Medium, Rare

Medium, Rare

Written by Travis Ryans

When Joel murdered a doctor in cold blood, I wasn’t sure how to feel. When the game cut to black after Ellie’s cryptic “okay,” I wasn’t sure how to feel. Both of those moments pale in comparison to the pained ambivalence of hearing that HBO will be adapting the story of The Last of Us into a television series. If Reddit is any indication, everyone else seemed elated by the prospect. So why was I so conflicted?

I mean, this is a terrible idea…right? Basic pattern recognition should tell us this is a terrible idea. Video games don’t make for great movies, we’ve learned this time and time again. Entire podcasts have been dedicated to showing how this form of adaptation is destined for failure. Either they’re hilarious campy messes like Super Mario Bros and Mortal Kombat, or they’re just mediocre action films like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. Interactive experiences just can’t be properly translated into a passive medium. At least, that was my initial reaction.

In 1964, media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. This adage, in short, posits that the medium by which a message is delivered (say, a story or a news broadcast), is just as crucial to the context of the message as the content of the message itself.

With my basic knowledge as a media student (dropout), I felt fairly justified in my suspicion of this new rendition of The Last of Us, but no one else shared my reservations. I felt like the Grinch listening down on Whoville as I watched the internet excitedly fan-cast the series, and speculate wildly about the various scenes and locales. I wracked my brain trying to balance out which screen adaptations had been done successfully, and which had been done poorly, when I realized that the comparison I needed was actually hiding inside The Last of Us all along.

It’s at this point that I would like to re-direct you dear reader, to watch The Last of Us Alternate Ending on YouTube. In it, Neil Druckmann playfully ambushes Troy Baker (the actor for Joel) and re-frames the ending as a musical without warning him. Whether this was a fun prank, a way to blow off steam, or an acting exercise to help explore the scene, it reveals a deeper truth about video games: they have an odd literary similarity to the Broadway musical.

The Broadway musical is a unique medium that was born out of a hybrid of theatre and opera, much in the way that video games are a cross between a physical game or sport, and a television series or film. It has also evolved as a storytelling medium, from empty spectacle to its current form of storytelling. That is to say, The Last of Us is to Pong, what Wicked is to Paris, a musical so bare of story that “critics could not find the plot.”

Each medium is at its best when it’s playing to its strengths, and they both give the audience unique perspectives that are not afforded to other visual media. Listening to Joel sing through his anger and confusion in that silly clip is actually a rare insight into his psyche that we can only approximate through his taciturn dialogue in a cutscene. Likewise, being in player control of Joel while he murders a defenseless doctor creates a unique sense of sympathy and dissonance from his actions that can’t be achieved in a passive cinematic either. That isn’t to say that musicals and video games are both superior to all other media, but one must simply consider the expectations of the medium when adapting. Failing to understand how the features of a piece’s medium worked in its favour will inevitably mean that you don’t know which ones to play up in the new medium.

Originally released in 1967 as a feature film Mel Brooks’ The Producers was eventually adapted into a stage musical in 2001. The Broadway show was very successful, in no small part because it was adapted well to its medium. Songs were added beyond the diegetic performances, and the musical format only served to heighten the satire of Broadway musicals themselves. Following this, the musical was adapted back into another feature in 2005, which was nowhere near as successful as its two predecessors. This new film was almost an exact re-creation of the stage musical, to its own detriment. It was all filmed with three-walled sets from the same angle, and did very little to adapt itself back into the strengths of cinema again. What lesson can The Last of Us possibly learn from The Producers? It needs to respect its source material, without being blindly faithful to it.

The act of transformation alone will not save a show. Chicago, widely considered to be one of the best movie musical adaptations, could have very easily fallen into the same trap as the 2005 Producers film. It too used elaborate stage numbers, but it framed them through the vivid imagination of its protagonist, the fame-hungry Roxie Hart. Each performance was a surrealist interpretation of the events around her, instead of being treated as human expression in the real world that just happened to look exactly like a stage show. The cinematic language of a courtroom drama doesn’t allow for burlesque dancers and a three-ring circus. By juxtaposing the two realities against one another, the audience gets a humorous look into the viewpoints of both Roxie and her huxter lawyer Billy Flynn while still grounding the audience in the real world.

The strength of The Last of Us lies in its characters. The bond between Ellie and Joel, and how they’re reflected by the people they encounter. Bill is a reflection of Joel’s emotional detachment, Henry and Sam are a lesson in dependency, David is a logical extreme of survival at any costs. Cinema is not bound to a single character’s perspective and could give the audience a chance to explore this ensemble in more detail. It will also have to find ways to make up for how the interactivity strengthens our connection to the characters.

Conversely, some elements will need to be left behind. The game may be in the stealth action genre, but that requires the patience and control that is only possible in a video game. Speeding up that pace into something watchable will make Joel into some kind of ninja and likely send the wrong message. He will need to be slowly presented as brutal and nearly barbaric to sell the ending that the game has established. The crafting system in the game may have helped inform us on Joel’s resourcefulness, but watching him search every last drawer for isopropyl and scissor blades is going to kill the pacing.

Movie musicals have also taught us that the creator must be carefully chosen. I personally love The King’s Speech, and think Tom Hooper is a very talented director. I also think that hiring a man who has been vocal about his disdain for melodrama may not have been the best choice for a sung-through operetta whose title is literally translated to: The Miserables. Adaptations aren’t suited to a director who chooses to force his performers to sing live for a movie because it’s, “like Broadway,” without factoring in that movies shoot for roughly 12 hours a day, and musicals are performed at most twice. That would be like forcing the HBO Last of Us actors to do the entire series in motion capture because the game did it. I’m not even really engaging in comedic hyperbole, considering that’s exactly what Tom Hooper did with his next musical. Choosing to impose hyper-realism on Cats - where the main appeal is face paint, leotards, and legwarmers - is a catastrophic failure to understand both mediums he’s working in.

HBO themselves have been guilty of this lack of vision in the past, having hired two completely inexperienced writers to helm their largest television series to date, Game of Thrones. The book series’ looming threat is an overt reference to climate change, and HBO chose to hire two showrunners who boast that they think “themes are for eighth-grade book reports” 7 It’s probably safe to say that the majority of previous video game adaptations have been soulless cash-ins from studios that just wanted to make a safe bankable product, and didn’t have any appreciation for the source material or the fans. Thankfully, HBO does not seem to have made this same mistake. They have hired the acclaimed writer of Chernobyl, Craig Mazin, to work alongside Neil Druckmann himself, the writer and director of The Last of Us. Neil was given complete control over the story, and it’s hard to imagine him choosing to share his work with someone who didn’t have its best interests at heart.

The path to a great adaptation for this game is not a clear one, and is filled with many questions. How will a new audience ever feel about Sarah the way I did after spending time playing as her? How can a television audience so used to seeing red-shirts murdered to establish stakes in the first five minutes, appreciate the shocking loss of Sarah when video game familiarity leads you to believe she’ll be a main character in the story?

A television audience won’t have to struggle with deciding whether to take a solemn look down at Tess’ corpse, or use every second she bought you to escape. How can someone appreciate the desperation I felt in that surgery ward as I tried to walk away? As I searched the room for a non-lethal weapon, fired warning shots, and was then forced to eventually kill the doctor and humanity’s last hope for salvation? How can anyone truly feel guilty themselves for Ellie’s misplaced trust in Joel, when they were never the ones to betray her?

Those are all great questions, but they all could have answers, even if I’m not the one who has them myself. At the end of the day, it’s elitist to deprive other people of this story just because I think they’re experiencing it wrong. Heck, my boyfriend loves The Last of Us and he’s never even picked up the controller. Can I really say that he doesn’t love it as much as I do, because he’s only watched me play through it?

There’s endless ways this series could breathe new life into one of my favorite games. The Last of Us is already a feast for the eyes, but who knows what kind of images we could get from a locked camera, properly framed, with good lighting. Imagine the prosthetics work that can be done with the clickers and bloaters. I can watch without fear that Joel will commit certain atrocities - I imagine the doctor killing will have to stay faithful, but I’m of course referring to the cruel choice of leaving Ellie hanging for a high five at the dam.

As a television creator myself, and an avid video game fan, I’m cautiously excited to see what this adaptation brings. Which story elements will be kept, and which will be changed, to reflect the medium it’s being told in? If the series can’t naturally reproduce the same emotions I felt in those moments, what changes will they make to evoke that experience? Furthermore, the series has expanded since that initial game. Will we see Ellie’s relationship with Riley? Will we see Abby at the Firefly hospital? Will we see hints of what is to come in an unannounced The Last of Us Part III?

Mostly, I’m intrigued to hear the takes of new audiences on the story of Joel Miller. The video game discourse surrounding Joel’s actions has been fascinating to me. I can’t help but feel like the player-protagonist relationship has influenced people’s sympathy for Joel, and it will be interesting to see whether a new audience feels the same way. Prestige television is the realm of the anti-hero, after all. How will they present Joel to an audience that has likely followed the journeys of Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Dexter Morgan?

If this is successful, who knows what this could bring for the future of video game adaptations. In a perfect world, this could position Neil Druckmann as a new Howard Ashman: a man who understood the book musical so intimately that he was uniquely suited to bring it to animated features. Ashman was the creative mastermind behind Disney’s “renaissance period,” and famously fought against studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg who did not respect the medium. He taught a masterclass on the musical to the creators at Disney, showing them the importance of certain genre elements, and how they could be adapted. Without him, we would have lost masterpieces like “Part of Your World” for being too sappy. Druckmann knew how to apply interactivity so carefully in The Last of Us, that I’m optimistic he’ll understand the new medium well enough to know what works and what doesn’t, in the same way Ashman did.

The only thing that’s certain right now is that none of these decisions could impact my love for the game. The issue of video game preservation aside, I will always have that story of Joel and Ellie’s journey in my memory, and not even the most cynical and butchered cash grab can take it from me. And if one of my friends watches the show and decides they want to play it for themselves? They will get to borrow my game free of charge, so long as they let me watch them play it.

TRAVIS RYANS is an Assistant Director in the film and television industry, as well as the co-host of the podcast “Rainbow Road” - a podcast about queerness in gaming. Twitter: @travisryans @RainbowRoadPod