The Long Walk Posits that the Cure for the Male Loneliness Epidemic is Death - Reactor

The Long Walk isn’t the best movie ever made about friendship and loyalty between men (That would be John Woo’s 1989 masterpiece The Killer) but it’s a damn good example of the genre.

I saw this one in a screening room—a rare thing for me, as I like to watch movies in real theaters with crowds—and to get a little more experiential with the movie, I did something stupid. After the film ended I walked down 12 very tall flights of stairs to the street rather than take the elevator, and then I walked two miles through Manhattan to meet a friends.

By the end of this movie, the remaining kids have walked THREE HUNDRED MILES, and yes, they’re younger than me, and probably in better shape, but given how I felt the next day after all those stairs they should be wayyyy more destroyed physically than they seem.

But that’s one of very few quibbles—I thought The Long Walk was interesting, often moving, and superbly acted. It’s not exactly a fun night out at the cinema, but I’m glad I saw it.

This is the first time The Long Walk has made it to the screen. It was supposed to be adapted by George A. Romero back in the 1980s, then Frank Darabont was going to tackle it, then André Øvredal. Finally, it’s been brought to the screen by Francis Lawrence, who, having made The Hunger Games adaptations, is familiar with building stories around societies that sacrifice their young. The script was adapted by JT Mollner, whose previous work includes Outlaws and Angels and Strange Darling.

The plot is exactly what it sounds like: a group of boys, all teens or early-twentysomethings, gather to walk for as long as they can. The can’t drop below a pace of three miles and hour, they can’t leave the road, they can’t stop. If they stop, they get three warnings before they’re shot—because never fear, there are trucks of armed soldiers flanking them along the way. The last one still walking wins a pile of money and a “wish”. They’re also filmed. The Walk is organized by The Major, a high-ranking official in the conservative, authoritarian government that rose to power after the old American democracy collapsed into civil war and anarchy.

The Walk is ostensibly a morale-boosting exercise—a chance for society to come together and root for the kids even though they know most of them are doomed. It’s also, of course, a warning. An example of what the powers that be can make you or your children do if you dare to challenge them.

One of the many strengths of the film is that the idea of anyone in this society challenging the status quo is very farfetched. As the boys walk through miles (and miles and miles and miles) of countryside, they only occasionally see other people—beaten down farmers and little kids who run out to see the spectacle. The land itself is largely empty. What billboards there are are falling apart, when they do pass through towns they’re sparsely populated and let’s say Last Picture Show-esque.

Another important thing to note is that the Long Walk is “volunteer”. No one has to enter the lottery—but every boy enters the lottery. And if you’re picked you can decline—but we don’t know what happens if they do. We don’t learn how many back out, if any, but the system relies on teen hubris and immortality haze. None of these kids think it’ll be THEM until after the first one dies. Even after that they can still banter and talk about what they’ll do with the prize money, as as though that doesn’t mean everyone else will be dead. But then you have to find a way to cope.

That’s the real meat of the story, and the reason to watch it. The movie becomes a character study and an endurance test, as the extreme conditions bring the boys’ true personalities to the surface.  

We start out with 100 kids, and a lot of them need to be nameless cannon fodder—the movie needs to give you a sense of the Walk’s danger, and its relentlessness, by showing how much smaller the group gets each day. We can’t get backstory on all of them, so the focus is on the ones who, for various reasons, become part of main character Ray Garraty’s journey. But I appreciated that for the first half hour or so, different characters came in and out of focus, and you could see how any one of these kids might become the main character. They’re all important, they all have a story, they all have a past and a reason for being here, and all but one of them are going to die a stupid, meaningless death.

We primarily follow a group who end up calling themselves The Four Musketeers. They kind of fall in line with a stereotypical World War II movie: the thoughtful audience proxy, the philosophical, endlessly loyal best friend, the religious one, and the lewd, sarcastic motormouth. The Audience Proxy is Ray Garraty, played by Cooper Hoffman, his Thoughtful BFF is Pete McVries, played by David Jonsson, the Religious One is Arthur Baker, played by Tut Nyuot, and our Motormouth is Ben Wang’s Hank Olson.

Cooper Hoffman is fantastic as Ray. Obviously this is a difficult role, a constant balancing act between realistically showing Ray’s terror and physical pain, and letting his personality come through, and not overplaying anything into mawkishness, but also not downplaying that he’s on a fucking death march. I don’t think there’s a single moment where he doesn’t feel real. Especially as we get into the second half, and reality has completely broken through any fantasy of what the Walk would be. David Johnsson, already a favorite of mine from his work in Alien: Romulus and Bonhoeffer, plays Pete beautifully. His is the most subtle role, the stalwart philosophical one who has hidden depths, and he could have become too perfect. But I don’t think that happens—as more of his story’s revealed we see just how much of his personality is a character he plays to keep himself sane, and the layers work really well. Tut Nyuot is solid and moving in a role that could have been too one-note—Art is sweet, innocent, and wants to win so he can take the money home to his family in Baton Rouge. And Ben Wang is hilarious as Hank Olson, but better than that is how well he cracks when his gallows humor finally fails him.

(Lol, as if gallows humor ever fails. Just part of the movie’s fun fantasy world, right?)

They’re the ones who we spend most of our time with, though we do also check in with Roman Griffin Davis’ Thomas Curley, who is obviously too young to be on the Walk, and must have desperate reasons for being here, Jordan Gonzalez’ Richard Harkness, a young man who’s taking notes for a book about the walk (what’s Stephen King supposed to do—not include a writer in one of his stories? Nonsense.), Joshua Odjick’s Collie Parker, a quiet Native American boy who occasionally explodes into rage, Stebbins, an arrogant boy who seems like he was engineered in a lab for the Walk, and Charlie Plummer’s Barkovitch, who I’ll talk about more in a minute.

Watching over them and barking “encouragement” is The Major, played by Mark Hamill. His role is the exact opposite of the kind, loving grandfather he played in another King adaptation this year, The Life of Chuck, and he’s equally good here. The Major is larger-than-life, like a parody of a tough drill sergeant, except he’s also a terrifying, dead-eyed authoritarian who truly does not care whether you life or die. He often bellows compliments at the boys about them “having the sack” to volunteer for the Walk, and I found that really funny (although that’s also important, and I’ll get into it more below.) but they’re not even human to him.

Obviously a big part of the arc here is that when the boys show up, they’re boys. They’ve lived lives, they have families. But by the end of the first day they’ve been reduced to meat, shuffling along, barely able to think or talk. The point of the film is that as they acclimate, they have to dig into themselves to become people again.

The film explores the physical reality of this kind of event extremely well. Exhaustion, sunburn, blisters, and all of that, of course, but also, the boys can’t stop to piss or shit or vomit. As their bodies adapt to the constant exertion they have to just… take care of all of that as they walk. The film deals with it just enough that we know it’s one of the many ways the Walk breaks the kids physically (diarrhea becomes a real problem for some of the characters) but not so much that it becomes too disgusting for an audience to watch. They’re given “food” in the form of nutrient paste, and that’s rationed throughout the day. They can bring hats with them, but it’s not like anyone passing out sunblock, or umbrellas. Once the Walk begins, you either walk, no matter blisters, charlie horses, broken toes, twisted ankles, or you get shot. Sometimes in the head, like an injured racehorse, sometimes in the stomach, as an example to the others. Some boys crack. Some boys dissociate.

But about the violence: the first time a Walker is shot, it’s a close-up brutal scene of a boy’s brains splattering across a road. After that, the camera tends to keep its distance, and only a few of the deaths take center stage again. Lawrence creates a balance between showing us the horror of this situation, and avoiding tipping his film into exploitation or trauma porn.

Then you get the stuff I think of as Just King Things:

There will always be a person I think of as the “Stephen King Standard Issue Batshit Aggro Liability” or SKSIBAL. Sometimes it’s a bully, sometimes it’s a psychopathic prison inmate or abusive husband, sometimes an incel being puppeteered by Satan during the End Times. Often this person becomes a henchman to the story’s Big Evil. This story’s SKSIBAL gets a little more depth than most. He’s a young man named Barkovitch, he’s played by Charlie Plummer, he practically foams at the mouth, and he picks fights with other Walkers in an attempt to psych them out. But, like a few of the kids, he’s brought a project with him. He takes photographs almost constantly, sometimes as just another antagonism tactic, but sometimes from a place of genuine curiosity and creativity. Unlike with a lot of the SKSIBALs, you get a sense that he might have been a very different person when he was younger, and that he’s playing up the assholery either to give himself an advantage, or to shield himself against the fear and pain of the Walk.

Then there’s the “Stephen King Outdated Pop Cultural Hoedown” or SKOPCH. In this case, it comes when a boy mentions a girl named Clementine, another replies by singing “My Darling Clementine, and all the other boys join in and know all the lyrics. Would these teens and young-twentysomethings, in a dystopian near-future post-collapse America, really know all the words to that song? I don’t even know all the words to that song. It’s sweet to have them singing together as they walk, but wouldn’t it have been better to have some ‘90s or ‘00s pop hit, something innocuous enough that it slipped through the fascist censors? Like “Seven Nation Army” or a Bruno Mars song or something like that. Or even something like Springsteen or REM, something that had a subversive meaning but seemed mainstream, and no one paid enough attention to the lyrics to see the deeper connotations?

A movie like this is an endurance test. You come to this because you want to see how they adapt it, how they bring such a brutal story to life, and how hard it is to watch.

Can the movie make you care about people when you know they’re doomed?

I know some of us in the office have gotten a bit snarky about how many Stephen King adaptations there are at this point—the words “are there no other authors???” may have been howled a few times—but here’s the thing: King gets adapted often because he’s uncannily good at grabbing you and demanding you listen to his story.

Looking at the two King adaptations this year, The Long Walk is about kids deciding whether it’s worth it to form friendships when they know they’re doomed. Can they snatch a few days of happiness and camaraderie from a terrible situation? (The Life of Chuck is kind of about the same thing. How do you live when death isn’t a fuzzy abstraction, but a physical fact sitting in the room with you?) And the beauty of the film is that they do. These are deep, real, life-changing bonds—it’s just that this society only allows them to form those bonds under these circumstances.

This is where The Long Walk finds its spark, I think. When King began the novella back in the mid-‘60s it was a brutal allegory for a brutal war as young men were marched off to Vietnam, drummed up with a fever for righteous sacrifice that wasn’t really any less dystopian than the fiction King wrote. By the time it was published, in 1979, I’d argue it was a work of both near-future and recent history.

But what do we get out of it now?

I would say that the story becomes a commentary on how propaganda remains the same.

By appealing to young men at what can only be called a scrotal level, with Mark Hamill yelling about “the sack” intermittently, the kids talking about walking off morning erections, the boys comparing physiques and dreams of the women they’ll woo once they win, it all builds to show us The Walk as a fantasy aimed at young men who are still in the throes of puberty, and, for the most part, still have their senses of youthful immortality glowing around them like halos. There’s not a fully developed prefrontal cortex among them. Of course each of them thinks they’ll be the one to win, and of course their minds gloss over what that actually means, and what they’ll have to experience for that to be true.

This performative machismo is tempered by the fact that there is at least one story of queer love woven in among the boys, brought to the surface far more than it was in the book, and I think I loved the way the movie handled it.

The problem with Stephen King is that he wrote so much prescient shit in the 1970s and ‘80s that now the adaptations feel almost old hat. Dehumanizing reality show? (The Running Man [1982]) Teen sacrifice competition meant to both unite a fragmented society, and remind the poor that they’re under the boot of the elite? (This one [1979]) School shootings? (Rage [1977], which King has since pulled from shelves.) Populace under an authoritarian regime that takes on a folksy persona? (A couple of them, but let’s round up to The Stand [1978], which features a bonus society-shattering epidemic!)

King got to them all before The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Squid Game, American Idol, Survivor—all of it. This is why I think he’s still so popular with young people—at his best, he’s very good at calling bullshit on society, and holding a mirror up not to reality, but to the seething greed and apathy that allow reality to be what it is.

The most uncanny moment, the thing that stuck with me comes right at the end—no worries, I’m not going to spoil the actual ending—but there comes a point when the Walkers come to a large town. Not one of the burned out wastelands they’ve walked through, with a gas stations and hardware stores and maybe some scattered houses on the outskirts, but a cute downtown area: brick streets, sidewalk cafes, soft glowing lights strung up in alleys for al fresco dining. The streets are lined with people cheering the remaining Walkers.

Because places like this still exist.

These boys can only get there through the Long Walk, but these kinds of towns, with bookshops (with extremely limited, government-approved books, presumably) restaurants and boutique hotels, still exist in this world.

None of the boys who grow up here will have to go on the Walk. They probably enter the lottery—every boy enters the lottery—but I highly doubt any of them go. This is where the Walk ends. In a town that looks very much like the lovely downtown plaza in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I used to get brunch on Sundays before a long wander through the giant used bookstore. This place still exists, with people living their happy lives, as their society eats its young and destroys its future.