Midweek Update: Love and 'The Last of Us'

[Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us video game and through Episode 3 of the HBO series adaptation]

Craig Mazin knows the feeling of hopelessness. We’re not living in post-apocalyptic times, but we know we’re in a time of social upheaval brought on by rapid technological change. There’s great uncertainty about what the future holds. It’s easy to look at the present and feel like we’re at the end of all things, and that human connection is a luxury we can ill afford. His adaptation of the video game The Last of Us isn’t so much about the speculation of “What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?” Instead, its central focus is, “Would you dare to love when all seems lost?”

The central tension of the series (or at least the first season) isn’t, “Who will survive?” Unlike The Walking Dead where you get an ensemble cast and then, to quote The Texas Chainsaw Masscare’s tagline, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”, we know in The Last of Us that we’ll be following Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). For these characters, and particularly Joel, the question is, “Can you love again after suffering unimaginable loss?” From Joel’s perspective, he’s not only seen the world fall apart, but one that fell apart rapidly for him when his daughter Sarah (Nico Parker) was shot and killed in the early days of the pandemic. Joel knows how to survive, but he hasn’t been living in any real sense for the last twenty years. Ellie only knows the world of the pandemic. She’s also a survivor, but having grown up in the ruins, she isn’t haunted in the same way that Joel is, and their bond is the crux of the series.

Which brings us to “Long Long Time”, the third episode of the series and one that largely doesn’t feature Joel and Ellie.

In the game, Joel and Ellie need to find a battery for a car so they can start traveling out west to find a rebel group called the Fireflies that may be able to find a cure to the pandemic thanks to Ellie’s immunity. You travel to “Bill’s Town,” a town largely rigged with booby traps and overseen by hardened survivalist Bill (W. Earl Brown). You know at one point Bill had a partner named Frank, but Frank left a note saying how much he hated Bill and left to find what was out there on his own. Bill is a colorful character who helps you find the battery and fend off zombies in the process.

The series goes in a different direction. Joel and Ellie still need to make their way to Bill find a battery, but then the show cuts back back twenty years. We see Bill (Nick Offerman) make the town his own by setting up traps and barriers, and then about four years into the post-apocalypse he meets Frank (Murray Bartlett). Bill decides to let his guard down, give Frank some food, and the two men quickly fall for each other. We then follow the next 16 years of their lives for the remainder of the episode.

What makes this such a strong departure from the game is two-fold. First, it’s thematically foreshadowing Joel’s journey. Like Bill, he’s kept his guard up as a way to not only survive, but prevent pain. But also like Bill, he’s going to realize that life only has meaning with love. For Bill, that love was romantic, and for Joel, that love will be paternal. It’s not that the Bill stuff doesn’t work in the game, but it’s more about coloring who Bill is rather than highlighting what Joel and Ellie can be.

That also leads to the constraints of the game. AAA video games like The Last of Us need to have that forward momentum. You need to meet Bill, learn he doesn’t have the battery, fight or sneak past zombies to get to the school and fight and sneak past more zombies to get to the house where you fill fight and sneak past more zombies to find a car battery. And it’s fun to do those things, but that’s one of the things about AAA video games—they have to be constantly engaging in such a way that you feel you’re accomplishing something.

What Craig Mazin and co-writer Neil Druckmann have figured out for the show is that TV doesn’t have to abide by that constraint. There wouldn’t be a satisfying way to tell Bill and Frank’s story in the show in a game unless you did some kind of basic thing like, “Press X to let your emotional guard down.” As a TV episode, there’s room to breathe, let the story unfold, and trust your actors to take control and make the relationship feel real and lived-in.

We can debate how successful other video game movies have been in the past, but I feel confident in saying that none have reached the heights of what The Last of Us has accomplished in its first three episodes. Part of that owes to how narratively driven the game is (as opposed to something like Doom or Prince of Persia), but it’s also how Mazin and Druckmann understand that they’re working in a different medium, and callbacks alone aren’t going to get the job done. The show needs to have a point of view and then make that vision clear as only the show can. HBO’s The Last of Us clearly knows how to do that, and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the season unfolds.

What I’m Watching

Last night I caught Knock at the Cabin and really dug it. I think M. Night Shyamalan, by virtue of self-funding his own movies, is currently in the most interesting phase of his career. Even when the movies don’t entirely work, he’s taking big swings and doing it with stories largely set in a single location. It’s an exciting phase because he’s past any talk of “The Next Spielberg” or “The Next Hitchcock” or “The Twist Guy” and using his directing skills (which are admirable—he knows how to move a camera and build tension) to make compelling thrillers.

Knock at the Cabin feels timely because it’s about our current epistemological crisis where we’re all acting on belief and those beliefs are irreconcilable. If someone believes that they must act or the world will end, then reason and evidence no longer get through, and that’s the real horror. Dave Bautista is incredible in the lead role of the home invaders, and he knows how to make a meal of juxtaposing his hulking physique against a quiet delivery. Directors need to start figuring out how to get Bautista into their movies, because he’s not just a muscular guy who can do action. He can give an honest-to-god performance. My main qualm is the ending where I feel like the story should have been left ambiguous, but Shyalaman needs his movies to have firm answers and thematic conclusions. It doesn’t ruin the film, but I think it would have been thematically stronger to leave certain aspects unanswered.

Over on television, are now caught up on Abbott Elementary, and the show more than earns every ounce of praise it has received thus far. We’re also making our way through Poker Face, and for my part, I hope to be caught up on Yellowjackets before the new season arrives in March.

What I’m Reading

I finished re-reading All Quiet on the Western Front since the recent adaptation scored a bunch of Oscar nominations. I also want to watch the 1930 adaptation, which was the third film to ever win Best Picture. The book itself remains just as harrowing, and its impact comes not from the description of warfare itself (not to shortchange the horrifying imagery of the war), but from how the protagonist, Paul, knows he, his comrades, and the soldiers on the other side are all being crushed beneath a machine they have nothing to do with. It’s about war not simply as a matter of life and death, but the severing of an individual from his own humanity.

Given that the book was somewhat dour, I changed gears to read The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl as a palate cleanser. It was delightful! Now that we’re in Black History month, I want to make an effort to read more Black authors, so I’ve kicked things off with James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

In other reading:

• Super Bowl LVII will mark the first time two Black quarterbacks (the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts) have faced off against each other for the championship. While I’m sure the NFL will like to play that up as proof of how much they value diversity, I highly recommend reading these three articles from The Washington Post that came at the start of the season. The first is about how Black coaches are hired at a lower rate and fired at a higher rate than white coaches. The second is about how Cowboys owner and general manager Jerry Jones, who some cite as the league’s “shadow commissioner” (Roger Goodell being a useful hand puppet for the ownership, but not someone with real power), as being willfully obtuse on race and emblematic of white owners who may mean well with regards to their Black players but are too entrenched in their own white cronyism to make meaningful changes. The final article is a strong editorial by Jerry Brewer about how football reflects America. All three articles are worth your time.

• “A.I. is here, and it’s making movies. Is Hollywood ready?” by Brian Contreras [Los Angeles Times] - While this article is causing understandable consternation (it’s part of the deepfake argument where if you can make anyone look and sound like something, then it leads to disturbing possibilities for deception), I feel like it’s a useful tool that needs guardrails. The kind of technology detailed here simply feels like the next step in what we’ve already seen like when they use digital head replacement for stunts. Using A.I. to make lip-sync more accurate for dialogue replacement or dubbing seems like a good use of the technology to me.

What I’m Hearing

Why yes, I have been playing Linda Rondstadt’s “Long Long Time” on a loop since Sunday’s episode of The Last of Us. Why do you ask?