"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

Arising from the Socratic dialogues and "The Grand Inquisitor" scene in the Brothers Karamozov, the dystopian dialogue has been employed most famously in the twentieth century by Jack London (The Iron Heel [1907]), Yevgeny Zamyatin (We [1924]), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World [1932]), George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four [1948]), and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale [1987]). Of all of these novels, only London's Iron Heel features a dialogue between a working-class protagonist (the autodidact labor leader Ernest Everhard) and a member of the ruling elite (the oligarch Wickham). Indeed, with the exceptions of Everhard, Alex in Clockwork Orange, and George Orr in Ursula Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven, most dystopian protagonists are solidly middle class. One thinks of Orwell's Winston Smith (an editor for the Times of London), Huxley's Helmholtz Watson (an emotional engineer), Zamyatin's D-503 (an aeronautical engineer), and Margaret Atwood's Offred (a former librarian).

Ben Richards, though, is most certainly a Prole. I would argue that if--as has often been claimed Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist reworking of Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Running Man is a working-class rewriting of that text. In Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (the book within the book in Nineteen Eighty-Four), Emmanuel Goldstein says that "proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the party. The most gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent are marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated" (186). When Killian tells Richards that part of the raison d'etre for "The Running Man" is disposing of troublemakers, he essentially echoes Goldstein. The perhaps non-existent author of Theory and Practice also says that this policy could be overturned in case of necessity. And--as will be discussed below--by offering Richards a deal, Killian enacts the policy changes toward gifted proles allowed by Goldstein.

Although King does indeed have the de rigueur dialogue between Richards and Killian, it is through the use of a second dialogue that King truly inspects and interrogates the middle class. It is this dialogue--along with the concept of working-class solidarity--that is (to invert the words of Edmundson) the "something" that King's readers can take back with them into the real world.

After Richards torches the Y, he makes contact with a variety of working-class characters (including children), who help to protect him. In doing so, he is following the advice of Killian, who tells him: "Stay close to your own people.... Not those good middle class folks out there; they hate your guts" (761). After one of his working-class allies dies in a high-speed chase in New England, a wounded Richards literally enters the realm of the bourgeoisie by carjacking Amelia Williams, a representative of the class wanting to destroy him: "She was dressed for town, and wore blue wrap around sunglasses. Good looking from what he could see" (845). According to Richards' description, she is one of "these beautiful chosen ones. They existed up where the air was rare" (849). Amelia is, of course, both terrified and incensed: "You've got some nerve, don't you, you cowardly little murderer! Scaring me half out of my life, probably planning to kill me the way you killed those poor boys in Boston" (848). The poor boys to whom Amelia refers are Evan McCone's Hunters, who exist only because the urban poor have no prospects for work and because the middle class needs to be entertained and assured that it is not in danger.