‘Running Man’ A Sensational Warning Of A Future Closely Approaching

Note: This post does contain spoilers to this and other movies.

One the surface, a movie like 1987’s The Running Man seems to be more of a typical Arnold Schwarzenegger action fare. But under the surface is a satire and maybe a warning of a future that seems vastly approaching to a reality.

Now that we have a man like Donald Trump back in the Oval Office and wealth inequality at its worse since the Gilded Age, you can look past the bad 1980s fashions and style and see a country where the rich will get richer if they play by the rules and the poor will get poorer just because they’re poor. It’s adapted loosely from a short novel Stephen King wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman about a dystopia future were people literally risk their lives to make money for a game show.

It’s been announced that Edgar Wright is working on a more truthful adaptation with Glen Powell in the lead role of Ben Richards this time. A lawsuit determined the movie was actually plagiarized from the 1983 French movie Le Prix du Danger or The Price of Danger in English. It was adapted from Robert Schockley’s 1958 short story “The Price of Peril” which was previously adapted into the 1970 German TV movie Des Millionenspiel or The Game of Millions in the English translation.

King’s novel, which is set in 2025 of all times, focuses on a man who is chased all over New England, by hitmen, law enforcement and even regular citizens who can get money if they alert authorities to his whereabouts. Richards in the novel has to mail two videos a day to the studio for broadcast which means his whereabouts can be track from where they’ve been mailed. The novel also has a very grim and violent ending, something audiences in 1980s wouldn’t have liked and definitely not on a Schwarzenegger movie at the time.

In the 1987 version, Schwarzenegger plays Richards as a police captain as the country has been turned into a police state. He’s in charge of a helicopter operation to examine a food riot in Bakersfield, Ca. When Richards refuses to open fire on the people as it appears they are not armed, his superiors order others in the helicopter to take command and complete the mission. Richards is knocked out and framed for the massacre which reportedly killed 60 people.

He’s sent a detention camp with with political prisoners, William Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Harold Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre), who assist him in overtaking the prison guards and deactivating the perimeter sensors that will cause the collars around their necks to explode. Richards gets help from an resistance leader, Mic (Mick Fleetwood), but he decides instead to contact his brother and hopes of getting him away from all this.

However, when he goes to his brother’s apartment, he finds it occupied by Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), an aspiring musician who has been living the high life after writing the jingle for the big TV network ICS. Richards kidnaps her, taking her travel pass in an attempt to get out of the country. However, Amber noticing the high police presence at the airport takes her chance and breaks away alerting them to Richards. He is captured and thrown in detention.

Yet, Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) the host/showrunner of the most popular TV show The Running Man, feels Richards would help improve ratings as the show as plateaued and they can’t get good “contestants.” In the novel, Killian is just the executive producer as there’s another hosts, but why hire two actors when you can just hire one. They actually get the prison system to give them inmates who they drug so they won’t be able to compete well against the stalkers and thus be killed on screen. They even produce faked images of the “winners” celebrating, even though they’ve been killed off-screen.

Killian urges Richards to compete in the next airing of the show or else Laughlin and Weiss, who have also been detained, will go on in his place. But Killian is actually going to send them all on the show as “contestants.” The movie has other shows that seem comical in a dark way as a man tries to climb up a rope grabbing money while vicious Rottweilers are chomping at his feet. Making fun of TV has been around for ages. And while the movie doesn’t have the same sting as Network, it still leaves us to wonder why we tune in only to see someone else’s misery.

Take the moment we saw Lee Harvey Oswald killed by Jack Ruby live on TV. No one could’ve anticipated it, but it happened. As Denis Leary said they were afraid to turn the channel for the next 30 years. I don’t remember watching it because I’m certain we didn’t go to school for a snow day, but millions of school kids elsewhere watched the Challenger explode around this same time back in 1986. We’ve watched in horror as the World Trade Center towers were hit by commercial jetliners and then crumbled.

Then, there was the moment Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson’s top off at the Super Bowl exposing her breasts. Actor Charles Rocket was fired from Saturday Night Live for supposedly saying “fuck” on the live show. They even invented the time delay for Richard Pryor’s hosting gig on SNL because they were afraid of what he would say. Damon Wayans acted like a gay man during a skit he hated more or less shoving his crotch up in Griffin Dunne’s face on an episode. He reportedly was fired as soon as the sketch ended.

Is TV a reflection of a society or is a society reflected by TV? I remember one time when I was younger I hardly ever watched TV and then we got cable and I spent more time watching it. As Killian says, “Americans love television. They ween their kids on it.” How did parents punish their kids without beatings and spankings? They wouldn’t allow them to watch TV. Even now today, parents are advised to observe their child’s TV time as well as time they’re on the Internet.

The second half of the movie basically devolves in an action movie/slasher hybrid as stalkers with unique traits track Richards, Laughlin, Weiss and eventually Amber as she is caught looking through footage disks that have been “edited for television.” This is a little bit of a joke as the footage Killian shows the audience is of Richards actually commanding the helicopter that fires on people. It also doesn’t show the three officers in the back, just his lieutenant played by the late famed stuntman George P. Wilbur, who he knocks out.

This has been an issue with TV since its inception. What are we really seeing versus what they’re wanting to see. I began to watch Room 237 the other day but stopped an hour in as someone went on and on how Stanley Kubrick used the sets from 2001: A Space Odyssey to fake the moon landing. But news stations, mostly conservative-based ones like Fox News and others, have tweaked the footage to complete their narrative. Hell, people have even done it in print journalism. And yes, some of the more left-wing media have done the same. Six years after this movie was release, NBC and Dateline came under fire when it was discovered they falsified footage of General Motors cars exploding when the tanks were damaged in collisions.

We’ve always lived in an Orwellian world where we’re basically told not to believe what we saw and heard. I believe this was more of the tone writer Steven E. de Souza was going for when he adapted King’s novel. Yet production on the movie wasn’t as smooth. Andrew Davis, who would go on to direct Under Siege and The Fugitive, was fired after two weeks as director because the production was one week behind.

Christopher Reeve had been the original choice to play Richards before Schwarzenegger was brought and the tonal shift caused the movie to be more action-oriented with dark humor overtones. Schwarzenegger also criticized the choice of Paul Michael Glaser who became the director. Glaser, who famously played Sgt. David Michael Starsky on Starsky & Hutch, began to focus more on TV directing as the show ended. And Schwarzenegger said Glaser shot the movie as a TV show or TV movie changing the tone. de Souza wrote about 15 drafts of the script.

That being said, the movie works best with Glaser as director and Dawson as Killian. Dawson had been the original host of Family Feud from 1976 to 1985 and he brings a savage snobby attitude to the performance. When an elderly janitor accidentally brushes his shoes with a floor mop, Killian assures the apologetic man every thing is ok. Then five seconds later, he tells his assistant to let him go or else she’ll be the janitor.

Dawson’s Killian also has the perfect response when Richards quips Schwarzenegger’s catchphrase “I’ll be back.” He pauses for a second doing a beat and replies sarcastically, “Only in a rerun.” The movie’s ending where Richards and Mic’s resistance along with one of his lieutenants, Stevie (Dweezil Zappa), take over the studio building seems a bit rushed and only added to fit Schwarzenegger’s movie style of the time.

Even though Mic and his hackers upload the real footage of the Bakersfield Massacre, how do you think the audience knows what to tell is real and what isn’t? We’re having that same problem right now with deep fakes and AI that it’s becoming a huge issue where celebrities are refusing to sign autographs with blue-ink pens as it can be used on forged documents. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t full examine how dangerous it is for the news, which is state-run, can falsify events to change the public’s opinion.

Instead, the movie seems to show how audiences have become excited to see real death and destruction instead of it faked. You know when you go see a movie that blood squibs, fake blood mix and latex prosthetics are use for violent scenes. However, to satisfy the masses, the shows are giving them their taste for blood. One of the technicians who works for the studios comments that it’s better to have people in the studio audiences rather than on the streets.

And the violence is enjoyed by people of all ages. Audiences members are selected to choose who the next stalker will be for which they get an armful of prizes including The Running Man home game which appears to be a board game and is one of those things you wish they told more about. Even though a yuppie white man at a sports bar screams, “Kill that son of a bitch!” when Laughlin looks to be in danger, there seems to be a equal representation of fans who enjoy the show along skin color. Both white and black people are shown in the audience and outside, as Latino people run betting pools to see who the next stalker is and who they will kill.

It seems ironic that violence has united the people of L.A. and possibly the country as they can watch people get murdered for sports and entertainment each week. Since they are prisoners and committed crimes, it seems they’re be more willing to watch people sliced up, set on fire or electrocuted. One of my former colleagues and supervisors attended an execution down in McAlester, Okla. at the state penniteniary back in the 2000s. I don’t think I’d ever want to see that even though I am in favor of the death penalty for extreme cases.

Public executions were often big crowd pleasers throughout the previous centuries. But you must wonder if people were really wanted to see people hanged, beheaded or drawn and quartered or were Draconian laws so vicious, people were glad it wasn’t them? When Richards comes up on one of the stalkers, Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth), who’s flipped on the side of his car, he has the ability to kill him as Dynamo has been pinned under the weight of his vehicle. Even a studio audience member screams out, “Kill him!” hoping to see Richards pound him with a metal pipe he’s holding. However, Richard doesn’t leading the crowd to jeer and boo him.

It’s apparent they don’t really care about real justice, just to see people punished. In a recent post, I noted how Leslie Bibbs’ character in Juror #2 seemed to be obsessed with convicting someone as a juror. This makes the standard ending where Killian is killed when he is forced to take a fatal ride in one of the rocket sleds they send the contestants on more disturbing when you think of it. The public are cheering that evil was punished, right? They’re cheering because Killian was killed as they’ve become accustomed in entertainment to witness “bad guys” get it in the end. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote about how this tactic of always killing the bad guy at the end became a stale trope. And Alfred Hitchcock even used it mockingly through the James Mason character witnesses a cop shoot Martin Landau’s bad guy villain just at the right time in North by Northwest as a deus ex machina.

In the real world, that’s not the case. Bad guys kill good people and get away with it. Nearly 20 years after it was released, people are still divided over Anton Chigurh getting away with all his violent acts in No Country for Old Men with nothing but a broken arm. Despite his efforts, Tommy Lee Jones’ Ed Tom Bell couldn’t save Josh Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss from the drug cartels. And it’s implied that Chigurh kills Carla Jean Moss (Kelly MacDonald).

When Richards and Amber are found by the Resistance in a private underground bunker after defeating Fireball (Jim Brown), Killian and his production team decide to use deep fakes to end the show to fix what one tech (Kurt Fuller) calls “third-act problems.” They can’t end the show without everything coming together the way we’ve expected it. The final stalker in the Green Room is Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) who refuses to go out against Richards for moral and ethical reasons because he’s tire of gimmickry.

All the stalkers seem to echo the growing trend of professional wrestlers in the 1980s where they have a persona and gimmick. Fireball has his own flame thrower. Dynamo has a suit that has flashing lights and he’s able to shoot out electric rays that can be fatal. Another stalker, Subzero (Professor Toru Tanaka) has a razor sharp blade on a hockey stick and he stalks the contestants around an ice rink on skates. Also, Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch) has a chainsaw he uses to kill people. Ventura, Tanaka and Van Lidth were wrestlers at one time before they all went into acting. And Brown was also a former football player.

But going back to what I was saying to finish with a perfect ending to a show, they have actors compete in a gladiator style cage with spikes and razor wires with special effects that make them look like Richards, Amber and Captain Freedom. And the show ends with the fake Captain Freedom killing the fake Amber and Richards as the crowd cheers. Why? Because they’re so used to have everything perfectly end within the broadcast time. It’s been noted time and time again that game shows are often edited to fill the allotted time and even non-scripted shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race have had producers admit they’ve had to coach the contestants and even use body doubles to make the footage look more exciting.

Unfortunately, it’s a lot to squeeze into a movie that is about 100 minutes with credits which is why the movie doesn’t full explore these issues. Maybe the newer version will.

What do you think? Please comment.