How ‘The Last of Us’ series haunts us – 04/10/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

I have several reservations about the apocalyptic-themed series that currently plague the film industry. Like every industry, its products meet market demands that reveal and shape our interests. The pleasure of seeing the place where one lives in ruins, so frequent in these productions, demonstrates our profound ambivalence for what we ourselves have built. Depending on the fictions we create, it becomes clear who, in the eternal dispute between Thanatos and Eros, is winning.

When watching “The Last of Us”, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the scenes in which humans are infected by fungus are not the center of the story. Always pathetic, uncreative and exaggerated, these characters could be replaced, without much loss to the plot, by any other factoid that would justify the dismantling of world society.

Be it the lack of water, global warming, the depletion of natural resources, “The Last of Us” is much more about the save yourself who can predicted for when everything starts to run out for everyone. The dystopian scenarios of the series take place in wealthy cities today, but they are not different from others in which penury has always been a reality. In the series, the oases of opulence and ostentation that still exist disappeared. Hence the chill of witnessing a very plausible outcome for the destructiveness of modern society. There’s nothing left for anyone.

In each episode, the two heroes, the handsome mercenary (Pedro Pascal) and the orphaned teenager (Bella Ramsey), find the different solutions that humanity provides for situations in which the survival of each depends on the balance of forces within the group. , the military, fanatic-religious, isolationist, scientific solution… Each one disastrous in its own way, except the community one, of course, which is worth one of the good jokes of the series. It is worth facing the eschatology to take advantage of an exceptional script, which avoids underestimating the spectator.

But what most draws attention in “The Last of Us” is the construction of the character Ellie, super well played by Bella Ramsey. One of the fundamental questions of our society is concentrated there, that which concerns the new generations.

Ellie is 13 years old and has never known what childhood is. Able to steal, destroy and kill like an adult mercenary, she reminds us of the child soldiers that exist in the world today. Let’s remember that childhood, that creation of the 18th century that aimed to prepare children for the bourgeois adult world, never contemplated all. She is not the only one, many groups respect children without having the same Western childhood project for them, as not all the care and protection offered to them aims to transform them into entrepreneurs or CEOs. Indigenous children, for example, have another model of childhood to protect and guide them.

Ellie, who, like many her age, has witnessed and participated in the worst that humans are capable of, is nonetheless a child. A child without the right to childhood, but still inexperienced and emotionally fragile. It is in this contrast that the character looms large, revealing the need for an adult to serve as a source of identification and confidence. If we want Eros to have any chance in the face of the epidemic of mindless people-eating humans that is intensifying with social networks, we need to rethink what we want to pass on to the next generation.

Certainly, mercenary adults are not the best option. More than saving humanity from the effect of man-eating fungi, it is necessary to think about how to save it from itself.

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