"The Long Walk" Is a Rare Example of Hollywood Celebrating Positive Masculinity

A new film based off a Stephen King novel shows us how men can support each other even in the harshest of circumstances.

Photo by jurien huggins on Unsplash

When it comes to men, Hollywood often has two modes. There are action movies and historical pieces that demonstrate men defying the odds and engaging in heroic acts to save the damsel in distress or maybe even the whole world. Then there are movies highlighting just how bad men can be (and yes, some men can behave very badly).

There’s a lot of unrealistic masculinity and a lot of toxic masculinity, but it’s less often that I see an example of realistic and positive masculinity — the everyday struggles of being a man.

That’s why I loved The Long Walk, a new Lionsgate-produced film released this week. The story — which is based off a 1979 novel by Stephen King, who was at the time writing under a pen name — revolves around an event that shares the title of the film.

The Long Walk serves as a competition for a fifty contestants from around the United States who are tasked to start walking down a road and never slow down below the speed of 3 miles per hour. If they start to slow down, they get a warning. Too many warnings, and you’re shot dead by a group of soldiers accompanying the walk. The only way to win is to be the last man standing.

All fifty contestants are young men who entered the lottery for a chance to win immense riches and make a wish the government has to grant. The American government started the competition as a way to revive the national spirit following a brutal civil war; the determination and strength of the men supposedly motivates Americans to work hard to rebuild the economy and make our country the very top of the world again.

In this situation, you might expect something more like The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ dystopian series, to break out. Maybe the men try to trip each other up. Maybe they try to psych each other out. After all, only one person can win. And in a dystopian America where virtually everybody is poor, that money can be truly-life changing. It’s certainly better than being dead, which is what will happen to 98% of the men walking because there can only be one winner.

But without spoiling anything in the film, what really stands out is exactly how pro-social these young men are. They do everything they can to help each other out when they’re faced with one of them collapsing from sickness or exhaustion. They care for one another when they know helping a fellow contestant up means hurting their own chance of winning the competition as escaping with both their lives and an enormous cash reward.

And the funniest part about it all is that it took a dystopian movie about a totalitarian government in America putting on a contest that would never in a million years be legal to portray the most realistic depiction of positive masculinity I’ve ever seen.

Because around the country and around the world, men do exactly what is portrayed in The Long Walk every day. They help out their coworkers when they see them falling behind. They let their pal crash at their home when they’ve had an especially bad argument with the wife. They pay out of their own pocket to help a friend who’s fallen on hard times.

As I’ve written in these pages before, being a man can be pretty hard. And some men do respond to that in unhealthy ways. But even more express the same kind of positive masculinity shown in this film because we know other men have it hard, too. And if we can’t help a brother out when they’re in need, why would they help us out when we need a hand? Thank goodness someone in Hollywood understood this and made this film.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the original version of this article I forgot how to do arithmetic. It’s 98%, not 95%.