{"id":76107,"date":"2014-08-29T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T16:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76107"},"modified":"2019-03-04T16:17:29","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T21:17:29","slug":"the-dreams-in-which-im-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/29\/the-dreams-in-which-im-dying\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dreams in Which I\u2019m Dying"},"content":{"rendered":"

The vanity of the zombie apocalypse.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are few things as narcissistic as an apocalypse fantasy. The apocalypse doesn\u2019t mean the end of the world, just the end of humankind, and considering such a fate can lead us into a sentimental peace with the present day. Suddenly, in spite of all its flaws\u2014flaws that might be harder to accept in less dire circumstances\u2014the world seems worth keeping intact. In recent years, zombies have been a catalyst of fictional doom in every conceivable manner, from popular horror and comedy to moral parable and literary send-up. They offer us freedom from death in exchange for our subjective consciousness and social identity. But we\u2019d sooner have death, if it means our egos can be spared for a bit.<\/p>\n

The Last of Us<\/em>, a PlayStation game whose latest version was released last month, is a story about a zombie apocalypse, but it wasn\u2019t supposed to be. Its creative director, Neil Druckmann, said in a 2011 interview<\/a> that\u00a0he wanted the game to be more of a love story, one between a middle-aged man and a fourteen-year-old girl. So maybe it\u2019s more accurate to describe The Last of Us<\/em> as a story about a kind of taboo love that requires a zombie apocalypse to normalize\u2014and, by extension, a story that, through love, gives the fungal zombification of humanity a silver lining. Our species may be on the verge of extinction, but if we\u2019re able to fall in love and learn a little about ourselves along the way, it can\u2019t be all bad. Love is where all educated people go to bury their narcissism. <\/p>\n

The idea for the game dates back to a 2006 BBC documentary\u2014part of the Planet Earth<\/em> series\u2014that showed the effects of the Cordyceps fungus on ants. The parasitic growth infests the ant host and begins to replace its tissue with fungal material until the entire body has been eaten away. The fungus can influence the ant\u2019s movement, causing its jaws to open and close sporadically and driving it to cling to tree leaves in warm spaces ideal for continuing growth. Druckmann immediately recognized the ramifications that such a relationship might have in a story about human extinction. Soon the creative spores for the game were drifting through his brain.<\/p>\n

In The Last of Us<\/em>, this fungus afflicts people. The game\u2019s protagonists, Joel and Ellie, bond with one another during the awkward limbo phase of the apocalypse, when most of the damage has been done but not quite everyone has been snuffed out. They fall in love between killing fungal zombies with crowbars and shooting scattered human outlaws. Joel is a single dad from a Texas suburb\u2014a short prologue lets us play as his daughter, Sarah, home alone experiencing the first wave of police sirens, terrified news reports, and power outages as the zombies appear in town. A soldier shoots both Joel and Sarah, thinking they\u2019re infected; as Sarah whimpers her last few breaths in Joel\u2019s arms, he quietly begs her to stay alive. \u201cPlease don\u2019t do this to me,\u201d he says, as if being shot was a thing kids did to their parents.<\/p>\n

Twenty years later\u2014when most of America has been wiped out by the fungal scourge, with ivy eating away building walls and abandoned quarantine zones left to be picked over by armed looters\u2014Joel has migrated to Boston, and we meet Ellie, a fourteen-year-old girl whom a militant group called the Fireflies believes can save the world. Ellie was bitten by a zombie, but she appears to be immune, and so they want to get her to a lab to try and engineer a vaccine from her magical body. Joel agrees to escort her to the other side of Boston, which, in the fashion of complication-driven road stories, ends up stringing them along to Pittsburgh, and then to Colorado, and finally to Utah.<\/p>\n

Ellie\u2019s not quite a replacement daughter for Joel, nor is she a friend, and the game seems oblivious to any sort of sexual tension between the two. And though the plot distinguishes her as a figure of mystic privilege, the lone immune human in a country of three hundred million plagued, she\u2019s not given any messianic pomp. It makes more sense to think of Ellie and Joel not as characters but as symbiotic symbols that need each other to reach maximum cathartic signification. All videogame characters carry the weight of what players want to be true of the world, and so Joel and Ellie must serve the dual purpose of revealing how horrible the apocalypse is\u2014forcing them to kill in increasingly gruesome ways\u2014while making the case that humans deserve, if not a reprieve, then at least some sentimental gratitude for the warmth and intimacy they brought to the world.<\/p>\n

The Last of Us<\/em> depicts the zombie end-times in a way that endorses a basic fear of other people. Zombies have always functioned as emotional shorthand for a condition in which it\u2019s morally allowable to attack everything, to see every encountered life as a possible threat, while resenting or mistrusting the last few survivors. The game\u2019s humans are hostile to both the zombies and one another, fighting petty skirmishes over remnant sacks of sugar and rubbing alcohol while leaving mazes of armaments and munitions in their wake\u2014cold, cubist structures that feel inhospitable and alienating as soon as they\u2019re deprived of electricity. There\u2019s little joy, cooperation, or generosity between anyone here. \u201cYou survived because of me,\u201d Joel tells his brother, Tommy, when they\u2019re finally reunited years after having parted ways. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t worth it,\u201d Tommy says. We have a habit of imagining others this way, romanticizing our own struggles while villainizing everyone else\u2019s\u2014seeing, in a documentary about ants, a way to make this intimate discomfort with other life seem justified.<\/p>\n

The underlying expectation here\u2014that without Western civilization humans would become monsters\u2014is a psychic tic of game designers, who tend to be overeducated upper-middle-class men whose primary lens for understanding the world comes from commercial entertainment. If your worldview is built around a series of compromises you\u2019ve made to secure a comfortable salary building eidolons of human narcissism into restricted-admission dream-states, paranoia and projected self-loathing are in order. And when these labors make you servant to an economy of Moore\u2019s Law and inescapable obsolescence, the competition for scarce resources (conveniently abstracted in the game with overlaid icons, as if Google Glass were the only thing to survive the collapse of human civilization) must seem like an especially poetic prism.<\/p>\n

The game\u2019s greatest irony is its conclusion, which finally seems to admit that if narcissism must be the banner of our species, then it might be best to let us all die out. It turns out that to save humankind, Joel will have to watch as Ellie dies; for some reason the Fireflies need to kill her to research her brain and create their vaccine. And while Ellie appears ready to make that sacrifice, it sends Joel into a narcissistic tunnel: he ends up rescuing her unconscious body from the operating table at the last minute and then kills the woman who\u2019d entrusted him with the mission at the beginning of the game. When Ellie regains consciousness, he tells her the Fireflies had been wrong about the immunity, and had studied several other immune cases from around the country before she arrived, concluding that there was nothing to be learned from them. The game ends with a mean-spirited close-up of her face as she questions Joel about the story, having a hard time accepting it could be true. We stare at her for a few seconds as she vacillates, and then she decides to accept the lie. \u201cOkay,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not by accident that the game immediately jumps forward twenty years after the death of Joel\u2019s daughter in its first section, depriving players of the chance to experience Joel\u2019s mourning, very probably because Joel didn\u2019t mourn and because the people making the game probably could not have imagined a believable way to dramatize that mourning. It\u2019s not by accident that industrial videogames\u2014produced by hundreds of people for millions of dollars\u2014cannot be about mourning, sorrow, or inaction. Shooters sell, and so the industry depends on its ability to produce fresh bodies to kill. It\u2019s continually reinventing variations on the same basic moral context that makes it permissible to kill them. As a metaphor,\u00a0The Last of Us<\/em> is a suicide note for the human species, but as an object of paid-for culture, duplicated and distributed en masse, it\u2019s a reminder of our sentimental preference for postmortem artifacts to living specimens. It\u2019s easier to understand the idea of death than the reality of life, and so we make an industry of waiting, imagining our end lumbering toward our vain and cubicled bodies, inventing the selfish moral blank spots we suspect ourselves of being.<\/p>\n

Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York and the author of <\/em>Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating and Other Issues for Men<\/a>. His work has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>The Atlantic, <\/em>Bookforum, <\/em>The New Inquiry, and <\/em>Guernica.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The vanity of the zombie apocalypse. There are few things as narcissistic as an apocalypse fantasy. The apocalypse doesn\u2019t mean the end of the world, just the end of humankind, and considering such a fate can lead us into a sentimental peace with the present day. Suddenly, in spite of all its flaws\u2014flaws that might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":742,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15070],"tags":[9517,7002,15127,15128,15130,10438,15126,15129,494,9678],"class_list":["post-76107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-games","tag-apocalypse","tag-genre-fiction","tag-narcissism","tag-narratives","tag-self-involvement","tag-storytelling","tag-the-last-of-us","tag-the-zombie-apocalypse","tag-video-games","tag-zombies"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Dreams in Which I\u2019m Dying<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Michael Thomsen on the vanity of the zombie apocalypse.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/29\/the-dreams-in-which-im-dying\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Dreams in Which I\u2019m Dying by Michael Thomsen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 29, 2014 \u2013 The vanity of the zombie apocalypse. 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