Family Values and Screen-Borne Darkness, from The Cosby Show to The Last of Us

I've been thinking a lot about stories, lately. About the way we interact with the stories we’re given. About what stories mean to us as we get older, and what they might mean to our children.

Note: This is another fairly lengthy piece, about 4000 words. It winds through personal memoir and television, but spends the second half squarely in video-game territory, so I'm filing it under the gaming tag. If you want to skip to the gaming stuff, scroll down to the first embedded YouTube video - you won't hurt my feelings! I'm not sure American Independence Day is the best time to share such a long piece, but it does have something to say about this country's core values, at least as they've been represented in the media landscape. As always, thanks for reading.

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I’m plenty attracted to darkness. Horror and carnage — why not? If what’s on our screens is any indication, the rest of the world is, too.

But lately I’ve been wondering if maybe we’re getting a little too much darkness, and if there might be room for a bit of warmth and kindness as well.

So this is a story about video games and television and broken families and disaster and hope.

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I used to be such a sap, emotionally. When I was a kid, I mean. I was needy and full of love and sentiment. I was blessed with a mother who made me feel very “at home” in a pretty messed-up family. I felt welcome. Special. Even cherished.

Then I got older and wondered how this changed.

Mom would stick with a man for an average of six years, doing everything she could to make it work. But she had this thing for drunks and cheaters, so she was doomed every time. And even though she had a bit of her own money, we were the ones who moved on when things didn’t work out.

I grew up thinking my little sister’s father was my father. He was my mother’s third love, her third child-producing partner, and the first lover she didn’t marry.

He was also right next door. They’d grown up side-by-side. They’d played together as kids. It was an easy hook-up for them, when they were both on a rebound.

This meant we got all kinds of grand-parenting right in one place. It was practically a family compound.

I was too young, at the time, to pick up on undercurrents of resentment and unspoken conflict. I didn’t understand what all that alcohol was doing, lubricating tensions while it ruined family business decisions. I was just happy to walk from one grandparent’s house to the other and play at both. I felt loved by all of them - whether, in truth, they were related to me or not.

Mom bought a house not too far away. It was literally a walk over the hill and through the woods to both grandmothers' houses. Then when things fell apart with my sister’s father, he moved back in with his mom. So I got to walk through the woods to visit him, too. (He was a decent guy, when he was sober.)

But our new neighborhood had new neighbors, and mom shacked up with the next door neighbor again. They became “sleepover friends” and next thing I knew she and this fat fuck were both selling their houses and we were moving again.

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When I was a kid, TV was the place that showed us what a family could be. And because of my mother's efforts, I still felt a love, belonging, and togetherness that trumped her poor decisions. Family came with an 80s sitcom soundtrack.

The media landscape shifted as we got older. A coldness in the culture. The visions of the small screen hardened as my sense of belonging unraveled. Cruelty become thrilling, or funny. It’s reached the point that today, relationships are just a game. You can buy the book that shows you how to win. Hook-ups are a prize for some and a surrender for others. Families — the loving, supportive groups meant to nurture the next generation — have become an afterthought in the hustle of getting off and feeling good.

I’m no “family values” evangelist — far from it. I’m an atheist with no kids and no desire for any. I’ve only been inside churches for weddings and funerals — more of the latter than the former. “No sex before marriage” has always struck me as a recipe for disappointment. I’ll even argue, based on the parade of “fathers” I’ve had to contend with, that single motherhood is better for the kids 90% of the time.

Gay marriage, no marriage, polygamy? Sure, do what you want!

On the other hand, if what you want is to make a family, it might be nice to have some examples of families being kind to each other.

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Here’s the thing: Generation X is all over 40 now. I’m right at the tail of it. If we’re not sweating to support a litter of kids, we’re looking around our empty apartments and wondering who’s gonna love us when we’re old. We grew up under some of the highest divorce-rates ever, but we watched family-centric sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Family Ties. These shows were the direct cultural descendants of The Waltons, Leave it to Beaver, and The Brady Bunch.

We didn’t watch much TV, but Cosby and Family Ties were weekly staples.

Thursday nights, we’d all crowd onto the couch and tune in for a shared experience. (I even remember the fat-fuck being there.) We’d watch nuclear families working together to face a challenge, confront a misunderstanding, learn a lesson or two, and grow closer. It was an acknowledgement that life was hard, messy, and challenging, but you could still laugh with the people closest to you.

Was this “hokey?” Was this “cultural whitewashing?”

Who cares? These were fictional families that worked. Parents and children treated each other respectfully. People had a laugh and faced their problems together and experienced a level of comfort and pleasure in each other’s presence.

Sure, you could go a little farther afield on other weeknights. We had Small Wonder, about a weirdo who built a robot daughter he stored in his closet; or Alf, about a dick-nosed alien who found a place for himself in a suburban home. In any case, the themes were the same: togetherness, closeness, harmony. Even action shows like The A-Team and Dukes of Hazard had a family vibe to them.

It didn’t matter that these were nothing like my family, with its chain of manipulative father figures and siblings that didn’t share my surname. In truth, not many families could come close to the ideals presented on screen. We still wanted to watch people getting it right. So what if our family was mediocre by traditional standards? You don’t tune in to watch mediocre sports figures missing goals and stumbling around the court. Why would you want to watch crappy parents fail on television?

By the 90s, Mom was too old to produce any more offspring. Fat Fuck said he’d met a woman who could still give him his own kids, so we got the boot again.

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When we moved into our fatherless rental we brought one 10" TV with us. We never bothered hooking up an antenna. It was easier to just watch a rented movie once in a while on VHS. By the end of the 90s I’d moved out on my own (age 18) to get away from the next step-dad, (we'll call him Old Fuck) and I never bought my own TV.

So I never saw an entire episode of Roseanne. But I remember those horrendous, shrill voices shouting back and forth at each other. I must have caught a few minutes at friends’ houses. All I could think was, why are these characters so miserable and cruel? Why are they behaving like that in their own home? And why would anyone watch this?

The only way I could figure it was, these characters were meant to provide viewers with a sense of superiority. Our family is shit, but at least we’re not like those assholes. But to actually sit down and watch them? It felt voyeuristic and invasive.

I did pick up a couple of 90s programs here and there. Friends took the old happy-family dynamic and applied it to some folks going through early adulthood. I guess the viewers who could no longer relate to the idealized, well-off middle class families of the 80s were okay watching young adults start their lives in spacious Manhattan apartments which they afforded by working in coffee shops. (Talk about whitewashing reality!)

The cast of Friends were, for the most part, kind people. They’d celebrate each others’ successes. They formed transitory families of their own while they transitioned into adult life. And _Friends_captured the sense of liberation that comes from choosing your own family. It’s a very real happiness: when you can move away from the accident of your birth, and form bonds with people who share your interests and passions, and your sense of humor.

Friends was plenty hokey, but it was something new. It was nice. It ended, full-circle, with weddings. So you knew this group of self-selected friends would carry their closeness into nuclear families all over again. Maybe this lot would finally get it right.

Seinfeld was the beginning of something darker. Jerry made no secret of the nihilistic non-message at the series’ core: this was a show “about nothing.” A refreshing take, I guess. If TV was meant to be an escape, why should it try to impart moral lessons or higher meanings? Maybe we just wanted to listen to wealthy New Yorkers bitch about their neighbors (Newman!), or fail at ill-advised business ventures (muffin tops?) or describe dates gone wrong with people they’d never see again (mocking a beautiful woman with masculine hands). It wasn’t warm-feeling or mutual respect that kept these characters together, but a shared nastiness.

Where Friends finished with a wedding, Seinfeld concluded with a prison sentence.

Any cultural authority I have to speak about sitcoms (as thin as that’s been so far) has to go out the window here, because pretty much the only comedy sitcom I’ve watched since the millennium turned is South Park - a cartoon so crass, absurd, and far-fetched it can hardly be described in the same terms as “normal” TV.

I will say this, though: unlike Seinfeld, South Park is always about something. It engages with the events of the world from the moment they happen, and it cares intensely about the issues it satirizes. Its scatological humor gives it a pass from political correctness, so it offends, and mightily. Still, family-values wise, you could do worse than to look at Stan’s family, or Kyle’s, both of which stick together through rivers of shit (sometimes literally) week after week. Even Mrs. Cartman keeps her act together as a single mother of the worst child you could imagine. Her greatest sin is the over-indulgence of a boy she loves very much.

Other than South Park, there is simply too much to watch now, through too many channels and portals, to make any kind of sweeping generalizations. I haven’t looked deeply enough to say that there’s aren’t any happy, feel-good family sitcoms along the lines of Cosby or Family Ties being aired today. (Of course I heard the news that Cosby, the man, is an alleged rapist. Does that mean we have to take all the joyful accomplishments of his fictional family and chuck them out the window?)

When I think about the shows that do rise to the top these days, the stuff that people talk about around the water-cooler, the things that even an anemic media-consumer like me can’t help hearing about, shows like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad, the overwhelming message is this:

Trust no one. If someone is kind to you, it’s because they want something. Your government is just a massive conspiracy, or it’s just a way to fund a techno-fetishistic military which is an acceptable evil because it’s all that stands between you and the terrorists. As for families? If you’re The Sopranos, families cheat and get you killed. If you’re in Game of Thrones, well, then: families are the things that fuck you hardest.

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We’re headed into a world of scarcity.

Is this true? Despite the hand-wringing of Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) and other neo-Malthusians, we’re feeding a bigger population than the world has ever seen. We live lives that are kind of stressful and depressing, but most of us aren’t starving to death. Violence, globally, is at its lowest point in the history of the world. (Stephen Pinker explores this good news in depth in The Better Angels of our Nature.)

Automation and mechanization has a lot to do with this. Unfortunately, the financial benefit of all this technology accrues more and more to the top one-hundredth of one percent. Each financial shock and crisis shakes down the middle class and concentrates wealth even more. So while they might not starve, it’s hard to see how a child born today will ever be able to afford a home, a college education, or even basic health care.

So yeah, maybe we are headed into a world of scarcity.

Whatever the fate of nations, at least we have more programs to watch on our cell-phones and tablets than ever before. It’s telling that the fastest growing genre across books, TV, and video games is post-apocalypse, dystopia, collapse.

Disaster.

We’re not gathering around our TVs to watch happy families come together, any more. We’re sitting alone and watching the world fall apart in our hands.

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The wife and I recently watched a series of Youtube videos where a bunch of teenagers play through a zombie-apocalpyse game called The Last of Us. This was a major release several years ago, so well-reviewed that I almost went out and bought a Playstation to try it myself.

I’m glad I waited. It was more fascinating to experience this cultural touchstone while simultaneously watching a bunch of millennials react to the story.

The graphics were superb: lush, hyper-realistic, and unrelentingly violent. The story was about as grim as they come.

“If we have the technology to create any kind of virtual world,” my wife asked, “why do we use it to create the most horrifying experiences we can imagine? These characters could be riding horses or planting gardens or going to a dance…”

The girls playing the game seemed to feel the same way, cringing at the violence they had to commit on screen. But the game had a hook for them, too.

Family.

The hero of the game is Joel, a man who lost his daughter in the first night of a zombie-virus-apocalypse-breakout-whatever. Several years later he’s tasked with protecting Ellie, a young teenager with an immunity to the virus. They have to make their way across the country to a medical facility, where they hope to study her immunity and fabricate a cure. Along the way they survive every kind of attack and commit every type violent murder you could imagine: smashing heads into walls, snapping necks, hacking people with exes, vaporizing heads with shotgun blasts, burning bodies with flamethrowers, and of course the video-game staple of sniping with rifles, bows, and arrows.

The zombies are horrific, but they’re also individualized: they’re male or female, young or old, black or white or Asian. They’re wearing the clothes they wore when they turned. You can see the remnants of their humanity as you blast and bludgeon them. It's a shame you've gotta kill 'em, but it's a mercy, too. It's just gotta be done.

But as the plot develops, the violence extends to the uninfected people. You can’t trust anyone in this world, human or monster. Anything moving is a threat. No one can help you. Kindness is just the prelude to ambush.

Still, it’s the tiny spark of family that makes this game so uniquely touching: this bereaved father and his surrogate daughter. The character arcs are predictable but effective: Joel’s afraid to get close because he can’t handle losing another kid. He wants to finish the mission and hand her off to the researchers. But along the way they get close. It’s a tear jerker, the first time Joel trusts Ellie with a sniper rifle. By the end, nothing is going to tear them apart. Fuck-no! Hell-yeah! They’re in this together.

But these two people, they’re as big as this family is going to get. The only way they can stay together is by killing the monsters, then killing the soldiers, then killing the marauders, then killing the survivalists, then killing some other people who were maybe just trying to get by same as they were, and then killing the -

Well, I’ll draw a curtain across any further spoilers. Anyway, the progression of antagonists from the mostly-monstrous to the people-just-like-us made a dramatic contrast to the growing togetherness of Joel and Ellie’s mini-family.

This is a world where there’s just no way to let anyone get close to you.

There’s a sequel planned. In the trailer, Ellie’s a young woman. She’s playing a guitar in a wrecked house full of dead bodies. The camera pans across the blood and gore while she sings. Then Joel shows up. (Fans of the original game cheer!) Ellie tells him she’s going to track some people down and “kill every last one of them!”

The suspense! Who is she going to kill? Who’s responsible for the dead bodies in the house? What did they do to Ellie?

This is powerful stuff, especially because her surrogate father is there, ready to support her in her decision. Families that slay together, slay together.

And they sell next generation consoles! Maybe I’ll buy this one.

There’s a part of me, though, that wants to see her meet a nice survivor boy and settle down. They could have a ceremony where Joel walks Ellie down the aisle of a burned out church. Then they could build a stronghold out in the wilderness and plant some crops and raise some livestock. It could be a sort of Little House on the Prairie with zombies instead of Native Americans. Ellie could have some kids. They’d grow up and get into scrapes and work out their misunderstandings every week, and at the end of each half-hour they could all have a laugh about their day as they fall asleep in their cabin, talking about how much they all love and appreciate each other. Good night, Ellie. Good night, Grandpa Joel. Good-night, Jon-Boy.

All I’m saying is, life gets ugly fast enough. I didn’t grow up in a family like the Cosbys or the Waltons or Family Ties. My mother (who is beautiful, talented, and caring, I’ll remind you) just happens to settle for assholes. It’s the same fatal flaw that killed her mother.

And it’s all too easy for me to daydream that “I’m gonna find, and I’m gonna kill, every last one of them.”

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Some of my proudest moments, growing up, were the times when I found the courage to stand up to horrible men and confront them in arguments that sparkled with violence.

When I was 11 I threw the cat at the fat-fuck boyfriend. He roared as the claws sunk in. I can still hear that noise today. Delicious. I was beyond caring that I'd be grounded or punished. But instead of yelling at me, Mom told the Fat Fuck, “You had that coming!”

We moved out shortly after that.

It took me over 20 years to stand up to Old Fuck. It had reached the point that I couldn't visit my own mother without putting on the emotional armor I needed to confront his manipulative attacks. And since my sister had never developed the courage to move out on her own, that meant I couldn't see her, either. But there was some family business that couldn't be avoided, so I suited up and headed over. Old Fuck decided to lay into me right away - for not coming to visit often enough, of all things.

Shit, I thought, I’m an adult now. I don’t have to listen to this. I felt a surge of adrenaline and rage that was absolutely terrifying, as if my numb and detached personality had been completely rewritten. I kept it under wraps, offering him 30 seconds to walk away from his planned lecture. But I don't think he recognized the man he was facing. He persisted.

I've never sworn in front of my mother - not in 40 years, not so much as a "shit." But I made up for it over the next three minutes as I unloaded two decades of emotional ammunition in three minutes. “This is my family,” I said. “What the fuck do you think you are?” I was as close as I’ve ever been to losing control, and yet I felt saner than I’ve ever felt in my life.

“Fine,” he said, “I’ll move out.” And he walked away.

If he hadn’t, who knows? Maybe I’d be in jail now.

My sister heard the argument from upstairs. She rushed down to tell me how proud she was of me.

Love.

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Old Fuck never moved out. Why would he? He gets free rent and three prepared meals a day because my mother is too afraid of being alone in her old age. But now, every time I visit, he leaves the room. It’s awkward, because he literally will. Not. Say. Hello. Is this a healthy dynamic? For me? or my mother? Of course it isn't. But I guess it works for us.

I’d love to force him to leave, but that’s a decision my mother has to make. “He does a lot of work on the house,” she says, “and as long as he doesn’t pick fights with my kids he’s all right, I guess.”

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So yeah, back to video games and TV. I get that families are awful and most guys are out to destroy you. And I get that physical conflict drives drama. But, man, I’ve lived enough of this shit. Is it too much to ask for some stories where people are kind to each other?

I’m right at the heart of middle-age. I’m looking back at a family that had some advantages and some good times, but lacked the role-models we were shown on TV. And I’m looking forward to a childless, biologically empty future. My own father took himself out of the picture with a bullet, so what chance have I got at handling the stresses of fatherhood?

Kids for me? Hell no.

All of this is fine. That’s how it was. This is how it’s going to be.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t understand the value of family, or that I’m numb to the pleasures of decent relatives, or eager to deny the meaning and purpose that arises from parenthood. I’m not immune to the lure of joy, contentment, and laughter that grows when generations care for and nurture each other.

As my wife says, our screens today could show us visions of any possible world. Maybe we need to see families that can do some things right. Maybe we could watch people do more than struggle to survive in harsh, violent worlds that ultimately crush them.

Maybe we need good models in good roles, just so we can see that the possibility exists.