[D66] ‘The Last of Us’

[René Oudeweg]

edition.cnn.com
‘The Last of Us’ isn’t the first doomsday story to hit our screens. Why 
we’re so fascinated by the end of the world
Scottie Andrew
9–11 minutes
The first season of "The Last of Us" showed Joel and Ellie's 
post-apocalyptic journey across the US -- and riveted viewers.

Editor’s Note: This article containers spoilers for the season finale of 
HBO’s “The Last of Us.”

CNN  —

In “The Last of Us,” the world ends over the course of the weekend. 
During that time, Joel kills a neighbor, watches his daughter die and 
nearly takes his own life – but ultimately, he survives for more than 20 
years after that fungus-induced apocalyptic event. The violent 
tendencies he stifled throughout his pre-apocalyptic life keep him alive 
when the world as he knows it ends.

“Apocalypse” comes from a Greek word that means to unveil or reveal – 
and an apocalypse, then, shows people who they really are when the 
trappings of society fall away. For Joel, it revealed the mechanical, 
horrifying violence he was capable of. For Ellie, meanwhile, it revealed 
a scared kid hiding beneath flagging courage.

“What I’ve come to find out is that during an apocalyptic time, that 
doesn’t change people – it reveals people,” said Glenn Stutzky, an 
instructor in Michigan State University’s school of social work who for 
years taught a course on surviving a zombie apocalypse.

Joel and Ellie’s trek across the American wasteland – depicted in HBO’s 
television adaptation of “The Last of Us” – drew in millions of viewers 
during its first season, which ended Sunday night. (HBO shares parent 
company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.)

Part of the series’ appeal might lie in its audience’s fascination with 
the idea of who they might be if the world ended, Stutzky said. 
Post-apocalyptic stories captivate us because they challenge our ideas 
of ourselves, the way our society functions and what the future could 
look like. Would we be able to make the same terrible choices as Joel? 
Could we defend ourselves like Ellie has? Would we align with the 
worldview of the activist Fireflies, or militant FEDRA, or something new?

“The apocalypse, I think, both reveals our humanity and our inhumanity,” 
Stutzky said. “It doesn’t get more basic or fundamental than that.”

Over a decade ago, Stutzky knew he wanted to teach a class on the way 
people behaved in disasters. To grab students’ attention, he turned it 
into a weeks-long simulation of a zombie uprising.

Students were separated into survivor groups, strewn across campus, and 
routinely tasked with making difficult choices. If someone attempted to 
join their group, how would they respond – protect their existing group 
or show compassion? How would they find food, medicine and other 
supplies? Would they disregard the government’s emergency broadcasts and 
rely only on each other? And if they do run into an infected person, 
who’s going to kill them?
Clickers are people infected by the Cordyceps fungus whose bodies have 
been overtaken in "The Last of Us."

There was something terrifying about the course – Stutzky’s colleague 
would paint some actors like zombies with convincing horror makeup – but 
thrilling, too. Students came for zombies but stayed for the chance to 
learn more about themselves and their knee-jerk reactions to 
catastrophe, Stutzky said.

“People want to know, ‘how would I be if everything else was stripped 
away, how would I respond? What person am I, really, when it comes down 
to that?’” Stutzky said.

There’s a part of us that yearns for the pre-digital age, too, even 
those of us who’ve never known a life offline, said Tony M. Vinci, an 
associate professor at Ohio University whose research includes 
post-apocalyptic narratives.
Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Daryl (Norman Reedus) were two essential 
components of a post-apocalyptic team in "The Walking Dead."

“Almost everyone I know is starving for an unmediated connection – like 
two people, digging their hands in the dirt, eating strawberries,” Vinci 
said, nodding to the third episode of “The Last of Us,” which included a 
scene of couple Bill and Frank delighting in the simple joys of fresh fruit.

Even when apocalypses are awful to look at or, god forbid, live in, 
they’re often kind of awe-inspiring, too – we’re terrified of the 
calamitous, and yet we can’t look away from it when it’s in front of us, 
said Kate Bossert, an associate professor at Notre Dame of Maryland 
University who teaches a course on doomsday literature.

The desolate landscapes of “The Last of Us,” with its shelled cities and 
the grotesque beauty of the bodies overtaken by the Cordyceps infection, 
are particularly gripping, just as the zombie gore of “The Walking Dead” 
and the pastoral calm of “Station Eleven” were before it.

“Part of it is fascination with the spectacular,” Bossert said. “Who 
doesn’t want to stop and rubberneck?”

Many cultures have “apocalyptic myths” that date back to ancient times, 
including the concept of Ragnarök in Norse mythology and the Bible’s 
Book of Revelation. These myths were often about “rebirth after the 
destruction of the old world,” said Diletta De Cristofaro, research 
fellow at Northumbria University and author of “The Contemporary 
Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times.”

“Humans have been fascinated with the end of the world since forever,” 
De Cristofaro said.

Stories set after the world ends also often assign villains a face and 
name, offering viewers something tangible to wrap their heads around.

“(Post-apocalyptic storytelling) takes the unknown and makes it very 
physical and very visible, in ways that actually are not always true to 
life,” Bossert said. “Narratives that pinpoint the thing we’re afraid 
of, there’s almost a comfort in that.”

Contemporary narratives of apocalypse often “do away with this hope of 
rebirth” and paint a bleaker picture, she said, pointing to Cormac 
McCarthy’s “The Road,” a mostly hopeless tale of a man trying to keep 
his young son alive after a cataclysmic event. Stories like “The Last of 
Us,” whose apocalyptic event is partly brought on by climate change, 
function almost as cautionary tales of what our world could look like if 
we remain set in our ways.
The version of the end of the world in "The Road" is bleak and mostly 
hopeless.

“What these narratives are interested in is not just human resilience 
and survival but ultimately questioning the very world they imagined 
destroyed,” De Cristofaro said.

Versions of the apocalypse have already happened in our world, Vinci 
pointed out: The arrival of Christopher Columbus and subsequent European 
colonizers resulted in the mass murder of Indigenous people in North 
America. The transatlantic slave trade killed millions of Africans who 
were forcibly taken from their homes. Natural (and unnatural) disasters, 
from historic storms to catastrophic train derailments to devastating 
pandemics, are not as far away from reality as they seem onscreen.

“We live in a world where the apocalypse has already happened,” Vinci 
said. “This is why this is important. Real people have already suffered 
this.”

In the years since Stutzky’s course on surviving the zombie apocalypse 
was last offered, students and faculty at his university experienced a 
mass shooting in which three students were killed. In hindsight, his 
course on survival seems less fantastical, he said.

“As I look across what’s happening in the world, there’s almost a 
certain foreboding that we could probably fairly quickly move to an 
apocalyptic situation in our future while we’re still living here,” he 
said. “People may have that shadow in the background.”

Truly innovative stories can show us a better way of being, Vinci said.

In “The Last of Us,” the community oasis of Jackson, Wyoming, is a 
society where most resources and responsibilities are shared, the 
opposite of the military-run quarantine zones where food is rationed and 
resistors are hanged. Ellie represents a potentially brighter future 
where the world-ending Cordyceps infection could be cured and society 
might be rebuilt.
Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) endured the first 
months of an apocalyptic pandemic together in "Station Eleven."

“Once all the other stuff’s been stripped away, (it grants characters) 
this choice to say, ‘this is what we as a society value, we’re gonna 
rebuild around these shared values,’” Bossert said. “If it was all just 
death and dying, I don’t think we’d keep watching.”

These narratives encourage audiences to critically consider the world in 
which they live, De Cristofaro. Would they support the Fireflies, a 
militant group who dreams of restoring democracy, or would they consider 
building a completely new society?

“By imagining the end of the world as we know it, it helps us question 
this world,” De Cristofaro said. “These narratives return us to a blank 
slate – no infrastructures, no governments.”

By the end of the first season of “The Last of Us,” Joel decides the 
future of humanity when he steals Ellie back from the Fireflies, killing 
the people who could have engineered a cure from her brain. Saving Ellie 
doesn’t upend the rule of the military tyrants who run quarantine zones, 
nor does it repair the world Ellie’s generation will inherit. Viewers 
will have to wait until the second season to see the consequences of 
Joel’s desperate act of love.