Untimely Dystopias: On The Long Walk and The Running Man

 

2025 will probably go down in history as a pivotal year in the US's decline into a particular kind of media driven twenty-first century fascism. It is the year that Trump got his paramilitary force, in ICE, it is also the year in which we saw the fourth estate capitulate to the administration, turning over CBS news to a bootlicking blogger, firing comedians, and gutting journalism to pour money into a fawning documentary about the first lady. The times would seem to be ripe for a film dealing with the combination of authoritarian power and media spectacle. We got two, both based on books by Stephen King. Books written over forty years ago. 

The Running Man  and The Long Walk are both books that Stephen King published under the name Richard Bachman. The Running Man was published in 1982, The Long Walk in 1979, although it was written much earlier. It was the first novel that King wrote, during his Freshman year at the University of Maine in 1969. Both of these books were relatively unknown until someone figured at that Bachman was King writing under a pen name. Apparently he was writing so much that he was competing with himself. After King's secret got out both books were then published as part of a collection with two other novels, titled The Bachman Bookis in 1985. The Running Man was then made into a film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1986. Both books take the same basic premise, an authoritarian government coupled with a brutal televised spectacle of death to placate the masses. 

As a teenager, I was really into Stephen King. I know that is a strange thing to say about one of the biggest authors of his time. It was mass culture, back when an author could be part of mass culture. As a kid growing up I would spend part of my summers visiting my grandparents in Stillwater, Maine--not too far from where many King stories were set. Derry always seemed to be an alternative version of Brewer, and Castle Rock was not too far from that area as well. My parents had also both gone to the University of Maine a few years before King's freshman year. Reading King always felt a little more personal than just being one of the millions of fans.I remembering reading the Bachman books and thinking that they were all uniformly dark, as King himself has said, they are young man's books, dark, cynical, and angry. That anger was at a different time. So we can ask ourselves how does it translate into the present. 

With the exception of recently reading The Shining to teach the film, I have not read anything by King in decades. So I am working on my memory here. I remember thinking that The Running Man was oddly prescient when it was published. The first film adaptation missed this aspect entirely. In the book "The Running Man" show is more like a souped-up version of America's Most Wanted. It was played out across the country, everyone was on the hunt. The first film replaced this setting with American Gladiator, moving the action to an underground maze, and replacing being hunted by everyone and anyone with themed antagonists in costumes. It is also a film made at the point where Schwarzenegger's one liners are truely groan inducing. Schwarzenegger made two great science fiction/action movies in the eighties, The Terminator and Total Recall. This was not one of them. 

 

In the eighties, the action film was less a particular genre, than a genre that science fiction had to pass through in order to be made into a movie. This is particularly striking when it comes to Philip K. Dick's works which generally function as just basic ideas or concepts, to which action scenes can be added.  I find a lot of that action to be dull. Even They Live, one of my favorite films from that period, gets boring when it collapses into a series of gun fights in the third act. 

One of the nods to the first film is that Schwarzenegger is on the 100 bill

(Of course in a dystopian future being on the currency is probably not a good thing)

The Running Man seems like one of those films that could be remade, or rather, readapted from its source material. (With the proliferation of words for IP films, reboots, and requels, we do not seem to have a word for something that is less a remake of a film than a remake of the original source material). At the same time, what is prescient in the 1980s can seem dated in 2025. The film is much truer to its source material than the first film. There are no opera singing villains festooned in electric lights. The "hunt" is carried out by an elite group of soldiers, but also anyone with a cellphone or a flamethrower. Everything about the surveillance and facial recognition technology places the film in the present, or not too different future. This means that it struggles with the question of technology. In the original book "the runners" have to submit a video tape everyday, proving they are alive and preventing them from going into total isolation. The film updates this with having them drop off tapes into drone powered drop off boxes, but beyond that  the film doesn't really know what to do with change of from technology from 1980 until now.  Over the course of the movie we get underground zines, a Youtube like channel trying to radicalize the masses, and all of this coexists with drone cameras and deep fake technology.

   

The use of "deep fake" technology raises a question that the film does not really address. At one point in the film the question is raised as to why not fake the same whole thing. The answer given by the show's producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) is that viewers need the unpredictable spark that real participants offer. It is only the spark they need, as we see the producers are not above interfering with the narrative, fabricating footage, and even killing people to get the story they want. In that way it is very close to the kayfabe logic of "reality television," in which the raw material maybe real, but the real can be produced, provoked, and edited to fit a story. 

This was downright prophetic in 1980, but a film made forty five years later cannot simply point to the date it was first written and claim to be insightful. It has to confront the reality of the present. Of course we do not have a reality based television show where people are hunted to the death--yet, but we do have an administration that increasingy follows the logic of reality television, producing events that are at once real and manufactured. As it has been argued, ICE is more about producing content than it is about catching the supposed "worst of the worst." The question that the film runs up against, but does not address, is how can one puncture this tightly interwoven web of fiction and reality. A web that is all the more inescapable because we all produce it. It is going to take more than a few zines or youtube channels to challenge such a power. Movies are not politics, and in the end the film caves to pressure to entertain in the actual year 2025 by changing the book's dark ending with a more uplifting one. 

Fredric Jameson has written that utopias come up against the narrative demands of fiction, a world in which all of the problems of life have been resolved is devoid of the necessary conflict to drive a story. A related problem confronts dystopian fictions, especially when they become blockbusters. The film demands action, and I don't just mean car chases and fight scenes, but the capacity to act, to change the world, but a world in which one person, or even a ragtag band, could actually change things would not be a dystopia, or would not be dystopian enough. The possibility of action, of transformative action, would suggest that whatever kind of control exists is not enough.  

 

The Long Walk is a film which embraces dystopia at the expense of action. The film takes place in a world in which the US has undergone a war and an economic crash. The struggling country turns to a yearly event, in which fifty young men walk until there is only one standing. That young man wins money and a "wish." King has mentioned that what prompted the novel was the senseless slaughter of watching his peers be drafted to fight in Vietnam. Of course that subtext would not longer work. 

The given by "The Major" (Mark Hamill) to the young men slightly shifts and updates the subtext. 

The Major: Each year after the event, there's a spike in production. We have the means to return to our former glory. Our problem now, is the epidemic of laziness. You boys are the answer. The Long Walk is the answer. When this is broadcast for all the states, your inspiration will continue to elevate our gross national product. We will be number one in the world again!
[All: Yeah!]
The Major: Now, uh... I'm not gonna go though the whole rule book, but it boils down to this. Walk until there's only one of you left. Maintain a speed of three miles per hour. If you fall below the speed, you get a warning. If you can't make speed in ten seconds, you get an additional warning. Three warnings, you get your ticket. Walk one hour at speed, one warning is erased and so on. If you step off the pavement, you will get your ticket without warning. The goal is to last the longest. There's one winner and no finish line. Any of you can win. Any of you can do it if you walk long and steady enough. If you refuse to give up. I look at each and every one of you, and I see hope. Now, boys, who's set to fucking win?
[All Cheering]
The Major: I said... who's ready to fucking win?

The Long Walk does nothing to update the technology of the original. There are no drones or deep fakes. Everything is stuck in world which looks like the late sixties, or at least looks like nothing has been updated since the late sixties. It is unclear when it takes place, the past and poverty intertwine. Even the machine guns date back to the Vietnam era. The film does not change the time or setting, just the subtext. 

I was curious enough about the speech that I checked the book. It is not in the novel. The speech subtly shifts the film's subtext from war to work. Thus we can see in it some of the ideological logic of capitalism. The Major is right, one of them will win. One out of fifty. That is true. One hears the same thing in the contemporary work place, and, if you are me, when you teach a class about work. Some people are going to make it, become rich. It is impossible to deny that. Of course many more will not, that is just as true. It is the exception that rules, or the fantasy of becoming the exception. The film takes a premise which has now become familiar, a brutal game to the death televised for the masses, but this is a game without skills, where archery or martial arts training will not help you, all you have to do is walk. The focus on walking extends the fiction that anyone could win, winning is a matter of will, of perseverance, not ability, while simultaneously limiting the scope of action. There is nothing to do but walk. 

The more interesting thing is what happens over the course of the long walk. The boys not only form friendships, but they engage in actual acts of solidarity, helping each other stay awake, even carrying each other when they collapse. Such acts are ultimately tragic. They know that only one of them will win, only one of them will live, and there is nothing they can do to change that. 

The Long Walk changes the ending of the book as well, but it cannot change their character's fate. It does, however, show that there is solidarity, or at least the possibility of solidarity, even in a world of brutal competition. 

Of the two films I want to believe more in the possibility of The Running Man, that we can rise up, or at least print zines, and challenge the system, but it seems to me that The Long Walk has captured the feeling of the present, forced to compete in a game that almost no one will win. Even though it reminds us that we can still refuse to internalize the rules of the game, we can still show solidarity in competition, kindness in cruelty.