Author's Note: Despite the fact that
Bachman's novel is nearly half a century old I am nevertheless going to do my
best not to spoil as little of it as I can. While I have yet to see Lawrence's
film (and I will review it for my column when I do) I've heard enough
descriptions to know that are major differences not so much cosmetic but in
terms of certain aspects of subject. For that reason for those who might not
have read the book but only seen the film, I'm going to speak in as vague terms
as possible so that the reader can seek it out. Like all Bachman's books its
depressing as hell but it absolutely needs to be read.
The reason that The Long Walk is
one of the best dystopian novels ever written is because of what it doesn't try
to do and that's explain how society became the way it is in this
unrecognizable future. There's no story
on the history of The Long Walk, we don't learn anything about The
Major, the only manifestation of authority of this society: not even his name.
We learn a few stray bits of the history but that tells us little and we really
don't learn much besides a few stories here and there about why the Walkers are
drawn to participate in a process that will kill all but one of them.
Indeed the striking thing about what
seems to be the obvious difference between Francis Lawrence's film and
Bachman's novel (there are a couple of more I will get to) is that all of the
Walkers go into this with their eyes wide open. Ray Garraty, the protagonist of
the novel, has seen a Long Walk before and remembers the horrors of it as a
boy. "He remembered being vaguely disappointed he saw no one got
holed" is in an early section of the book. You get a sense of something
almost celebratory at the start of the novel as they wonder if they will break
the record of going the longest without anyone 'buying their ticket'. It's not
until Curley, the first walker to get shot that he starts to realize that it is
real.
There are 100 Walkers in every Long
Walk (as opposed to the 50 in the film) and we get to the know the names of
about half of them and get some stories of about a third of them. There's no
indication that the Walk is televised though it very well might be but there
are always crowds along the road and in every small town between the 450 miles
between the Maine/Canada border and Boston which is where the finish line is. There
is an indication as the novel progresses that this may be the most 'successful'
Long Walk on the record; by the final section of the novel the remaining
Walkers are within proximity to Boston which is clearly the furthest anyone has
ever gotten in the memory of the survivors. And this matters because even as
the bodies continue to fall as the Walkers get more and more exhausted and just
as often are driven insane there's still a sense the Walkers care about
breaking this record even as it kills them. That may be one of the most
frightening things about a book that is not a horror novel by any stretch of
the imagination. Everyone knew what they were signing up for and not only did
they so there's every indication that did so voluntarily and in some cases spur
of the moment.
Another reason this novel resonates is
that when King first wrote the novel (in 1967 when he was around the same age
as the characters in this book) America was beginning to realize just how much
of a quagmire the Vietnam War was becoming. The Long Walk is very much a
metaphor for what King presumed teenagers his age were getting into when they
were drafted to serve in the war. Contemporary readers might not be aware that
one of the ways the military drafter soldiers was through a lottery which was
televised before the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That is exactly how everyone who is picked
for the Walk is chosen with 'primes' and 'alternates'. There are signs that the
winners of the Walk are the ones who back out: McVries mentions that he was
thirteenth alternate and that twelve people backed out before him. There are
deadlines when you can choose to do so (ironically the blackout date is April
15th). But there are two hundred walkers chosen and you don't know
if you’re a backout until the final day is announced. "They like to stack
their deck that way," McVries says at one point.
(Interestingly the final blackout date
is listed as April 31st and April has only 30 days. In another book
there might be some attention paid to this, some reason the calendar has been
altered or perhaps an indication that it’s a trick. In a note of subtlety it's
just mentioned and then everyone moves on.)
The clearest indication we get of the
government of America is in discussion of the Walk. There is a term
"Squad" which is used to indicate how America now deals with
dissidents. You don't talk against the Walk and if you try to back out at the
last minute the same will happen to you. This is clearly a metaphor for the way
America was beginning to break down based on one's opinion of Vietnam and King,
in the way so many people of that age, no doubt felt those who chose to back
out or speak against the War were being silenced. This is also true when its
announced how people cheer and celebrate long Walkers, holding testimonial
dinners and making them 'the face of the nation'. You can read this as being forced to fight in
an unjust war – or just as easily the way so many of King's generation, thought
those that served were tools of the military-industrial complex.
And it's worth noting that when
Garraty gets notification of it originally he has a reaction that I'm pretty
sure every Walker goes through originally as he tells us halfway through the
novel:
"I didn't go into any fits of
joy, but I was pleased. Real pleased. And confident. My feet didn't hurt them
and my back didn't feel like somebody had shoved a rake with a busted handle
into it. I was one in a million. I wasn't bright enough to realize the circus
fat lady is, too."
This could accurate describe any of
the soldiers who got drafted and then found themselves being forced to fight in
a war their government had decided it couldn't win.
It's worth noting that there does seem
to be mandatory testing for it but its never clear how seriously people take
it. Indeed one Long Walker, tellingly named Abraham, actually explains how he
handled the essay question Why Do You Feel Qualified to Participate in The
Long Walk:
"I couldn't think of a thing. So
finally some bastard in an Army coat strolls by and says: "Five minutes
please." So I just put down: "I feel qualified to participate in the
Long Walk because I am a useless S.O.B.
and the world would be better off without me, unless I happened to win and get
rich in which case I would buy a Van Go to put in every room of my manshun and
order up sixty high-class horrs and not bother anybody.' I thought about that
for about a minute and then I put in parenthesis: '(I would give all my sixty
high-class horrs old age pensions, too)' I thought that would really screw them
up." So a month later – I'd forgotten about the whole thing – I get a
letter saying I qualified." (All
of the misspellings are clearly intentional.)
Abraham's friends I should add all
thought it was a big joke and his girlfriend wanted to have the letter
photographed and get it turned to a T-shirt. But the joke was on him.
The biggest difference between the
novel and the book may be the setting of the title incident. In Lawrence's
version there is no sign that anyone is actually watching the walk, the world
is destitute, the streets are empty. This is not the case in Bachman's novel.
If anything the thing that gives this novel such power half a century later is
how accurate it predicts the future: Bachman argues that what is going on is
entertainment for the masses, perhaps the signature event for the country if
not the world. As the Walkers move towards their destination the numbers grow
bigger and bigger. This is perhaps best illustrated when they reach Augusta:
The town itself had been swallowed,
strangled and buried. In a very real sense, there was no Augusta,...Only Crowd,
a creature with no body, no head, no mind. Crowd was nothing but a Voice and an
Eye and it was not surprising that Crowd was both God and Mammon. Garraty felt
it. He knew the others were feeling it. It was like walking between giant
electrical pylons, feeling the tingles and shocks stand every hair on end,
making the eyes seem to crackle as they rolled in their beds of moisture. Crows
was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshiped and feared. Ultimately Crowd was
to be made sacrifice to.
And it is telling what happens when
the remaining Walkers reach it and the Major himself is there:
And the Walkers – the strings were not
broken on their emotions, only badly out-of-tune. They had cheered wildly with
hoarse and totally unheard voices, the 37 of them who were left. The crowd
could not have known they were cheering but somehow they did, somehow they
understood that the circle between death worship and death ish had been
completed for yet another year and the crowd went completely loopy.
It is only when a Walker is killed –
the sacrifice Crowd demands – that the Walkers stop cheering. He promises to
himself that this is the end of the craziness, not knowing that insanity is
among the Walkers as much as death.
For much of my life I thought The
Long Walk was unfilmable. Part of this I thought was likely due to the
sheer logistics: how could one hope to accurately portray a story where all the
characters are in constant motion with no pauses? Perhaps that is why the
director of The Hunger Games was chosen to direct the film version:
there's no question that groundbreaking trilogy would not exist without
Bachman's book.
But there's a part of me who wonders
based on some of the changes, including the ending whether Lawrence did get the
idea of Bachman's original vision. It's
not just that King was using the present to create his dystopian fiction but
that he saw the future. He starts half the chapters of the book with a
catchphrase from game shows of his childhood and the present from Jeopardy to
Twenty-One to The Price Is Right. The other half are nursery
rhymes with violent images. The most pertinent of the quotes comes from Chuck
Barris, the creator of The Gong Show: "The ultimate game show would
be when the losing contestant got killed."
(As any reader worth their salt knows that's basically the plot of The
Running Man but more on that later.) King could not possibly have foreseen
the rise of such things as social media or reality TV but it's impossible not
to think of either when you are reading The Long Walk. The moment that Squid
Game became an international sensation I knew that America was ready for a
movie adaptation of The Long Walk just as we are finally ready for Edgar
Wright's more accurate retelling of The
Running Man.
It's also why I think that if
Lawrence's version has an optimistic ending of any kind he has completely
missed the point of Bachman's story. I do understand why he might feel he has
to give the viewers some hope: considering the world we live in today, to go
with the unexpurgated version of Bachman's story could very well be a
turn-off. And yet its precisely because
of that vision that I think Bachman's story has its real resonance as well
as why I reread it so many times as a teenager despite the bleakness of
the ending.
Because despite what all of the
Walkers think and indeed those who see the film might believe the Major is not
the villain of The Long Walk nor is the government. It is Crowd that is
the monster and it is a more terrifying one than Pennywise or Cujo or Randall
Flagg could ever be. And that's because Crowd is us and it can be even if we
are not all in the same place anymore. If anything Crowd exists without us
having to be in the same room anymore. And it is rare to find the individual
who can master it or control it. Certainly the Walkers are powerless to stand
against it. Late in the novel one Walker goes to his death screaming that
they're going to eat us up and its hard not to look at our world today and see
that as a metaphor for so much of society.
If there is an underlying theme of The
Bachman Books it is how the mentality of the masses are far more
destructive than any monster that King could possibly imagine. In all four of
Bachman's books he can only see two ways to defeat it: you lose your sanity or
you lose your life. It is not an optimistic view of the human race (by
comparison much of King's work has a more cheerful view of the induvial and the
human spirit) but we can't pretend its not one that far too many people share.
I don't hold with it, as my readers of my other columns are aware, but that
doesn't mean I don't find certain fictional versions riveting, nevertheless.
Perhaps that's why I'm slightly
disappointed Lawrence chose to make the changes he did with his film version of
The Long Walk, though perhaps not entirely surprised. The novels of
Suzanne Collins argue that as horrible as The Hunger Games are society
can be changed by the bravery of the human spirit turning against a corrupt and
broken world. Bachman argues in The Long Walk a far bleaker version
saying that the corruption is not in society but in every single one of us and
that it's just waiting to get out, even in our entertainment.
And if you need any proof that he's right consider this: Survivor just
entered its 49th season. If we didn't learn after 2016 how dangerous
reality TV was for our world, maybe we deserve the future we get.
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