You Gotta Walk Before You Can Run (The Running Man, 1982)

The Running Man (1982)

The greatest action movie never made.*

* The 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger dooftacular resembles the book as much as Goofy resembles a...dog? But we'll enjoy the joyful, gap-toothed idiocy in screenshots, anyway, because it was a fun sort of stupid and worthy, at least, of a little representation here.

"Don't go for second best, baby, put your love to the test
You know you know you've got to make him express how he feels
And maybe then you'll know your love is real..."
("Express Yourself," Madonna, 1989,
and don't tell me that video wasn't inspired by this and...)

...most especially THAT--The Carrying Man-- aka Arnold, poppin'
muscles and facial hair down at the factory.

I am going to step out of the self-imposed SK Read-a-Thon Spectacular timeline because I had my hands on The Bachman Books (1985) and was not about to squander an opportunity to read the rest of it. Unfortunately, I had to turn it back in to the library before I read the entire thing, skipping poor ol' Roadwork in the process, but I was determined to get the other two down for what will be very obvious reasons. Sorry (again), Roadwork. I may get back around to you again depending on availability and my wavering drive to try.

THE VACATIONING MAN

Get to da choppahhh!

Ben Richards won't be getting any sugar during The Running Man.

First, I like The Long Walk (1979) and The Running Man best, primarily because I've been a sucker for dystopian angst since the Cold War was all the rage. In fact, from the first time I read it to this very last, The Running Man has been my favorite of all the "Bachman" (nee King) pseudonym penned works. It's a runaway train on a downhill slope and it drives hard, ruthless, and full throttle to the very end. It is a page ripping, heart-pounding joy to read. I consider myself very lucky to have read The Running Man years before the movie came out. King's story is gritty, breathless, and unvarnished. His projection of a world not fifty years into the future is shocking but not unbelievable. It is filthy, low, and without hope. The rivers are teeming with toxins and the air is thick with poison. People aren't just poor, they are a starving, desperate, wretched poor. Crime is commonplace and kindergartners are selling drugs and kicking guys on crutches in the streets. It is grim on top of grime with a side of asthma.

The Sitting Man.

The Long Walk and The Running Man are thematically connected on several different levels. They both take place in the dystopian near-future where people bet their lives to win long-shot riches beyond imagination. The Long Walk, sort of a proto-Hunger Games where teen boys need only outwalk ninety-nine fellow competitors to win The Prize (anything you want for the rest of your life), is the less gritty yet still just as morally debased of the two, and is set out in the Maine countryside with contestants from all walks (ahem) of life. Amidst the harrowing exhaustion and bland bloodshed, boys remain boys, jokes are bantered, and friendships are formed. On the flipside, The Running Man is set in primarily urban, impoverished areas, with the main protagonist a desperate, hungry, angry Everyman who chooses to sacrifice his life to save his child and give her a better future. His bonds with others, as tenuous and brief as they are, are scattershot, painful, and marked by unfathomable suffering. While the characters of both works live in worlds rampant with pollution in countries run by authoritarian, militaristic governments, they are driven to these extreme competitions for very different reasons.

Showtime!

As heartless as the world in The Long Walk might be, the twisted sacrifice of a hundred young men once a year is ultimately by choice--it is considered a great honor and the kids must test to even be considered. While The Prize is at least theoretically coveted, a great number of the participants chose to be there for the perceived privilege, for the singular competition, and sometimes for reasons too complex for their young minds to comprehend, especially once the race grows harder and the consequences of bowing out turn from theoretical to literal.

The dancers are seriously the most 80s thing to ever 80s.

In The Running Man, the world is a much darker place, all kinds of ugly, scabbed, and mean. The contestants of the various shows run by the Games Network know exactly why they are there: Money. The United States is a far more fractured place, wrought with pollution and extreme poverty, run by an authoritarian government in tandem with the all-powerful Games Federation. The divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots is cavernous and largely unbreachable. The only bridges across the chasm are slim, rickety, and go by names like Treadmill for Bucks, Dig Your Grave, and, of course, The Running Man. These bridges are rigged, deadly, and the last hope of those that would dare to traverse them.

These close-ups are meant to showcase the bitchen,
glittery leotards and nothing else.

The most unnerving yet spot-on connection between these two Bachman tales is the living, breathing monstrosity that is "the Crowd." Each novel's main event is followed reverently and obsessively by the riotous, impetuous, fervent, ravenous carnival of the Crowd...an unblinking audience of voyeurs, vapid onlookers, a reeling, shrieking wall of clutching Attention. In The Long Walk, the circus atmosphere is more apt, with celebratory signs, banners, confetti, and well-meaning (though highly illegal) interference, with one man chucking watermelon slices at the exhausted walkers much to the crowd's delight (and the walkers' relief). Even in the cacophony of cheering hoards in the cities and towns, or smiling kids camping out in the country just to see the walkers trudge by, there are also moments of grim analytics (the walkers overhear plenty of wagering on which boy will fall next) and the cold application of punishment. Walkers don't just get to tap out and take a nap of failure in the back seat of dad's car on the way back to Walla Walla. Once their time is up (120 seconds), their time is really up. Slowing down or stopping at least get warnings; more serious infractions mean instant death. And the crowd, while avid to the point of hysteria, clearly understands that the rules work both ways. Walkers can't run into the crowd (they still try) and the crowd can't run into the road, specifically anywhere near the walkers. When a little dog skitters out onto the highway, yapping its simple little head off, the soldiers blow it away just as nonchalant as you please. A crying boy is left dogless, sure, but it's a mean old world, anyway.

The Opiate of the Masses.

The Crowd in The Running Man is less carnival, more carnivorous. Part of the game requires whipping the audience into a frenzy of bloodlust, smearing the character of the contestant and his family, and triggering the most primal fears of "good citizens." While the game employs hunters to track down and take down the running man, the audience is incentivized to participate. There's money for confirmed sightings, but there's big money and a heap of fame if an audience member manages to kill the contestant. The Crowd is a weapon of the Games Authority and the State and the bloodier and more spectacular the violence in the chase, the better.

King understands a Crowd. He is a devoted student to its nastiest behaviors and stupidest convictions. Much like the heaving, groaning congregants amassed to raise hands and speak tongues for Jesus, he understands that we all need a little proselytizing to get by, we all need some Good Time Religion to believe in, even if it's bank notes over bibles, or Orange Julius Caesar over crucified Jesus Christ. Hell, I used to hate Twitter, found it too cacophonous and chaotic to get into, but have taken to checking it every day since the election in 2016 just to read the latest "sick burns" delivered by silverest tongues on "my" side of the aisle. Sometimes they go too far. Sometimes I find it hard to care. It's a manufactured balm on my own burns. Fuck those guys (TM), brought to you by Unguentine. This is deep in the bone, the chattering, murmuring, shrieking wave of the Crowd.

As time in this real world progressed, some of King's futurstic gimmicks and gadgets grew less futuristic and more nifty "for the time," and many things still commonplace even in King's imaginings (party lines and phone booths, for example) have long gone the way of the dinosaur. But I still shudder at how close he got to the Truth of things where it really, really counted. Air cars be danged, we literally have Free-Vees in our houses...and not just one but several, and they come in all shapes and sizes, from the mega flatscreen in your living room to the laptop I'm using to write this blog entry. Instead of watching a single channel of propaganda we have a whole slew of channels to choose from, many of which spew whatever propaganda you and your like-minded friends and family are most likely to feel best about, lean into, and fall calmly asleep against in the soft assurance that you are, in fact, on the right side of history. Worse yet, it isn't even free. At least in King's dystopian future, people had no choice. Free-Vee was government mandated. We pay for the equipment (tvs, computers, phones), the electricity to run it, and every "entertainment package" imaginable to get as much of the Vee-Sans-Free as we can consume. Hog heaven and a buffet full of bullshit.

One of the departures from the book is Killian. Here, he's the host (and
founder) of The Running Man. In the book, Bobby Thompson is the host
while Killian (Dan, not Damon) is the executive producer. 

Maria Conchita Alonso searches for change in her futuristic triangle purse
while the futuristic glow of neon pulses in the background.

When Survivor premiered in May of 2000 my very first thought was "OH SHIT, RUNNING MAN." Sure, no one was going to die while participating on Survivor, but things were going to get ethically murky and people were going to get hurt. And they have. There are always bug bites and hunger. Some of the contestants get rib-jutting skinny. They look dirty, tired, and quite a few start fragmenting mentally. Real injuries have occurred. I only watched the first couple of seasons, mostly because it was such a titanic force in the pop culture ethos, but also because I wanted to see the drama, the car crash, the train wreck. Everyone talked about the show. After The Real World, Survivor was a catalyst in reality television programming. What was once cable-only and kind of slimy had gone mainstream and primetime. I had to stop watching after a while. The premise of suffering on a deserted island while playing ridiculous games against another hungry, angry, sleep-deprived team did not appeal to me. Watching people waste away while bickering over meager supplies became just too gruesome to bear.

"YOU." Arnold sees Maria for the first time since she ruined their vacation.

There are limits to the game shows of the real and now, but what hungers can't be sated from watching survivors starve can be refreshed on the next channel with police pursuits, fail video montages, and reruns of Forensic Files. And if the immense catalog of real or fictionalized televised entertainment does not delve deep enough into the sick marrow of inhumanity? Fire up the computer and use whatever search engine you choose to find real, live car crash investigation photos, celebrity autopsies, beheading videos. We may not have The Running Man, but we have a million little alternate outlets for whatever depths of depravity we might seek to reach. So far, there is no bottom.

In all The Running Man's manufactured vilification of its contestants, the lies, retouched photographs, and poverty based fear mongering, it's still somehow not as creeping loathsome as so much of the easily accessible media today. The Running Man, for all it's grotesque misery and empty despair, is almost quaint.

Severe shoulder pads on beige women = Future Forward.

Maybe it's the lies that have salted the pot so slowly and steadily over the years that we've collectively been brined into thick, dulled deadheads with no sense of the parameters of decency outside of whatever works for us in the moment. It is easy enough to gather around a television set alongside fellow humans to watch and rewatch the aerial view of a white Ford Bronco racing down a busy highway interspersed with footage of a walkway smeared in blood. Worse, I remember believing just about everything my government told me when I was growing up, regardless of whatever party was largely in charge at the time. If the news said it, it had to be true. You might say I was ignorant and naive...and you would not be wrong. It is also just a part of my personality, one flimsy gate made of duct tape and popsicle sticks that persists to exist even to this day. I'm learning, though, and it's been just horrible, akin to a sizzling, screaming exorcism of goodwill and dopey, smiling handshakes, but I'm girded at least against anything politician-related. I do remain, as always, vulnerable on an interpersonal level. I believe people are forthcoming, honest, and well-meaning. As empathetic as I imagine myself to be, I struggle to believe that a person standing in front of me, smiling and seemingly friendly, could have any other agenda than friendship and openheartedness. I know, right? Like fish in a barrel, I am.

This is the closest Schwarzenegger gets to the Real Ben Richards.

"Here, use my back, victim."

But people don't always mean well, and governments mean about as well as they are required to while still milking as much money and power as they can under the flimsy guise of "service." In the novel and the movie adaptation of The Running Man, Ben Richards kidnaps an upper-class woman (at vastly different stages and reasons because the book and the movie are only vaguely similar) who also believes everything the government tells her. Until the truth shines its ugly yellow light on how things are really done. In the movie, the Free-Vee programming is meant to numb the legions of the poor with flashy violence while feeding the bourgeois bloodlust against "criminal elements," most of which are poor and/or revolutionaries who would upend the status quo. There is a suggestion that if you just tell people the truth, they will rise up together, proletariat and bourgeoisie hand-in-hand praise Jesus, and crush the authoritarian powers of the Games Federation and the government to (perhaps) create a better world. Adorable, but stupid.

Sure, bitch.

Here's your pen. (Look at Sven's expression.)

In the book, the people living in poverty already know the score. They watch the Free-Vee or don't watch the Free-Vee, but they know exactly what they are and how little power they have. Contestants on all of the games are citizens, not criminals, but are painted in an ugly enough light to root against, anyway, not that it takes much for the upper class folks to root against the dirty destitute. It is easy to hate what you fear, even if it isn't the person at all but the poverty they wear like a stinking crevice of government cheese flab with a rheumy cough.

This face. Almost as good as the original ending in the book.

The most gripping part of this read through was, by far, Ben Richards himself. I remembered each plot point as I read, but the rage he feels was so much more visceral this time around. I do not live in poverty, I do not go hungry, and I can breathe just fine most of the time, but I still understood that rage so much better than I ever had before. It isn't about one man, one party, one government, one country. If only. It's more about that insidious flora of lies, all the intertwining roots, hardy, healthy trunks, the shiny, greasy leaves, and all that heady, smoking haze of pollen, treacherous and sticky. The most comfortable are happy to believe whatever serves their own interests, everyone else be damned. Somehow millions of people living in poverty are convinced to work against their own interests to fatten cats already too fat to scat. Remember those Twitter tricksies I mentioned earlier? They fuck up, too, and more often than I can understand, because everything is reactionary now, minute to minute: the fastest condemnations, declarations, and witty decimations get the most likes. It's infuriating. I'm comfortable, I'm fed, I have everything I need and want, but that Ben Richards rage, man, it's too real, too present, too Now.

BLUE STEEL MAN.

This is why, now more than ever, I am absolutely screaming for someone to please, please make this film. The real Running Man, the gritty, dirty, mean, hateful, angry, true Running Man. They could even keep it set in 2025 just like the book (the movie changed it to 2017, exactly 30 years from its release, which is funny because few movies look as bracingly and ridiculously 1980s as The Running Man). It could be a truly epic movie, something both action packed and moving, with little tweaks here and there, of course. Just after 9/11, I would have agreed that the ending would have to be changed. It's still tricky, but not impossible (or even groundbreaking, there have been several movies and shows that have depicted that very thing since to differing negative audience response). A new depiction of The Running Man could be a smeared, cracked mirror of the near-future Now. Audiences would definitely relate.

Tunnel of Death!
In the book Ben Richards just takes the elevator down to the street.

Do I hate the 1987 movie version of The Running Man? Nah. They are dissimilar enough, first of all, that it's almost more of an homage than a adaptation. In fact, it is more of an extremely silly, extremely campy Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle than it is an action movie based on a Stephen King work.

And I may have had other reasons for not hating it so much. Context always matters...

Deeeaaaaathhhhhh!

In 1988, I had my first summer job, a real moneymaker, too, because it was summer custodial for the school district, which paid well above minimum wage. I worked 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday in the smothering heat of un-airconditioned junior highs, swabbing out lockers, dusting shelves, spraying out metal trashcans, and for one truly blissful week, scraping decades of floor wax buildup from around the perimeter of the entire cafeteria. Gro. Dee.

With my first paycheck, I bought an NES and Super Mario Brothers. With my second paycheck, I bought a VCR, our family's very first. I'd coveted one since spending hours taping and rewatching Mtv videos and cable movies on my best friend's Betamax, even going so far as watching all of Poltergeist on backwards play. I was a high school kid with a mild video game addiction and a major movie fixation. I was obsessed.

Best friends! In the movie, Arnie's pro-revolution, jail break buddies are
rounded up and sent into the arena with him, later to be joined by Maria
Conchita Alonso. In the book, Richards gets help from various people
along the way, but only meets the other contestants at the end of the
interview cycle, only one of which is similarly named to a character in
the movie (Laughlin). In the book, Laughlin is caught and slain by two
little kids in Topeka, Kansas.

Soon enough, we were hooked on taping movies and comedy specials off of HBO on our new VCR...Spaceballs, Splash, Aliens, The Lost Boys, everything...including The Running Man. I was the right age to enjoy some slapstick gore and pithy one-liners, but truth be told it was kind of a hard sell. Even in 1987, The Running Man was a very ridiculous movie. Plus I knew the truth of the story and how little it jived with the film. It made serious stuff into something worse than a joke. A high-haired girl could get righteously mad and stompy about it. Except...

It also had Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was important. I may or may not have had a Massive Crush on said Schwarzenegger. I may or may not have had the only damn poster anybody carried of said Schwarzenegger up on my wall, a gross, camo-makeup smeared, gun toting promotional poster from dorky Predator. I may or may not have watched The Running Man just to see said Schwarzenegger in his lil yellow track suit or, better yet, that Nice White T when he benchpresses Maria Conchita Alonso. Who can say.

Grow lights in the arena.

Most of it was sufferable enough to watch while existing in the 80s (the jazzerdancers, the neon, the big hair) but even then the acting is just terrible--terrible--and there are few things worse than Mick Fleetwood the earnest revolutionary acting against Arnie the muscle puppet. Well, one thing was worse. In the movie, Richard Dawson (acting exactly how we imagined Richard Dawson to act after the Family Feud cameras turned off and all the kisses were dispensed) introduces the contestants, makes the audience hate them, then sends them down this silly chute to a sort of arena (earthquake ruins of the city). There they are hunted by "stalkers" who are basically just campy superhero characters from some rebate comic in Hell. They go by names that describe their particular talents, like Buzzsaw, Subzero, and the absolute worst, Dynamo, a dipshit, rapist, cartoon of an asshole in an ELO charioteer, plastic suit-of-armor who lip syncs opera and electrocutes people from afar. What. An Asshole. In, like, every way. It's so campy you start to slide down in your seat and end up on the floor with popcorn debris.

Sure, why not.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is not Ben Richards. In the book, Richards is described as "a man in baggy gray pants and a cheap bowl haircut and sunken eyes." He lives on a diet of "greasy pizza wedges and government pill-commodities." He is not anyone remotely related to Mr. Universe. Of course the image of that hideous bowl cut really stuck in my craw when I read the book in the 80s (and quite frankly still irritates, like why) so my brain adapted a different appearance to make the hero more palatable. Ironically (or not), I always imagined Michael Biehn would make a fine Ben Richards. Yes, Arnold's pesky little rat of a Sarah Connor savior, Mr. "Cyborgs Don't Feel Pain I Do," and all around furrowed-brow-troubled-by-these-developments Everyman who later played the much loved Hicks in Aliens. He was skinny enough, for sure, but also normal-handsome and able to convey all sorts of tortured inner feelings about whatever bad thing was going on in makebelieve land, be it mean-mouthed cyborgs or skittering, chompy xenomorphs.

The Concerned Man. 

A modern take on The Running Man would require it's own vision of Ben Richards, but there would be no restrictions on the scope of the story. No more relegating the action to one sequestered section of Los Angeles. In the book, Richards starts out in Co-Op city, and suburban blight across the river from the fictional Midwestern city of Harding, the base of operations for the Games Network. His run takes him to New York City, Boston, Manchester (NH), and Portland (ME) eventually ending up back in Harding, however briefly, at the conclusion of the chase. There are moments of creeping terror, blind panic, massive explosions, car chases, and a slow motion kidnapping so close to the edge of disaster from start to finish that the reader barely breathes until the very end of it.

Frankly, the book could never have been accurately depicted in 1987...probably not even 1997. We were still so deep in the pocket of paranoia and blind nationalism from the Cold War to buy into the ugly truths laid out in King's story. Not even one projected as far into the future as we could stand to imagine--thirty short years--and even then it was a candy-coated, high-minded, Good Always Wins clown college of slapstick murder and flat one-liners. We deserve a real, full-tilt, no-holds-barred update of The Running Man. Something that let's off steam and let's us all collectively rage against the machine, even if it's only vicariously.

Grade: A
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 6, not scary so much as intense. The depiction of rampant, lethal pollution is scarier now than it was 30+ years ago, that's for damn sure.
Warnings: Casual and virulent bigotry and racism, Real Rage, despair, and some truly fantastic GORE that will freak you out for a lifetime (guaranteed).
Artifact: See, Rage. Thanks, Wichita Public Library!

Note: All screenshots were taken from this HD trailer and this hilarious part of the movie with the dancers and the pen. Thanks to these YouTube heroes for sharing the weirdness that is ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER'S the running man.