Little big death

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The thing about apocalypses is that they happen to everyone, and anything that happens to everyone all at once really freaks us out. I suspect this has something to do with the fact that most of us like to think that we’re (mostly) in control of our fates. Of course, on a fundamental level, that’s not true. We’re all locked into a personal apocalypse that’s coming at some time or another — that is, we’re all going to die. 

When that baseline reality spirals out into society at large, we lose our tenuous (perhaps deluded) grip on what we presume is our individual trajectory to the grave. One person dying in the hospital of an illness is sad, but within the tolerable, incremental pace of mortality. Millions of people dying in the hospital of an illness all at the same time is terrifying. 

Never mind that all of those people were going to die someday anyway; the fact that they’re all shuffling off the mortal coil within close proximity to each other vaults death from the scope of the individual (and therefore manageable) to the communal, and therefore out of control. That makes us feel smaller and more vulnerable than we already are, and we don’t like that. At all. 

Juxtaposing the personal and collective experience of an “end time” is at the core of every existentially-driven piece of art, from the Bible to disaster movies. That said, it’s a particularly critical tension at the heart of two recent pieces of big- and small-screen storytelling: the so-named film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise and the also-so-named HBO Max series adapted from the video game The Last of Us.

A screenshot from White Noise.

White Noise puts the apocalypse in the living room of an upper-middle class family in the 1980s. Two death-obsessed academic types and their kids have to navigate an amorphous “airborne toxic event” that puts their fears of mortality front and center, thereby also placing immense strains on the many fractures within their relationships. It is decidedly a personal rumination on the inevitability of death. 

The Last of Us is a collective armageddon, in which the world has been overrun by life (ironically) in the form of a rampant fungal infestation that invades human bodies and turns them into “zombies” who only seek to spread the mycological plague. In this scenario, almost everyone has been turned into mushroom people and only a hardy band of survivors remain not only to survive, but find a cure and therefore end the infection.

DeLillo’s novel, published in 1984 and winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1985, is widely regarded as a postmodern masterpiece and also impossible to bring to the screen. That’s a big reason why it’s taken almost 40 years — and director Noah Baumbach — to attempt it. The results have garnered mixed reviews: critics seem to mostly like it, but audiences have been more than a little dismissive.

A screenshot from The Last of Us.

That’s surprising, given the cast: Adam Driver as the “Hitler studies” professor and hapless husband Jack Gladney; Greta Gerwig as his wife and mortality foil Babette; and Don Cheadle as the cheerful scholar of Elvis, consumerism and car crashes Murray Jay Siskind.

People who don’t like White Noise the film probably wouldn’t like White Noise the novel, because the former really is a pretty faithful rendering of the latter: Gladney is as distinguished in his career as he is schlubby in his life — an international expert on the narcotic mass-cultural attraction of Hitler (i.e. Death), but he can no more speak German than he can exert authority over his own much more capable children. Babette, meanwhile, is not-so-secretly addicted to an experimental drug that removes the terror of death just as it causes memory loss. Siskind is almost like a Greek chorus, opining on the “optimism” of car wrecks in cinema, offering Elvis as a mass-culture counterpart to Hitler and wandering grocery stores like they’re European cathedrals.

When the caprice of a drunken truck driver causes a train derailment that spews an obscure toxic chemical into the air above their bucolic college town, all these characters must suddenly confront the reality (or maybe non-reality?) of actual (or perhaps simulated?) imminent (or creeping?) death among them. All the while, the family unit — which is described as “the cradle of the world’s misinformation” — stands as the shaky scaffolding on which Jack and Babette’s middle-aged death terror is erected and dismantled. 

That’s awful damn thinky for most American audiences. Boil it down, though, and you’ve got an incisive family dramedy that explores how individual, private death is cast into cathartic relief by the prospect of communal death, and that family is the first and most important form of community.

There has never been a better time since its publication almost 40 years ago for White Noise to reenter the zeitgeist. Screw the reviews, the masses are asses on this one. It’s more than worth a watch on Netflix.

By contrast, The Last of Us comes from much humbler origins (the 2013 game franchise by Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment), and travels much more familiar terrain. People love this series — now past its third episode, with new installments airing each Sunday — and are trying to get as thinky about it as they should be about White Noise, but aren’t.

Honestly, it’s a zombie apocalypse tale with all the tropes that entails. 

Pedro Pascal stars as Joel, the grizzled, damaged, yet-golden-hearted custodian of a “very special girl,” who is 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey). They have to use their awesome wits, guns and sass to deal with all the inconveniences and treacheries of a collapsed society, and etc., etc., etc.

Both are Game of Thrones alums, which might account for why they work so well together: There is seriously heart-warming chemistry between the two, as they break through the grotty proto-fascist strictures of their post-mushroom doom world in the Boston “QZ” (“quarantine zone”) to find Joel’s long-lost brother and deliver Ellie to whatever semblance of civilization still exists and serve as “humanity’s last hope.”

It’s super rote and boring on paper, but the set direction and characterization leave even the most cynical viewer actually feeling for these video game-inspired ciphers as they battle the ’shroomers, rapacious humans remnants, and (naturally) themselves and each other in a valiant bid to force individual survival above the relentless onslaught of global fungal rot.

Friends, enemies and allies come and go, struck down by bullets, infection or simply changing scenery along the quest (Episode 3, which aired Jan. 29 is particularly evocative, despite some thinly veiled homophobic gamer-dork howling); but, above all, the individual resilience of our heroes is underscored as the engine of collective salvation — even if the masses are asses, whether mushroomed or not.

White Noise and The Last of Us provide weirdly consistent notions about the centrality of community in the face of communal disaster (though, as the former would point out, those communities don’t do much good work when they’re reduced to screaming fan hordes for Hitler or Elvis, and the latter toys with the very definition of “group-think”). 

Regardless of the nuances, a central theme is that transmuting the personal fear or threat of death into deeper connections with those around us might not stop the apocalypse, but it certainly slows it to a manageable pace.

Stream White Noise on Netflix and The Last of Us on HBO Max.