I left the experience with a sense that familiarizing and desensitizing ourselves to violence like this can turn us into zombies. Our lack of empathy and unwillingness to engage with those involved in tragedy stems from our comfort with the trauma those people are experiencing.
Ashley Gilbertson, a war photographer for Time, recently was asked to play and document The Last of Us Remastered. Thrust into the role of a violent killer, Gilbertson quickly melted down: a brief session left his “vision blurred” and his stomach in knots; and finally his mind “crashed out.” The protagonists’ zombielike indifference to the butchery around them baffled him. Yet, his own revulsion began similarly to dry up, even after he delegated the combat sequences to his assistant. Gilbertson concluded that his typical war photography is “an antitode to the type of entertainment this game represents”, a way to wake up people accustomed to atrocity.
In 1990, director Alan J. Pakula said, “Movie violence is like eating salt: the more you eat, the more you need to eat to taste it at all.” By then, increasingly callous audiences had “developed an insatiability for raw sensation”; and filmmakers had responded with works of ever worsening savagery. The fatal shotgun blast that heralded The Last of Us at E3 2012—a blast at which journalists cheered like spectators at the Colosseum—told an old story: transgression is normalized by repetition. Even the “Edward Pistolhands“ apathy in The Last of Us, which so disturbed Gilbertson, was preceded and enabled by a loss of empathy in society at large. A person is changed by her surroundings—and no witness to brutality is unscathed.
Still Eating Oranges