"A funny thing happened on the way to the dystopia": the culture industry's neutralization of Stephen King's The Running Man

Utopian Studies, Wntr, 2007 by Douglas W. Texter

This hailing function of "The Running Man" becomes incredibly aggressive after the hunt actually gets underway. On one occasion, when Richards torches the Boston YMCA on Huntington Avenue and roasts several hunters in the process, Bobby Thompson presents coverage. With the screen displaying Richards' face, Thompson engages in a call-and-response with the studio audience: "What will you do if you see him on your street?" The audience responds: "TURN HIM IN!" Thompson asks, "And what are we going to do when we find him?" The audience replies: "KILL HIM!" (802). The point of view shifts from the first question to the second. This shift invites audience members to think of themselves (both conceptually and legally) as deputized agents of the state.

If Thompson's first question sounds familiar to television viewers of the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, it should. It's approximately the same one posed weekly by John Walsh on "America's Most Wanted." And the Vietnam-style, three-minute, action-packed-clips--with police violence taken out of socio-political context--are very similar to the video segments used on "COPS." In "The Court of Last Resort: Making Race, Crime and Nation on America's Most Wanted," Margaret Deroisa argues that the "conflation of law enforcement and entertainment is troubling for many reasons" (238). Chief among these are the "show's implication that blacks and Hispanics are defacto criminals" and the construction of a "national climate of unwarranted fear and paranoia" (238). Ironically, this climate rose at precisely the time when real crime rates were falling.

In The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime, Joel Dyer notes that in the 1980s, "when the media corporations decided to dramatically increase their use of violent, crime-oriented content as a means of increasing ratings or pickup rates and thereby enhancing profits, it created a by-product--an exaggerated apprehension of crime throughout the general population" (3). Writing in 2000, Dyer explains that since most people perceive their vulnerability to crime not through the viewing of actual criminal acts but by watching images presented by the media, "nearly 80 percent of the public now believes crime to be one of the biggest problems confronting America, despite the fact that most of us are safer now than we were in the 1970s" (3). Although crime rates have gone down, poverty rates, which dropped precipitously after the implementation of the Great Society Programs introduced by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, climbed in the 1970s and 1980s and have remained fairly steady at between 9.3 and 11 percent for the last decade or so.

This focus on crime and lack of attention to poverty lead to what Dyer calls the "Mean World Syndrome" (109). As Arlen said in the 1960s, "What television mostly gives us is some other world we dream we live in. It tells us almost nothing about how life is and how we are (connected, as most of it is, inextricably and pragmatically to the sacred mainstream)" (178). The Running Man very accurately predicts that the dream world to be created by the media in the (as it turned out) not-at-all distant future would be one in which ever-present urban-bred criminals from the ghettos of the South Side, North Philadelphia, Watts, and Harlem lurk at every turn and need to be hunted down by the police with the willing help of the general public. As Deroisa says, shows like "America's Most Wanted" make Americans think that their nation is "under siege and infiltrated by dangerous criminals who are simultaneously both like and unlike us, the supposedly law abiding citizens watching at home" (244). This siege mentality is produced partly by the vigilantism of "America's Most Wanted," "especially given the show's extensive reliance on the second person and direct address. Rarely employed on contemporary television as consistently and forcefully as on 'America's Most Wanted,' Walsh frequently points his finger at the camera with a dead serious glance" (Deroisa 242). Reminiscent of Bobby Thompson's call-and-response interaction with the audience of "The Running Man," Walsh's finger wagging usually involves a request to "'you' the viewer to call in and provide information that will bring this criminal/punk/scumbag/animal ... to justice" (Deroisa 243). Thus, The Running Man foreshadows and critiques the conflation of entertainment with policing and eerily predicts the vigilante mentality of "America's Most Wanted."