Fallout 3: The Impossible Will Take A Little While
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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.
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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.
Thanks, NMA.
