The Most Dangerous Genre

The Schwarzenegger version of “The Running Man” is one of my favorite movies. There’s a deep nineteen-eighties corniness to it, but no easy morality. Most of the characters are trying to make their way through an authoritarian regime in one piece, and don’t have a propulsive interest in changing the world for the better until they’re effectively guaranteed that doing so won’t have a material impact on their lives. Richards won’t kill a bunch of starving children, sure, but he doesn’t become a Runner because he wants to take down the regime, or because he desperately needs money. (When his fellow-escapees try to recruit him into the resistance, he says no, because his only focus is survival.) In this telling, Richards serves as a retributive sacrifice for the authoritarian government—that is, until he goes full Arnold-mode and starts taking out the people who are hunting him, referred to in this movie as “Stalkers.”

The movie was a vehicle for Schwarzenegger’s stardom—he was coming off a string of films that included the “Conan” movies, “The Terminator,” and “Predator,” which turned him into a one-man box-office draw—and Glaser gets the most out of him. Immediately after the helicopter scene, Schwarzenegger walks through a forced-labor metalworks carrying an I-beam; his grapefruit-sized biceps are bursting from the sleeves of a ragged thermal top. He is action figure as actor, which made him the perfect Running Man.

It’s the casting of Richard Dawson, though, that makes the movie tick. Dawson, the slightly lecherous host of the game show “Family Feud” from 1976 to 1985 and again from 1994 to 1995, was best known for kissing all the female contestants on the show. Dawson is a born carnival barker; I was surprised to learn he was English, because the only voice I’ve ever heard come out of him sounded like a proto-megachurch pastor. In the movie, Dawson plays Damon Killian, the host of the “Running Man” competition, and Dawson basically treats it like he’s doing a bonus episode of “Family Feud.” Killian lusts after Richards as a potential contestant like he’s two Martinis deep and eyeballing a steak. When he’s told that he can’t get Richards on the show—military prisoners aren’t allowed to participate—Killian gets on the phone to argue for an exception, his bejewelled pinkie finger lifted delicately off the handset. “Get me the Justice Department, entertainment division,” he says. “No—hold that. Operator, get me the President’s agent.”

The original “Running Man” is a schlocky satire, lampooning the kind old ladies and salarymen who can so easily be turned into bloodthirsty fanatics—when a Stalker has one of Richards’ comrades cornered, the movie cuts to a bar, where a young man shouts, “Kill that son of a bitch!” The new version functions more as a commentary on the modern surveillance state, where everyone with a phone is a potential informant. Powell, who has been on his own action-star run over the past few years, certainly brings more pathos to the character than his predecessor. But Wright’s telling—and, in particular, his cultural critiques—can be a bit obvious and dull. Consider the fictional reality-TV show “The Americanos” that airs on the same channel as “The Running Man” game show. It’s a clear sendup of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” but it hews too close to the source material to be interesting as a piece of the dystopian world that Wright is trying to build. Absurdity can be a more effective weapon than plain criticism; just look at the fake TV shows in Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” or Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy.” There’s a difference between satire and pure replication.

Recently, we’ve seen the death game-show concept break containment and enter the real world. Earlier this year, in New York, people could pay forty dollars to participate in the Squid Game Experience, a brand activation where fans could don a numbered jersey and play Red Light Green Light with a giant doll. There was no prize money, and there was also no risk; even if you lost the first game, you could move on to the next one. A deadly game show had become the premise for a midtown escape room. Even still, I was surprised by how many people wanted to reënact, however mildly, the events of a game show where failure means death. I’m not a superstitious person, but when I started to see advertisements for the Squid Game Experience on subway-station walls over the summer, it felt spiritually profane, like some inauspicious symbol.

In 2src21, the YouTube mega-influencer Jimmy Donaldson, known as MrBeast, also made a real-life version of “Squid Game,” which has become his most-watched full-length video to date, with nearly a billion views. He recreated many of the challenges from the series, but, instead of executing the losers, he had contestants wear harmless squibs under their uniforms that detonated when they were disqualified. Donaldson’s adaptation successfully inverted satire, turning what was a grim tale about what it means to be desperate in a society with very little hope for improvement into a hollow, earnest piece of entertainment.