Love in the zombie apocalypse
On HBO's *The Last of Us*, theology of death, and eschatology
Gentle reader,
The technicalities of contemporary life make for a storytelling challenge. Cell phones are ruinous for story arcs, robbing of us mystery, convincing us of mastery. I suppose this is part of the reason we’re now living in such a great age of genre fiction.
If you want to tell a story about what it means to be human, write about mutants. If your story is about power, write medieval fantasy. And if you want to write a story about love, apocalypse is the way to go. For love stories, the zombie apocalypse may be best of all. Wealthy contemporary folk pretend that we’re insulated from death, but zombies force the question of what it means for us desperate mortals to love in the face of our mortality.
As Alexander Schmemann has it, we all have to answer the question; “in the final analysis, how do I personally relate to this inescapable, universal, and relentless question about death?”
On Schmemann’s analysis, every religion and philosophy ultimately tries to gloss over the horror of death, to pretend death is not a mortal wound (circle of life, anyone?). Every one, that is, but Christian faith, which reveals death for what is: a terrible enemy, an enemy conquered in the resurrection of Jesus.
“In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited *this* world, gave it up decidedly to death…Why has [death] become so powerful that the world itself has become a kind of cosmic cemetery, a place where a collection of people condemned to death live either in fear or terror, or in their efforts to forget about death find themselves rushing around one great, big burial plot?” —Alexander Schmemann, Oh Death Where is Thy Sting?
Death with a Woman in His Lap (Tod Mit Frau Im Schoss), Käthe Kollwitz, public domain.
HBO’s zombie apocalypse, The Last of Us, is a magnificent story of mortal love. It may be the best television I’ve ever watched. If you want to avoid spoilers for the show, stop reading, and go and watch it now.
The Last of Us is based on a video game, a medium my teen son sees as the future of storytelling. Reports are, the series is quite faithful to the game, which, as something a player participates in, makes for an immersive story. I can feel this in watching the TV series as well; the viewpoint character’s is our viewpoint too.
We open at the outbreak of the apocalypse. It takes only a few days for the fungus to overtake the world, turning its victims into zombies, using its host’s body to live, move, and bite new hosts. Most of the first episode is from the viewpoint of Sarah (Nico Parker), a teenager going about her day, but this day is the one where the world falls apart. We meet Sarah’s dad, Joel (Pedro Pascal), and feel the tightness of their relationship, no mom in view; the only other person with any claim on them is Uncle Tommy (Gabriel Luna), who is still peripheral to the tight “us” of father and daughter. Joel, Sarah, and Tommy try to flee, a panicked military shoots, and Sarah dies in Joel’s arms.
We’ve been set up by heartbreak to jump forward 20 years and live the story through Joel’s eyes, the viewpoint of a man so stripped and broken, he is as much a zombie as are those who’ve been infected. Here we stand, a good way out from the red adrenaline panic of the apocalyptic beginning and deep into life in a society reorganized by disaster, bleak and gray. We’re in an analogue to the move from red Covid 2020 to gray Covid 2023. Are we still too traumatized to watch and learn, or can we navigate a way forward, for love, in the face of death?
“Dead people can’t be infected,” says Joel. He’s living, now, in a militarized quarantine zone, carved out of a bomb-scarred and barb-wired Boston. His day’s work is burning the bodies of the dead. And we meet our second protagonist, 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey). She’s chained to a radiator, bombarded with questions. Is she showing any sign of turning into a zombie? She’s not. Ellie’s been bitten, but she’s not a zombie. Her body is resurrection hope.
Joel and his partner Tess (Anna Torv) agree to get Ellie out of the quarantine zone and into the hands of rebels who believe her immunity can unlock a cure to the zombie plague. What can’t be overemphasized here is Joel’s lack of care, lack of hope, lack of desire to shepherd Ellie. Joel’s a zombie, but Ellie—though scarred—is not. They’ll spend the next eight episodes working their way West, fighting a treacherous world. They’ll embody the American story of manifest destiny—wondering if it’s possible, sometimes trying desperately to believe it could be possible, edging towards hope it might be possible, but never quite finding it possible—to turn that story of violence into a story of love.
Each episode that follows is a microcosm for love; each could almost stand alone as it open’s love’s windows to us. Few characters, besides Ellie and Joel, appear in more than one episode. Episode three is the best episode of television I’ve ever seen. It’s impossible to do it justice, but within a grim show, it’s a bright window into a beautiful love, a foil to all that Joel and Ellie lack. Somehow, decades of a love life, tender and difficult, are compressed into about 45 minutes.
“The resurrection of the body - what do we really mean by this? ... We [must] consider more profoundly the meaning of the body … On the one hand, of course it is entirely clear that all of our bodies are transitory and impermanent … In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others; it is my life as communion and as mutual relationship. Without exception, everything in the body, in the human organism, is created for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of oneself. It is not an accident, of course, that love, the highest form of communion, finds its incarnation in the body; the body is that which sees, hears, feels, and thereby leads me out of the isolation of my *I*. —Alexander Schmemann, Oh Death Where is Thy Sting?
The episode begins with Ellie and Joel on the move, navigating a landscape of bones. (Pascal and Ramsey are some of the finest nuanced actors I’ve ever seen). Since leaving Boston, they’ve suffered more trauma, and to one another, they are locked doors. Joel plans to leave Ellie with his friends Bill and Frank and so to be done with whatever duty he has.
Photograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO
Then, we flash back; it’s much earlier in the apocalypse. Bill (Nick Offerman) is a survivalist; he locks himself in his gun filled basement to avoid military relocation, and he settles in for a solitary life of fenced in pleasures. Frank (Murray Bartlett) falls into a pit trap, dug by Bill to protect his perimeter, and, shortly after we become reasonably sure that Bill won’t, in fact, shoot Frank, they settle in for a dinner of rabbit and a good bottle of wine, and a decades long love story ensues.
Bill and Frank embody the polarization of the Covid apocalypse. They are on two sides of a ravine which love somehow bridges, not as sentimental nonsense, but as hard earned, hard kept, hard lived faithfulness. Though he’s the gruffest of recluses, a double for Joel with his locked-door heart, Bill finds that a beautiful dinner alone is not really a beautiful dinner. But years of dinners with Frank are a love life. Frank plants flowers. Bill is baffled. “Paying attention to things,” says Frank, “it’s how we show love.” Even though I disliked the ending, I’ll reiterate the beauty of this love story. The performances are a miracle.
But a contingent of fans hated the episode. It changed the story from the video game. It took us away from Joel and Ellie. And where were the zombies?
Ah, but loves, the point of a zombie show isn’t the zombies. The point is love. With cell phones and false assurances all cleared away, we can focus on love. The stripping of the apocalypse lays love bare, and though zombies won’t take Bill and Frank, death will still come for them, for death stalks every love story. We’re all living the zombie apocalypse.
They say it’s impossible to write an interesting story about a happy marriage, as if human stories without antagonists were a possible thing, but there’s no human love not stalked by predatory death, no love made boring by lack of threat, (though we act like there is, as if that were the goal, some frictionless paradise devoid of plot twists). The zombie apocalypse means we have to stop acting. Death comes for us all. To Frank, Bill says, “I was never afraid before you showed up.”
… the body is not the darkness of the soul, but rather the body is its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, the soul as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement. And this is why, when the soul loses the body, when it is separated from the body, it loses life.” —Alexander Schmemann, Oh Death Where is Thy Sting?
Bill and Frank show us one love, with its risks and compromises. Even in its beauty, it isn’t safe for mortals. Another episode will give us the tangled knot of weighing love for a brother against love for the community. Still another offers a utopian community—significantly, built like a frontier Western movie set—where the people try to embody love but can do so only by violently policing their walls. We’re in the great wide West, we haven’t seen a zombie for miles, but an elderly Native American couple (Graham Greene and Elaine Miles) warn Joel and Ellie that the direction of the utopia is the direction of death. Nearing the end of the season, an episode opens a dystopian twisting and disordering of love, a preacher claiming love but dealing death, literally feeding his starving people on the flesh of their beloved dead; there are zombies out there, but it’s the humans in here who are eating each other. How do we love in the apocalypse? Is there any hope at all for a heart as numb as Joel’s?
Another flashback episode takes Ellie and her best friend to an old mall, a creepy, neon-lit setting, a time-capsule strewn with the detritus of capitalism (looters grabbed all the sneakers but left the Victoria’s Secret thongs behind. Apocalypse can bring a certain clarity).
In 2009, James KA Smith, wrote of the mall as a place where worshipers enact cultural liturgies which “aim our love” away from God, a place whose embodied liturgies “are grabbing hold of hearts and capturing imaginations, shaping our love and desire, and actually forming us in powerful, fundamental ways.” In 2023, both in the real life USA and Ellie’s post-apocalyptic city, malls are derelict, hollow shells, their decline accelerated by global pandemics. While Smith’s critiques were insightful, malls were also hubs for community, and the kids who once hit the mall with friends, giddy with freedom just like Ellie, too often, now, are zombies, alone in their rooms, eyes fixed on little screens, bodies stilled while desire still goes racing.
"I like the rug. It brings the room together." Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Tess (Anna Torv) in HBO's The Last of Us. Liane Hentscher/HBO
And even in the ruins, in that grayed out fungal world, there is new life. In several key places in the story, green spaces open up in the wilderness. When Ellie is at her most broken, having had any remaining wisp of childhood ripped right out of her, she stumbles onto an oasis in the middle of the concrete rubble. She encounters, there, a giraffe. And as she nuzzles its neck and takes in its ethereal beauty, her face, which had gone inanimate and zombie gray, comes back to life and laughter. In watching Ellie’s momentary transfiguration, life starts to come back to Joel too.1
“Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?” — Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
A miracle: Joel’s heart does thaw. But, under the reign of death, we don’t get a happy ending. I could write reams on the brilliant ambiguity of that ending.
If death is the last word, it can seem we must weigh the life of the one against the life of the many, and Joel, in trying to love against death, becomes the apocalypse, doing so in the name of love.
But if death is a conquered enemy, we, who inhabit this zombie apocalypse, can love in hope and hope for something more.
“I refer to the Gospel account in which Christ weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus. We need to pause and consider the meaning of these tears, for in this very moment there occurs a unique transformation within religion in relation to the long-standing religious approach to death … Up to this moment the purpose of religion … consisted in enabling man to come to terms with death, and if possible even to make death desirable … But Christ *weeps* at the grave of his friend … Suddenly, death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’” —Alexander Schmemann, Oh Death Where is Thy Sting?
Grace and peace,
BFJ
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For readers interested in the conversation about Christian sexual ethics and the Josh Butler article at TGC, I responded last week to claims that criticism of Butler amounts to prudishness about sex and a denial of the Christian tradition.
We have loved this show and YES, episode 3! (I love the stories, but ignore the games.) At various times I have imagined the zombie horde as the aging bubble of Boomers whose group is growing and seem so antagonistic, the political Them, and the numeratively small but voracious 1%. But maybe the real virus or fungus is the apathy, the overwhelm, and we are the zombies as you say, alone in the rooms, eyes on the small screens, essentially eating ourselves as we numb our discomfort. Church is where most of my real life connection happens outside of my home. It can be a source of tension and frustration, but also tenderness and authentic relationship. Can church be an enclave and faith be an immunization against the spiritual zombies? Clearly it should be.
That Love in the Ruins quote is my inspiration for the week, thank you.
YEAST ALERT - YEAST ALERT - YEAST ALERT!!!!!!!