Everybody Runs: Spielberg’s Running Man Trilogy
At the end of the 20th Century, Steven Spielberg found himself at a crossroads. During the 1990s, he’d once again proven himself as the king of the blockbuster with Jurassic Park, but also — at long last — gained the respect of critics and awards bodies with Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Across the last three decades, he’d covered a range of genres, tackled multiple subjects, and achieved almost every conceivable goal he could have set for himself. What was left? Where else could Steven Spielberg go?
Judging by his output in the first decade of the 21st Century, it seems Spielberg himself didn’t know. The seven films that constitute Spielberg’s Noughties efforts are a blend of genres, styles, and tones. There’s the the 70s thriller aesthetic of Munich, the post-9/11 anxiety of War of the Worlds, the retro fun of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the Capra-esque comedy of The Terminal. Finding a narrative throughline in these films is difficult, but not impossible, because the three films Spielberg began the decade with reveal much about where he would go for the rest of the decade, and beyond.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, and Catch Me If You Can may not share many things in common, but just as Close Encounters, E.T., and Poltergeist can be roughly combined into a Suburban Trilogy, so too can these films be brought together in a thematic trilogy I’m calling Spielberg’s ‘Running Man’ trilogy. This is because not only do they all feature characters undertaking a literal journey, seeking something (be that real life, proof of their innocence, or a return to a life they once knew), they home in on the idea of escape through fantasy that Spielberg had begun to explore as far back as E.T. and developed further in the likes of Empire of the Sun, Always, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List.
The concept of escape has changed as Spielberg has grown older. Escape was the only way for Roy Neary to live a fulfilled life in Close Encounters and Elliot requires the escapism E.T.’s provides to mature enough to be a functioning member of his broken family. Empire of the Sun shifted the concept, delivering arguably Spielberg’s most fascinating deconstruction of fantasy and escape by marking it as a dangerous but necessary device the film’s hero Jim needs to survive the horrors of war. Survive he does, but by the film’s end, he’s a hollow shell lacking a clear identity and place in the world: too old to be a child, too young to be an adult.
Jurassic Park furthered the concept by building a link between the destructive power of the blockbuster film fantasy to a theme park run amok, while Schindler’s List added historical weight by turning the story of Oskar Schindler into a coming of age maturity story in which our lead shuns his life of fantastical luxury for one of social responsibility. This, of course, reflects Spielberg’s own journey, which in his own words took him from “ignorance to honour” with his Jewish heritage, and five years later, he’d face another spectre of his past with Saving Private Ryan, a film which he made to honour his father and his father’s generation’s efforts in the war. Accepting his Best Director Oscar at the 1999 ceremony, Spielberg dedicated his win to his father.
As Spielberg embarked upon his first film of the Noughties then, his relationship with film was complex. The man who had birthed the modern blockbuster and still engaged with high-profile populist entertainment was expressing a concern about application of the art and an insistence that it can be used in a socially responsible way. It’s little surprise then that the films that constitute the Running Man Trilogy blend light and dark, dramatic weight and genre conventions, and ultimately emerge with complex views of life and the fantasies we use to get through it. They are films about the nature of escape, the dangers of escape, and ultimately the impossibility of escape.
A.I. is perhaps the most complex of the three, an opening salvo that mutates one of the most well-known stories of escape and wish fulfilment into something dark and disturbing. David’s journey through A.I. is, of course, a Pinocchio analogue, but this is a Pinocchio story that simultaneously embraces and rejects the concept of wishing upon stars. After being abandoned by his mother, David chooses to run in order to get back to her. Surrogates appear during his journey (most notably Gigolo Joe), but none are sufficient. None can be sufficient. Because David’s in a cage, imprisoned by his programmed need to be loved by one specific person.
His journey then is a necessity; he needs to feel that the love he seeks is real and attainable. Indeed, he needs to feel he is real. If he can’t feel this, his purpose disappears, and that’s why he reacts so violently when confronted with the other David models at the Cybertronics factory. Suddenly, he realises not only that he’s not a real boy, but also that he’s not the only version of himself. And if there are other Davids, exactly alike in every way, how can his mother love him specifically? Surely she would have to love all Davids equally, or maybe even choose another David over ‘her’ David.
Eventually, David’s granted his wish — he wins the love of his mother — and his journey is over. He stops running. But he closes the film trapped in an endless dream. He will never grow old, never develop, never experience anything more than the one thing he’s been programmed to experience: that singular, unending love for the person he imprinted on. More than that, he’s committed the very same act that we found so ethically dubious in Monica: creating and manipulating life to serve his own ends. Dreams have turned the innocent into the evil, the victim into the villain, and as the film closes, Spielberg pulls out of the fantasy home David and his mother find themselves in, and frames it as what it is: a cosy prison, entirely separate from reality.
Dreams and incarceration line Minority Report too, but here they’re much more literal. The very nature of the Pre-Crime set up blends the line between what’s real and what’s not: everyone accused under Pre-Crime becomes a sort of Schrodinger’s Cat, both innocent and guilty, both criminals and not criminals. Spielberg even has a character describe being incarcerated as being similar to sleeping and dreaming. The popular theory that the film’s happy ending is the byproduct of Anderton’s dream-like state while incarcerated can’t entirely be supported by the evidence in the film, but nor can it be entirely disproven.
Anderton’s journey through the film is just as contradictory as David’s. Mourning his lost son, Anderton has supported the Pre-Crime system and made it a success as a way to atone for his feelings of guilt. He watches home movies of happier times between he, his son, and his wife and they play out as holograms, like a waking dream, Anderton playing his part in them, rather than simply passively watching them. Pre-Crime is a comforting dream for him, a way of keeping his son’s memory alive without having to confront his guilt, remorse, or indeed the vast ethical problems Pre Crime poses. Why would he need to? The system is ‘perfect’?
When Pre-Crime turns its attentions to him, however, Anderton loses his sense of purpose and is finally confronted by the fact that his dream may be just that. So when he runs, his identity starts to disappear — literally. He has an illegal operation to change his eyeballs in order to evade retina recognition technology, and at one point disfigures his face so he can’t be spotted nearby Pre-Crime headquarters. Minority Report is about identity and people’s right to keep their identity private and as his dream turns into a nightmare Anderton realises just how big an illusion his life has become.
The Running Man trilogy’s final entry, Catch Me If You Can is the most open about its dreamlike state. Thanks to Janusz Kaminski’s candy-coloured cinematography, John Williams’ jazzy score, and Spielberg’s pacy camerawork, the film plays like a dream of the 60s, where airports groove to the sounds of Frank Sinatra and con men can hide behind the image of the latest comic book superhero. Little surprise then that the film’s hero is a kid who constructs fantasy after fantasy in order to maintain a long-dead vision of happy childhood harmony.
Playing like an extension of the themes explored in ET, Catch Me If You Can shows what happens when divorce takes its toll on children. Both Elliott and Frank need fantasy to survive, but while Elliot uses the fantasy of his friendship with ET to gain maturity, Frank enters into con after con, posing as lawyers, doctors, and airline pilots in order to return to the life he once knew. He’s running but like David and Anderton, he’s standing still, utterly fixated on the idea that his destructive crimes can one day reunite his mother and father.
Spielberg shows us meetings between Franks Jnr and Snr at regular intervals, with each one seeming more desperate for the elder Abagnale. With his ingenuity, Frank could easily stay and help his father recover from his crippling financial worries, but he doesn’t. Instead, he hopes that by using his ill gotten gains to buy new cars and expensive clothes, Frank’s mother will simply fall for her husband again, given up her new life, and everything will be fine again. But as Frank Snr explains, that’s never a possibility. His son may be deluded, but the elder Abagnale has crystal clarity on what’s going on.
It all comes crashing to the ground at Christmas, when Frank tracks down his mother. She’s with her new husband and now has a young daughter. They’re inside a warmly lit house, while Frank looks on from the outside, freezing in the cold snow. Finally confronted with the fact that his fantasy belongs to someone else, Frank gives up, handing himself over to French police and getting taken away in a cop car as his mother looks on, unaware it’s her son in the vehicle. For a director credited so often with making dreams come true, it’s a stark and downbeat moment set against an idyllic backdrop. By trying to force the fantasy, Frank has denied himself the opportunity to ever earn it.
Three characters, all on literal and metaphorical journeys, all running to or from something, and all trapped in a fantasy they can’t escape. Their films end on deceptive high notes, with Spielberg framing David and Frank in comfortable quasi prisons and Anderton reuniting with his wife but still not having the answer to the mystery of his lost son. Like David and Frank, he’s run through moral quandaries and ambiguous fantasy only to finish the film no closer to what he desired.
Spielberg would return to running men in the rest of his Noughties films: with the questing of Indiana Jones, the vengeance mission of Avner in >, and the desperate fleeing of Ray Ferrier in War of the Worlds. None, however, explored the role of fantasy and escapism in the same way the Running Man trilogy does. Fittingly, his only film of the Noughties where fleeing is a literal impossibility is his follow up to Catch Me If You Can: The Terminal. Here our hero is a good man imprisoned in a corrupt world, and the only dream he’s interested in — the American Dream — is the one everyone else seems to have given up on.
