I think of "the last of us" as a popular example of a widespread contradiction in "American" cultural works: ostensible desire and effort for being "deep" and "real" resulting in the most banal superficiality. This story proposes to strip the veneer of civilization and show the real foundation and nature of human life. This world we are living in is impermanent and thus false. Just as an individual life will find its true meaning only after the death, human society will reveal its true face only after the inevitable collapse. All that is fine by me because you have to accept the basic premise of any fictional work to then judge it mercilessly by the goals it set itself for. So the question is whether the story comes close to this goal. In my opinion its barren world and normalized brutality actually hides away what it proposes to bring into view. The violence in the game is pornographic and banal. It has no content. But the worse part is, the story itself is, in its cliches and so called "depth" is also pornographic. It has no real depth because it has no real humanity so it tries to compensate this lack by brutality. Not just the scenes and fights but the story itself is brutal Joel kills his former friends who are genuinely trying to save humanity, without any visible remorse and no emotional repercussions. It is obviously acceptable to sacrifice a young girl's life if it has the chance to save all the next generations. This is not even debatable. Joel is a genuine monster who is incapable of thinking beyond his existence. The game clearly shows Joel's monstrous crime as acceptable and even respectable as part of the burden of being a father. In fact he "becomes" her father not by the countless murders he committed by that point but by choosing her life over all the other lives and practically choosing to sacrifice the whole human race by murdering selfless people who are trying to save it. You can't get more extreme than that.
The story's politics is at this point becomes obvious: Fireflies are a revolutionary organization who are trying to save humanity and in contrast Joel is a cynical opportunist and a murderer. The game puts Joel in the right by formulating sort of a trolley problem: one innocent girl's life for the rest of humanity. Isn't the choice obvious? Joel has to choose her life because he is her father figure. But what about all the countless children who will have no chance to grow up because of his decision? A human being at that point would feel really conflicted but still try to think beyond his own existence. But not this story's "hero". If you follow his logic you can even justify all the Zionist crimes. Because these people really think like that. They are sick.
I don't think "The Road" is a good or even a decent novel. The violence there is gratutious and pornographic too, the father son relationship which is supposed to be touching and real does not feel genuine at all. Cormac McCarthy too falters when he tries to become "deep" and "real". He obviously lost touch and he feels it too but he can't reach reality by this way. Blood Meridian is great because it is completely based on real events and a memoir.
Why is Fallout great? Because it is a western and it is a parody, it feels unreal all the time just like living in such a world would probably feel like. It is not "deep" and doesn't try to be. The violence is cartoonish and over-the-top. You are not really in the story but you are in fact surveying it from above. Everything is absurd but you are still trying to survive. In that essential sense it is more "realistic" than all the modern games put together.
The Road is likely Cormac McCarthy's worst novel (although Stella Maris probably comes close), but I do think it "succeeds" better at what The Last of Us is trying to with regard to making the metaphor of a contemporary parent's terror about protecting their child from the terrifying outside world in that the relative inhumanity and horror of the surrounding world produces an affective response that makes the intention more felt. But that does not mean that it is, of course, "good," I think McCarthy lost his shine after the Border Trilogy and lapsed into self-parody most of the time. Except for with the aforementioned Stella Maris, which was just perplexing. I do think however the point can be made that it's too pornographic -- another commenter made a really funny and neurotic post about how the "cauterized human cattle" section makes zero fucking sense and sees McCarthy give in to making something completely parodic in the pursuit of shock.
I disagree with regard to Fallout in that I DO feel like I am "in the story" in spite of how ridiculous it all is. I feel invested in the world and it often even feels touching at times, which contrasts well with its grand historical dialectical themes and its high satire.
I loved the complexity of the first ending because I was convinced Ellie knew. She’s too smart not to figure it out.
But she deals with it, because she realizes in that moment that if she sacrificed herself, it would kill Joel. So she chooses to save him over saving humanity, mirroring his decision to save her and elevating herself from witty MacGuffin to an actual protagonist with actual agency.
That ending, to me, is what made it a new and powerful story. But you gotta get that sequel money, I guess, and I suspect they were already talking about TV rights at that point, which is another incentive to bloat the franchise.
Perhaps I misremember but I'm pretty sure you can walk around the Firefly's base and read their research that makes it clear killing Ellie will almost certainly not produce a cure.
Watch the TV show with my girlfriend and it’s total dogshit. Entertaining enough to finish but total shit. Good review
P.s. the videogames you named as “art” are absolutely not “easily as important as the best books”, that is fucking insane. Shadow of the Colossus does not compare to Moby Dick
Good: Last of Us is mad overrated, kill Neil Cuckman.
Bad: Death Stranding is art? Fuck no lmao. You also put too much emphasis on Last of Us not being original, when it would suck even if it was. Example, parts of the Metal Gear franchise are borderline plagiarism, yet most of the games are still good.
Ugly: Uncharted is a worse Indiana Jones? Nonsense. Indiana Jones is a Jewish pedo professor who starts fights he can't win unless he fights dirty and kills innocent Germans and Arabs, which tbf most accurate WW2 movie? The second isn't as fun and the third doesn't need our protagonist, the fourth is underrated thobeit. Uncharted doesn't excel by trying to being artistic, it excels by trying to be fun. Neil Cuckman got rid of fat Drake and ruined the fourth game. It also has Amy Hennig as the writer, who is certainly the best character writer in the entire gaming industry. Neil Cuckman fired her because she wasn't feminist enough.
The allies declared war first and refused Hitler's peace offers, so yes in every sense. In Indiana Jones the titular Jewish pedo professor starts every fight with the Germans who are just digging in the sand and has to fight dirty to win.
So while I absolutely agree with the broad brush strokes of the article, I think it might be doing that thing where you become extra critical of something to try to balance out the excess of praise and admiration you feel it is getting, rather than because there is something really wrong with the thing.
My husband played most of the games you mention, and whenever he plays something with a storyline I tend to watch along. I have to say we absolutely enjoyed both The Last of Us and Dad of Boy, as games with a relatively strong storytelling aspect. I do agree that they would probably be judged differently if they were movies, but that is pretty normal, just as movies are judged differently to novels and comics are judged differently to paintings. You kind of look at what came before in that medium, not whether there is a Greek tragedy that did it better in Homer’s time, right?
I thought Dad of Boy brought up some legitimately difficult parenting questions, such as to what degree can you prevent your kid from possibly growing up into a little shit, especially if you are still dealing with your own unresolved trauma. That in a sense hits harder for me than losing a cub in the woods, since I am not worried mine will get carried off by wolves on his way to school but I am worried about what sort of person he will grow into, and how much I can influence that, and whether I even should.
Hmm, I wonder if you really felt this way or you're just mad 'cause you couldn't finish the game, haha.. i'm half joking there! but I agree with parts of your commentary and your greater point about videogames not needing to emulate cinematic art, though I still think the first game was a legit great gaming experience, haven't played the second one
You're frankly wrong about Primo Levi. He didn't move to Israel, he was critical of Israel (particularly in the '80s), and he would be critical of them today, but I think his position was more "liberal Zionist" than "anti-Zionist."
Yeah upon looking back into it I realized I was wrong about that, somehow remembered something by him where he was more explicitly against -- wishful thinking, probably, due to my respect for him. Unfortunately it is becoming harder and harder to find those in the Jewish intellectual and creative classes who aren't "at best" "liberal" Zionists, even some who otherwise pose rather scathing indictments of Israel historically. A lot of my Jewish friends, many of whom had for years expressed "Anti-Zionist" sympathies to me, have since October 7th surprised me (and disappointed me) by revealing a sort of preciousness about Israel I assumed would be beneath them. But I suppose when there's that much ancestral trauma + billions of dollars of Zionist international brainwashing its hard to not have at least a bit of it leak into you. No one is immune to propaganda, etc.
I clicked on this review to read, because I dislike the 'cinematic' nature of all contemporary video games, especially those I used to like, such as Skyrim or GTA. Video games provide a campy escape from reality. Why make them simulate reality to such an extent? Doesn't that sort of take the fun out of it? The intrusion of fast food and gym breaks into GTA IV was especially annoying. I have to eat and work out in real life, so why would I want to do so in a temporary sojourn, from real life? That particular issue was discussed at length online, while many players do like the push toward more realistic rendering, so I guess it could be driven simply by cash.
However, I didn't get the Road reference, because I didn't bother watching it. Post-apocalyptic screen food, just like most everything else cinematic made these days, is mostly crap. However, after reading about the Road in this review, I am now sort of wishing that I had not read the review either. It's not that the review is not well written, but honestly I am now too fixated on amputee cannibalism to deeply ponder the rest of it. Not having watched the Last of Us tv series either, I didn't realize the video game was some kind of biblical allegory set in a post-apocalyptic future, though I probably could have guessed it was something like that, from the title.
Back to amputee cannibalism, though...(I would not have posted here, but I could find no other online forums by googling this. Instead, I got a host of results related to xenomelia [the desire to have one's healthy limb removed], nutrition tips for amputees, and one story about a man who served up one of his own amputated body parts [ewwwww])
While, amputee cannibalism is certainly a concept that is useful for inducing horror and fright, where in the real world do people find it advantageous to amputate cow or pig parts, while keeping the livestock alive? It seems like it would be especially difficult to keep them alive, as you have to feed them something, in a food limited environment, to keep them even barely alive, especially after going through so much trauma as an amputation?
What is the utility then of keeping people alive, while amputating their limbs for food? Wouldn't it be easier to just kill and butcher them at once? Surely, there is still salt as a curing agent in this dystopian hellscape? It is, after all, a mineral, not a packet of Skittles, a Coke or even an apple. Wouldn't such a hypothetical cannibal also risk losing all the rest of the meat to gangrene? Surely, that would have happened once or twice and deterred them from that practice in the future?
Also, isn't cannibalism itself sufficiently dramatic? If it was good enough for Hannibal 'the Cannibal' Lecter, it's plenty good for me, as was Buffalo Bill's search for a woman 'suit'. I suppose if one is killed to be eaten, it would certainly feel especially unjust, but also, would it be much different experientially from simply being killed for your wallet? In both cases, you're being murdered, because someone else wants something you have, which sucks. I guess, it depends on whether you know they are going to eat you?
While Silence of the Lambs would not have been nearly as horrifying or scary, if the Cannibal were just on a killing spree to obtain wallets, I can see where incorporating torture probably does reliably pump up the fear quotient. Does it do it in the sense that 'this could actually happen' though? There is something much more viscerally scary about something that could really happen to you. Isn't that what makes bat-vampires kind of more of a fun-scary, rather than a scary-scary, concept?
I knew Cormac was prone to using violence a tad gratuitously, having seen some of his movies, though never having read his books. Yet, I didn't think of him as a horror novelist, certainly not one that uses tropes more appropriate to horror-for-the-sake-of-horror movies, like Saw or Human Centipede, rather than in a 'serious' post-apocalyptic drama?
Anyway, thanks for some disturbing food for thought.
Got a chuckle out of me. McCarthy had a reputation as an ardent researcher for his work but ultimately didn't consider the situation as closely as you did here because I suppose the morbidness of the scene infatuated him too greatly. I certainly think the "shock" potential in the book is a good way of making a reader really "feel" the desperation, but this kind of handling can also feel very cheap -- hence The Road doesn't land very high inn my esteem out of his books -- and with your considerations in mind almost seems farcical .
On the Israeli art footnote: I quite like Shye Ben Tzur, but obviously the styles and impulses there are distinctly not Israeli in origin, certainly not Zionist.
I just read your other essay on video games and the lack of aesthetic education in gaming. Glad to know I am not the only one that is embarrassed about the art world of a medium that should be producing higher quality works.
In the TV show for the Last of Us 2, they even included some gross person chained up and seemingly experimented on. The writer couldn’t resist that part of “The Road.” The beginning of the video game (original) seemed the most interesting but even there it’s a generic post apocalyptic genre piece. I can’t take the cinematic they are not movie quality and just force gamers to wait for gameplay.
I've been saying this for over a decade. You get me. Thank you.
I think of "the last of us" as a popular example of a widespread contradiction in "American" cultural works: ostensible desire and effort for being "deep" and "real" resulting in the most banal superficiality. This story proposes to strip the veneer of civilization and show the real foundation and nature of human life. This world we are living in is impermanent and thus false. Just as an individual life will find its true meaning only after the death, human society will reveal its true face only after the inevitable collapse. All that is fine by me because you have to accept the basic premise of any fictional work to then judge it mercilessly by the goals it set itself for. So the question is whether the story comes close to this goal. In my opinion its barren world and normalized brutality actually hides away what it proposes to bring into view. The violence in the game is pornographic and banal. It has no content. But the worse part is, the story itself is, in its cliches and so called "depth" is also pornographic. It has no real depth because it has no real humanity so it tries to compensate this lack by brutality. Not just the scenes and fights but the story itself is brutal Joel kills his former friends who are genuinely trying to save humanity, without any visible remorse and no emotional repercussions. It is obviously acceptable to sacrifice a young girl's life if it has the chance to save all the next generations. This is not even debatable. Joel is a genuine monster who is incapable of thinking beyond his existence. The game clearly shows Joel's monstrous crime as acceptable and even respectable as part of the burden of being a father. In fact he "becomes" her father not by the countless murders he committed by that point but by choosing her life over all the other lives and practically choosing to sacrifice the whole human race by murdering selfless people who are trying to save it. You can't get more extreme than that.
The story's politics is at this point becomes obvious: Fireflies are a revolutionary organization who are trying to save humanity and in contrast Joel is a cynical opportunist and a murderer. The game puts Joel in the right by formulating sort of a trolley problem: one innocent girl's life for the rest of humanity. Isn't the choice obvious? Joel has to choose her life because he is her father figure. But what about all the countless children who will have no chance to grow up because of his decision? A human being at that point would feel really conflicted but still try to think beyond his own existence. But not this story's "hero". If you follow his logic you can even justify all the Zionist crimes. Because these people really think like that. They are sick.
I don't think "The Road" is a good or even a decent novel. The violence there is gratutious and pornographic too, the father son relationship which is supposed to be touching and real does not feel genuine at all. Cormac McCarthy too falters when he tries to become "deep" and "real". He obviously lost touch and he feels it too but he can't reach reality by this way. Blood Meridian is great because it is completely based on real events and a memoir.
Why is Fallout great? Because it is a western and it is a parody, it feels unreal all the time just like living in such a world would probably feel like. It is not "deep" and doesn't try to be. The violence is cartoonish and over-the-top. You are not really in the story but you are in fact surveying it from above. Everything is absurd but you are still trying to survive. In that essential sense it is more "realistic" than all the modern games put together.
The Road is likely Cormac McCarthy's worst novel (although Stella Maris probably comes close), but I do think it "succeeds" better at what The Last of Us is trying to with regard to making the metaphor of a contemporary parent's terror about protecting their child from the terrifying outside world in that the relative inhumanity and horror of the surrounding world produces an affective response that makes the intention more felt. But that does not mean that it is, of course, "good," I think McCarthy lost his shine after the Border Trilogy and lapsed into self-parody most of the time. Except for with the aforementioned Stella Maris, which was just perplexing. I do think however the point can be made that it's too pornographic -- another commenter made a really funny and neurotic post about how the "cauterized human cattle" section makes zero fucking sense and sees McCarthy give in to making something completely parodic in the pursuit of shock.
I disagree with regard to Fallout in that I DO feel like I am "in the story" in spite of how ridiculous it all is. I feel invested in the world and it often even feels touching at times, which contrasts well with its grand historical dialectical themes and its high satire.
I loved the complexity of the first ending because I was convinced Ellie knew. She’s too smart not to figure it out.
But she deals with it, because she realizes in that moment that if she sacrificed herself, it would kill Joel. So she chooses to save him over saving humanity, mirroring his decision to save her and elevating herself from witty MacGuffin to an actual protagonist with actual agency.
That ending, to me, is what made it a new and powerful story. But you gotta get that sequel money, I guess, and I suspect they were already talking about TV rights at that point, which is another incentive to bloat the franchise.
I forgot but this reminded me, I'm pretty sure the first game makes it clear that carving up Ellie wouldn't actually produce a cure.
Yeah, you might be right. Like “this isn’t a guarantee but it’s our best and only shot”
no it dosen't
Perhaps I misremember but I'm pretty sure you can walk around the Firefly's base and read their research that makes it clear killing Ellie will almost certainly not produce a cure.
Watch the TV show with my girlfriend and it’s total dogshit. Entertaining enough to finish but total shit. Good review
P.s. the videogames you named as “art” are absolutely not “easily as important as the best books”, that is fucking insane. Shadow of the Colossus does not compare to Moby Dick
Good: Last of Us is mad overrated, kill Neil Cuckman.
Bad: Death Stranding is art? Fuck no lmao. You also put too much emphasis on Last of Us not being original, when it would suck even if it was. Example, parts of the Metal Gear franchise are borderline plagiarism, yet most of the games are still good.
Ugly: Uncharted is a worse Indiana Jones? Nonsense. Indiana Jones is a Jewish pedo professor who starts fights he can't win unless he fights dirty and kills innocent Germans and Arabs, which tbf most accurate WW2 movie? The second isn't as fun and the third doesn't need our protagonist, the fourth is underrated thobeit. Uncharted doesn't excel by trying to being artistic, it excels by trying to be fun. Neil Cuckman got rid of fat Drake and ruined the fourth game. It also has Amy Hennig as the writer, who is certainly the best character writer in the entire gaming industry. Neil Cuckman fired her because she wasn't feminist enough.
Innocent Germans in WW2.
Ok bud go shine that iron cross…
The allies declared war first and refused Hitler's peace offers, so yes in every sense. In Indiana Jones the titular Jewish pedo professor starts every fight with the Germans who are just digging in the sand and has to fight dirty to win.
Indiana Jones irl admitted to underage dealings. Thats factual brother. Dirty on screen and off.
Nazi shithead
Allied Satanist
So while I absolutely agree with the broad brush strokes of the article, I think it might be doing that thing where you become extra critical of something to try to balance out the excess of praise and admiration you feel it is getting, rather than because there is something really wrong with the thing.
My husband played most of the games you mention, and whenever he plays something with a storyline I tend to watch along. I have to say we absolutely enjoyed both The Last of Us and Dad of Boy, as games with a relatively strong storytelling aspect. I do agree that they would probably be judged differently if they were movies, but that is pretty normal, just as movies are judged differently to novels and comics are judged differently to paintings. You kind of look at what came before in that medium, not whether there is a Greek tragedy that did it better in Homer’s time, right?
I thought Dad of Boy brought up some legitimately difficult parenting questions, such as to what degree can you prevent your kid from possibly growing up into a little shit, especially if you are still dealing with your own unresolved trauma. That in a sense hits harder for me than losing a cub in the woods, since I am not worried mine will get carried off by wolves on his way to school but I am worried about what sort of person he will grow into, and how much I can influence that, and whether I even should.
I will keep reading, but "a cover of “Dead Flag Blues” played on the kazoo" stopped me in my tracks. The *precision* of it. God.
Hmm, I wonder if you really felt this way or you're just mad 'cause you couldn't finish the game, haha.. i'm half joking there! but I agree with parts of your commentary and your greater point about videogames not needing to emulate cinematic art, though I still think the first game was a legit great gaming experience, haven't played the second one
You're frankly wrong about Primo Levi. He didn't move to Israel, he was critical of Israel (particularly in the '80s), and he would be critical of them today, but I think his position was more "liberal Zionist" than "anti-Zionist."
Yeah upon looking back into it I realized I was wrong about that, somehow remembered something by him where he was more explicitly against -- wishful thinking, probably, due to my respect for him. Unfortunately it is becoming harder and harder to find those in the Jewish intellectual and creative classes who aren't "at best" "liberal" Zionists, even some who otherwise pose rather scathing indictments of Israel historically. A lot of my Jewish friends, many of whom had for years expressed "Anti-Zionist" sympathies to me, have since October 7th surprised me (and disappointed me) by revealing a sort of preciousness about Israel I assumed would be beneath them. But I suppose when there's that much ancestral trauma + billions of dollars of Zionist international brainwashing its hard to not have at least a bit of it leak into you. No one is immune to propaganda, etc.
I clicked on this review to read, because I dislike the 'cinematic' nature of all contemporary video games, especially those I used to like, such as Skyrim or GTA. Video games provide a campy escape from reality. Why make them simulate reality to such an extent? Doesn't that sort of take the fun out of it? The intrusion of fast food and gym breaks into GTA IV was especially annoying. I have to eat and work out in real life, so why would I want to do so in a temporary sojourn, from real life? That particular issue was discussed at length online, while many players do like the push toward more realistic rendering, so I guess it could be driven simply by cash.
However, I didn't get the Road reference, because I didn't bother watching it. Post-apocalyptic screen food, just like most everything else cinematic made these days, is mostly crap. However, after reading about the Road in this review, I am now sort of wishing that I had not read the review either. It's not that the review is not well written, but honestly I am now too fixated on amputee cannibalism to deeply ponder the rest of it. Not having watched the Last of Us tv series either, I didn't realize the video game was some kind of biblical allegory set in a post-apocalyptic future, though I probably could have guessed it was something like that, from the title.
Back to amputee cannibalism, though...(I would not have posted here, but I could find no other online forums by googling this. Instead, I got a host of results related to xenomelia [the desire to have one's healthy limb removed], nutrition tips for amputees, and one story about a man who served up one of his own amputated body parts [ewwwww])
While, amputee cannibalism is certainly a concept that is useful for inducing horror and fright, where in the real world do people find it advantageous to amputate cow or pig parts, while keeping the livestock alive? It seems like it would be especially difficult to keep them alive, as you have to feed them something, in a food limited environment, to keep them even barely alive, especially after going through so much trauma as an amputation?
What is the utility then of keeping people alive, while amputating their limbs for food? Wouldn't it be easier to just kill and butcher them at once? Surely, there is still salt as a curing agent in this dystopian hellscape? It is, after all, a mineral, not a packet of Skittles, a Coke or even an apple. Wouldn't such a hypothetical cannibal also risk losing all the rest of the meat to gangrene? Surely, that would have happened once or twice and deterred them from that practice in the future?
Also, isn't cannibalism itself sufficiently dramatic? If it was good enough for Hannibal 'the Cannibal' Lecter, it's plenty good for me, as was Buffalo Bill's search for a woman 'suit'. I suppose if one is killed to be eaten, it would certainly feel especially unjust, but also, would it be much different experientially from simply being killed for your wallet? In both cases, you're being murdered, because someone else wants something you have, which sucks. I guess, it depends on whether you know they are going to eat you?
While Silence of the Lambs would not have been nearly as horrifying or scary, if the Cannibal were just on a killing spree to obtain wallets, I can see where incorporating torture probably does reliably pump up the fear quotient. Does it do it in the sense that 'this could actually happen' though? There is something much more viscerally scary about something that could really happen to you. Isn't that what makes bat-vampires kind of more of a fun-scary, rather than a scary-scary, concept?
I knew Cormac was prone to using violence a tad gratuitously, having seen some of his movies, though never having read his books. Yet, I didn't think of him as a horror novelist, certainly not one that uses tropes more appropriate to horror-for-the-sake-of-horror movies, like Saw or Human Centipede, rather than in a 'serious' post-apocalyptic drama?
Anyway, thanks for some disturbing food for thought.
Thank god it wasn't a pickled human foot.
Got a chuckle out of me. McCarthy had a reputation as an ardent researcher for his work but ultimately didn't consider the situation as closely as you did here because I suppose the morbidness of the scene infatuated him too greatly. I certainly think the "shock" potential in the book is a good way of making a reader really "feel" the desperation, but this kind of handling can also feel very cheap -- hence The Road doesn't land very high inn my esteem out of his books -- and with your considerations in mind almost seems farcical .
On the Israeli art footnote: I quite like Shye Ben Tzur, but obviously the styles and impulses there are distinctly not Israeli in origin, certainly not Zionist.
I loved "The Stanley Parable", but whatever the intended point of "The Beginner's Guide" was went right over my head.
I just read your other essay on video games and the lack of aesthetic education in gaming. Glad to know I am not the only one that is embarrassed about the art world of a medium that should be producing higher quality works.
I like The Last of Us. I haven’t finished it either because the disc went missing. I’m sure it’s in a CD case somewhere.
As a game I like it better than Fallout NV, but not as much as 4.
In the TV show for the Last of Us 2, they even included some gross person chained up and seemingly experimented on. The writer couldn’t resist that part of “The Road.” The beginning of the video game (original) seemed the most interesting but even there it’s a generic post apocalyptic genre piece. I can’t take the cinematic they are not movie quality and just force gamers to wait for gameplay.
Very interesting review. I have written these themes myself in novels. I became an actual father, though, and that probably helps.