'The Last of Us' and the Apocalypse
It sure feels like we’re in endtimes sometimes, doesn’t it? Really it all feels like exactly what Naomi Klein was talking about in The Shock Doctrine, coordinated efforts to barrage you with so much information — and often so many bad things — that you don’t notice what’s really happening under your feet. It’s funny, too, that people need complicated conspiracies while bad things happen out in the open. But it’s somehow easier to swallow that the government is filled with lizard people than something with a real paper trail.
But anyway, that’s not hte point. The point, sort of, is that we just finished The Last of Us season one. Fun show. Felt a little much like a video game at several points, but I guess they had gamers to satisfy. Because if there’s any group that is known to be easily satisfied, it’s gamers. They certainly weren’t radicalized by reactionaries.
If you haven’t been watching the show, the gist is simple: a deadly fungus turns people into zombie-ish creatures. A man (Joel) is paid to smuggle seemingly the only person (Ellie) with immunity to the outpost of a dissident group in the hopes of developing a cure or a vaccine.
This will have only the mildest spoilers, none for the finale.
Importantly, on the way, they gather at the community Joel’s brother Tommy has settled into, a place based on mutual aid and shared sacrifice. There’s relative safety, and unlike some of the other places in the series, people take care of each other.
The rest of the show is your average apocalyptic wasteland of cities in ruin, shady cults, and paramilitary groups. After all, it’s the stuff of common fiction and video games and whatever else.
I’m terrible at video games. Just horrific. I thus mostly play games that involve solving puzzles, sandbox games, cozy games, and games actually designed for children but good for adults with bad hand-eye coordination. I love to build a rocket in Kerbal Space Program or solve puzzles on my own time in The Last Campfire without the threat of death.
And granted, maybe I’m just not getting out enough, but why aren’t there more Apocalypse movies that are about the post-post-Apocalypse? Where are the narratives that involve, say, how Tommy and crew built their own outpost and uplifted each other? I remember long ago hearing a tweet or a … something that was about how there should be some kind of fiction around people patching up the Earth once billionaires yeet themselves to Mars. So where is that? There’s the idea of hopepunk, which has been nebulously termed and not necessarily entirely seen as a genre, but here’s what I’m saying.
I would love a game or TV show or movie that’s about the challenges of being resourceful in the post-Apocalypse. I’d love something that isn’t just a hero’s triumph over a foe and the liberation of those people subject to their tyrannical rule. But it’s ever so fleeting, usually. The Star Wars trilogy followed people, roughly, overthrowing their despotic rule to bring about their previous republic-based society. The sequel trilogy could have been about that, and followed the republic 30 years later (maybe not exactly like the expanded universe) facing a new threat and needing a triumph. Instead the 30 years of rising above is wiped out in a matter of seconds to more or less remake the first movie, return it to a grim status quo. Give us hope again at the end, but when will that, too, be taken away down the line.
So anyway yeah where is the story of the actual rebuilding? Where do we have narratives that drop us into a grim world. and show a path toward rebuilding it? You can still have villains in it, but it’s about not necessarily slaughtering marauders making your way toward hope as it is about what it takes to build that hope, to rebuild society, to lay stake to a place after the world shattering event happened.
I’d love the game that is a resource harvesting game that’s about working to build, for lack of a better analogy, the village Tommy in Last of Us lives in. A feeling of triumph at the end of the game, when liberated people actually gather together and cement the rebuilding process. I’d love to watch the movie that’s about the hard work of standing in the wreckage, where the triumph at the end is that the biggest hurdle in the way of the proto-society has been overcome, rather than left to our imagination when a movie ends with liberation.
We see something of this future in Star Trek, where the world was rebuilt after class rebellion and nuclear war. The first big steps — the warp drive — are shown in the movie Star Trek: First Contact, but the next step in the story, in the universe’s chronology, is 90 years later in Enterprise. There, you have a proto-Starfleet, but what happened in between to get the world on a path to healing? There was hope in First Contact but what further happened to make the hope real. Deep Space Nine, to an extent, is about the Bajorans overcoming their own Apocalypse in similar ways after occupation.
Right now I think we are at a certain point of darkness. Every generation, of course, had their feeling that the world was ending. We feel saturated in the shock doctrine. Maybe the narratives of renewal, rebirth, cooperation, and rebuilding would make people think more forwardly. I’m sure these narratives are out there and I just don’t know about them, but that’s all the more reason to make them commonplace.