Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Running Man
2025 · Edgar Wright · The Running Man on Sightlines
A man does something on a dark street. Hard cut. The same few seconds again, this time lit like a commercial, stung with brass, recut so that what he did means its opposite. Both versions are in the movie. Only one of them is going to reach the nation watching at home.
That cut is Edgar Wright's invention here, and it's worth being exact about what's new in it. The doubled image has ancestors. The Parallax View buried a corporate-assembled film inside itself while Gordon Willis pinned the fugitive low in wide, top-heavy frames. Death Race 2000 ran in-world announcers as a continuous commentary track over the kills so the satire could live in the sound mix. What Wright adds is a joke. His whole career runs on one three-beat gag, setup then hard cut then inverted payoff, and Paul Machliss has been cutting it for him since Scott Pilgrim. In The Running Man that gag structure is bolted to the ideology. The punchline becomes propaganda. The grammar doesn't change. Only its job does.
Deleuze called what the Games Network is doing the powers of the false. The phrase sounds grand; the idea is plain. For most of cinema's life there was a quiet contract: what's in the frame happened in front of a camera. Bazin built an entire realism on it. Deleuze noticed that certain films stop asking images to deliver truth and start using falsity as a productive power, manufacturing a world rather than lying about one. Two of his finer terms do real work on this film.
The first is crystalline description: a description that composes an object and then replaces it. The Network's cut of Richards isn't a report on Richards. It becomes him. By the next broadcast it's the only Richards the country has. King's 1982 novel had Richards mailing videocassettes twice a day for the Network to splice and dub; the 2025 film doesn't need the splice, and the adaptation's sharpest technological argument follows from that. The danger is no longer that the state owns the transmitter. It's that no image reaching the audience can be assumed to have happened.
The second is falsifying narration: mutually exclusive versions of the same minute, both circulating as true. Deleuze found it in Welles. Wright makes it a broadcast schedule.
Why does this lens open the film rather than decorate it? Because it marks exactly where Wright diverges from his forebears. Network and Rollerball both assumed a real event getting distorted on its way to air. Lumet and Owen Roizman pushed their own picture closer to television's flat sheen reel by reel until film and broadcast were indistinguishable; Rollerball covered its arena with the fixed rink-side positions and crowd reverse-angles of a live sports feed. Their subject was emphasis and appetite. Wright inherits the same two-tier apparatus and refuses to merge it. Chung Chung-hoon keeps the Network world high-key, glossy and symmetrical, and Richards's periphery handheld, underlit, grimed. Two exposures that never reconcile, so the cut between them reads as an argument instead of a transition. We get both images. The people inside the film get one.
That hands the viewer Deleuze's third position, the relation-image, where the meaning isn't in either shot but in a relation only the audience holds. The film's cruelty is structural. It seats you in the one place in its world from which the truth is visible, then shows you a country that will never have that seat.
Here is the part I think is undervalued. Films that go to the powers of the false usually surrender the action-image on the way. The protagonist stops being able to act and becomes a watcher, Deleuze's seer. Not here. Richards runs. The sensory-motor circuit is intact and at full power: he perceives a situation and acts to change it, which is the movement-image in its textbook large form, an encompassing situation pressing until a decisive act is required. Thirty days. A Free-Vee in every dwelling. A continent for a board. Lee Pace plays the lead Hunter as a competent professional rather than a costumed grotesque, which keeps the duel an actual duel. The gauntlet architecture comes from The Warriors: discrete territories, each with its own crew and its own exit, so the chase advances in chapters. Deleuze would call that trajectory a vector, a zig-zag stitching spaces that have nothing else to do with each other. The Most Dangerous Game set the board; Wright keeps it visible, which is an old-fashioned virtue in a genre that mostly gave it up.
So: a movement-image body running through a falsified image-world. The legs still work. What's been taken from him is the picture of himself.
Sound holds the two apart, then collapses them. Steven Price lets the Network's branding creep onto the non-diegetic track, stings and applause beds and countdown cues, until you can't say whose music you're hearing. That's audiovisual disjunction in Deleuze's sense, a soundtrack narrating against its own image. Then the reverse gesture, the best thing in the film's design. Sound drops out entirely and leaves breathing and footfall. No score, no commentary, nobody's edit. It's the only guarantee the movie offers and it lasts about as long as a held breath.
Chung's camera has a job title. The aggressive push-in, the sudden motivated rack focus, the frame repeatedly taking the posture of something looking for Richards rather than at him. Deleuze called a shot that makes you feel the camera as a perceiver a dicisign. This one is on the payroll.
Marcus Rowland puts the politics in the set dressing: a world of deferred maintenance where the studio floor is the only surface anyone spent money on. And the casting carries an argument the 1987 version couldn't. Brolin's Killian designs the cruelty, Domingo's Bobby Thompson sells it as warmth, a professional product. The earlier film compressed both jobs into one man. Restoring the split shows that the false has a division of labour. Michael Cera plays Elton Parrakis, whom King wrote as physically imposing, as small and breakable, which recodes the underground as ordinary rather than heroic. The people, in Deleuze's phrase, are missing. There's an audience where a public should be. What Richards does with his mandated tapes is fabulation, a man caught in the act of legending himself, and the Network takes the legend and runs it backwards. Glen Powell plays the whole thing as charm he resents having to use, the labour of ingratiation visible, contempt underneath. You get to watch an image being manufactured by the man it's made of.
Whether Wright's velocity suits King's grinding, exhausted book is the honest dispute this film produced, and it isn't settled. Neither is the forward lineage. But the device is cheap to pick up and hard to unsee: show the act, show the edit, let the audience carry the difference. Watch the exposures next time. And watch for the moment the applause stops.
Concepts in play
- puissances du faux — Richards is required to mail tapes twice daily and the Network edits them into propaganda before broadcast; the 2025 film makes that manipulability a plot mechanism rather than a metaphor, so no image reaching the audience can be assumed to have happened.
- crystalline-description — The Network's cut of an action doesn't report the action, it replaces it — the broadcast version becomes the only Richards the country has.
- falsifying-narration — Paul Machliss's central device: an action is shown, then immediately shown again as the Network's version, edited to mean the opposite, with both held on screen.
- le faussaire — The film restores the novel's split between Brolin's Killian, the producer who designs the cruelty, and Domingo's Bobby Thompson, who sells it as warmth — a professional product; the 1987 film collapsed both into one figure.
- the mental-image — The two-tier exposure scheme gives the viewer both the event and the broadcast, so the film's meaning sits in a relation only the cinema audience holds — the in-world audience never sees both.
- the readable image — Chung keeps the Network's high-key symmetry and Richards's handheld, underlit periphery in separate exposures that never reconcile, so the cut between them has to be read as an argument rather than followed as continuity.
- action-image-large-form — A thirty-day continent-wide hunt with a Free-Vee in every dwelling presses on Richards until decisive action is required; unlike most powers-of-the-false films the sensory-motor circuit stays at full power throughout.
- binomial — Lee Pace's lead Hunter is played as a competent professional rather than a costumed grotesque, keeping the pursuit a genuine force-against-force duel; wide-format staging keeps the Hunters legible as bodies in space.
- line of the universe — The Warriors-derived gauntlet architecture: the hunt is segmented into discrete territories, each with its own antagonist crew and exit, so the chase zig-zags through spaces otherwise unconnected.
- dicisign — Chung Chung-hoon's aggressive push-ins and sudden motivated rack focus make the camera adopt the posture of something looking for Richards rather than merely at him.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Steven Price lets the Network's sonic branding — stings, applause cues, countdown beds — colonize the non-diegetic track until the distinction erodes, then drops sound entirely to bare breathing and footfall.
- people-are-missing — Michael Cera plays Elton Parrakis, whom the novel describes as physically imposing, recoding the underground resistance as ordinary and fragile; what the film has instead of a public is a nation addicted to watching.
- story-telling / legending — Richards's twice-daily tapes are a man legending himself into an unexpected fan favorite, with the Network re-editing the legend to run the other way.