"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

Thus, King works squarely in the dystopian tradition. In addition to borrowing language and settings from Orwell and Huxley, he employs the technique of offering a dialogue with a member of the ruling elite. By making his protagonist working-class, he performs a maneuver not seen in an American dystopia since Jack London's The Iron Heel. And unlike the dialogue between Ernest Everhard and the oligarch Wickham in London's work, the exchange between Richards and Amelia ends with the representative of the elite converted to the proletarian cause. Finally, through interrogating corporate as well as state oppression, King anticipates structural and thematic innovations not made until at least a decade after The Running Man was originally written.

Blaad and guts in the sky: from Snowden to Richards

In The Running Man, King also examines the concept of co-optation of working-class dissent. To perform this examination, King borrows heavily from Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

In "The Life and Death of Richard Bachman: Stephen King's Doppelganger," Stephen E Brown notes that The Running Man "builds without pause to a final chapter that must be among the most appalling scenes ever written" (127). In this scene, a fatally wounded Richards rejects an offer made by Killian to have him (Richards) replace Evan McCone as Chief Hunter as a reward for his cunning during the chase. After shooting McCone, the wounded Richards, his intestines trailing behind him, flies an airliner into the Games Commission Building, thereby permanently canceling both "The Running Man" and its producer.

Besides conceivably--and certainly inadvertently--serving to inspire Fundamentalist terrorists in 2001, this scene performs two very important pieces of work for the novel: it emphasizes Richards' ultimate solidarity with the working class and his rejection of co-optation by the ruling elite. In addition, it emphasizes and concretizes the ghastly costs of such a rejection. Both the high-altitude deal making and the evisceration featuring so prominently in this section come from a source very different from Stephen King's admittedly dark imagination alone. Rather, they are allusions to one of the most important pieces of anti-war satire of the twentieth century--Joseph Heller's Catch-22. By unpacking these allusions, I'll show that King was attempting to do more than simply sicken his audience (although he does manage to do that quite nicely).

In a 1986 interview with Maine high-school student Elaine Landa, "I am a Hick, and This Is where I Feel at Home," King was asked what novels by other writers he wished he himself had written. He named these books: Lord of the Flies, A Separate Peace, Catch-22, The Grapes of Wrath, and Light in August (252-253). The palimpsest of the works of Golding, Knowles, Steinbeck, and Faulkner is pretty clearly visible throughout King's corpus: child bullies, school scenes, dissolving families, and endangered women. Catch-22 seems the joker in the hand that King dealt to Landa. King doesn't do Heller. Or does he? In fact, the final fifth or so of The Running Man draws its themes of co-optation and bargain striking as much from Catch-22 as from "The Gong Show" and "Let's Make a Deal." Heller's haunting imagery of the primal scene of the gunner Snowden's evisceration in Catch-22 is incorporated practically wholesale into the novel.