I don’t mean our 2017 but an imagined one from 30 years ago. This was the setting for 1987 movie The Running Man, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bad news? Much of this action-adventure slugfest looks eerily prophetic now that we’re here for real.
In the film, Schwarzenegger plays police helicopter pilot Ben Richards in a 2017 when many people are living on the streets and food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. The movie begins with him refusing to fire on a food riot from his helicopter because the people are unarmed, with women and children caught up in the protest. He gets overpowered by colleagues and the rioters are massacred, with footage of the incident edited to make him the perpetrator – and a useful scapegoat.
Imprisoned for life, Richards is offered the chance to win his freedom by competing in the most popular TV programme in history, Running Man. This state-sponsored show pits contestants against high-profile hunters with extreme weaponry. It’s a Schwarzenegger vehicle from his 1980s heyday, so you can probably guess who wins.
The script by Steven E de Souza loosely adapts a
1982 novel of the same name by Richard Bachman, the pseudonym of horror author Stephen King. The source material is set in 2025 and far less heroic. It ends with Richards hijacking an aeroplane and flying it into the television company’s skyscraper headquarters – stop me if this is sounding in any way familiar.
The film adaptation is a product of its time, with 1980s props that look out of place in the fictional 2017 setting. People carry clipboards instead of tablet computers, use analogue phones rather than mobiles, and store their music on cassette. The Running Man does feature smart home technology, like voice-controlled coffee makers, but the computers are primitive. It’s the satirical touches that stand out most in this film, such as the president of the United States having his own theatrical agent.
When in Rome…
The central conceit of both novel and film – that those in power use mass entertainment to distract the population from reality – is part of a long tradition. It dates all the way back to the
Roman empire when the masses were appeased with free wheat and arena spectacles, a tactic described as panem et circenses – bread and circuses.
One of the first writers to transplant this notion to television was
Quartermass creator Nigel Kneale in his 1968 play for BBC Two,
The Year of the Sex Olympics. It envisaged a dystopian future where the elite maintains control over the people by broadcasting a constant stream of pornography and trash television.
Kneale effectively predicted the rise of reality TV programmes like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here; and much other science fiction has drawn on the same theme. It appears, for example, in Doctor Who in the 1985 adventure
Vengeance on Varos – set in a totalitarian world where torture and executions are televised to amuse and divert the masses – and more recently in
The Hunger Games trilogy.
The additional element that makes The Running Man even more resonant right now is fake news. The fake footage of Richards’ helicopter massacre is replayed to the live audience in the gameshow studio to coerce them into believing Schwarzenegger’s character is a liar, a murderer and a threat to everyone. The programmers then do the same thing to his sidekick, Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonso), before later faking their televised deaths during the game itself.
It’s
not unlike how social media and even some broadcasters have been guilty of distributing and promoting fake news in recent months, especially during the US presidential election. When psychotic Running Man host Damon Killian (Richard Dawson) interviews studio audience members in the movie, their simple-minded responses echo footage of real American voters dismissing reality for what they’ve been told on TV or via alt-right news sites.