Covid serial trauma is television’s latest soothing distraction.
What’s worse than the Covidapocalypse: movies and TV shows that exploit it for cheap thrills. HBO’s The Last of Us is the product of shameless opportunists who manipulate actual Covidapocalypse dread for the TV equivalent of clickbait. This show, based on a 2013 PlayStation game, and set 20 years into a pandemic that has turned citizens into zombies, follows ravaged, middle-aged Joel (Pedro Pascal) and orphaned teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they traverse present-day, post-apocalyptic America.
Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann (the latter cashing in on the game he wrote) exploit dystopia for hip cynicism. The incessant flashbacks don’t flesh out the modern story but break videoplayer continuity for sly political references, as when the sight of a Gore-Lieberman T-shirt aims to lend historical authenticity.
In liberal Hollywood terms, that detail recalls the first “stolen” election that sparked mainstream media’s previously unimaginable political revenge — the beginning of the plague that not only broke the culture but divided Americans into perpetually frightened, vengeful partisan antagonists.
This premise could have been satirical, making The Last of Us a twist on the mawkish network show This Is Us, resulting in fatalistic derision of what historians used to describe as Democracy’s Last Best Hope. Instead, the 2013 video game has been updated to convey fashionable anti-American, anti-capitalist disdain.
Mazin and Druckmann load their last-survivors tale with echoes of militia movements and the social distrust that batters our political “conversation” into ideological cacophony. It’s a lousy series because it depicts our distrust and division so matter-of-factly. Video-game make-believe becomes heinous when presented as realistic TV drama.
The Last of Us flatters the specious assertion that television drama has advanced beyond movies, but that’s no more than the preference of a couch potato, validated by the guilt and desperation that the Covid lockdowns stoked. Bingeing habits prevent HBO superfans from recognizing that the show is inferior to the cinematic achievements it rips off. It lacks the vision of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and the insight of Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad.
HBO formula cheapens the imagination once thought crucial to science fiction (The Matrix), but cable fiction has been faking it in non-cinematic programs. Here’s how: The Sopranos imitates Goodfellas; Game of Thrones sensationalizes Lord of the Rings; The White Lotus pillages House of Gucci; and HBO’s racialized Watchmen weaponizes Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.
Rather than deal with the political reality of how our institutions betrayed us, Hollywood fantasizes the waking nightmare of the Covidapocalypse but fails to show that it has any significance beyond horror-movie thrills. This apolitical negativity banalizes Spielberg’s hallucinatory masterpiece War of the Worlds, which visualized Hell on Earth in a spiritual, political, and aesthetic response to 9/11 (a companion piece to the global realities of Munich). Mazin and Druckmann often cut from Joel and Ellie’s prosaic sojourns to black — a blank screen that dully borrows, to no effect, Spielberg’s great blackout (in which a child asks, “Are we still alive?”).
Similarly, Joel and Ellie’s “chosen family” subplot breaks domestic unity into a social-credit system pairing — grieving father accepts lesbian daughter. But in Mom and Dad, Brian Taylor explored the two-way anxieties of parental regret and offspring resentment. In The Last of Us, there are no compelling dynamics between the predictably sarcastic, bluffing allies (a continuation of how Euphoria’s sex-drug predators resemble an uncinematic Bones and All.)
The deliberate proselytizing becomes evident in Episode 3, about another “chosen family.” This same-sex romantic digression, as incidental to the Covidapocalypse as it is to Joel and Ellie’s adventures, delves into nontraditional domesticity. Lonely survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman) changes his sexual orientation when he encounters vagabond Frank (Murray Bartlett). They’re gourmands in love with similar musical taste for Linda Ronstadt (a liberal-class giveaway).
The Last of Us isn’t just another distraction; it placates those who feel real red-pilled horror upon realizing how bureaucratic entities in politics and the media forced Armageddon upon us. (It literalizes the liberal self-loathing and self-pity of James Gray’s Armageddon Time.) What’s decadent about such doomsday scenarios is that they are mostly horrific and are only resolved with either facile uplift or capitulation to the very moral and political reset that is the cause of genuine paranoia. (Naïve fans fall for this, and they attacked filmmaker Paul Schrader online for stating his resistance — he lambasted Episode 3 as a “super shmaltzy gay bro euthanasia melo.”)
Mazin and Duckmann never achieve the pure visceral catharsis of great action filmmakers such as Spielberg or Paul W. S. Anderson, whose Resident Evil movies, also based on a video game, were so supremely kinetic that they did provide such a release. Spielberg and Anderson achieved narrative resolve and emotional cleansing, whereas the serial traumas of The Last of Us leave viewers feeling worked over, brainwashed, and accustomed to being the walking brain-dead.
