The Major and The Long Walk: when punishment becomes a spectacle

The Major does not walk. He appears for an instant at the start, salutes, starts the clock and vanishes behind his mirrored sunglasses. In The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence, 2025, from the Stephen King novel), fifty boys set off down a road and cannot stop: whoever drops below the minimum pace gets a warning, and on the third warning, a bullet. There is no finish line to cross, only a condition for winning —to be the last one still standing— and an entire country watching it on television like a match. The Major is the human signature of that machinery, and his power lies not in the strength of his arm but in the fact that no one questions the rules.

What is disturbing is not that The Major is a sadist —he is barely seen, and his tone is almost bureaucratic— but that the Walk works so well as a spectacle. An atrocious punishment turned into a national rite, into ratings, into patriotic pride. To understand why a State would stage such a thing, and why people applaud, criminology has a precise tool: the political economy of punishment of Rusche and Kirchheimer. Understanding the function of the spectacle does not absolve the one who administers it.

// The theoryThe political economy of punishment, in brief

In 1939, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer published «Punishment and Social Structure» and turned the usual question around. Classical criminology asked how to punish the offender better; they asked something else: whom does punishment serve? Their thesis is that the form of the penalty in each era responds less to the crime than to the needs of power and of the economy. Punishment, they held, is an autonomous social institution that mirrors relations of domination: not a simple reflection of justice, but an instrument that produces order. You can read it developed in our file on the theory of the political economy of punishment.

From that root springs an idea Foucault would develop decades later in «Discipline and Punish» (1975): the public execution seeks not only to harm the condemned, but to school the public that watches. The scaffold in the square was a theater of power: the convict's body became a message, and the message was «this is what happens to whoever defies the sovereign». Punishing in public disciplines those who watch far more than the one who dies. The penalty, so understood, has two addressees: the one who suffers it and the thousands who learn by watching.

The decisive thing is that the spectacle performs a double task at once. It disciplines, because it teaches millions the price of faltering, of underperforming, of falling behind: the Walk is a brutal parable of a society that demands you endure or die. And it distracts, because it channels collective attention and anguish toward a controlled ritual, toward a winner and some losers, instead of toward the conditions that make that ritual possible. Power need not convince anyone that the Walk is just; it is enough that it is unmissable. A country glued to the screen is a country that does not ask questions.

Read The Major’s full case file · Political economy of punishment →

// The caseThe Major: the friendly face of a discipline machine

The Major is the perfect administrator of that economy. He does not invent the Walk nor sustain it alone; he is its public face, the authority that lends it legitimacy and ceremony. He hands out the start like someone inaugurating games, congratulates the participants, embodies the benevolent State that «offers an opportunity». His distance is functional: the less he looks like an executioner, the better the spectacle works. Behind his mirrored glasses there is no obvious monster, but a manager who has understood that cruelty is easier to swallow wrapped in epic, patriotism and prize. His case file describes exactly that: not a torturer with stained hands, but the institutional signature that turns slaughter into tradition.

And yet the machine needs him, needs a face, a voice to give the order to begin. There lies his responsibility. The Major is not a neutral cog dragged along by the system: he is the one who chooses to embody it, to lend it prestige, to present it as a national honor. The theory explains why a power would want such a spectacle —cheap discipline, mass distraction, obedience with no need to argue—; it does not explain why this particular man agrees to be its master of ceremonies. That the punishment-spectacle has a social function does not turn its administrator into a victim of the function. The structure builds the stage; someone decides to step onto it and give the start.

// The same patternFrom the scaffold to the screen: the punishment that gets broadcast

The pattern of punishment turned into spectacle runs through real history far more than through fiction. The public executions in the main square, conceived as a collective warning; the circuses where the Empire sated and stupefied the plebs while it decided for them; the penalties exhibited to «set an example» rather than to repair anything. The set changes —the gallows, the arena, the camera— but the grammar is identical: someone suffers in public so that many learn to obey and, along the way, look away from what really matters. King's Walk is not an isolated dystopian fantasy: it is the old logic of the public execution with a television audience and sponsors.