[COLUMN] The Mundane, Banal, Unsettling Brutality of The Long Walk | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains relatively light spoilers for The Long Walk, which is maybe - give or take Doctor Sleep - the best theatrical Stephen King adaptation since The Mist. It only really spoils the movie’s first death, but if you want to go in completely blind, consider yourself warned.

It has become a cliché to repeat the argument, often attributed to François Truffaut, that “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film”, that the conventions of cinema make it impossible to present the realities of war in a way that is not viscerally thrilling. The very existence of Elen Klimov’s Come and See would seem to disprove that statement as a universal and absolute truth. It is just as lazy to argue that depiction must equal endorsement, that showing something must inherently celebrate it.

Still, while these arguments have been repeated so often that they’ve been rendered absurd, they resonate because there is at least some fragment of truth in them. Within the confines of big budget blockbusters from major studios, films crafted for mainstream audiences often designed to reinforce rather than to challenge preconceptions, there is a strong pull towards glamorizing and romanticizing the acts depicted on screen. There is a certain gravity towards wonder and excitement in these films.

This conflict simmers through a lot of the current wave of “sad hitman” movies, typified by the Taken, John Wick and Nobody franchises. These are all action movies in which men who feel very bad about being forced to engage in really cool-looking violence are forced to engage in really cool-looking violence, as the films ask their audience to understand this violence as both inherently tragic and also really cool. The best of these films play with this dissonance, but it’s always there.

This is also one of the central tensions of the Hunger Games franchise, the five films adapted from the novels written by Suzanne Collins. These films unfold in a brutal fascist dystopia, a bleak future in which the United States has descended into totalitarianism. To reinforce its power over its citizenry, this regime arranges for a particularly horrific public spectacle. The eponymous Hunger Games pit two dozen children against each other in a battle to the death as televised entertainment.

On paper, this is horrific. By her own account, Collins was motivated to write the books by watching television, flicking between news coverage of the Iraq War and reality television, seeing something grotesque and revealing about contemporary American culture in that juxtaposition. Although Collins denies any intentional influence, the books also owe a lot to Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, adapted from Koushun Takami's novel, a Japanese film released a few years later.

One of the central tensions of the Hunger Games film franchises lies in the push and pull between the premise and the execution. Intellectually, the audience understands that constructing a game whereby children are coerced into killing one another is truly monstrous, but the demands of a $78m mainstream crowd-pleasing Hollywood spectacle mean that it must also be entertaining, particularly given the commercial realities that pushed the film towards a four-quadrant-friendly PG-13 rating.

This set of contradictory impulses serves as the franchise’s original sin. Directed by Bill Ross, the first Hunger Games movie builds to a sequence in which the adorable 12-year-old Rue (Amandla Stenberg) is brutally impaled on a spear. It is a moment that should be visceral and unsettling. It should sicken the audience. However, the show must go on, and the MPAA must be appeased, so the death of this sweet innocent child is sanitized. It is almost graceful.

While the audience understands that it’s horrific for teenagers to kill one another, the films are structured so that the viewer’s sympathy always aligns with the heroic Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence). The audience might agree in the abstract that no child deserves to be murdered for the entertainment of a failed state, it’s undeniably exciting to watch Katniss murder her way through the conveniently evil competitors like Marvel (Jack Quaid) or Cato (Alexander Ludwig).

Director Francis Lawrence took over the franchise after that original film, and it seems like a large motivating facet of his vision for the five remaining entries in the series was to explore how far he could push the franchise to deglamorize this spectacle of violence. A large portion of Catching Fire plays as a commentary on Katniss’ (and Lawrence’s) celebrity, while the two halves of Mockingjay spill out into the larger world outside the games.

Using the prequel setting of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Lawrence managed a couple of deft tricks. He stripped back the glamor of the arena, emphasizing the brutality of the violence. The film also minimizes the amount of time spent in the arena, focusing on the metagame outside it. Lawrence also challenged the audience by aligning the film’s perspective with the villainous Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) rather than the saintly Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), inviting the audience to question their own perspective.

It is perhaps reductive to discuss The Long Walk, Lawrence’s latest film, in the context of the Hunger Games franchise. After all, The Long Walk is based on a novel published in 1979, by Stephen King under the penname Richard Bachman. That novel had a long path to adaptation, with filmmakers like George A. Romero and Frank Darabont attached at various points. As recently as 2019, the adaptation was still on at New Line, the studio responsible for King adaptations like IT or Salem’s Lot.

Still, The Long Walk makes a fitting companion piece to The Hunger Games. It is another story about a dystopian regime that has reduced the death of innocent children to grim public spectacle. While Collins acknowledges the influence of the Iraq War on The Hunger Games, King suggests that the Vietnam War exerted a more subconscious pull on The Long Walk. “You write from your times, so certainly, that was in my mind,” he admits. “But I never thought about it consciously.”

It feels somewhat fitting that The Long Walk should have ended up at Lionsgate in the hands of Lawrence, who is currently working on Sunrise on the Reaping, the next Hunger Games movie for the studio. Even just aesthetically, Lawrence and his cinematographer Jo Willems carry over and heighten the desaturated look that they brought to Songbirds and Snakes. This is not the glamourous and beautiful dystopia of the original four Hunger Games films. This is something much bleaker.

The Long Walk is a relatively simple film. The movie reportedly had a modest production budget of $20m, and Lawrence only agreed to make the film for an R rating. These are choices that limit the movie’s commercial appeal. There are no big action set pieces. There are no thrilling combat sequences. There are just a bunch of kids walking in a mostly straight line down a long stretch of tarmac for the better part of two hours.

It’s easy to understand why it took so long to make an adaptation of The Long Walk. The premise seems almost hostile to the idea of a cinematic adaptation. There is none of the spectacle or excitement that comes into something like The Hunger Games. However, watching the finished product, it can feel like that was exactly what drew Lawrence to the material. Lawrence seems to be asking if it’s possible to make a version of The Hunger Games completely shorn of the thrill.

The result is a film that feels genuinely unflinching in its depiction of state-sanctioned violence on innocent children. The deaths are often graphic, particularly the first execution of Thomas Curley (Roman Griffin Davis), a competitor strongly hinted to be under-age who falls behind when he develops Charley Horse. There is no dignity or grace as Thomas falls to the ground, screaming “it’s not fair!” like Tessie Hutchinson in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, a major influence on King.

It's a brutal and horrific sequence, and it is much more effective than the death of Rue in The Hunger Games, a death that essentially served the same narrative function of illustrating the stakes of this story to the viewer at home. However, while Rue’s death was peaceful and graceful, Thomas’ death is pathetic and graphic. It sets a tone for the rest of the film. Most of these characters are going to die gruesomely for no greater reason than because they got tired.

While the murder of children in The Hunger Games takes place in specially designed arenas with cool weapons, The Long Walk is much more mundane. The film constantly reminds the audience that these characters are flesh and blood. The Long Walk pays particular, deliberate attention to how the participants urinate and defecate during this competition, in a way that strips out any hint of glamour or prestige from what the audience is watching.

One of the biggest challenges in making blockbusters about the encroaching threat of fascism is the tendency to make fascism look cool. There are Star Wars fans who find themselves drawn uncritically and unironically to the aesthetics of the Empire. This isn’t down to any bias on the part of the movies, it’s just that there’s a clear desire to make movies look cool, and that extends to making the villains in movies look cool, even when they are totalitarian monsters.

The Long Walk is so effective because it manages to avoid doing this. The Major (Mark Hamill) who oversees the march is only intermittently present, bellowing at the participants from the back of a truck – the contestants speculate that he goes away to shower and sleep so he can appear refreshed. Instead, The Long Walk unfolds in the backdrop of a hollowed-out heartland, populated by endless fields and burnt-out wrecks, rusting bridges and decrepit shacks.

Watching The Long Walk unfold at its deliberate and considered pace, it’s hard not to think of the billions of dollars that have been spent to realize urban devastation at a previously unimaginable scale in mainstream cinematic entertainment over the past decades. As mainstream cinema reflects a darkening political climate in the wider world, it’s easy to wonder whether such depictions have a numbing effect, if reducing that horror to spectacle can lull the audience into a dazed complacency.

It is to the credit of Lawrence and the entire team working on The Long Walk that it feels like proof that mainstream genre entertainment capturing that current mood can still shock and unsettle, without sensationalizing such horror. Sometimes all it takes is a long walk and sudden stop.