Long before his first published novel “Carrie” hit shelves in 1974, Stephen King began work on a very different kind of book. When he was in college in the late 1960s, King started writing “The Long Walk,” a dystopian story about a post-war United States under totalitarian rule. In this world, each year 100 young men are forced to walk until just one of them is left, the rest shot and killed by soldiers if they slow down or break a rule.
The novel is widely considered a metaphor for the Vietnam War. Almost 60 years later, a new film adaptation of “The Long Walk,” from director Francis Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner, proves that the themes King was dealing with then are as relevant today as ever. But, while timely indeed, the film’s overtly political bent is the least interesting thing about it.
The obvious authoritarian allegory in “The Long Walk,” borne out in a Trumpian figure called The Major (Mark Hamill) is an overly broad one, almost cartoonish in its execution. But the walkers themselves – 50 in the movie instead of the book’s 100 – are far more richly considered. “The Long Walk” is most interesting as a parable about how toxic masculinity and authoritarianism go hand in hand, at its best when it explores how the political environment informs the young men at the center of the story rather than considering the political signifiers on their own terms.
The first walker we meet is Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), in the car with his mother (Judy Greer) as they head to the walk’s starting line. During that drive, we learn a couple of things: Ray’s father is gone, the walk is not mandatory (Ray signed up of his own volition), and the winner gets a whole lot of money. As the walk begins in earnest, Ray strikes up friendships with a couple of the other boys, most notably Peter McVries (David Jonsson).
“The Long Walk” novel was eventually published in 1979, but the boys themselves feel far more old-fashioned. Most of them are posturing at a very particular, very gendered idea of adulthood. It’s in the way they talk, the way they interact with each other, and even, in some cases, the way they dress – Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), the strongest boy of the bunch and the one deemed most likely to win, dresses like a newsie from the 1930s, complete with a pageboy cap and suspenders.
This is not the first time this year we’ve seen a horror movie contemplate the idea of regression in the aftermath of a dystopian event. In Danny Boyle’s “28 Years Later,” the village where the main characters live has returned to an almost medieval idea of community. In “The Long Walk,” there is a similar sense of traditionalism. An epidemic of laziness has taken them over, The Major says, and the walk will teach them how to be men. Everyone, whether they want to be or not, is on a path toward the societal ideal of traditional masculinity. Even someone like Ray, the most political of the group and who joined the walk for reasons having nothing to do with winning or glory, comes full of preconceived notions of what it means to be a man – and it sure doesn’t mean staying at home and taking care of his mother, ensuring she doesn’t lose anybody else.
The sort of masculinity that The Major pushes – one where every other word out of his mouth is “balls” or “sac” – is built on notions of competition and brute force, leaving no room for empathy or softness. While some of the boys buy into that sort of thing (particularly a character named Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), and even he has more nuance than The Major), their intrinsic beliefs about manhood are also present in their quieter, sweeter moments. When some of the boys start talking suggestively about Ray’s mom, he valiantly warns them off – because, of course, talking crassly about a boy’s mother is the worst possible offense. When McVries jokes (or is it a joke?) about being so horny that he’d even consider having sex with one of them, the boys react with the societally-accepted amount of humor and disgust, laughing the notion off.
The Major lingers as a mostly unseen force throughout all of this. That’s probably a good thing, because when the movie shifts its focus to anything outside of the walkers and their dynamic, it loses its punch. Hamill plays The Major as a gruff, Aviators-wearing cartoon of a military man, and that broader, surface-level commentary on authoritarianism – the kind where “America the Beautiful” plays over a dead teenager’s face – is far less subtle or affecting than the rest of the film.
Moments like the above example leave no room for analysis, and the best moments in “The Long Walk” are ones where the audience can unpack and unravel questions about masculinity, about trauma, about community. The walkers hold all of this in spades.Hoffman, like many of the other actors that make up the group, starts out a little shaky as Ray tries to find his place in this new group. The only outlier in that regard is Jonsson who, as McVries, gives a character that could have felt hollowly perfect and uncomplicated a sense of soul and backstory, solidifying his status as one of the best young actors working today. The other performances, stilted at first, start to gel around him and Hoffman as the movie progresses, the boys becoming easier with each other as they spend more time together.
As that sense of camaraderie grows, each death hits harder than the last. It’s not empty brutality, but rather feels like a real, personal blow each time. That’s perhaps the magic trick of “The Long Walk” – as bleak as it is in its entirety, the boys manage to find some sort of hope and catharsis within their doomed community.
Throughout the walk itself, the boys weave in and out of instances of togetherness and isolation. Some band together, but others – Barkovitch, in particular – choose the path of most resistance. At first, Barkovitch (a wonderfully nasty, pitiful Plummer) fashions himself a leader – the coolest, the funniest, the smartest. But a sharp remark from another boy early on causes him to immediately begin separating himself from the group, in ways both purposeful and horrifyingly accidental. He quickly finds himself at the point of no return.
McVries and Ray are the tightest unit, but even they are not immune to this pattern. In one scene, McVries implies to Ray that he is gay, an insinuation that Ray reacts to with barely disguised confusion and anger. After McVries continues to help him through the worst moments of the walk, Ray apologizes, the moment laced with shame and solidifying a connection that neither one of them can quite name, borne of damage and mutual understanding. In moments of conflict, the type of manhood that this world propagates does not help these boys. Hardness and rage, no matter how earned, will not win the day. But, outside of these small, tender moments, it might be too late for anything else.