The Last of Us: An Unconventional Take

As the amount of media content on offer has burgeoned, so has the quantity and intensity of the claquing intended to convince us that each and every last banal product of the colossal Masscult-generating machinery that is Big Media is a work of staggering, heart-breaking genius offering an experience we will never forgive ourselves for missing out on the least little bit.

I have long since come to find this wearying--so much so that even the occasional glance at the entertainment news is so often tiring, with all this especially going for the "prestige TV" churned out by the Midcult division of the Masscult machinery, the claquing on behalf of which has made the unhinged levels of critical acclaim with which The Sopranos was presented to the world increasingly the norm. Recently this claquing has extended to The Last of Us, which seems to be the successor to The Walking Dead as a prestige TV zombie show craze (because, apparently, someone decided that this trend simply cannot be allowed to end).

Naturally I have had an eye open for critical takes (especially when they did not fall into the standard, tiresome, "culture warriors vs. SJWs" pattern), with Ed Hightower supplying just that. As one might guess from his colleague Carlos Delgado's review of the game that was the show's basis as "a thoroughly miserable experience; nasty, gratuitously violent and misanthropic . . . more of a symptom of a coarse and violent culture than a commentary upon it," for Hightower the show "marks something of a new high-water mark for savage violence and self-assured misanthropy in the entertainment industry," with this drama in which "unspeakable cruelty" of various kinds is "most of the plot," in between acts of which cruelty the "dialogue barely rises above the level of grunts and barks." And, contrary to what those of fashionable, dark-and-gritty-loving taste may imagine, this was not meant as a compliment, the work not only repellent, but lazy, shallow and, rather than trite-but-true, trite-but-false throughout.

Sounds about right for this kind of thing.