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If it’s not communism, then it’s zombies that will bring us together.

This modification of the chorus of The Smiths’ 1986 song “Ask” gets to the ideological heart of zombie apocalypse. When vocalist Steven Morrissey sang that “if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb…that will bring us together,” he was encouraging a potential lover to express their romantic desires before the world ended in nuclear war. If we wait too long to love, Morrissey fatalistically predicted, the bomb’s fiery embrace will achieve our unity for us. The philosopher Maurice Blanchot made a similar point when he observed that imagining nuclear war allowed us to conceive of ourselves as a single species—a dead one.  

For Blanchot, the image of negated humanity called for a positive communist alternative, by which he meant a global community united in freedom, cooperation, and reason. The main ideological function of zombies in contemporary capitalist entertainment is to block this very movement from negative to positive community—to tie us together not through communism but through violent and individualistic passions.

Love is supposed to have brought together Joel and Ellie, the main characters in HBO’s zombie drama The Last of Us. In season one, which is based on the 2013 videogame of the same name, Joel’s daughter dies in the early days of the zombie pandemic. After Joel meets Ellie, a teenage girl who is immune from the mutated Cordyceps virus, the duo embark on a dangerous cross-country journey that connects them so tightly that Ellie becomes Joel’s new daughter, his “baby girl.”

According to showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, The Last of Us is about “the unconditional love that parents feel for their child.” In their view, this love is essentially illogical and warrants the most extreme violence. Refusing to let Ellie die in a surgery that might develop a cure for the fungal virus, Joel goes on a killing spree to remove her from the operating table, effectively dooming humanity. Druckmann and Mazin want to shock us with Joel’s murders, but not enough to challenge their frank portrayal of parental love. We’re supposed to believe that if loving kids this way is wrong, no parent wants to be right.

Many gamers and TV viewers sympathize with Joel. This is a testament to how zombie apocalypse gives cultural producers an effective excuse for passing off their political sensibilities as honest reflections on human nature. Far from revealing parenting’s heart of darkness, Joel in fact models a more specifically and traditionally male form of self-esteem rooted in protective violence. Druckmann and Mazin’s moralizing is actually just as ham-fisted as Jake’s assertion in Avatar: The Way of Water that “a father protects; it’s what gives him meaning.” The difference is that while Avatar wears its enthusiasm for patriarchal power fantasies on its sleeve, Druckmann and Mazin want us to believe that The Last of Us reveals a deep, dark, but honest truth about fathering.  

Joel also has a better alibi: zombies. Their ideological job is to reduce the world to two collectives, the infected and the non-infected, “them” versus “us.” What people do in this radically simplified environment takes the fantastic form of the human condition. So if Joel uses violence to protect Ellie, that’s supposed to reflect what all of “us” would do when faced with the elementary conflict between love for our own kin and obligations to strangers. In fact, like most capitalist depictions of human nature, The Last of Us reproduces the prevailing gender norms under the guise of universality.

A telling change to the game underscores the narrowness of Druckmann and Mazin’s take on humanity. In the sixth episode of the first season, Joel and Ellie meet up with Joel’s brother, Tommy, in the latter’s community in Jackson, Wyoming. Whereas the game gives players only the briefest glimpses of community life, the show provides a surprising new detail. Tommy explains that “everything you see in our town, greenhouses, livestock—all shared. Collective ownership.” After Joel offhandedly suggests that this sounds like communism, Maria, community leader and wife of Tommy, confirms his assessment: “This is a commune. We’re communists.”

Such a deadpan affirmation of communism on “quality” cable television elicited a riposte from the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, which was anxious to inform impressionable viewers that the Jackson commune was not, in fact, communist. The FEE wanted us to unsee not only Jackson’s collective ownership but also its democratic planning, which is carried out by an elected council. If post-apocalyptic narratives often seem to bluntly deny the possibility of a better future, they can also smuggle in utopian wishes for more meaningful ways to live. Perhaps this is why so many of us are fascinated by the end of the world. We know that endings are usually not really endings but excuses for change.  

Yet the libertarians’ critique was ultimately unnecessary because The Last of Us only toys with communism’s utopian energies. Maria’s line resembles a Freudian slip that blurts out this procedure: the commune becomes mere background to the story of selfish parental love. In fact, this story’s ideological power rests on the weakness of the commune as an alternative. Joel returns to Jackson with Ellie at the end of season one, but by now it is little more than a convenient location to which the protagonists can retreat. A man who has committed the ultimate act of misanthropy to protect Ellie obviously has only the thinnest sense of community, and so we can easily imagine Joel burning down Jackson if he thought it necessary for saving Ellie. Thatcher herself would have admired how season one privileges relationships among individuals over the collective.

If Joel doesn’t start out as a communist, could life in the commune transform him and his ways of loving? The second season, based on the game The Last of Us Part II, signposts this possibility. Ellie rejects Joel’s violent protection once she realizes that he lied to her about the surgery. In the season opener, Ellie kisses her love interest Dina, eliciting a homophobic insult from a fellow commune member. Ever the guardian, Joel brutally pushes the man to the floor. The outraged Ellie barks at Joel: “I don’t need your fucking help!” Similarly, a flashback in episode six shows Joel confronted with the loss of his patriarchal authority after catching Ellie smoking marijuana and making out with a girlfriend in her bedroom. Bewildered by Ellie’s deviant behavior, Joel resorts to the classic patriarchal-capitalist assertion of property rights: it’s his house, so Ellie must obey his rules. But Ellie cleverly retorts that Joel doesn’t own anything; the house is communal property.

To his credit, Joel, played with remarkable emotional vulnerability by Pedro Pascal, seems aware that his relationship with Ellie must change now that property-based forms of kinship have vanished. He helps her set up a more autonomous living space in the garage, perhaps accepting that his little family will become more expansive, egalitarian, and queer.

Crucially, while Ellie deflates Joel the patriarch, she passes up the opportunity to say that he isn’t her real dad. Joel is a surrogate father, an “oddkin,” and this is why framing The Last of Us as a story about parental love does make some sense—but only if we stress that parent-child relationships are broader and weirder than genetics. Kinship can form wherever there is trust and responsibility, even between people as different as Joel and Ellie. And since surrogacy is the core of Joel and Ellie’s relationship, why shouldn’t their family blossom in the commune, further distributing love and caregiving across romantic partners, friends, and neighbors? The stage would seem set for the communizing of family under conditions that resemble what Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now terms “disaster communism”—a situation that is “not exactly enviable” but still affords “a life worth living against all odds.”

Alas, season two sacrifices this potential on the altar of “universal” hate, the supposed counterpart to the first season’s exploration of love. Joel is viciously murdered by Abby, the daughter of the surgeon whom Joel killed at the close of season one. Overcome by hatred for Abby, Ellie sets off with Dina to track her down, violating the commune’s decision against allocating labor power and resources to the mission. Joel forsook humanity to protect Ellie; Ellie now abandons the commune to avenge Joel. Thus, instead of embedding the family in broader networks of support, The Last of Us does just the opposite: it reduces the parent-child bond to an irrational, anti-social devotion to a single person, and wants us to believe that this is the timeless essence of love and hate. In both cases, kin are personal property that can only be protected or emotionally repossessed through violence.

Although the second season made significant changes to the source material, the third and probably final season of The Last of Us is unlikely to take any major turns. Druckmann has announced that he will step away from the show to focus on making games, but if Mazin preserves his former colleague’s blinkered views about Israeli settler colonialism, The Last of Us will culminate in a bothsidesist political allegory in which “hatred” leads to a “cycle of violence.” Season three will switch perspectives and focus on Abby’s hatred for Joel, and eventually she and Ellie will realize their errors after suffering enormous traumas because of their bloodlust.

Once again, a utopian horizon comes into view. Whereas season two already shows Abby burning her bridges with her comrades in Seattle, The Last of Us could theoretically end by sending Ellie back to Jackson. Finally freed from possessive love and hate, she could rebuild and expand her surrogate family, perhaps finding some redemption in contributing to an egalitarian society. In this scenario, the commune is the true cure. 

But let’s not kid ourselves. The Last of Us asks us to suspend disbelief about many implausible things, including the central conceit that the Cordyceps virus can mutate and infect humans, but its creators are unable or unwilling to use their imaginations to elaborate on new and positive forms of collective life. Of course, if they had wanted to do that, they wouldn’t have needed zombies.

Zombies eat community. Like Blanchot’s image of extinct humanity, zombies are the negative universality of our species; they are what solidarity would look like if all we had in common was death. What Blanchot didn’t imagine, though, was how this negativity could be reanimated and turned into a weapon against the living. Zombies will always overrun the barricades and force the creation of new ones because their purpose is to sanction the most parochial behavior. Contaminating all attempts at remaking kinship, zombies are perhaps the greatest anti-communists that capitalist entertainment has ever dreamed up.

When The Last of Us Part II was released in 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, games journalist Maddy Myers skewered the developers for their cynicism. Against the game’s insistence that “humans will enact violence upon one another to their dying breaths,” Myers affirmed “a widespread level of selflessness and an intense care for the preservation of human life in the real 2020…and an increasingly loud demand for a society that meets that need.” The Last of Us might occasionally pander to this demand, but it won’t meet it. As the name already implies, the franchise is ultimately about the last remnants of a misrecognized “us,” the subjects of the current hyper-individualistic, competitive social order masquerading as plain old humans in the grip of timeless moral conflicts. This is the way the capitalist world ends: with the bangs and whimpers of a false dialectic between kin and commune.

As climate disasters, wars, and perhaps the next pandemic loom on the horizon, future episodes of The Last of Us will bring the game’s outmoded messages back to life over and over again. Insisting on the vivacity of the commune—and recognizing how capitalism’s popular culture betrays it—is how we shoot these zombie ideologies in the head.