Dystopias Are Necessary Escape Fantasies →

“Why do I not find this depressing?”

That’s the question I find myself asking throughout season one of The Last of Us, HBO’s blockbuster videogame adaptation, the latest entry in the thriving genre of post-apocalyptic dystopian fantasy stories, many of them (like this one) involving flesh-eating (or at least very bite-y) zombies.

It’s well done, of course. The premise—that a mutation has enabled the Cordyceps fungus to colonize human bodies and minds, turning us into zombie spore-carriers—is an original twist on the genre. The screenplays by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin are crisp, intense, and often mordantly funny (dark humor helps in a world where, at any moment, a zombie might pop out from behind a crumbling armoire and vomit spores into your mouth.) The performances of lead actors Bella Ramsay and Pedro Pascal are psychologically nuanced and moving, especially remarkable given that their activities in this bleak landscape are mostly limited to fighting and fleeing. The scenic design is marvelous, too—titanic downtown development complexes transformed by neglect and ever-persistent nature into verdant, ruined grandeur, reminiscent of the Talking Heads’ song “Nothing But Flowers”:

This used to be real estate
Now it’s only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it’s nothing but flowers

But production values alone don’t answer my question. Neither does the easy observation that climate change and pandemics and political polarization have all of us feeling like the world is about to end, pretty much all the time. It’s not a good feeling. So why are we so hungry for stories about the world ending?

Another possible explanation: dystopian fiction offers us stories of hope in desperate times. In this season of The Last of Us, a traumatized father who has suffered the loss of a child learns to care again. A cynical teen, born and raised in a hellscape, learns the meaning of trust. We’re starved for hope right now, and these kinds of stories feed that need.

That’s part of it, surely: hope in desperate times drives the narrative in The Matrix, The Walking Dead, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale—every massively successful dystopian story-franchise I can think of. But their worlds are almost universally dark, ugly, war-torn, suffocating places. They amplify to the point of parody all the worst elements of contemporary life. Even Game of Thrones—on one level, arguably, an escapist fantasy story set in a universe very different from our own, is rife with political corruption, human cruelty, and existential threats that—dragons or no dragons—feel all too familiar to us.

So why do so many of us want to spend so much time in these places?

In 2000, the year that gave us the apocalyptic Y2K scare, Columbia University historian Jacques Barzun turned 93 and published From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. As the title promises, it’s a sweeping 800-page survey of Western civilization that traces recurring themes of the past 500 years in the Western world. Barzun puts these themes in all caps throughout the book: EMANCIPATION. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. PRIMITIVISM. And so on.

Toward the end of the book, he describes the mood in Europe at the start of World War I:

…It was exhilarating and righteous besides…. Long dormant motives burst into life: heroism—risking one’s life unselfishly to defend the homeland, its women and children… Altogether it spelled liberation from the humdrum of existence… A new life opened, free of corrupt motives and vulgar self-indulgence.

Barzun also notes the surprising phenomenon that most of the major intellectuals of the time, including many former pacifists, found themselves swept up in the tsunami of enthusiasm for a war that—in the rat-infested, corpse-strewn trenches of the Western Front—would give us one of our most enduring modern visions of dystopian horror.

Here, I think, we have a more satisfying answer. Dystopian fantasy appeals to us not because the world is ending, but because it isn’t ending fast enough. Or, as T.S. Eliot famously put it in his poem of post-WWI disillusionment, The Hollow Men, because the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.

We’re hungry for the liberating cataclysm.

This is where Barzun’s concept of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS comes in. Worries about our place in the universe, the accelerating pace of technology, and—since the birth of psychology, worries about worrying—keep the modern Western mind all wrapped up in itself (and/or the annoying neighbors). This started at least as far back as Ancient Greece, but it just keeps getting worse. I came of age in the 1990s. The music of the English band Radiohead has often been called a defining sound of that era—an era of anxiety and uncertainty that has only grown more intense since the turn of the millennium. In times like these, which Barzun describes as “decadent” in the sense that many people feel paralyzed, unable to settle on a clear course of action or direction for their lives, apocalyptic fantasies promise EMANCIPATION from fretful ambiguity. There’s nothing like a common enemy to take us outside of ourselves.

In a dystopian survival scenario, your life is a black-and-white struggle for survival in which you are unquestionably the hero. Careful viewers of The Last of Us will note that the “heroes” of that show make complicated ethical choices that are anything but black and white…and that, after all, even the zombifying mushrooms are ethically neutral; like us, they just want to survive…But by the end of season one at least, we’re rooting for Ellie and Joel as unambiguously as TV watchers of my father’s day rooted for the Lone Ranger.

Dystopias offer emancipation, too, from the boredom and loneliness of urban life. Survival in hell depends on close relationships. It’s cliché-because-it’s-true that war forges lifelong friendships among fellow combatants. And after a year and a half of sitting through Zoom meetings alone in your boxer shorts, the idea of fighting zombies might seem like a welcome diversion.

By PRIMITIVISM, Barzun means a desire—evident even in the Middle Ages—to simplify or empower our lives by escaping society and getting “back to nature” by various means. There’s no implied pejorative—society offers advantages but it’s also, always, a form of confinement. The urge to escape it is probably as old as civilization itself. In America, the start of the pandemic prompted a mini-exodus out of major cities to wildernesses where social distancing was less of an issue and where, hiking up an empty mountain trail, for example, one could forget for a while about masks and lockdowns. What few could escape, then or now, was the circumscribed world that social media and smartphones have made for us, or that we’ve co-created with them…the endless feeds and ads and lifestyle nudges that for so many of us provide the invisible architecture of our lives.

In dystopian worlds like The Last of Us, cellphones don’t work. “Branding” doesn’t matter. Nor does what kind of water bottle you have, so long as you can manage to find clean water. Mortgages and landlords and gentrification are non-issues. Forget the enervating ethical dilemma of which eggs to choose at the supermarket (free-range, free-run, organic, Omega-3, furnished, enriched, nest-laid…): if you come across a deer in the forest (as Ellie does at one point), you kill it and you eat it as an alternative to starving to death. Primitivism here (as always) is a form of emancipation, a fantasy of freedom from the structures of daily life.

No matter how attached we become to any of the structures we build (religion, family, community, the Internet), some aspect of our humanity is always imprisoned within them. Some part of us feels the urge to knock them down. Total upheaval seems to promise renewal, which brings us back to “hope in desperate times.” There’s a belief that if everything falls apart, something new, better, more natural or real might eventually take its place. There’s a belief that we might finally be free.

Dystopian stories (even when they’re quite nuanced like The Last of Us) allow us to escape—for a while—the boredom, the complexity, and the creeping dread of contemporary life. For 45 minutes or so, we get to imagine what it would be like to burn it all down and start over again. It’s a controlled burn—much like the experience of catharsis Aristotle described in the context of Greek tragedy, watching (for example) the Bacchae tear Pentheus to pieces with their bare hands. It lets us expend pent-up emotional energy and return (a little less anxious, maybe) to the concerns and complications of our 21st century lives.

The word “escape” has a mixed reputation. That’s because we only have the one word for the kind of experiences that make us a little freer and those distractions that tend to turn into their own kind of prisons. Dystopian fantasy is the former type; by taking our everyday horrors to their logical conclusion, it lets us pan out from the grind of hand-to-hand combat with existience and see the whole battlefield at once. It gives us some breathing space and a sense of strategic perspective. Perhaps it gives us a glimmer of much-needed hope or clarity. Or, at the very least, it makes us take a deep breath and think: “Dude! I need to chill. Those guys have it SO much worse.”