Stephen King's The Running Man as a Critique of Corruption and

Social Injustice

Candidate: Mihajlo Stefanovi, 275

Professor: Milica ivkovi

Subject: Utopia and Science Fiction

English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, Ni, Serbia, 2017

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Introduction

This research paper, centred around Stephen King's The Running Man, will attempt to

use the novel as a lens through which today's American capitalist society, can be viewed

and criticized. The paper aims not only at shedding light on social and political issues of

the futuristic American capitalist society in the novel, but it also aims at comparing

them to recent views and the current situation of the real-world American capitalist

society. The book is certainly not unique in its main theme and motifs, having in mind

that similar views of dystopian future had been offered before by such authors as

Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, but it makes for a good addition to a plethora of

such views in literature.

To put the novel into perspective, a brief account of the author's professional

biography will be provided, along with some of his milestone works and dominant

literary genre. It would be useful to take a look at the plot of the novel, its setting, and

its dystopian characteristics, as it would provide the reader with some insight before

commencing the analysis of the motifs that are the topic of the paper. Where does The

Running Man stand compared to King's other works? What is it that makes King's

America a dystopia? How are the social issues in the novel relevant to today's real-

world issues? Since the two important keywords are corruption and social injustice,

the paper will be structured around these two keywords, beginning with dictionary

definitions of the words and then proceeding to exemplify them in the context of both

the novel and the real-world American society. Opinions of philosophers, social critics,

as well as statistics, will be used to further elaborate the issues of today's American

society reflected in the novel. It should be noted, once again, that since Stephen King's

dystopian world is set in the United States, the focus of the paper will predominantly be

American society, with a few exceptions.

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The Author and the Novel

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author whose works

include horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. Out of all

these, he is revered as one of the greatest horror fiction writers, with many of his novels

being adapted into successful films. His first novel, Carrie, was published in 1973, and

to the present day, King has written roughly around 56 novels, and according to some

sources, even more. In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King (2000)

describes his writing discipline: Once I start work on a project, I dont stop and I dont

slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I dont write every day, the characters begin to

stale off in my mindthey begin to seem like characters instead of real people. [...] I

used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July,

and my birthday. That was a lie. Some of King's well-known works include It , Pet

Samatary, Misery, The Shining, The Stand and Salem's Lot.

Since King's name is predominantly associated with horror fiction, The

Running Man does not quite fit this category. Not only is this not his typical horror

work, but it was also written and published under the pen name of Richard Bachman,

along with six other novels. He wrote under a pseudonym because back in the early

days of my career there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year

was all the public would accept (StephenKing.com).

In the original introduction to his omnibus The Bachman Books, King (1985)

describes himself in the years he wrote the books as "a young man who was angry,

energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing". King (2000) claims he

wrote the novel within a single week, and the novel was originally rejected, Ace Books'

response being: We are not interested in science fiction that deals with negative

utopias (Beahm, 1998).

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The Plot of the Novel and its Dystopian Traits

The First Edition cover of the book offers a short hook: Welcome to America in 2025,

when the best men don't run for presidentthey run for their lives. It is 2025, and

amidst a worldwide economic crisis, America has turned into a totalitarian dystopia.

Ben Richards, a denizen of the fictional Co-Op city is reduced to penury and unable to

find a job. He is married to Sheila, and they have a daughter named Cathy who is

gravely ill and in need of medicine. These harsh circumstances make Sheila resort to

prostitution in order to earn money. Desperate, Richards decides to turn to the Games

Network, a television station operated by the government that runs violent game shows.

All homes are required to have a Free-Vee, and while the service is free, it cannot be

turned off, only turned down. In order to make his way to being a contestant in one of

these violent games, Richard undergoes rigorous physical and mental testing. He ends

up appearing on The Running Man, the Games' most popular, profitable and

dangerous show. He is met with Dan Killian, who is the executive producer of the

program, and is met with the challenges lying ahead.

The rules of the game are as follows. The contestant is declared an enemy of the

state and is given a 12-hour head start before an elite team of Network-employed

hitmen called the Hunters are sent out to kill him. The contestant earns $100 per hour

that he avoids capture and stays alive, an additional $100 dollars for each law

enforcement officer or Hunter he kills. If he survives for 30 days, he is given a grand

prize of $1 billion. The public is also included - being rewarded with money for

informing the network of the runners location. The runner is also given $4,800 and a

pocket video camera, instructed to videotape two messages and mail them to the studio

for broadcasting. He can travel anywhere in America, but if he fails to deliver the
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videotapes, he will stop accumulating prize money, but will still be hunted. No one has

yet won the game, and the previous record was eight days.

As the game begins, Richards travels to New York, than Boston, continuing to

Manchester, trying to conceal his identity by disguising himself and with help from a

few people who also realise the Network is doing everything to keep the people in

control, yet nothing about the rising air pollution issues. He is helped mainly by Stacey

and Bradley, two African-American youngsters whose sister is dying of lung cancer,

and then, in Manchester by a friend of Bradley's. Doubtful of the Network, he sends the

tapes from other cities, in an effort to maintain a low profile. In an unfortunate turn of

events, the mother of the aforementioned friend of Bradley's informs the authorities

about Richards' location, and he almost ends up being caught, while her son is killed in

the process. He finally abducts a woman named Amelia Williams and holds her hostage

to ensure safe passage to Derry, Maine. The police confront Richards at the airport, but

he bluffs his way onto a plane past both them and Evan McCone, the lead Hunter, by

pretending to be carrying an explosive charge powerful enough to destroy the entire

facility. By this time, Richards has broken the Running Man survival record of eight

days and five hours. Richards takes both McCone and Amelia as hostages and demands

that the plane fly low over populated areas to avoid being shot down by missiles.

However, Killian calls Richards aboard the plane and reveals that he knows Richards

has no explosives, as the plane's security system would have surely detected them.

Killian offers him a chance to replace McCone as lead Hunter but Richards is hesitant to

take the offer, worried about his family becoming a target. Killian then informs him that

Sheila and Cathy were murdered over ten days earlier, even before Richards first

appeared on the show, and gives him some time to make his decision. With nothing left

to lose, he calls Killian back and accepts the offer. He does away with the flight crew
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and McCone, suffering a mortal gunshot wound. Richards allows Amelia to jump off

the plane with a parachute, then uses his last strength to override the autopilot and fly

toward the skyscraper housing the Games Network. The plane crashes into the tower,

resulting in both Richards' and Killian's deaths. The Free-Vees all over the country go

white.

The dystopian characteristics of the novel range from the scenery and

topography to the socio-political affairs. It is a top-down dystopia, with the elite

populating the wealthy and towering parts of cities, and the underpaid or poor groups

living in ghettos or badly maintained districts. The Games Building towers everything

else, described as growing taller, more and more, improbable with its impersonal tiers

of rising office windows, its polished stonework (King, 1982). Strictly controlled

content in the form of violent games is used to control the citizens and make them

complacent. Dissentience, nonconformity and education (reading books) are treated as

dangerous to the authority. This makes the citizens rarely come out, as the streets are

ridden with crime. Not only are the streets ridden with crime, but there is a strange air of

destruction and dereliction in the streets - broken windows, rats, ghostly silence. The

horrifying spectre of air pollution and asthma and lung cancer hovers over the book.

(Sharp Pencil, 2012). Both addictive drugs, such as The San Francisco Push and

medicine are found only on the black market, which paints a grotesque picture.

Richards' traits as a dystopian protagonist are those of questioning the current political

and social affairs. He is overcome with a feeling that something is terribly wrong with

the society he lives in. Through him, the reader is able to recognize all the negative

aspects of that dystopian world and while it is not that easy to co-identify with him, the

reader will at one point or the other start feeling sorry for him.
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Corruption

According to the online Oxford Learner's Dictionary, corruption is defined as

dishonest or illegal behaviour, especially of people in authority or the act or effect of

making somebody change from moral to immoral standards of behaviour. There are

various ways in which the picture of corruption is painted, chapter by chapter, in the

novel.

The corrupt ways of the government, namely the Games Network are explicitly

shown early on in the novel. The first form of dishonest, brutal and illegal behaviour is

most obviously, the media, the means through which those in power control the rest of

society. We are introduced to the concept of the Free-Vee, the outstretched, grasping

hand of the Games Network. They have their fingers in every home, in every household,

in every public institution. The population are held in a state of hypnosis by violent

games that thrill, humiliate and subdue. Here's a description of one such game:

This wasnt one of the big ones, of course, just a cheap daytime come-on called

Treadmill to Bucks. They accepted only chronic heart, liver, or lung patients, sometimes

throwing in a crip for comic relief. Every minute the contestant could stay on the

treadmill (keeping up a steady flow of chatter with the emcee), he won ten dollars.[...]

The contestant, dizzy, out of breath, heart doing fantastic rubber acrobatics in his chest,

missed the question, fifty dollars was deducted from his winnings and the treadmill was

speeded up (King, 1982).

This excerpt shows but a tiny bit of how the crowd is held in control and

mesmerised by violence. The fact that only seriously ill people are taken in for this

gruesome show, supports the fact that the game can never be won. This symbolises the

power of the government - it can never be overturned. In a way, it instils fear and a kind

of subconscious discipline into the general public. The public, even if they wanted to,
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could never win the big game, could never rebel, never show their dissatisfaction. In

the novel, this kind of dissatisfaction is only murmured, but not outright expressed.

Reality TV, like the lottery, holds out the carrot stick of wealth and fame for being and

doing nothing the ultimate scam that ensnares the lethargic denizens of refuse

programming. (Dyer, 2012). The government turns people into animals by potentiating

and encouraging their animal-like traits, namely bloodlust and violent behaviour.

Animals are much more easily controlled and, if necessary, dispatched and replaced.

Another way the Network does this is through control of education. Pervert magazines

have almost entirely replaced books, described in the novel as safer. Through the

means of enticing man's primal sexual urges, his downright lust, control is secured and

rational human behaviour is brought down to a point where an ordinary citizen gets an

impression that everything is alright. The Running Man, the Network's most popular

show works under the guise of justice and law enforcement, where in fact, it is just a

means of getting rid of embryo troublemakers (King, 1982) and a sure way of keeping

the public under control, by removing all those who are a potential threat to the

established system. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Emmanuel Goldstein

says: "Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most

gifted among them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked

down by the Thought Police and eliminated." (Orwell, 1949). The runner is declared an

enemy of the State, yet no background information is provided on why that particular

individual is dangerous. Either that, or the information is manipulated and distorted to

create a general impression he truly is. Ben Richards is seen by Killian as a perfect

candidate, because he is deemed rebellious, anti-authoritarian and anti-social, having

been suspended twice from work for failure to respect authority. The best men, truly do

not run for President.

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The crowd control becomes even more prominent as the audience is included in

this highly sophisticated manhunt. In one fell swoop, the public is swayed into thinking

they are helping to maintain law and order and are promised lucrative rewards for doing

so. The only form of collectivism is turned to apprehending a single man. The incentive

is desirable, and there is also negative incentive for harbouring a fugitive. In a way, not

only is there corruption in the government, but the public is corrupted as well. Taking

into consideration the second definition offered by Oxford Learner's Dictionary, it is

clear that the Network aims at corrupting the general public. One can easily compare

The Running Man to the bloody gladiatorial Roman spectacle, with the spectators

have already given a thumbs-down to the gladiator that is Ben Richards, and have now

turned to bloodthirsty lions ready to devour. Their rage is fuelled further by the Network

which censors and overdubs Richards' tapes broadcast in the show. Richards is

desperately trying to wake them up by informing them of a rising environmental issue

the Network is keeping them oblivious of. The final cut of his tapes instead shows

obscenities not even spoken by him, and though it is clear that the words and the mouth

do not match, nobody seems to notice.

Finally, the view of the police as those who are here to serve and protect is also

challenged. When Richards carjacks Amelia's car, they are at one point shot at by

policemen, even though Amelia was innocent and was pretty much forced to comply

with Richards' intentions. Amelia is awe-stricken, coming to the painful realization the

policemen would kill everyone who stands in their way. They are later confronted with

an even greater piece of the military, but leave unharmed due to them being filmed, and

killing a well-to-do, middle class hostage in front of the whole world does not bode well

for the Government's reputation.

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Surely, one must take a look at how these examples of corruption are reflected in

the American capitalist society today. Douglas W. Texter (2007) calls The Running

Man "a very Marxist-oriented interrogation of the American superstructure". Texter

believes that The Running Man parodies or critiques the American educational system

as a whole, particularly standardised testing. The tests Richards has to undergo while

applying for the Games, open doors for some people and exclude others, much like SAT

tests. Having each successive test on the next higher floor mocks the idea of upward

mobility. Education in America today is threatened by corporations, and public schools

are threatened to become dead zones of imagination if the corporate powers have their

way (Graeber, 2012). Noam Chomsky (2014) also supports the notion of a corporate

attack on education, listing costs and student debt as significant factors and quoting a

trustee of the New York State University system: There has been a shift from the belief

that we as a nation benefit from higher education to a belief that it is the people who

are receiving the education who primarily benefit, so they should foot the bill.

Chomsky (2011), also speaks of the notion of corporate personhood, which is

the ability of organisations to be recognised by law as an individual, bringing with it

certain rights, protections and abilities that are enjoyed by human beings. He says that

the progressives supported it, believing that the so-called organic institutions were more

important than individuals. Over the years, corporations have gotten rights that are

way beyond those of persons of flesh and blood. He also states that over the years, the

legal definition of person was formed so it does not include creatures of flesh and

blood who don't have the right documents. In the novel, the Network is usually referred

to as if it were a real person, a living being. It has become more human with more rights

than the dehumanized population who are nothing without permits, ID cards and clear
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records. During their application for the Games, the potential contestants all get an ID

card. Not being branded, means not being human.

Bill Guttentag (2008) comments on the actual reality of reality TV shows,

stating that nearly all of them are not particularly real. The conceits, the casting, the

shooting, the editing, the storytelling - they're not intended to serve as beacons of light

and truth, they're intended to make the audience stick through to the next set of

commercials. Another Guttentag's quote reflects the manufactured truth offered to the

public, when Richards' tapes are broadcast on live television in the novel: These shows

frequently use what I call 'frankenbites' and frankenbites are sound bites that are taken

out of context, statements from the participants, by stealing a word from here and two

words from there, and then artificially constructing these sentences and putting them

over neutral footage. And while the aforementioned frankenbites are used for

intensifying and re-scripting reality mostly for fun and intensification, such cutting and

re-scripting happens in the media as well, media that is supposed to inform the general

public of the truth. Paul Joseph Watson (2017), an English YouTube conservative

personality, provides one such example in one of his videos. Namely, on July 7th, three

Muslim women dressed in black attacked and stabbed a woman in London while

reportedly chanting about Allah and the Quran. A BBC interview with an eyewitness

was revealed to have intentionally had a part where Allah and the Quran were

mentioned cut out from it, as there is an obvious skip in the video. The Telegraph has

also interviewed the same eyewitness, but this part was not omitted in the broadcast

footage. The BBC has intentionally edited out eyewitness testimony... (Watson, 2017).

The BBC may not be an American broadcast service, but this does serve to exemplify

how the media in the novel is reflected in the real world media.
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Social Injustice

Injustice, as defined in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, is the fact of a situation being

unfair and of people not being treated equally or an unfair act or an example of unfair

treatment. To define social injustice, one has to turn to what social justice is, in the first

place. According to Oxford Living Dictionaries, social justice is defined as justice in

terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.

Under the assumption that social injustice must be an opposite of this definition, let us

take a look at these opposites as illustrated in the novel.

When one looks at the distribution of wealth in the novel, there is a clear cut

between the well-off and the poor classes. The poor live in the midst of chronic air

pollution, urban violence and street crimes and government informants, while the

wealthy live for pleasure in a protected enclave of skyscrapers and decadence. It is

mentioned several times in the novel that the rich, especially those inhabiting the Games

Building have nose filters that protect them from the air that feels like smoking four

packs of cigarettes a day just breathing (King, 1982). Lower classes are either unable

to afford these filters or can only come by cheap ones which serve no long-term

purpose. The wealthy watch the Free-Vee for pleasure. The poor watch it out of misery,

dreaming of an easy way out. As the novel opens, it can be immediately noticed that

Richards is one of the poor. He did not care for or watch the Free-Vee, but since his

daughter got sick, he had been watching the big-money giveaways (King, 1982). This

same economic inequality, which pushes his wife into prostitution, also pushes Richards

to apply for the Games. Not only him, but many others, as we can see later when he

stands in a long line and goes through a great amount of red tape in order to apply.

When he first stands in line, the candidates are asked to dispose of valuables. But there

are no valuables in his wallet. He resorts to borrowing coins from a guard, only to call
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his wife on the phone. As he moves up and gets chosen for the games, he is provided

with a luxury room and services at his disposal, a temporary illusion before the running

starts. The poverty of the people is his main enemy once he starts running, because the

people are so desperate that they will give out his whereabouts for money, an incentive

that works so well having in mind their current financial state. There is a recurring motif

of the New Dollar which is apparently worth more than the old currency, and this

motif stands as a promise of wealth and fortune. The class distinction is brought home

in the final third of the novel, when Richards carjacks and takes hostage a well-to-do

woman, Amelia Williams, who is absolutely oblivious of the struggles of those not so

well-off. The following excerpt from the novel perfectly sums up these struggles and an

obvious divide among the people in terms of class and money:

Its disgusting to get blackballed because you dont want to work in a General

Atomics job thats going to make you sterile. Its disgusting to sit home and watch your

wife earning the grocery money on her back. Its disgusting to know the Network is

killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be

manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw. (King, 1982)

It should also be noted that King frequently uses racial slurs such as kikes,

niggers and negroes. Although this issue is not wholly addressed in the novel, it helps

support the divide in privilege from a racial standpoint. It is further illustrated through

the characters of Stacey and Bradley, both of which are African-American, that race has

to do with wealth and social status. However, Dan Killian, the executive producer of the

Games, is also African-American, so black, in fact, [...] he might have stepped out of a

minstrel show (King, 1982). Whether this means wealth is stronger than race is

debatable.
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Before further exemplifications of how the social injustice and inequality in the

novel are reflected upon the real world America, it would be worth mentioning a dated,

but still relevant class theory by Karl Marx (1848). Marx viewed modern society as

having only two classes of people: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production: the factories, businesses,

and equipment necessary to gain profit. The proletariat are the workers. According to

Marx, the bourgeoisie in capitalist societies exploit workers. They are paid by the

owners just enough to afford food and a place to live, and the workers have a false

consciousness or a mistaken sense they are well off, not realizing they are being

exploited. However, there is mention of the third, transitional class called the petite

bourgeoisie, whose definition does not go beyond small capitalists. It is interesting to

compare this class model to the stratification in the novel. Namely, the Network with its

representative Dan Killian, represents the bourgeoisie. Ben Richards and many those

like him represent the proletariat, and it is safe to say that Amelia Williams belongs to

the third, transitional class. Marx's theory of the proletariat rising against the

bourgeoisie is somewhat reflected in a line, spoken by Bradley: A bad day is comin',

though. A bad day for the maggots with their guts full of roast beef. I see blood on the

moon for them. Guns and torches. A mojo that walks and talks. (King, 1982).

According to an Internet article found on Social Justice Solutions website

(2016), more than 60 million Americans do not have adequate access to basic health

care while also suffering the effects of poverty, discrimination, and dangerous

environments that accelerate higher rates of illness. Almost 50% of all American

households are financially insecure, without adequate savings to meet basic living

expenses for three months and the top 1% owns nearly half of the total wealth in the

U.S, while one in five children live in poverty.

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In their article Wealth Inequality in the United States, Lisa A. Keister and

Stephanie Moller (2000) say that: researchers agree that wealth ownership in the

United States is extremely unequal and that inequality has worsened in recent decades.

A small percentage of the population holds the largest concentration of wealth in the

United States. In a Skype interview with the Huffington post, Noam Chomsky (2014)

describes the current economic situation as pure savagery. He asserts that the

corporate class, the wealthy and the government are creating a system designed to keep

control by ensuring that the middle class remains downtrodden. The fact is, that in the

mid-twentieth century one person could, by holding down a normal job, own a home

and feed and educate a family a prospect that is fairly impossible today (Chomsky,

2015). To wrap-up, here are some statistics by the Pew Research Center (2016) about

racial inequality:

about four-in-ten (43%) blacks are sceptical that the country will ever make the

changes needed for blacks to achieve equal rights with whites.

About four-in-ten (43%) black Americans believe the country will never make

the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites

About eight-in-ten (84%) black Americans say blacks in this country are treated

less fairly than whites in dealing with the police

blacks and whites are more likely to say blacks are treated less fairly than whites

in the country than they are to say this is the case in their own community.

Note that these statistics are taken strictly for comparison to King's novel, and the

statistics represented partially show the current situation of racial inequality in the USA.

It is worth mentioning that the USA's former president, Barack Obama was also

African-American, with his novel counterpart being Dan Killian, in a way.

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Conclusion

Taking into consideration how well King's novel (and the corruption and social injustice

described therein) fit well with the critiques and opinions of contemporary American

capitalist society, one can simply conclude that it definitely serves as a critique of social

injustice and corruption. King, however, did not bring many novelties to the table, as

such dystopian and, in a way, prophetic views have already been offered by other

literary authors. The novel's focus on how a government regime is upheld through

violent games and reality television, can be mildly upsetting for the reader, having in

mind the variety of reality shows being broadcast today. King's portrayal of inequality is

one in many, but again, adds another point of view, and it is meant to warn, as all

dystopian views are. The angry, fast-paced writing style may, in some way, remind us

of the swift passage of time, the time one should use to ponder how these issues are

manifested in reality and, hopefully, strive to solve them.

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