Watercooler Shows, the trending series that everyone talks about the next day at the office, around the water cooler. Watercooler Wednesdays seeks to be a (critical) guide through the VoD maze: from masterpiece series to guilty pleasures, and from blockbusters that keep you on the edge of your couch to hidden gems; if it leads to bingeing, then it’s exactly what we’re looking for.

The Last of Us (Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann, 2023)

I’ve been waiting for The Last of Us to come out for almost two years, and not because I’m a big fan of the famous video game it’s based on. Actually, I was waiting for a good zombie horror – not necessarily this one (which has every chance to be great) – to follow through on some ideas that had sprouted since I wrote about another gem of the genre, Black Summer. And the global context at the time, that is, the pandemic – when post-apocalyptic narratives (both on screen and conspiracy websites) have flourished like mushrooms – has become even more surreal: we have a war in Europe and cold war vibes between nuclear powers.

The zombies in The Last of Us also seem to flourish like mushrooms, in fact, the zombies are the mushrooms. When everyone is focusing on viruses (bacteria-based apocalypses have become obsolete), HBO veers creatively into the fungal realm, fully aware that it must contend with the reality that overcomes fiction. The series opens with a scientific debate on TV (it’s the 60s), a Shakespearean invitation to the suspension of disbelief, only reversed, the reality of Covid-19 must be minimized: we have always won the fight against the virus, that’s not the real danger. The virus makes you ill, warns the eccentric epidemiologist whom everyone regards with scepticism, but “there are some fungi who seek not to kill, but to control (…) fungi can alter our very minds.” And the science behind this fiction is as interesting as it is creepy.

Open-world video game

The prediction turns into reality and humanity comes to a halt, technologically and culturally, in 2003, the year of the disaster. If Black Summer was basically a first-person shooter (with two speeds: sprint and sprint with a gun in hand), The Last of Us rather qualifies as an open-world video game. The series progresses slowly with successive accumulations of relevant details: a “Operation Desert Storm / Combat Veteran” car sticker tells us everything we need to know about our (anti)hero (played by Pedro Pascal), George Bush’s portrait smiles at students in a high school classroom for nostalgic effect, a long-paralyzed old woman twitches menacingly but barely perceptible in the background. Everything moves slowly and explodes violently out of nowhere.

Skipping forward in time – The Last of Us is an expert in flashbacks and flashforwards – the world of 2023 seems to have reached a precarious balance. After bombing the urban centres to eliminate the infection, the remnants of the government coalesced into a network of militarised quarantine zones (QZs), run more or less in an authoritarian/arbitrary way (percentages vary locally in good American federalist tradition). Joel, the military veteran mentioned earlier, remained the same workaholic: during the day he burns infected corpses, while at night he deals with smuggling. And the newest cargo he has to deliver to a group of rebels known as Firefly is Ellie (Bella Ramsey), an infected teenager who doesn’t get sick.

What follows is exactly that first-rate drama that everyone praises, wrapped in a survival road movie in which the cargo gradually becomes the adopted daughter, as the world gets bigger and bigger and more desolate. That’s also because The Last of Us turns its title into its motto with every episode, but respects its other characters enough to give them not just a memorable exit but the whole stage, allowing them to evolve three-dimensionally, not just as bait.

With all the narrative and temporal threads it weaves, The Last of Us can also pass as a frame story. Two such characters, who have made half the fans cry and the other half rise in revolt because of the “LGBTQ agenda”, are Bill and Frank, an unlikely gay couple. Unlikely because Bill is a gun-nut survivalist and conspiracy theorist before it was cool (remember, the world came to a halt in 2003). When the army came to evacuate his small town, Bill hid in his basement full of weapons. While his more confident compatriots were butchered by the side of the road, Bill proclaimed himself mayor and sheriff of the deserted town (until Frank knocked on his door), which he surrounded with barbed wire: every anti-immigration Republican’s dream.

Perhaps unwittingly, The Last of Us nailed it with this character deeply rooted in the American psyche, an eternal source of nightmares about the end of (their) civilization. The Last of Us is in fact about the last of the USA, like all on-screen (post)apocalypses. Speaking of which, the classic wide shots of the ruins of American civilization engulfed in vegetation are stunning, worthy successors to the original, Lady Liberty washed ashore in Planet of the Apes. There is a dialogue in this episode, a couple’s fight, that humorously highlights the inherent tension in the American body politic, illustrated on a micro-scale by the gay couple: “You live in a psycho bunker where 9/11 was an inside job and the government are all Nazis,” accuses Frank. “The government are all Nazis!,” Bill snaps back, exasperated. “Well, yeah, now! But not then.”

Looking from the outside, it’s fascinating how the American social contract always fails into fascism in these types of narratives, but also the appetite for such stories among those who produce them and those who consume them (there’s probably a revisionist post-apocalyptic zombie horror out there somewhere, in which the government does the right thing, as we are taught by all other American films).

The zombie apocalypse is the new western

The metamorphoses of the American dream are always dystopian, the ingenuity of the narratives lies in how it comes to that: bacteria, viruses, now fungi, pollution (leading to universal infertility in The Handmaid’s Tale), nuclear annihilation (which proliferated during the Cold War and will probably have a strong comeback), or civil war – all lead to an authoritarian society and obviously to rebellion. Thanks to these productions, the American Revolution will never find its end on the screen. Proof that it’s a strictly American thing is the total absence of the rest of the world, other affected countries are just red dots on the breaking-news map, famous monuments underwater or on fire, or attempts at localising the initial outbreak somewhere exotic (in The Last of Us everything started at a bread factory in Indonesia).

In a way, the zombie apocalypse is the new western, the defining genre for American cinema. On the one hand, there is this fascination for a new beginning, sometimes inevitably pushed towards the iconography of western films: leaving town and migrating to the sparsely populated West, on horseback and with a revolver in one’s belt. Magnificent landscapes, an ode to nature, are now magnificent ruins, an ode to a fallen civilization. Then, like in western films, it is always about negotiating a new social contract, that’s why the old order has to acknowledge its fascism (while in western films civilization was built from scratch). Funnily enough, the communities that elected those leaders who turned out to be fascists will now make the right choice (which is of course a charismatic leader, not a parliament). It could be argued that this kind of popular cinema also serves as a modern tragedy: by illustrating the status quo’s darkest nightmares, Hollywood exorcises and provides catharsis.

One thing is clear, and in that sense, The Last of Us gets it right, alt-right: after the fall of civilization, the new American dream will always be founded on the Second Amendment, the one that guarantees the right to bear arms. The American film industry (a progressive bastion) feeds exactly the plots residing in the obscure corners of the Internet.

The Last of Us is available on HBO Max.

Andrei Sendrea

Film critic and journalist, UNATC graduate. Andrei Sendrea wrote for LiterNet, Gândul, FILM and Film Menu, and worked as an editor on the "Ca-n Filme" TV Show. In his free time, he works on his collection of movie stills, which he organizes into idiosyncratic categories. At Films in Frame, he writes the Watercooler Wednesdays column - the monthly top of TV shows/series.