Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of The Long Walk.
From the very first novel Stephen King published under the name Richard Bachman—the 1977 school-shooting novel Rage—his pseudonymous work has been even bleaker than what’s normally associated with the horror master. The stories collected in The Bachman Books are downbeat and bloody. The heroes almost always die at the end, usually in a self-inflicted act of violence or terrorism. They thrum with an angry, youthful nihilism so potent and potentially seductive that King let Rage fall out of print after it was associated with a number of high school gunmen. All things considered, The Long Walk might have one of the sunnier endings in the Bachman oeuvre, since there’s at least a chance that the protagonist is alive on the final page. Even after countless young men died on the road to glory and the lone survivor has lost his marbles, there remained something like relief beckoning the exhausted Long Walk‘s winner. But the feel-bad ending of director Francis Lawrence and writer JT Mollner’s adaptation lacks even that small consolation—and it hides its even sadder finale under the guise of satisfaction.
Around the third act of the film, we learn that Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), as friendly and good-hearted as he is throughout the walk, was motivated to enter and to win by the dream of violent revenge. His quest is not one of financial greed or mere survival. He wants to use the wish he gets for winning to snag a carbine and shoot The Major (Mark Hamill) in the head, just like so many of his peers on this walk (and his dissident father) were executed.
It’s a childish eye-for-an-eye fantasy, one that his level-headed—almost saintly—pal Pete McVries (David Jonsson) questions from the get-go. What will this solve? Will cutting off the head of the snake really change anything about the Walk, or will it just be a cheap hit of dopamine? These questions haunt Mollner’s new ending, which makes good on The Long Walk‘s film-long investment in Pete as an enlightened guy worth corrupting.
In the novel, like in the film, the final three Walkers are Ray, Pete, and Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), The Major’s bastard son. But because Stebbins is a bigger character in the book, not to mention a bigger threat, he’s the one that persists alongside Ray at the end. Pete, tired of walking and tired of being saved by Ray—something the film reverses, having Pete always saving Ray—chooses to simply sit down and die. As Ray mourns his friend, he spies a shadow on the road in front of him; when he turns to tell Stebbins, Stebbins keels over, leaving Ray the winner. King never makes Ray’s desires explicit in the book, and his ending capitalizes on that ambiguity: Ray never even seems to grasp that he’s won, simply pursuing the dark force ahead.
Either he’s lost his mind and can only see life through the lens of this contest, haunted by visions of infinite competitors one step ahead of him, or he’s so close to dying that he can literally see the Reaper who’s come to take him away. It’s a narrative move that emphasizes the all-encompassing nature of the death march—a literalized nihilism, a specter of military PTSD or endless economic competition keeping him on the dystopian hamster wheel. Ray, in the story’s final moments, even begins to run towards his fate.
And that’s one of Bachman’s lighter endings! But Lawrence and Mollner, in part, I imagine, to keep the ending as grounded as the rest of their bloody adaptation, nix the Ghost Of Long Walks Future. They also change the winner. The Long Walk spends its runtime not just establishing a straightforward genre premise or building the bromance between two young men caught in its meat grinder, but establishing Pete’s moral fiber and idealism, born of past mistakes. And, knowing how pessimistic The Long Walk is, a character this pure must only exist to fall back down to grubby earth.
In the film, Stebbins kicks the bucket a little earlier, and then it’s Ray who quits early. He sacrifices himself for his friend, knowing that Pete has the big heart and silver-lining perspective needed to actually do some good with the power bestowed upon the Walk’s winner. Or at least, he did before The Long Walk broke him. After Pete enacts Ray’s plan, wishing for the carbine of the soldier right next to him, then blowing away The Major in an act of impotent political violence, his lurch off into the night has no hope, no glimmer of possibility that by snuffing the loudmouth at the top, anything has changed aside from tarnishing his own morality.
Lawrence refuses to show any of the aftermath of The Major’s death, any chaos from spectators or soldiers, because he doesn’t need to. By following through on this juvenile daydream, this delusion that killing one man can stop interlocking systems of oppression, Pete has compromised himself. Even if he keeps walking forward, he hasn’t really changed anything. The future is just as uncertain as in the book, but with the added certainty that corruption awaits even the best of us as long as we’re stuck in societies like this. That some in the audience—probably some younger guys who look a lot like those on the Walk—will inevitably cheer The Major’s death is just another facet of the ending’s broad tragedy.