The Last of Us Director proves why we can't have nice things

 >Sigh< They never learn, do they?

You know I did just do a blog about this which covers most of my usual points rather succinctly, but I feel the need to get a bit more specific now that we've got an actual fresh example to ruminate on. Example of what, you may ask? the sheer unfounded elitism of traditional media to any and all other forms of entertainment. And in some cases, such as the fellow we're talking about today, I will go so far as to say that it's probably a largely unconscious elitism. I don't think the show runner of the upcoming Last of Us show would agree to go sign onto a project like this if he wasn't at least enticed by what this game in particular had to offer him in adaptable material; but good lord does his blind arrogance echo a far more prevalent and widely accepted sentiment around the world that video games, animation and pretty much anything that isn't live action isn't quite real art in comparison to what they do.

A lot of the time in the past it has been by extracting this very clear underlying prejudice from very pointed comments, that I have been able to see the lack of respect so blatantly slathered on the faces of all those recent video game adaptation studios. The Halo TV show team lauded about how not a single one of them played the game, and then delivered a product that failed to capture the vibe, charm or point of the source material. (Shocker!) The Resident Evil TV show was just helmed by a man who suffers from terminal CW show brain, and decided to run the decently adaptable Resident Evil franchise through the 'creativity' blender to spit out one of the most disappointing soggy messes of a one-and-done 'series' I've sat down and endured in a very long time. Which isn't to say that lack of respect for the source material will automatically result in a worse product, mind you; but not everyone out there is Stanley Kubrick with his hands on a Stephen King novel. Unless you're an auteur, it's probably advisable to stick to the original material and what made it special.

To which The Last of Us show is said to be a rare exception according to the director behind the games, although I wouldn't exactly take the word of Druckmann at face value, I'm inclined to agree that for everything I've seen, this show looks frighteningly accurate to the games. But then, The Witcher series was driven by people who regularly proclaimed how much loved the books, only for the show to veer wildly from the source material and ultimately veer of in it's own direction. Same with Rings of Power; same with whatever adaptation Netflix and co are working on next. This isn't me trying to establish the precedent that The Last of Us is going to veer into mediocre territory, that's just an unpleasant side product of all these deviations, what I'm trying to highlight is the sheer lack of respect from modern adaptors for the material they're working on, particularly when that material comes from video games. 

I think video games get the most dismissive of adaptations because our passtime is seen as the most juvenile of established entertainment vectors. It's also the most profitable which provides some of the more toxic flavours of the hipster phenom, where snotty TV directors can wax lyrical at how the 'mindless masses' flock to 'inferior platforms of entertainment' because they simply 'don't know better'. Animation, anime, video games; are all lesser forms of art in the face of these higher people, who somehow never learn the simple lesson of how certain platforms can simply do some things better than live action can. Hands down. Animation is better at realising fantastical characters whilst imbuing human emotion that an audience can connect with; but Disney still made their photorealistic (because the term 'live action' is a wild misnomer here) Lion King movie. Anime can covey bombast and speedy movements better than real actors could ever hope to; but there's Cowboy Bebop with it's crappy live action adaptation! And games... we'll get into it.

There's no point picking apart the statement until we absorb it for ourselves. So here it is, an excerpt from a larger interview with the man who is show running the upcoming Last of Us TV adaptation. "When you're playing... when you die you get sent back to the checkpoint. All those people are back, moving around in the same way. Watching a person die, I think, ought to be much different than watching pixels die." Now the responses have very much been obvious; poking fun at the fact that 'hey, films are fake too, my man!' To diving into the actual meaning behind the statement (Which he touches on a bit later in the interview) and picking apart how the desensitisation of violence is not a video game specific occurrence, painting a whole medium with a single brush is always, invariably, going to bite you on the arse. But even beyond everything that has already been said I just have to remark, personally, about how genuinely disrespectful it is. 

Because I understand the poorly chosen words spoken by a man who is trying to hype up his show, and everyone gets a little marble mouthed and says the wrong thing here or there, but to phrase what he did in the way he did speaks volumes about the way he's trained to view gaming as a medium. He doesn't see it as valid. He sees games as flat and emotion-compromised, lacking the impact of the 'higher art form' which live action represents. That his mind could only conjure up a compliment of his medium by denigrating ours tells us all we need to know about the mindset of the man, and talented though he may be, and the man is talented, it sucks to hear that. Because at the end of the day, my problem is the confidence with which this man talks about a medium he clearly knows absolutely nothing about.

This isn't the first time he's done this, by-the-way, but I regarded the last remark as too flippant to really dive in to. But let's go back this time. In another interview with Empire magazine the man said "It's an open-and-shut case: This is the greatest story that has ever been told in video games." And again, I can't help but draw issue with that sentiment. With what experience does he make such a bold assertation? Is he taking into account the sweeping narrative of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater? The greatest James Bond story, and it doesn't even feature James Bond? Is he placing his series above the original Bioshock, the first game to subtly slide past the confines of the Magic Box and ask the player, not the protagonist, but the player with the controller in their hands; what the concept of 'agency' even means? Surely he's accounting for 'Fallout: New Vegas', the expertly complex web of stories so robustly constructed that they can come together in an uncountable number of narratively coherent variations! And what about Yakuza 0? The greatest crime drama story told on any medium, perfectly balancing melodrama, absurdity, romance and heartbreak! He must have factored all those into account, right? And the dozens upon dozens more examples beside? Of course not, because he knows nothing about any of those games.

Which is fine, by the way; the man doesn't need to know a single thing about the wider gaming market to adapt The Last of Us. All he needs to know, is The Last of Us; (But he has to know it well; we don't need another 'Halo the TV show' situation on our hands.) everything else might as well be white noise. But to use that platform of privilege that he has been granted as the showrunner on the most anticipated video game TV adaptation to date, placed on a pedestal as the unofficial (and I'll bet unwitting) ambassador of video game narratives to the mainstream world, and to spout indirect, and more recently actually direct, disparaging remarks about matters he knows nothing about is simply asinine and insulting. I trust the man knows what he's talking about when it comes to making TV shows and everything that happens in the world of TV entertainment and I genuinely believe he's going to make, at the very least, a watchable show out of The Last of Us. (Which would itself be a vast upgrade from the usual offerings) But with the utmost respect, which he clearly does not return, he needs to sit down and stay out of his lane because he is a frank embarrassment to our medium. Stick to TV, Mazin; play to your strengths.