On HBO’s The Last of Us, no one shows fear towards low-level threats. So far, no one is afraid of the dark, or spiders, or clowns. In non-apocalyptical times, fears are an identity marker as much as an actual cause of palpitations. The recently published Book of Phobias and Manias by Kate Summerscale approaches our pet fears with whimsy and dark humor, surely an effective way of quelling them. No such impulse seems to exist in the world of The Last of Us; that world has two things to fear: the Infected and other people (either the harm they can do you or the loss they can cause you). So when 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) shies away from crossing a hotel lobby turned green lagoon (complete with a frog hopping across the piano keys), it’s a flash of humanity. Ellie can’t swim, because she’s 14 and the world ended 20 years ago. Whatever semblance of government, or resistance, or recreation that this world has managed to rebuild, it is scant. In contrast, Joel, her unwilling companion, is in his 50s. He spent most of his life steeped in our world, watching movies, swimming in lakes, going to war. The contrast between their frames of reference for the very experience of living creates a beautiful narrative opportunity.
It also opens up a chance for me to talk about something I’ve long noticed in movies and TV. People in them frequently act as if they themselves have never seen a movie or episode of TV. This is easiest to spot in horror movies. Anyone who has grown up in a culture steeped in visual imagery has absorbed a largely unconscious set of signs and symbols, among them a whole host of indicators designed to keep you safe. It is not due only to parental guidance or gut instinct that women remain hyper-aware of their surroundings when walking alone, or people are wary of overly-charming strangers, or less than keen to go into the basement to investigate that odd noise. I personally would take some convincing to go up to a cabin in the woods with a group of friends or watch old snowy video footage or read Latin aloud from a dusty book.
We live in a world of stories, many of which were originally created to keep us from harm. The tale of Narcissus isn’t just a charming story of self-love gone wrong; it’s also technically a warning against inattention around large bodies of water. Fairy tales teach you not to trust people who aren’t your blood relatives (all those stepmothers) and not to go into the woods at night under any circumstances. In modern times, our most popular stories contain a whole host of lessons; The Wire has much to teach us about (dis)trusting authority; Deadwood makes it clear why living in anarchy is a death sentence; Friends teaches us to be clear with our partners whether we are or are not “on a break.”
Yet too often I see characters act in ways that make it clear to me movies and television might somehow not exist in their universe. This is explicitly made a plot point in the 2011 film Cabin in the Woods. The set up for that movie is classic horror film, so much so that the victims’ decision to ignore the numerous creepy signs thrown at them and still go to a creepy cabin in the woods is enough to condemn them to live out the rest of the movie. By ignoring the signs they’re in a horror movie, they fail to save themselves from the consequences of one. Of course, the reason many movies and TV series allow their characters to ignore the lessons they should have taken from said mediums is because it would be hard to make many genres if they didn’t. You couldn’t make a rom-com with characters who have watched a lot of rom-coms. There would be no “whoops there’s only one bed” scenarios, no “let me just take care of this pretty stranger with amnesia,” no “why are we fighting so much maybe we love each other?!?!?” emotional arc. No letters would ever go astray, no critical text message would be misinterpreted. You would know from watching rom-coms how all these tropes play out and easily skirt these many narrative traps and pitfalls.
Few genres are as storied as the zombie apocalypse genre. I remember a frequent topic of conversation in my middle school days was “who would be on your zombie apocalypse team?” We would talk about how we would survive if such a thing were to happen and who would be most likely to help us stay alive (my friends landed on “commandeer an aircraft carrier,” which is both a great idea and close to impossible to execute). Zombies are a powerful specter; they combine our fears of illness, senility, and gnawing hunger. They are funhouse mirror versions of ourselves, our friends, our family turned into monsters with no hope of a cure. We’ve created countless works of art to reflect these fears, from Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead. The Last of Us, both the videogame and the new series from HBO, have joined a multitudinous throng of undead predecessors.
The Last of Us is clearly HBO’s attempt to have their own version of the post-apocalyptic epic. HBO infamously passed on The Walking Dead when it was first pitched to them, a decision they’ve clearly come to regret. That show went on to become a juggernaut, spawning multiple spin-offs that all connect somehow, kind of like the underground zombie fungus network. The success of movies like The Hunger Games and shows like Station Eleven (also on HBO) have shown HBO that this is a genre that continues to draw viewers (kind of like the underground zombie fungus network draws zombies). It was an open question, for a bit, whether a show about a pandemic would fascinate or repel. It’s possible the relatively muted viewership for 2021/2’s Station Eleven, which centers on the catastrophic aftermath of a global flu pandemic, was a result of viewers not being quite ready for such a direct reference to what so narrowly could have been. Perhaps The Last of Us’s success is down to the classic sleight of hand a monster story plays on us. Make a global pandemic produce monsters instead of just sick people, and it becomes more easy to engage in as entertainment.
So why does it matter that Ellie can’t swim? It certainly doesn’t stop her from wading into the green swamp water when she realizes it’s only thigh-deep. But her moment of hesitation, her need to highlight what sets her apart from Joel and Tess, reminds us that Ellie has no knowledge of the world we know. Joel has seen zombie movies before; Ellie has probably never seen movies at all. She isn’t worried something will wind its tendril around her ankle below the surface of that green water, as I would have been after watching countless movies where exactly that occurs. She is a person entirely formed by her own experiences and impressions, with so little cultural baggage it is almost unimaginable to us (yet somehow a deep knowledge of Street Fighter). Joel and Tess may have forgotten the movies they watched 20 years ago, but they grew up so immersed in them that their subconscious remembers even when they don’t. Tess’s actions at the end of episode two are an echo of so many heroic scenes of self-sacrifice. When they burst into the statehouse and she saw all the elements needed for a heroic self-immolation, both she and the audience knew what would happen next for that very reason.
We don’t know what stories Ellie knows; she couldn’t have grown up without any. When she tells Tess she got bitten after sneaking into an abandoned mall, that echoes a million stories of teen hijinks gone wrong. But whatever stories Ellie has, whether they still have the Bible or Shakespeare or Star Wars after the apocalypse, she doesn’t have our absolute immersion in story. She doesn’t have the narrative reflexes we have. And to me, out of all the narrative possibilities The Last of Us presents, that is the most interesting.