Earlier this year, The Life of Chuck made its way to theaters. It’s a poetic summary of life in all its beauty, grief, joy and pain. Multitudes, as Chuck says. Calling it a “feel-good story” might be a stretch, but the film asks, more so begs, its audience to savor life and every moment in it.
The Life of Chuck is one of the many Stephen King works to have transitioned to the silver screen in recent years, joining the likes of It, Doctor Sleep, The Monkey and as of this weekend, The Running Man. Another one of his works, Mister Yummy, is in early development stages.
The Life of Chuck, however, stands out for its rapid transition from page to screen, having been released as a novella in 2020. That makes it particularly interesting to return to King’s first novel, The Long Walk. Not the first to be published, having been released in 1979 under a pseudonym, but the first to be written.
Now, nearly sixty years later, it too has received a theatrical release. And while King’s often known as the “King of Horror,” few of his works are as terrifying as this.
Terrifying, first, because of the subject matter. Fifty young men, boys really, chart course on a walk where only one can survive and cash plus a single wish are the ultimate prize. That means forty-nine deaths are about to happen in one hour and 48 minutes. So, yes, that’s fairly dark.
But even those who enter the film knowing the backstory — I did not — may find themselves kept up at night for an entirely different reason: How closely this story parallels the climate our country sits in today, to the point where The Long Walk starts to feel much more like a docuseries than dystopian fiction.
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Perhaps this feeling isn’t new, however.
Inklings of The Long Walk date back to 1966-67, penned by a man then known as Richard Bachman, the pseudonym of one of the century’s most prolific authors. At the time, King was a freshman at the University of Maine, whereabouts the walk in the story sets foot.
Several influences contributed to King’s work. The ever-popular dystopian fiction genre certainly played a role. So, too, did the existence of real-world televised marches. Or, take what King said on a recent Reddit AMA: “I just wrote it. Didn’t think about relevancy. I was a kid having fun. And I wanted to impress a girl.”
That kid was also living right through the heart of the Vietnam War.
While I’m no political scholar, the Vietnam War was an undeniably contentious time in America. A significant portion of the country supported the choice to invade Vietnam following World War II. However, as time passed, that sentiment largely decreased. Protests engaging hundreds of thousands, predominantly young people, engulfed the nation. In time, there were simply no more bodies to throw into the war, ultimately leading the United States to withdraw from it.
That war, however, sent nearly two million young men to Vietnam, often without a return trip home and without a choice. King was one of those men up for auction. While he was not ultimately selected, the anger stemming from that circumstance is evident throughout the story. To take one example, The Long Walk may be optional, yet nearly everyone in America participates. In that sense, the “decision” to apply for The Long Walk is a rite of passage akin to joining the Selective Service.
That said, The Long Walk is, to some extent, a politically motivated piece. It’s those same politics playing out in the United States today, with incredible parallels to the world of a story written nearly fifty years ago.
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In The Long Walk, a series of events — seemingly war, famine — transformed the United States into a totalitarian regime. The Major, played wonderfully by Mark Hamill, is one executioner of that regime. The film shrouds much of this entity’s identity, but one tenet of its control revolves around limiting access to information, or the nation’s “old ways” specifically.
Locking away or whitewashing information is not a new concept, just standard dystopian fare. But as government has crept into the classroom, altering history, placing topics off-limits and censoring literature, it doesn’t seem all that fictitious anymore. One of the current president’s first executive orders was to promote a “patriotic education” in schools receiving public funding.
Moreover, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids occurring bear remarkable similarity to the film’s act of “squading.” If the regime finds people to be un-American, whether for their beliefs or where they were born, they have every right to eliminate them. In the film, that end is seemingly death. Currently, it is deportation or incarceration.
That concept of “un-Americanness” is ambiguous, ultimately up to the Major’s definition. We see disappointingly little of the Major in the film, but he’s seemingly equal parts despised, adored, feared and protected. Above all, he’s a water spout of patriotism, proudly proclaiming in a top-of-film monologue that The Long Walk is the answer to America’s disposition, these young men’s struggles, and to the future.
The current president has often cast America in this same light. Campaigning in 2022, he described America as “a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.” In a speech to America’s top military generals three years later, he declared, “We’re under invasion from within.”
This practice, positioning the nation as a failure, is exactly what allows a totalitarian regime to enter the fold, and with force. In his deployment of the National Guard to America’s democratic cities, the president has not hesitated to utilize the military as a solution to these problems. Strikingly, some version of that same military oversees The Long Walk in the film.
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Politically, meaning is not hard to find, but equally as resonant is the film’s message about humanity on a cultural level.
For one thing, whereas Vietnam faced a certain level of pushback, The Long Walk encounters no such public opposition. I’d like to believe there are pockets of the country despising it, far away from the barren New England highways. Wisely, though, the film never shows any evidence of a protest, pitchfork or yard sign. The Walk appears to be a celebrated tradition of American pageantry, akin to the Super Bowl.
The comparison to the Super Bowl, one of the world’s biggest televised events, connects to The Long Walk’s place on broadcast television, which particularly resonated with me. I can imagine the pre-interviews revealing each athlete’s backstory, similar to American Ninja Warrior. On the course, helicopters likely fly overhead with sideline reporters chronicling all the action as it happens. It’s easy to see The Long Walk playing out like the recent New York Marathon, particularly considering the immense crowd gathered together at the site of the final kill.
I think too about the people at home, the millions watching this marathon. They likely do not witness any of the deaths themselves, fully removed from the realities of the competition. Shown in this way, to them, the Long Walk is not an act of survival, it’s a piece of entertainment.
The book even includes the element of an odds-on favorite to win The Long Walk as if it’s a high-stakes horse race. Considering how gambling-obsessed our country has become, it’s a scary thing to think that, were The Long Walk to be real, the bets would fly in nonstop.
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All that said, politically and culturally, The Long Walk holds a candle to our modern civilization. But, importantly, that same statement remains true no matter the era in which it’s read.
Readers who encountered the book in the late 1900s likely described it in the same vein as film viewers like myself today. Ultimately, that’s because The Long Walk is a story about humanity, something that has rarely ever changed.
The love of sport and spectacle dates back to ancient times, and regimes like that of the Major’s have risen from the ashes more than once. Those same regimes have asked for more from their populus, whether in mobilization for a war effort or to put a man on the moon. And at times, particularly during the Civil Rights Movement or the more recent immigration protests, American troops have stood against their own people.
Perhaps that’s the real message here. Not that The Long Walk is particularly relevant to our time, but that, especially with the significant change the film made to the ending, it holds a mirror to what our country, our humanity, has always been: a violent species.
Therein lies the brilliance of King’s work: its ability to position rural America as a voicebox to timeless statements about civilization. Assessed decades from now or with its next adaptation, The Long Walk’s relatability will be as strong as ever. The unsettling question to ponder is how many more comparisons there will be by then.
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