I'll be Bach(man)
It's time to start running
I’m not sure I have any business writing about fiction.
My usual reading pattern with novels is to borrow five or so books from my wife’s ever-growing collection to read on holiday, with each earning little more than a brief and non-specific review on a scale ranging from ‘quite good’ to ‘pretty good’.
I do have a soft spot for Stephen King, though, even if I need to cheat slightly by covering his work with reference to a very daft 80s film. (For which, incidentally, there will be some spoilers below).
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Edgar Wright is apparently about to direct a new film adaptation of The Running Man starring Glen Powell.
Possibly to distance themselves from accusations of fronting yet another Hollywood remake (and possibly because this is what they’re actually trying to do), both have suggested that this interpretation will be a lot more faithful to the original book by Stephen King, published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, than the one released in 1987 and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It’s a fairly commonly held opinion that the film glosses over a lot of the subtleties of its source material in favour of an Arnie-beats-up-bad-guys caper that was fairly typical of his output at the time. While this is true, I think it’s possible to be a fan of the book and the film. And it will certainly be interesting to see what kind of new movie emerges, if it ever does: the book is unremittingly bleak stuff, although not, perhaps, by the standards of some of the other Bachman books.
An ex-colleague of mine, with whom I had an occasionally testy working relationship, once told me that I reminded her of a character in a Stephen King novel — ‘in a good way’, naturally. As more time has passed, and I’ve read more of his work, I’ve yet to find much evidence that this statement could reasonably be considered a compliment of any kind.1
I think of this most often when I read The Bachman Books — a collection of four novels King secretly published under this name, including The Running Man, prior to being unmasked in 1985.
I’m not sure why, but they were the first of his books that I read. Possibly my aversion to scary films and the slightly sensationalist presentation that usually adorned King covers during his heyday (‘The master of the bone-chiller strikes again!’, etc.) made me think that they wouldn’t be my cup of tea, while these non-horror efforts, including the basis of a cheesy Schwarzenegger film, possibly appealed to me more.
The main characters of two of the Bachman books are the teenage perpetrator of a high-school shooting (Rage) and a middle-aged man who has a breakdown which manifests itself in a refusal to make arrangements to move house or place of work, both of which are to be displaced by a new road extension (Roadwork).
Probably these aren’t the characters my former colleague was referring to. At least, I hope not.
Rage is, unsurprisingly, now out of print and excluded from new editions of The Bachman Books. King didn’t exactly disown it, but no longer wanted it to be considered an influence — as in some cases it evidently had been — on those who carried out real-life school shootings and withdrew it from sale.2 Unfortunately, I might recognise something of myself in the slow-motion, I-refuse-to-accept-the-bad-thing-is-happening, behaviour of the protagonist of Roadwork that precipitates his life going off the rails, although not in what he does afterwards.3
I do, of course, share my name with the protagonist of The Running Man, although I sadly never asked my late mother whether it was the sickly, downtrodden Richards of the Bachman book or the musclebound Schwarzenegger — one mean motherfucker — who was the inspiration.4
As the basis for a movie centred on the cruel violence of a government-sponsored competition, The Running Man probably isn’t even the best example in the Bachman collection. Instead, I’d nominate The Long Walk, a pre-Hunger Games tale of young men participating in a kind of sponsored-walk-to-the-death in a fascist future, where the slowest youngsters are gunned down one by one until only the winner remains.
(For reasons unknown, I decided to re-read The Long Walk while preparing for a recent 10km run with much less stringent rules — I was worried about finishing but not that worried — and was woken up one night by my wife who told me that a) I had been screaming and b) it probably wasn’t the best time to be revisiting this particular collection.)5
Indeed, while reading the four-book version of The Bachman Books, the intensity of the stories that precede The Running Man, which appears as the final instalment — a school shooting, the army torturing and killing teenage boys, a man having a long, drawn-out, breakdown — is almost enough to make it seem a relatively lean and brisk read by comparison.
King would later describe it as the work of a ‘young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing’ which is a very ‘serious male fiction author’ thing to say, although given that most of the anger appears in this case to be directed at inequality and unfairness in society, I think we can give him the benefit of the doubt.
The book has broader targets than the film, and it is a combination of economic strife and inaccessibility of healthcare that forces the novel’s Richards, unable to work or afford medicine for his sick daughter, to volunteer for the show in order to earn money. Meanwhile, the show itself requires its ‘runners’ to be, quite literally, on the run, out in the real world, with the public encouraged to assist the professional ‘hunters’ — the people tasked with executing the runners on behalf of the show — in tracking them down.
In the modern day, King’s version of the show has some parallels with something like Channel 4’s Hunted, which might rightly be considered a bit of a laugh, despite the fake authorities’ evident glee in using the full power of surveillance technology to apprehend contestants, but with one or two tweaks would be equally as terrifying as anything depicted in the fictional future nightmare of The Running Man.
The film version instead tells a simplified tale of an innocent man wrongly convicted and sent to participate in a more violent version of Gladiators,6 with Schwarzenegger’s Richards selected on the basis that he might be more of a match for the show’s hunters than previous contestants.
King, who wasn’t a fan of the movie, wrote that Arnold Schwarzenegger was as far away from Ben Richards, as he imagined him, as it was possible to get.7 Arnie’s two associates, Weiss and Laughlin — a nerdy computer guy and a slightly overweight middle-aged teacher — are probably more like the book’s typical contestants, but are, of course, killed off midway through the film as Arnie single-handedly saves the day.8
(How to explain a concept like peak-era Schwarzenegger to those unfamiliar with it? A physical colossus in almost all of his movies, he would invariably be given extremely normal American character names like Doug or Harry, with his obviously-not-American origins rarely explained or rationalised, and posters and publicity essentially telling you to ignore whatever name the character had been given because it was Arnie, being Arnie, who was the star of this film anyway. The DVD art for The Running Man, for example, states: ‘A game nobody survives… but Schwarzenegger has yet to play’.)9
Still, it’s easy to understand why the movie turned out the way it did. For example, none of the show’s hunters feature particularly heavily in the book: lead hunter, Evan McCone — not featured in the film — shows up only at the end, while the host, Bobby Thompson, has little interaction with Richards, which is mainly left to producer Dan Killian.
Moves like making the hunters the brawny equals of Schwarzenegger and increasing their prominence and celebrity, or combining the roles of host and producer into a single Killian character (now called Damon, and played by real-life game show host Richard Dawson) make a lot of sense for the time.
It would be a couple of years before American Gladiators would first be shown on TV, but the popularity of WWE was already soaring. And in Killian, the film captures perfectly the duplicity of producer-hosts like WWE’s Vince McMahon or once-ubiquitous talent show svengali Simon Cowell: a ruthless businessman hiding behind smirking on-camera charm.
There is humour, too, in the emasculation of fallen hunter, Captain Freedom, played by ex-WWE star Jesse Ventura, as he is shown advertising exercise videos and reduced to a background role in the show itself. Again, it has echoes of the wrestling and reality TV worlds, in which a former competitor, supposedly retired or otherwise eliminated — albeit reluctantly — is offered the chance to participate once again.10
Having said all that, it’s easy to pick holes in the film. It’s a very generic kind of oppression, and generic kind of rebellion, that’s witnessed here, offering little more than vague notions that ‘TV is bad’ and ‘the network’ needs to be shut down.
Even though the bloodlust of the show’s fans is shared by yuppies and the poor alike in the film — a typically 1980s comment on how right-wing governments come to dominate power — it is assumed that once the truth is out there, the people will turn on their TV shows, and government. And while Dawson’s Killian character is a good one, his role as the main villain means that once Richards gets the better of him — which (spoiler alert) he does — it’s symbolic of everything in the world being fixed.
There’s also Schwarzenegger himself, whose performance in one of the opening scenes I used to hold up as the textbook example of ‘Arnie is bad at acting’:
While I’m not about to turn this into some movie-nit-picking exercise, I will also note the following points:
Arnie’s Richards — unlike the book’s protagonist — apparently works for the evil government, but appears shocked that he is instructed to fire upon innocent people. Is this the first bit of oppression in which he has had to participate? Or does this represent a crystallisation of doubts he’s had for some time — for example, when burning down a monastery or tear-gassing an orphanage?
This whole incident is supposedly being filmed, with the show broadcasting sneakily edited footage that shows Richards firing upon the crowd as evidence of his crimes, with the ‘unedited’ version later being shown at the end of the movie to provide some kind of vindication. But it’s literally the same thing that we — the viewer — see, with external shots, camera switches, and everything. How was any of this recorded in the first place?
Still, I do still quite like the film, and will defend it as a logical — for the time — Hollywood movie version of the novel (which I also like, along with the rest of The Bachman Books — although, as previously noted, you might have to choose the right moment to read them).
I’m very interested to see what a new version of The Running Man will look like, but — and take this from Ben Richards himself — making a more faithful film adaptation, one that still works on screen while also addressing some of the book’s flaws, will be a stiff challenge indeed.
At least not in the context of doing office-based work to a good standard.
King’s 2013 essay, Guns, further explains his rationale behind the decision, although he is clear that he did not, and would not, apologise for writing the book: ‘No, sir, no ma’am, I never did and and never would… These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse… They found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken.’
In the 1985 edition of The Bachman Books, King indicated it might be the weakest of the four, which I don’t necessarily agree with, although he revised this conclusion in a subsequent reprint.
I like to think it was the latter, as we had The Running Man on VHS in a double-pack with The Terminator, and it was only after viewing it multiple times that my name was changed by deed poll to Ben Richards. The rest of the family also had to change their surname, too, otherwise it would have just been weird, but it was, I understand, an administrative nightmare.
Maybe King really is the true master of the bone-chiller after all!
Awooga!
Although you might also make a similar argument about the extremely chiselled and handsome Powell.
There are no similar equivalents to the film’s Weiss and Laughlin in the book: few other contestants are featured or mentioned, although one is also called Laughlin.
What about Whitman, Price and Haddad? You remember them — Whitman! Price! And Haddad!
In 2028, when Anton du Beke is offered the chance to leave the Strictly Come Dancing judging panel to assist a celebrity upset that his or her professional dance partner has subjected them to a torrent of verbal and physical abuse, will he storm into the producers’ office to refuse, only for an AI du Beke to take his place and later be presented as the winner, not only of the competition, but also the hearts and minds of the British public?