We Might Secretly Crave Apocalypse
Lessons from The Last of Us, Zombies, and anything "life or death"
The lights are off. The volume is on full blast. My friend, Lars, watches intently from the comfort of an armchair, as I push my character deeper into an abandoned shopping mall.
I crouch. I keep tight to the walls. I gather supplies where they can be found. I hear the growls of the infected. I have to kill to survive.
I charge one of the walking corpses. I’m too hasty. I waste my bullets. Another flanks me. Soon the flesh from my neck is in the jowls of a zombie.
The screen goes black.
“Jack,” says Lars, “You have to treat this game like real life.”
The words are spoken sternly, like a coach hell bent on winning.
I correct my posture. I tighten my grip around the Playstation controller. I’m back in the abandoned mall, this time with a greater appreciation for the preciousness of life.
That’s where this essay begins. In an apartment in Hollywood, while a friend watches me play his favorite video game, The Last of Us.
Once I began playing, I couldn’t stop. I obsessed over it. I nagged at Lars constantly. When are you free this week? Maybe I could come play tonight? What are you doing today? I wouldn’t leave him alone.
It took me months—but finally—after the umpteenth trip across Los Angeles to Lars’ living room couch, I beat the game.
I was addicted to the game, yes, but perhaps more so to the feelings I had in anticipation of playing. As I approached his apartment, I started to get chills. I started feeling like I was in the game. I started wondering about what I would do if shit really hit the fan. Would I bunker down? Would I dare to travel to those I care about? Would I be prudent? Could I hold my own?
Why was I so enthralled? And more pressingly, why should you care?
I know it’s practically insane to tell you about my experience with a 2013 video game, again, particularly one about surviving a world overrun by zombies. But I believe that my previous article on Grand Theft Auto V proved that video games are substantial pieces of media which can provide valuable insights into our own reality.
Or to put it into cliché: art imitates life and life imitates art.
As such, there is much to be gained from looking at the two in tandem—and I believe that doing so has allowed me to find the answers to both of our "why” questions.
Just as GTA V is enlightening with its strikingly realistic parody of our culture, so too is The Last of Us, in its radical dissimilarity to our everyday life.
In our United States of America, we live in a world of abundance and excess. Our concerns are about intangible anxieties like “failure” or “success” or “opportunity” or “happiness.” But our country looks quite different from the version in The Last of Us.
In fact, that version isn’t really a country. It’s just a plot of sprawling land. There are people. There are infected. Success means survival. Failure means death. This stark contrast is the root of my obsession and also the answer to why you should care.
Today, for you and I, almost nothing is “life or death.”
What does that mean? And if it’s true, why are we always talking about the end of the world?
The Prevalence of Apocalyptic Content
We are such myopic creatures that we often fail to notice wider trends when we don’t find them particularly interesting. But as a writer, I’m the opposite, as I am trying to take culture in from 10,000 feet. I worry less about the nitty gritty of any one sect of society, and enjoy analyzing the grander going-ons. It is in these larger trends that I find what connects us all.
So apocalypse content might not be your cup of tea, but it is still everywhere. If you don’t believe me, here is a list of zombie content I can think of off the top of my head:
Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn, Army of Dead, Zombieland, Zombieland: Double Tap, World War Z, The Last of Us, The Last of Us Part II, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombies (a game mode in multiple editions of the franchise), Resident Evil (multiple games), Left 4 Dead, and Left 4 Dead 2.
That’s not even the tip of the iceberg—and that’s only zombie content. If we were to open this conversation to all media whose subject pertains to armageddon, we’d be inundated. So why do we have so much content of that nature?
For one, the Bible did it first. The most widely read book of the last two millennia has a famous story of the apocalypse—so it’s no wonder that the concept of a world-ending event is firmly embedded in the collective cultural psyche of the west. And, because this idea is so familiar to us, modern storytellers can repackage it in all sorts of formats (from alien invasion to zombies) and we find it to be entertaining.
Secondly, (and much less scholarly of me to suggest) armageddon is juicy. It’s big. It’s dangerous. It’s got built-in high stakes—actually it has the highest stakes. What could be more consequential than everyone and everything you know coming to end? This is why superheroes stories work, and why tales from WWII are so popular—if such and such didn’t happen, or so and so didn’t save the day, we might not even be here.
Finally, these types of stories are an expression of societal angst. It is a reminder—albeit often hidden behind too much CGI—that our species and our planet isn’t invincible, and more often than not, it’s a story of how we might bring this upon ourselves: God is pissed because we sinned. Aliens attacked and we weren’t ready and we couldn’t work together to stop it. And best of all, the world is ending because unrecognizable versions of ourselves (zombies) are attacking.
What Happens After The End?
Interestingly enough, the end isn’t really the end, is it?
That’s why I like zombie stuff. It isn’t about the zombies eating everyone and thus destroying everything. The very existence of zombies is already the end—by the time everyone figures out what the fuck is happening, the undead have done enough damage to change the way our whole species operates. And this brings me back to The Last of Us.
It’s a game that doesn’t try to “save the world.” In fact, it takes place 20 years after the initial outbreak. Life is now a stroll through a knee deep ocean of shit, and you have to get with the program or literally die. And that! That is why we really really like this stuff!
From WWII to World War Z to War of the Worlds—we like these tales because they put human beings in life or death situations. Every decision and action means something, and consequences can be dire. Survival or death, is largely up to the individual, and it’s captivating to see those individuals be ultimately responsible for something that really matters.
That’s why I couldn’t stop daydreaming about the game and the world it portrays; it’s the antithesis of our own experiences. It’s a world which lacks Modern Anxiety. In fact, Modern Anxiety and “life or death” are practically opposites.
So much of our concerns, worries, corruptions, backstabbing, power grabbing, whining, bullying, hesitations, kindness, attention seeking, and whatever beautiful and grotesque things we do to each other or to the environment or to ourselves has fabricated reasons of import behind them.
But if we could, if only for a moment, be transported to a world like The Last of Us, we’d be able to recalibrate our value of everything. Politics, currency, material possessions, and countless other elements of our status quo all go poof! Food, shelter, sleep, trusted friends, and waking up each morning all increase in worth by 1000 fold—or at least our perception of their worth does.
In truth, what’s valuable in a post apocalyptic world is still valuable in ours—but we so often forget that.
And all our mechanisms of survival that would spring into action when the undead attack, are still within us now. You would assume these instincts of survival are bored, desensitized, and covered in cobwebs since we have mastered survival in some ungodly ways—but no, they’re still active.
And since they aren’t pinging us like “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST MY ENGLISH TEACHER IS A ZOMBIE!” or “HOLY SHIT THAT GRIZZLY BEAR IS GOING TO FUCKING KILL ME!” they instead ping us for situations and concerns that aren’t life or death at all. Like, “If you don’t do well in this interview you’re going to die, you miserable failure piece of shit!”
In my non-medical, non-neurological-biologist opinion, this is all a formula for a lot of unnecessary (modern) anxiety, and the reason why apocalyptic content is so thrilling.
Immersing ourselves in content which features zombies or aliens or ghosts or anything life-threatening, is fulfilling a piece of us that’s become ignored and disrespected—the very piece of us that got us this far. And more importantly, reminding us, that things could be much, much worse.
So watch The Last of Us when HBO releases its adaptation—or better yet…do something literally dangerous—it’s probably good for you.
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Great article! It is fascinating to think about why we crave such content. I think another important reason is that this sort of survival vs death gives a human being purpose for one's own life. This apocalypses strips down the core concept of life versus death while also pushing the existential question of what it means to live one's life.