The Long Walk: The Movie

The last time I got excited about the colon was during Superman: The Movie. I read “The Long Walk” after reading “The Rage” in Stephen King’s The Bachman Novel at age 12 that sealed me as one of his Constance readers. I looked at the trailer and saw too few Walkers and too few crowds. It seems watered down because of the rule of screenplays being 120 pages or less. When I watched the movie forty years later, I realized I was right.

The book envisioned 100 walkers, two from each state and throngs of crowd intending to get their pounds of flesh. And all the blood that goes with it. It reached deeply into the mind of Raymond Garraty and he developed friendships and bonds with the other long walkers, so each death hit him deep. And I pictured General in full regalia, like General Patton. And remote from Raymond’s own life unlike the movie. His Dad “got squaded” being forced into a van by soldiers in his boxer shorts for his vocal opposition to the authoritarian state instead of executed personally by the general in the movie.

The horror scenes from the book were toned down in the movie: a long walker who got his feet run over by one of the carts, (I know it happened in the movie, but his whole body got run over by a tank. The scene in my head was uglier because just his feet were sliced off by the halftrack, so he died in agony, and it took longer. Just bear with me. Jesus Christ.) Another got diarrhea which is more incapacitating than just taking a dump. While the character in the movie just had to take a solid dump, I assumed he could have let it roll down of his pants or shorts and leave it behind him. But in the book, it was clear he had explosive diarrhea and kept squatting instead of letting it roll down their shorts. Gary Barkovitch tore his throat out with his hands instead of with the sharpen end of his spoon. More characters died, like Scramm and Abraham, to show the monotony of endless deaths. Olson got guts shot not from fighting the soldiers but, from their boredom as they shot his nonvital body parts before killing him.

Peter McVries got his scar when his girlfriend sliced his face open with a letter open as he knelt sobbing at her feet. He reacted like a broken-hearted teenager who ran away to join the foreign legion like every war movie and cartoons implied. I thought it was interesting how Peter McVries was Black in the movie while I imagined him white in the book. That perception was reinforced by a passage which described one Black walker who thought he could hide among the other walkers for teammates’ protection, but the soldiers easily part the others around him and pressed the barrels of the guns to his muscular neck and shot him, then shot him again after seeing his leg still kicking. Again, not all the long walkers practiced the spirit of The Three Musketeers in the novelette when one walker went insane and started shrieking about the whore of Babylon spreading her diseased legs in the alley, screaming “VILE, VILE!”. Another walker muttered, “and she got the clap” before shaking his fist and shouting at him to shut the fuck up. Back then I was haunted by how they were horrid to each other, but now I had to laugh at how there are always too many assholes to put up with on the march. Do they treat each other like that during the Bataan Death march in WWII? Maybe there’s one good thing about the possible language barrier between the Americans and Filipinos.

Their behaviors are like Kurt Vonnegut’s miserable soldiers in Slaughterhouse Five. If there was a Deaf/Hard of Hearing long walker screaming, “I’m Deaf! I did not know! No one told me. Don’t shoot!” before getting their ticket, the half-wits among them probably would mock his gobbling scream and show each other the American Sign Language for PUSSY or mimic his Deaf accent. “I’m Deaf-uh, I dis nos know! No one tole me! Don’s shoo!”

Even the cheering crowd became the antagonist as throngs cheered for their death. One of the worst was when the crew repaired the bridge just in time for the walkers to cross it after the poor downtrodden teenagers thought they might get caught a lucky break. No wonder many of them cursed out the crew that cheered for them to go on.

Even if I enjoyed the movie, I prefer to sink my teeth into books rather than sit passively watching the movie. The right well written words are more than a moving image for me. And some of them bite right back.