The Future Pasts of The Last of Us Part II
Grappling with visions of a possible America.
by Paul Walker-Emig
America, like any other nation, is a construct supported by a series of fantasies. These fantasies help create what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community” via a shared vision of what America “is”.
Think of the concept of “manifest destiny”, or self-aggrandizing labels like “land of opportunity” and “leader of the free world”. These ideas often maintain a degree of plasticity—the concept of the “American Dream”, for example, is flexible enough that it can encompass immigrants building new lives under conditions of equality, middle-class suburban utopias with white picket fences and two cars to every home, or the illusion that you have as much chance as anyone to accumulate extreme wealth through entrepreneurship and hard work. But even that flexibility seems insufficient at a time when the nation is so remarkably fractured. The Donald Trump presidency, the Black Lives Matter movement, the climate crisis, growing inequality, and Covid-19 have all revealed tensions around ideas of freedom, equality, democracy, opportunity, and other politically-charged concepts that are difficult to incorporate in any coherent, shared national vision. This difficulty is something that The Last of Us Part II, Sony’s recently released prestige videogame for the PS4, struggles with. It is an artifact of a culture in crisis.
The game cycles through a number of different visions of America, returning to touchstone moments in its history as if testing the degree to which they still fit in 2020. Near the game’s opening the player, taking on the role of a young woman named Ellie, steps onto the main street in Jackson, a town built by survivors of a zombie apocalypse who are trying to build a stable new life in the wake of the destruction of the old world.
You could be forgiven for doing a double-take and wondering if you had accidentally slotted Red Dead Redemption 2 into your PlayStation 4 instead: wooden walkways line wooden houses, horses walk the streets, the sounds of a banjo being plucked drift through the air. Jackson feels like a frontier town straight out of a Western. Even the snow that lines the streets can’t chill the sense of comfort the game finds here. But that bliss can’t last, and this brief moment of nostalgia for a time long gone must be quickly cast aside in the face of a world that can no longer accommodate it.
This young girl who has done nothing to deserve the horror she has had to live through will never know the relative safety and comfort of that lost world.
We encounter another fabled American age in a flashback scene where Joel—Ellie’s father figure—surprises her with a trip to an abandoned museum on her Birthday. The pair wander past old exhibits and dinosaur bones on their way to a climactic scene where they enter a section of the museum dedicated to space travel. After perusing models of spacecraft and a collection of space suits, Ellie eventually hops into an old shuttle. Joel surprises her again with a tape. Ellie slots it into her walkman, puts on her headphones, closes her eyes, and finds herself listening to a recording of an old launch sequence. She allows herself to be enveloped in the fantasy as she hears the countdown, a smile beaming across her face in anticipation. She feels the rumble of the engine as she lifts off, transported for a moment into another time and place, before it all fades away and she is back in a bleak and brutal present. This scene is presented as something happy and joyful, but it’s hard not to feel a tinge of sadness, too. This young girl who has done nothing to deserve the horror she has had to live through will never know the relative safety and comfort of that lost world. She lives in this new reality of violence, terror, and scarcity. She cannot go back.
Neither can we. Part of the sadness we feel for Ellie is because we share her sense of loss. This scene expresses a collective cultural nostalgia for Space Age America that resonates well beyond the experiences of Joel and Ellie. Ellie herself is well aware that her fascination with the space age is not just about the futuristic technology associated with it, but about what that age represents: when Joel asks her to explain her fascination with space travel, she replies, “people in your time, they had it easy.”Indeed, the space age was congruent with the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism”, a time of relative economic stability where mild wealth redistribution and a more robust welfare state made it far more believable than it is today that capitalism could deliver on its promise of providing ever-more prosperity to all. This post-war boom helped make a certain idea of “progress” constitutive of the American (and, arguably, global) psyche—a belief that economic growth and new technology would ensure that things would continue to get better and that they would all reap the benefits. The technology that took men to the moon was a symbol of this era of optimism. It was a sign that America could achieve anything, a victory in its ongoing battle against communism that seemed to confirm not only the primacy of the union between capitalism and liberal democracy, but of America as its ultimate expression. The nation gathered around the most American of technologies, the TV, knowing that their fellow citizens were doing the same. Together, they could marvel at what their nation had achieved. They knew what America was. They believed in America.
The Last of Us Part II longs for this time where the American people believed, just as it longs for the perceived material prosperity of this golden age of capitalism. We should of course remember that nostalgia is always, at least in part, a fiction. Many were excluded from this “golden age” and, even though it is true that there were ways in which the average person was materially better-off in this period, the union between free-market capitalism and social democratic innovations like the welfare state and wealth redistribution was only ever a temporary one, with the wealthy inevitably moving to dismantle the infrastructure that helped insulate us from some of capitalisms worst effects over many decades. Even in that context, and even though our ambitions should be higher than retruning to a time where we were slightly-less exploited, we can be forgiven for feeling, like Ellie, that we have lost a measure of safety and security that should have been ours.
The Last of Us Part II longs for a time when the American people believed, just as it longs for the perceived material prosperity of this golden age of capitalism.
In finding that these visions of America no longer fit, The Last of Us Part II looks elsewhere. At the base of a militia called the WLF in Seattle—and to a lesser extent, Jackson—we get glimpses of an attempt to imagine a future that doesn’t rely solely on reanimating bygone eras of American history. Here we see small communities that raise their own animals, grow and share their own food communally, and even produce renewable energy. It calls to mind trends for small-scale self-sustainability, permaculture, and so one. Both in the game and in reality, these look like appealing but limited attempts to address the large-scale problems society faces. Growing your own vegetables and recycling isn’t going to reverse the apocalypse, be that a zombie outbreak or our ongoing climate crisis. The game can find no large-scale collective vision. This is indicative of the imagination deadlock that curtails our ability to think outside the confines of capitalism and adequately respond to climate change, spiraling inequality and the other key problems we face today. We are stuck with fragmented, piecemeal approaches that fall well short of the sweeping structural changes that are necessary.
We can find further problems in this stunted alternate vision if we look at the way that these small communities are shaped by the very-American culture of preppers and survivalists—a contingent preparing for some sort of doomsday event that typically blends self-sufficiency and survival skills with some combination of right-wing politics, conspiracy theory, libertarianism, gun culture, and military fetishism.
The WLF in particular is a fiercely militaristic culture, closer resembling the kinds of right-wing militias that patrol the Mexican border for immigrants than the anarchist mutual aid group it could have been. In that sense, it’s more fantasy prepper roleplay than it is a viable vision for the future. This is a vision that offers us social structures that can only be used to respond to a crisis after the fact, rather than an alternative that can avert it. There’s a famous phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson that is so often repreated that it feels like a cliché, but it is too relevant to avoid: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism”.
The Last of Us Part II takes another stab at providing us with a functional vision of America towards the latter part of the game when Ellie sets up home with her girlfriend Dina and her baby JJ to begin a new life together in an isolated old-farmhouse. It is a vision that Vice’s Rob Zacny referred to as “Settler Homesteading, but Queer”. In other words, it takes a deeply conservative vision of America—one where a nuclear family acquires their own property and land and can live self-sufficiently, free from the interference of society and/or government—and gives it a twist by splicing in some queer representation.
If The Last of Us Part II’s doomsday militias represent a vision of America deeply infected by a strand of the American right, here we have a vision emblematic of the liberal mindset; a politics that, unable or unwilling to imagine an alternative to the world as it is, can only offer a veneer of difference by appealing to diversity and eschewing systemic solutions. This is the same politics that can hail Google for celebrating feminists in its Google doodles even as the company faces law suits for systematically underpaying women in comparison to their male colleagues. As I write this, an incoming President Joe Biden appears to be in the process of freezing out an insurgent left desperate for fundamental systemic solutions to problems of racism and inequality, while winning praise for appointing women and people of color who share his politics to key positions and leaving the ones that don’t in the cold. It would appear that the tendency of liberals to favor of an aesthetics of progress over a substantive one will only continue.
Just as the game’s “queer homesteading” vision feels unsatisfying and incomplete, so too will a liberal response to Trump that makes superficial appeals to ideas of diversity and representation while leaving fundamental systemic problems untouched. That approach has helped deliver us one Trump, and there’s a good chance it will give us another. In The Last Of Us Part II’s struggle to find a satisfying vision for America’s future, we should see an opportunity. People are dissatisfied with America. They do not believe in it. This is a sign that there is space for a new vision to be built and realized. A vision that is collective, emancipatory and that can help deliver the radical change we need for a better future.
Paul is a video game critic and the host of a podcast about utopia called Utopian Horizons.
