Stories are dangerous.
Always have been – they’re older than most gods and sneakier than any ideology. A good story will take your hand and walk you straight into the fire before you realise that the smell of burning… is you.
The problem is that they shape our world – and we desperately want to believe them. Real life is chaotic and inconvenient and full of people who refuse to fit into neat little categories. Stories tidy all that up and tell us who to cheer for.
Which brings us, more or less, to The Running Man (1987).
At first glance, it’s all camp: spandex and chainsaws, pyrotechnics and pulp. Killian, the toothy, tanned game show host, keeps the audience primed and bloodthirsty with all the confidence of someone who’s never lost control of the room.
But underneath the camp and carnage, The Running Man demonstrates something far more terrifying than a fictional dystopian regime. It shows us that narrative trumps truth. That if you give people a story that feels right – not true, just right – they’ll eat it up and ask for seconds even if it’s cooked up from corpses and creative editing.
Ben Richards doesn’t lose his freedom because he broke the law – he loses it because he refused to follow an order he knew was wrong. That one act of resistance was enough to cast him as the villain in a state-sponsored fiction machine that needed someone to blame. He’s framed, edited, and served to the public. And the public eats it up: they boo when told, cheer when told and vote for death like they’re ordering dessert – because that’s what the story hungers for.
Even when the story flips and Richards becomes the underdog – the reluctant hero clawing his way back toward redemption – they cheer just as hard. No hesitation. No reflection. Just a new narrative to consume and no real change at all.
Which is where the film starts to fold in on itself.
The Stephen King/Bachman novella ends very differently. Ben Richards hijacks a plane and crashes it into the television network’s headquarters in a bleak triumph by immolation. He can’t beat the system, so he destroys it in a final, desperate act that leaves you shaken and thoughtful. But that ending was never going to work for an audience paying to see an Arnie movie.
For a while, there was even another version (somewhere between the two endings we know) where Richards and Amber fake their deaths using the same deepfake tech that framed him in the first place. It was poetic with a clever loop back to the beginning, but test audiences weren’t on board. Turns out that obliteration doesn’t test well and ambiguity makes us uncomfortable.
Because what we’re really after – what we crave – is catharsis, not consequence.
It’s easy to imagine we’d be different, that our comfortable position outside the story exonerates us. We want to believe that we’d see through the edits, question the framing and refuse to clap on command. But the truth is that we do it, without noticing, every day. We build stories around ourselves, cast ourselves as the hero, the genius, the good guy with the bad luck. And we assign everyone else their parts too: the villain, the fool, the obstacle. It’s all story logic, all the time and the truth doesn’t matter unless it fits the plot.
Once, that instinct might have helped us survive by giving us myths and moral lessons. But now, it gives us clickbait. Outrage. Reality TV. Friendly corporations. Noble governments.
News coverage that bleeds just enough to lead, wrapped neatly around a narrative we’re already invested in.
When everyone’s the main character, we start seeing villains everywhere. And those that can’t defend themselves get crushed under the momentum of the story. The Running Man tells us that. And then, just to make sure we’re paying attention, it pulls us into the frame.
Ben Richards wasn’t a villain.
Then he was.
Then he wasn’t again.
Nothing changed – not really. The story just needed a new ending.
And, obviously, a new villain which it dished up with a sly wink, serving us Killian in a flambeed finale. He wasn’t the source of the rot – just a willing mouthpiece. The one who fed the narrative, until it turned on him, and in his last moments delivers a scathing roast of American TV, followed by a fiery death for dessert.
And when the credits rolled, they left us feeling vindicated – like justice had been served.
And that’s the real danger.
Not that we enjoy stories but that we need them to provide easy answers that make us feel safe. To let us believe that if we play our part and clap on cue, the system won’t come for us.
Which is why there’s always another story waiting: another hero, another villain, another ending.
Another distraction.
But you never know – one day we could cut through the noise just enough to hear ourselves think.
And maybe we might hit pause and ask ourselves “who’s running the show?”