Stephen King has made a lot of things scary over the years. Hotels. Classic cars. St. Bernards. Corn. That one laundry machine. Aliens that are super into butts. But in many of his stories, the greatest horror is what human beings do to each other just because they can. We all know how despicable people can be, and that’s why King’s stories still resonate. Maybe not the alien butt one, but a lot of them, certainly.
“The Long Walk” is one of those tales. It’s based on the very first novel Stephen King started writing, way back in the mid-1960s, and it plays a lot like the kind of horror story a young man would write back in the mid-1960s. The film takes place in an alternate version of the United States where the economy has collapsed after a failed war. In an attempt to inspire the American people — at least, that’s the official party line — every year a group of young men from every state are enlisted to march. Together. Until all but one of them dies.
It’s a brutally simple premise. All these young men, played by fascinating actors like David Jonsson (“Alien: Romulus”), Cooper Hoffman (“Saturday Night”) and Ben Wang (“Karate Kid: Legends”), trudge along a highway, hour after hour. If they walk slower than 3mph, they get a warning. If they don’t pick up speed, they get another. After a third, they’re shot dead. They get as much water as they want — gee, thanks — but no outside assistance. No breaks, not even to go to the bathroom.
The amount of distance they travel in “The Long Walk” strains credulity, but that’s besides the point. The point is that the walk is grueling, and the act itself is arbitrary. It accomplishes nothing, except a show of strength by the state. And a show of violence by that same state. And, hypocritically, a symbol of hope, also courtesy of the state. The last surviving walker will receive enough money, to quote Suzy Eddie Izzard, to make Solomon blush. And that’s the only chance most Americans have to alleviate their economic burdens, so they all feel obligated to try.
Francis Lawrence (“The Hunger Games” franchise) and screenwriter JT Mollner (“Strange Darling”) have zeroed in on the economic aspect, and that’s where they linger. The film’s Vietnam allegory can take care of itself, apparently, since the images of a forced march and young men shot tragically for the sake of a government that feeds on them instead of feeding them are hard to mistake for anything else.
This adaptation of “The Long Walk” reaches out, generations after the tale was conceived, to draw parallels with all the other ways the United States forces its young into a meat grinder. The fantasy that anyone could become a billionaire if they work hard enough and treat their fellow Americans like competition is writ large in Lawrence’s adaptation. It’s a horror in-and-of-itself that so much of this story is still relevant. Even if the context shifts, the systemic violence King found caked into the American identity hasn’t changed much. Only the excuses the perpetrators of this violence make up to justify themselves.
But let’s not pretend the Vietnam allegory isn’t at the heart of “The Long Walk,” or that any amount of thematic redirection can hide it. Again, that metaphor takes care of itself. It’s etched into every frame. But it’s one of the problems with the tale in the first place. Despite “The Long Walk’s” obvious concerns about the effect Vietnam had on the American people, it’s disappointingly disinterested in the impact it had on Vietnam. Or anyone or anywhere else.
Yeah. “The Long Walk” leaves Vietnam, the country and its people, pretty much completely out of its conversation about the Vietnam War. I guess it’s easier to present young Americans as the sole victims of a selfish and bloodthirsty American government if you willfully ignore all the millions of other people those Americans were conscripted to kill. “The Long Walk” portrays drafted soldiers as they are forced to march endlessly, pitiably. But the emotions these characters stir up would be more complicated, and obviously less inspiring, if they were taking other human beings’ lives along the way and winning medals for it.
So “The Long Walk” is a near-sighted film. It’s so focused on the American experience that it falls into the trap of treating the United States as significant only to itself and its own people. But despite that myopia, as a film about the way it feels to be an American — especially a young American whose hopes and dreams are already worn down next to nothing — the film has undeniable strength. Lawrence never lets the visual simplicity of this situation get in the way of the drama. It is, after all, technically a film about people walking in a straight line, which doesn’t sound exciting on the surface. But the filmmaker makes us feel every miserable step of that trudge, and internalize what every step means to the characters and the culture that surrounds us all.
It’s not that “The Long Walk” has made walking terrifying — although certainly it’s a fraught and frightening walk. It’s that it makes every trudge through every day remind us of torture. And that’s how it feels, a lot of the time, to live in a country as fraught and frightening as this. A place where the suffering of others is an apparent non-issue to most of the powerful people who, technically, are supposed to alleviate that suffering, and who instead demand that the people in need of help do all the work themselves. If we don’t drop dead in the process, and almost all of us will, maybe one of us will get a cookie. Gee, thanks.
