The Bachman Books, Part 2
The Running Man: 1982
There’s no shortage of horrible film adaptations of Stephen King, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s but by far the one that barely deserves the term ‘adaptation’ is the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Richard Dawson film of The Running Man in 1987. Regardless of its overall quality (and even by the low metric of 1980s action films its pretty close to the bottom there) it bares no similarity in plot, has only the names of two of the characters (and one is completely taken out of context of where it’s used in the novel) and even completely messes up the point of the game show that is the center of the original novel. I suppose the only reason King doesn’t consider it the worst version of any of his works is that technically it isn’t one of his works.
The irony is that there was a perfectly filmable and brilliant story in the original plot of The Running Man which it’s looking from the trailers that Edgar Wright has basically gotten exactly right in the lead-up to the November release. He’s certainly done a better job by casting his leading man as Ben Richards: Glen Powell definitely has far more of the everyman quality that Ben Richards is in the book and while he may have leading man looks he’s definitely not the muscle-bound fighter Ahnold is.
According to King he wrote the original novel in a period of roughly seventy two hours and it was published with virtually zero changes. If that’s the case it’s even more remarkable that such a brilliant, finished novel seemed to spring ex nihilo out of the head of King this quickly and efficiently. The Running Man very well could take place in the same world as The Long Walk (even though it is set in what was the far-off and distant year of 2025) but whereas few details of America or the world were clear in that book, Bachman manages to give us a very vivid snapshot of this future time. It may also be the most prescient novel either King or Bachman ever wrote.
It’s not just that the title game is very much the kind of thing that reality TV does in a big way: it’s that the entire world is fixating on the kind of game shows of which The Running Man is just the biggest. There is only one channel in the entire world: Free-Vee and it is always on somewhere. And so many of the games seem like the kind we would eventually get in this century.
In the opening page of the novel Treadmill for Bucks is playing:
They accepted only chronic heart, liver or lung patients, sometimes throwing in a crip for comic relief. Every minute the contestant could stay on the treadmill (keeping up with a steady flow of chatter with the emcee) he won ten dollars. Every two minutes the emcee asked a Bonus question in the contestant’s category…which was worth fifty dollars. If the contestant, dizzy, out of breath, heart doing fantastic rubber acrobatics in his chest, missed the question, fifty dollars was deducted from his winnings and the treadmill was speeded up.
By the time the first chapter is over the contestant has both missed a question and had a heart attack and the audience applauded. Remember the early 2000s when we had such game shows as The Chair, The Chamber and Fear Factor?
The Running Man which Richards qualifies for is the biggest game show. A contestant must avoid the captivity of the Hunters for thirty days. Every hour he eludes them he earns one hundred dollars; if he makes it the whole thirty, he wins one billion dollars. The all-time record, as we learn late in the book, is eight days and seven hours.
No one is rooting for the title contestant. Indeed they are given rewards for tipping off the Hunters with a bigger one if it results in the contestant being killed. The contestant is set up to be a villain; his family monstrous; evil incarnate. The film has the studio audience rooting for Schwarzenegger to be killed and they are appalled when he manages to kill someone. It seems that the audience for the show is sheep though the further along Richards gets there is a possibility that he may be reaching the people despite the efforts of the state.
Unlike The Long Walk which barely gave us a sense of what America was like Bachman gives us a very clear picture of what 2025 America is like and it’s a little unsettling how prescient he was in many ways. The Richards family lives in a slum that is so run down the cops don’t even go near it. The air is filled with pollution and toxic: the wealth wear nose filters to keep from breathing it and the poor get sick, though it is unknown. Poverty and graffiti decorate the city, and most of the public is on drugs. Crime and decay populate every section of it. As Richards walks to the Games Building:
“No smell but the decaying reek of this brave year 2025. The Free-Vee cables are safely buried underground and no one but an idiot or revolutionary would want to vandalize them. Free-Vee is the stuff of dreams, the bread of life. Scag is 12 old bucks a bag, Frisco Push goes for twenty, but the Free-Vee will freak you for nothing. Farther along, on the other side of the Canal, the dream machine runs 24 hours a day…but it runs on New Dollars and only employed people have any. There are four million others, almost all of them unemployed, south of the Canal in Co-Op city.
The Games Building is the only way for a desperate man to make living. And Ben is desperate. He is twenty-eight years old, with a wife and a two year old who needs a doctor and he has no money to pay her. He got married at sixteen and while he is smart there is no real hope for education or advancement in this world.
In this world books are regarded with suspicion at best; there are dozens of doctors in the Games Building but none in the slums. The world is a horrible place; we hear news reports of cannibal riots in India. No one knows the past (Richards confuses the Beatles and The Rolling Stones). Everyone spies on their neighbors for the police.
Richards is clearly angry against the world and he loathes the Games themselves. He hates himself that he has to stoop to this and he shows the level of visceral contempt every step of the way. Its clear the further along he gets that he is both intelligent and angry. When he gets to the psych part and he is forced to tell the truth, he actually explains why he’s doing this:
“I haven’t had work in a long time. I want to work again, even if its only being the sucker-man in a loaded game. I want to work and support my family. I have pride. Do you have pride, Doctor?”
“It goes before a fall,” the doctor said.
The further along in the process Richards gets angrier and more determined that somebody has to pay. By the time he gets to the final stage he’s told what he gets who has a clear idea of what’s coming:
“I think we’re getting the big money assignments. The ones where they do more than just land you in the hospital with a stroke or put out an eye or cut off an arm or two. The ones where they kill you. Prime time, baby.”
The police load them into an elevator with a cop. His colleague says: “We’re dangerous characters. Public enemies.” He has no idea how accurately he’s referring to Richards.
It is only with his meeting with Killian (who is the head of the network, not the host of The Running Man) that we get a hint as to why Richards might have been chosen. He has a failure to respect authority dating back to high school. He has refused to sign oaths of fealty to the state. He has been fired six times for insubordination, insulting superiors and abusive criticism of authority. He’s intelligent enough to stay out of prison and serious trouble with the government. The main reason he has been chosen for this job is because he is an ‘embryo troublemaker’. The game is in league with the government as this is the best way possible to eliminate the kind of people Killian considers an anachronism.
And it is clear this show is weighted to get the public to root against these people, something Killian is proud of: “People won’t be in the bars or the hotels or gathering in the cold in front of appliance stores rooting for you to get away. They want to see you wiped out, and they’ll help if they can. The more messy, the better.”
I suspect the original film combined the characters of Killian with the actual host Bobby Thompson, who in his description in Bachman’s book actually sounds like he had Richard Dawson in mind. Thompson is only seen in a few random scenes during the book but every time we do we get a sense of the kind of genius he must be. Perhaps the most brilliant sign of it comes after Richards has eluded the hunters the first time by killing five people, netting him $500:
“Five hundred dollars,” Thompson was saying, and infinite hate and contempt filled his voice. “Five hundred dollars. Five police, five wives, 19 children. It comes to just about seventeen dollars and twenty five cents for each of the dead, the bereaved, the heartbroken. Oh yes, you work cheap. Ben Richards. Even Judas got thirty pieces of silver, but you don’t even demand that.”
By the end of it, the crowd is chanting “Strike him dead!” and Thompson has become religious in his oratory:
“Behold the man! He has been paid his blood money — but the man who lives by violence shall die by it. And let every man’s hand be raised against Ben Richards.
Hate and fear in every voice, rising in a steady, throbbing roar. No, they wouldn’t turn him in. They would rip him to shreds on sight.”
I would have loved to hear Richard Dawson make that speech. I hope Wright’s film has some version of it.
The reason that I believe Wright is getting his film right is that, based on the trailers, his Ben Richards is actually running. That’s the real problem with the Schwarzenegger version: the contestants are put into a life-sized pneumatic tube and shot into a giant but essentially enclosed arena where they must due battle with mechanized gladiators. In this version of the film the final boss is called Captain Freedom and he’s played by Jesse Ventura.
In the book, by contrast, Ben gets what’s amounted to a forty-eight hour head start and then is being chased down by every cop in the world as well as the Hunters. The head of the Hunters is Evan McCone, who is described in the book as a ‘direct descendant of J. Edgar Hoover and Henrich Himmler. The personification of the steel inside the Network’s cathode glove.”
Eventually we meet him and it’s almost anticlimactic to Richards:
“He was a small man wearing rimless glasses, with a faint suggestion of a belly beneath his well-tailored suit. It was rumored that McCone wore elevator shoes, but it so, they were unobtrusive, There was a small silver flag pin on his lapel. All in all, he did not look like a monster at all…Not like a man who had mastered the technique of the black car in the night, the rubber club, the sly question about relatives back home. Not like a man who had mastered the entire spectrum of fear.”
I won’t give away the circumstances in which the two men meet face to face (you may very well see on the big screen soon) but it becomes clear within minutes of their meeting that McCone is a master of psychological warfare and almost manages to hypnotize Richards into giving up his secrets within seconds. I doubt this is the case but I could see him being played by Christophe Waltz because in his dialogue and delivery he reminds me very much of Hans Landa and Ernest Blofeld.
I should mention that there is a rebellion of sorts going on in Bachman’s novel but it’s not being done with guns and an assault but an effort to bring out information. It comes from the slums and the underprivileged, the ones who want to get the truth out but who FreeVee is actively silence. Richards’ rebellion is not one of guns and violence but of trying however he can to reveal the truth.
This brings me to the most important point of The Running Man. It is delivered in the form of a countdown. The novel unfolds in 100 chapters, all begin ‘Minus 100 and Counting’ and yes we do reach zero at the end. Bachman/King makes it clear the novel is counting down to some grand climax and he doesn’t back away from it.
That said, I must tell you upfront that there is no way the version in the book could appear in a film today. In a way that King could have never foreseen he foresaw the future with his final page of this book and there’s no filmmaker in the world who would dare try to have it play out. (Wright knew this going in and when he chose to rewrite the ending King gave him his blessing, understanding why it had to be done more than anyone.) That said, in a perverse way it is the most optimistic ending of any of the Bachman novels as the protagonist does sacrifice himself but for once his actions may have irrevocably changed the system in a way none of the other endings of a Bachman book do.
I will admit that considering that essentially the final third of the novel is set on a passenger jet much of it may itself have to be rewritten. That said there’s a part of me that hopes it will play out in a certain extent because in order to get there Bachman essentially gives a monologue to Richards in which he makes it clear that he knows the situation he’s in and how he plans to beat it. In it Richard uses poker as a metaphor to explain his situation and that he knows the deck is stacked against him. He says they are playing stud poker and that the biggest hand possible is a royal flush with spades. I won’t describe how he qualifies who his four up cards are (save that he is the King) and that while his hole card isn’t the ace, he intends to run a bluff. When he’s told this won’t work his answer is:
“I think that they’ve been playing a crooked game so long that they’ll fold. I think they are yellow straight through the belly.”
It’s not that much of a reach to argue that Richards is talking about the top one percent of which Free-Vee is the most visible manifestation of that. And when you consider that this book came out in 1982, right about the time trickle down economics was becoming gospel for Reagan and Republicans, King might very well have had that on his mind.
In ‘Why I Was Bachman’ King says The Running Man might be the best of the Bachman novels “because it’s nothing but story — it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side.” There is manifest truth to that but there’s also a lot of subtext that is just as pertinent in the real 2025 as the fictional one that is the era of Bachman’s original novel. Wright might have to change a few dates and plot points to make it more relatable to today’s audience but honestly it’s as timeless a story that you could put it anywhere. I just hope we don’t inspire an actual game show with the same gimmick.
(And no The Amazing Race doesn’t count. Not until they start killing the losing contestants each week.)