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I live half a world away from the Santa Monica pier, but over the years I have been a frequent visitor to its planks, so ghosted by the insistent sun, so buffed and smoothed by the sandy wind. It's a handsome pier, narrow enough that you don't mistake it for a road (even though the occasional police car creeps along its back), but long enough to carry you a good distance out to sea. At its far end the fishermen bob in a row, their taut lines stretching off forever into the easygoing Pacific.The Santa Monica pier is an honest jetty leading away from the dishonest plastic and bronze of the beach, where the bodybuilders flex and maintain, and the girls jog along behind their tottering poodles. But it's also a jetty leading away from Los Angeles, with its heat and murder, its sky-bothering monuments to money and power, the humanity-thinning strip clubs and strip malls and that relentless ambition that hazes in the air during daytime, only retreating at night. Whenever I'm in town I go to the Santa Monica pier, to get away from the city, to get away from the job at hand.
Not all of Los Angeles and its surrounding area can be found within Grand Theft Auto 5's Los Santos, but much of the geography and architecture is present and correct even if the names have been mangled and perverted (Beverley Hills becomes Rockford Hills, Skid Row becomes Mission Row, Hollywood is Vinewood and so on). Los Santos is a dreamlike approximation of Los Angeles, which is to say that it trims away its defects (that wearisome sprawl, for one thing) leaving just the highlights and the monuments.
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