The last of the living: Quarantine as a critique in two popular culture apocalyptic narratives

Abstract

This paper analyzes two popular culture narratives created in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic: the movie Songbird, made in 2020, and the TV show The Last of Us, from 2023. The main idea of this paper is to analyze the ways in which popular culture, through different pandemic narratives, perceives the future of social systems after the appearance of the deadly disease, as experienced in current reality as well as in pop-cultural narratives. The paper will point to the pandemic apocalypse as an environment of a new social reality, that is, the quarantine as a critique of state organization and regulation.

Keywords

• pandemic
• state
• apocalypse
• popular culture
• quarantine