we know what that hate looked like in form, but we don’t see the colour it was once painted. Voss lets us encounter a fascist in full colour, even if the saturation is sometimes pumped up to exaggerated levels. He sees everything through an immature lens of power and takes pleasure not just in having power over others, like any baddie, but in annoying and humiliating them on top of that. He is an awful schoolboy bully who learned some big words.
When the game starts up, you’ll see a disclaimer messageexplicitly saying the game doesn’t endorse nazism. This is a legal thing, probably, but also a comically unnecessary warning. It’s doubly unnecessary to anyone who meets Voss. A man so ferociously disquieting that finding out how he is going to die is just as powerful a motivator toward finishing the game as finding the next vivid explorable location. The developers at Machine Games suggested in a behind-the-scenes marketing video that they intended for him toget under the player’s skinin the same way as he gets under Indy’s skin. Well, mission accomplished. I am simultaneously glad to have encountered him and foaming at the mouth with rage any time I think of him. Which, in hindsight, is a splintered state of mind he would absolutely love to see, the astounding rat fucker.
