You never get away from the dust.
I feel it crunch beneath the palm of my hand as I lower myself to the ground next to the rusting Corvega, resting the .30-06 along its bumper. I brush my hand absently on the padded leather pants I stole off my last victim, not noticing if the dust goes anywhere. Taking a deep breath, trying not to choke on the dry grit in the air, I lower my head to the scope.
“I am in a conventional dither / with a conventional star in my eye …”
I turn down Galaxy News Radio in my earpiece, but don’t turn it off entirely. I’ve reached the point where I can’t stand to switch it off. Letting the silence take over feels like acknowledging despair – letting the world win a war that’s already over. Still, I have to wonder where Three Dog pulls these albums from. He told me some of them are over three centuries old. I can’t think of the last working thing I saw that’s three decades old.
“And you will note there’s a lump in my throat / when I speak of that wonderful guy!”
The raiders one hundred yards down the road – snarling and merciless in spiked leather and chains – have pushed two cars across the front of the highway, angling them to create a narrow chokepoint. I could backtrack the mile I spent climbing this highway and walk overland, hoping all the yao guai are hibernating. But I need to make Big Town by nightfall and top off my canteen. These bastards parked between me and the next 24 hours of my life. And that’s all it takes.
I dial the scope gingerly, squinting through the chipped and faded My First Telescope that I’ve strapped to the top of the rifle. A raider’s shaved head bobs into view, shadowed by the Brotherhood of Steel issue rocket launcher strapped to his back. I take a breath, let out half.
“I’m as corny as Kansas in August / high as the flag on the Fourth of July …”
A brash cry jerks my head up. Another raider, at the opposite end of the improvised barricade, spotted the sunlight flash on my scope. He approaches my hiding place with cautious steps, sliding the TEC-9 out of the DKNY clutch he’s appropriated as a holster. He’s coming from my right. In forty yards, there’ll be nothing between him and me but asphalt.
Swearing, I swing my rifle around, glance into the scope, and squeeze a shot off. With no time to reset the range I hit him on pure luck – a one inch slug that tears his left knee halfway off his leg. He collapses, screaming, and the gun clatters out of his grip. I swing back as the guy with the rocket launcher begins to unlimber it off his back. One in the shoulder slows him down; another in the throat stops him.
“If you’ll excuse an expression I use / I’m in love, I’m in love …”
Now the other three raiders – I counted two before – have cleared their holsters and taken cover behind their car barricade. Automatic fire peppers the car I hide behind. A bullet gouges the asphalt inches from my right foot, sending shards of stone into my hand and face. I wince, gasping but not screaming. The bastard I kneecapped’s doing plenty of that.
I’d rather save this last grenade for the Super Mutant I know the sheriff in Big Town’s going to ask me to take out, but I only have one shot left in the mag on my rifle and they’ll be on me before I reload. One of the raiders is already waving his friend toward me: flank him; I’ll cover you.
I pull the pin on the grenade. Instead of throwing it, I roll it from under my car toward theirs. It bounces over a loose stone – just high enough that they see it coming – and lands neatly in the cinderblock that’s propping up their car’s engine. Nuclear-powered, as was every 2075 Corvega.
“… I’m in love, I’m in love …”
The glare blinds me. The rush of heat and wind knock me hard onto my back. My counter ticks in panic as the burst of rads blows over me. I stay there, waiting for the ticks slow to one every ten seconds, until I open my eyes.
My legs. stiff with tension, throb in protest as I stand. The surge of nuclear heat in the cool air above the overpass has kicked up an impressive gust of wind. The man I wounded with my first shot is gone. So is the man with the rocket launcher, his rocket launcher, his three clever friends and the cars they hid behind.
There’s no one left on the road ahead. Just me and the dust.
“… I’m in love with a wonderful guy!”
Fallout 3, the most critically acclaimed video game of 2008, continues the series tradition of incorporating big band music from the 40s and 50s. However, while the first two games only used these classics for one-offs (Fallout 2’s instructional video being a classic example), Fallout 3 is the first game to incorporate them into the soundtrack.
In the game, one of your earliest missions is to repair a jury-rigged radio antenna atop the Washington Monument. Doing so allows Three Dog – a jive-talking DJ, part Wolfman Jack and part Super Soul – to broadcast his pirate radio station, Galaxy News Radio, to all corners of the Capital Wasteland. Three Dog announces helpful tips (“make sure to keep your weapons repaired,” etc). He also keeps everyone within one hundred miles informed of your progress – praising you if you do good, slamming you if you do evil.
But mostly, he plays music.
Every song Three Dog plays comes from the big band boom of the 40s and 50s. Upbeat music about city life, swooning torch songs, and toe-tapping jazz numbers. You’ll hear classics like Roy Brown, Cole Porter and Billie Holliday, as well as long-dormant artists like the Ink Spots (whom you just heard in the trailer above).
Pleasant, yes? An entertaining diversion? Well …
Consider the soundtrack in context.
All of the music comes from American artists in the 1940s and 50s. America had just won the second World War. While Europe reeled with debt and death – several generations lost in the last two wars, architecture and infrastructure bombed to flinders – America at least had the appearance of health. The war effort had propelled American technology forward, giving the world the digital computer and the atomic bomb. The postwar housing boom and the Interstate Highway Act put two conflicting goals – the security of land and the freedom of the open road – within reach of every American.
The theme was Optimism, and the music of the time reflects that.
Look at the lyrics of the Andrews Sisters’ hit “Civilization” (featuring Danny Kaye):
They hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train
And though it’s smokey and it’s crowded, they’re too civilized to complain
When they’ve got two weeks vacation, they hurry to vacation ground
They swim and they fish, but that’s what I do all year roundSo bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t wanna leave the Congo, oh no no no no no
Bingo, bangle, bungle, I’m so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go
Don’t want no jailhouse, shotgun, fish-hooks, golf clubs, I got my spear
So, no matter how they coax him, I’ll stay right here
It sounds like a paean against civilization, but it speaks with a smart-aleck, satisfied tone. It spends all of its verses listing the immense wealth of the First World – mass transit, movie theaters, ranch houses – but little depicting what makes the Congo so preferable (“I got my spear”). People who are genuinely unsatisfied with civilization don’t write big band music. They write punk.
For a less ironic take, consider the dopey sentiment of the lyrics of Bob Crosby’s “Way Back Home”:
Bob doesn’t even bother coming up with clever rhymes – “the trees are the sappiest; the days are the nappiest” – or developing much of a narrative beyond them. The meaning is clear: the benefits of home are obvious enough that I don’t need to spell them out. I can make up silly nonsense rhymes about it, because we’re all on board.
So this is the soundtrack. What is its intended effect?
Fallout 3 takes place two centuries after a nuclear war between the U.S. and China. Most of the Earth’s population has been decimated. The rest scrabble out grueling lives in wasteland tribes, scrapyard villages or the irradiated remains of cities. Raiders roam the wastes, raping and murdering with abandon. And let’s not forget the Super Mutants.
Though we see little of the world outside the U.S. in the Fallout series, it’s safe to presume that nuclear winter has turned the human race into a threatened species. It’s likely that the population is too small, and too thinly spread, to maintain sufficient biodiversity. On top of that, centuries of collected knowledge have been lost. The human race has stopped creating and now survives by scavenging. Perhaps if the surviving humans banded together into one peaceful community and set their differences aside, the cycle of growth could resume. But instead, raiders, slavers and Enclave soldiers blow each other apart, thinning out the already sparse ranks.
The tragedy’s not that ninety-nine percent of humanity died in a fire. It’s that the last one percent will finish the job.
In this world, which Fallout 3 depicts with photorealistic accuracy, the Galaxy News Radio soundtrack acts as literal nostalgia: the “pain of a remembered wound” in Greek. Listening to the sweet voice of Billie Holliday or the cheery tones of Mary Martin reminds you of a world with a hopeful future. There was a time when people woke up in the morning thinking the future might be better than the past. And you – a lone wanderer in the remains of America’s capital, surviving on stolen ammo and rusting firearms – know that isn’t true.
Fallout 3 seems calculated to evoke a profound nihilistic despair. But is it really?
Existentialism, as advanced by writers and philosophers following World War II, derives meaning from human action instead of social order or supernatural ethics. Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus is probably the classic example – though Sisyphus’ task is cosmically hopeless, and in fact a punishment from the gods, he derives meaning from the labor he exerts.
Existentialism also tells us that human beings define themselves through the act of existing – hence the name – rather than conforming to some Platonic essence. “Man first of all exists,” wrote Sartre in Existentialism is Humanism, “encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterward.” This has both depressing and exhilarating impact: it means that humans are not inherently good, but neither are we inherently wicked. We are (to quote Vonnegut) what we pretend to be.
Finally, existentialist literature pulls a lot of weight by drawing our attention to the absurd. Kafka’s the supreme example here, depicting the absurdity – both frightening and entertaining – in modern bureaucracy and civilized mores. The alienation that Kafka’s protagonists feel, whether being turned into insects or witnessing horrible judicial tortures, divorces them from their prior allegiances to God or society.
In Fallout 3, there is no evidence of the supernatural. And there is no social order to speak of.
In Fallout 3, your character can be as good or as evil as he or she wishes. Nothing requires her to accept missions from friendly town elders; nothing prevents her from slaughtering them.
In Fallout 3, listening to Billie Holliday croon about being crazy with love while setting a bunker full of human beings on fire is absurd.
By pairing cheery big band hits of the 40s and 50s with post-apocalyptic despair, Fallout 3 does more to advance the case for existentialism than five decades of French philosophy. It projects the player into a world where hope is impossible: the human race has reached the end of its technological arc, and the die-off has begun. But instead of descending into savagery, the game reminds you of the sentimental world from which this one emerged. Their sentiment and your despair have equal weight. Some people – raiders, slavers and the tyrants of the Enclave – will take that as an excuse for brutality. Others realize that it means you’re free to do good.
The battle between right and wrong comes not from God or from society, but from the war in every human’s private soul. And that war never changes.
The door claps against the house in the breeze, like a sarcastic friend greeting me.
“I say I’ll go through fire / And I’ll go through fire / As he wants it, so it will be …”
Big Town has been decimated. The smell of human flesh baking in the sun tells me I’m too late by only a matter of hours. The swinging chain-link gate on the bridge into town was knocked clean over, its post uprooted. Windows are shattered from gunfire; sheet metal walls ripped off their welding.
I fill my canteen from the cistern in the center of town, surveying the wreckage. Anyone the Super Mutants didn’t kill or drag off has probably fled already. I didn’t pass them on the way here, meaning they’re heading north or west, most likely. Enclave territory. The Enclave won’t have much use for them; maybe take them in as serfs. Probably feed them better than they managed here.
“Crazy he calls me / Sure I’m crazy / Crazy in love, you’ll see.”
I stumble toward the nearest house, turning off Galaxy News Radio, ready to flop down on a mattress and pass out. Then I stop and give the town another look. Sure, some of the doors have been ripped off their hinges and the entire town reeks of sweet burnt flesh. But the buildings are largely intact. There’s a major road that passes a few hundred feet nearby and an intact cistern. And I know the folks from Little Town will send someone else by eventually.
“Like the wind that shakes the bough / he moves with a smile …”
Laying down my .30-06, I return to the bridge that leads into town. I grab the gatepost, squatting down and reaching between my feet, and lift. I struggle with it for a good thirty seconds, the awkward weight of the chain-link gate swinging the post erratically. Then I finally push it past my chest and up over my head. Walking it forward, I push it all the way upright until it slides back into the hole it was knocked out of. Big Town has a gate again.
“The difficult, I’ll do right now / the impossible will take a little while …”
