The Long Walk: a brutal, brilliant film about suffering in the name of patriotism

The Long Walk is one of several high-profile film adaptations of Stephen King’s lesser-known works to be released this year, coming out just after The Life of Chuck.

Director Francis Lawrence’s film is adapted from the novella written while the author was at university in the late 1960s – a story wasn’t published until 1979. It was, however, released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which King reserved for some of his most unflinching and hard-edged writing.

The setting for this violent thriller is an alternative America in the 1970s, which has suffered economic decline in the aftermath of an unspecified war. A group of 50 young men have been called up to compete in a televised contest, which is intended to inspire patriotism and work ethic among the destitute populace. The rules they must walk continuously at a speed above 3mph, with the threat of execution if any fall behind.

King’s novella is an antecedent to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games and Takami Koushun’s Battle Royale, both made into successful films. Like The Long Walk, these stories depict a nation whose rulers have gamified and made spectacle the suffering of young people with the aim of encouraging a productive, obedient populace.

Written as an angry response to the Vietnam draft, in The Long Walk, young men must suffer for nationalist ideology. The impact of the Vietnam war on men of King’s generation – he was declared physically unfit for service – resonates throughout his early fiction.

It’s a brilliant choice to distil in this film many of the familiar tropes of the Vietnam movie, here inverted to have the US, not Asia, as the inhospitable, dark and violent environment that is deadly to the young men. Their continuous march feels strangely reminiscent of GIs trudging through Vietnam in films such as Full Metal Jacket or Platoon.

The essence of the film is in the relationship between protagonist Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and his competitor, Peter McVries (David Jonsson). With its focus on young male friendship, The Long Walk shares DNA with Stand by Me, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of King’s other story The Body.

Like Stand by Me, this film is about male bodily experience, particularly bodies made vulnerable through exertion. At first it mines scatalogical humour like the contestants questioning how to urinate while walking, to gross-out comedy around a contestant with diarrhoea, which later turns horrifying, humiliating and tragic.

This is an interesting film for its release at a time of debate around the activities and values of young men, incel culture and secret online lives, embodied by stories like Netflix’s Adolescence.

In The Long Walk, young men are capable of acts of kindness and generosity, they display vulnerability openly and support each other through struggle. Through playful dialogue and the boys’ wit and tenderness in the face of violence, the film successfully connects us to its characters and renders many of the inevitable and gory deaths horribly poignant.

The Long Walk is clear and overt in its criticism of American cultural experience and political stagnation. Mark Hamill, once the figurehead of youth rebellion in Star Wars, is brilliantly cast against type as the jingoistic Major, who barks like a drill sergeant at the boys. The core values they need, according to the Major’s pro-America creed, are “determination, pride and ambition”.

Read more: The Life of Chuck: Stephen King adaptation celebrates the richness of ordinary life

The film presents a grim vision of the US that is far from the promise of the American Dream. The boy are taken along hundreds of miles of perpetually overcast rural American landscape that is desolate and “one big pile of litter”, as Garraty remarks early on.

Kings prose is sparse, heavy on dialogue and light on description. But here, in this richly shot film, we are continually shown drab depictions of American life: sprawling cornfields, dilapidated industrial buildings, rusted locomotives creaking along tracks, all imbued with the sense that the machinery of the country has ground to a halt. As the boys trudge on, increasingly ragged and physically traumatised, the Major rants obliviously “Where else in the world could you have this opportunity? Nowhere!”

Some of the imagery used to deliver this critique is a little heavy-handed: a flaming Cadillac and a trio of distressed horses galloping behind a barbed wire fence. But the film commits admirably to its presentation of a disturbingly apocalyptic US.

King’s fiction draws criticism for lack of female perspective and it’s an interesting choice that the film keeps this a contest open exclusively to young men. Like Stand by Me and the beloved Shawshank Redemption, this is a story of men bonding without women.

A female perspective is offered in a tokenistic form through brief scenes of Garraty’s idealised mother (Judy Greer), distraught but dignified as her son volunteers. It’s also curious that, like Shawshank, this film focuses on the platonic bond between a white man and a black man while race, – especially the dynamics of race within a military and white supremacist dictatorship – is not mentioned even in passing.

For their core differences in plot and resolution, both King’s story and this excellent film adaptation share in their final moments an ambiguity as to whether nationalist doctrine can be resisted and oppressive systems overthrown. Peter MrVries, the most obviously critically illuminated member of the walking party, comments at one point on the deep-seated conditioning to which the walkers and the rest of the country are subjected.

King’s bleak text is youthfully pessimistic and steeped in the despondent nihilism of the period in which it was written. This bracing, emotionally affecting film is rather more galvanising. It does go some way towards imagining the means of rebellion in the hands of the nation’s youth – even if it doesn’t commit outright to the view that there is power in acts of resistance.

The Long Walk is a brutal, brilliant film that stands among the best adaptations of Stephen King’s work.

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Matt Jacobsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.