A Running Joke

The other day I got the special edition of the Running Man on DVD. Now, if you've never seen this 80's Schwarzenegger action movie, you're really missing out. It's a classy piece of kitsch based on an obscure Stephan King (aka Richard Bachman) novel: in the post-apocalyptic future, the government has enforced a police state and controls everything on TV. For entertainment, and to make sure the majority of the people don't rise up, the government creates a reality TV gameshow called "Running Man," hosted by none other than Family-Fued veteran Richard Dawson. The show pits a convicted criminal against a group of "stalkers" that try and hunt and kill him. Schwarzenegger gets wrongly accused of a crime and is forced into being a "running man"... little did they know that he was totally sweet.

Now, the premise for this movie is fairly simple, and it's clearly set in the man-movie action mold. It doesn't make you paranoid like a Philip K. Dick movie, nor does it hit you over the head with humanistic messages of Asimov. Maybe that's because it was written by a horror writer, or because it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger (the man who killed the Predator); whatever the reason, there isn't alot of thinking involved with this film. Yet somehow, Artisan Entertainment--the studio responsible for the DVD release-- found a way to force a socio-political message into this thing.

The DVD is a two-disc set, featuring some cool director's commentary, as well as a feature on the stalkers in the film. Artisan also decided to fit the DVD with two pre-produced documentaries. The first is called "Game Theory" and is about the effect of reality television on society. Clearly, this documentary was made on its own and was made to connect with the film. But that's alright, at least it sort of applies. It's true that Running Man was ahead of its time-- I remember when Ben Affleck wanted to produce an actual reality show similar in concept to the Bachman novel.

The second documentary shoved onto this special edition, however, is a little more blatant in its message and questionable in its connection to the film. Titled "Lockdown on Main Street," it's a 20 minute documentary on the Patriot Act and the "current state of privacy and criminal issues in a post-9/11 society." In other words: it's a leftist piece of propaganda. I was curious as to how this feature could possibly connect to the film, so I sat through it... and I can honestly say that it has no connection whatsoever that is relevant to the film. Artisan's move to put this feature on the DVD could mean that they are trying to extrapolate some sort of deep meaning from the film, but really it's just not there-- at least not this meaning. The documentary is one of the funniest features I've seen on a DVD since the commentary track on Mallrats. It basically features a bunch of paranoid liberal "specialists" talking about how the government could, at any moment, track our Google searches and listen in on our phone calls. Spliced between these interviews are sections of the Patriot Act, flying towards the viewer like the ominous angel of death during Passover. Running Man is never mentioned.

You could certainly draw social/political meaning from the movie--as you could with almost any movie, if you really wanted to. The world of Running Man is more similar to that of the Soviet Union pre-Glasnost, and even then, the film doesn't touch on wire-tapping or court-ordered searches. Running Man is about how television fuels the violent animal urges within, and how we are willing to push the limits of human decency when it comes to entertainment. If anything, the actual world in which Running Man takes place is poorly realized and glossed over. The director, Paul Michael Glaser, chose to show us very little of the lifestyle of the future, and focused completely on the forward momentum of Schwarzenegger's quest to clear his name.

I love analyzing the meaning behind film, and I'm willing to do it with even the basest of movies... however Artisan's poor attempt to link Running Man with a movement against the Patriot Act (an act, by the way, that has prevented countless terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11) is a shoddy piece of liberal posturing. The feature had no right to be on the DVD, and I'm sure that if Arnold found out, he would play the home version of the Running Man with the folks over at Artisan.

But hey, at least the video and audio transfer on this version of Running Man is top notch.