I have to admit I do not care for jogging. But I have always had an admiration for runners. “Nurmi Nurmi” were the first words I remember ever hearing on the radio. I had to ask what they meant, because – at that age – I had understood “nur mich, nur mich”. My first sporting hero was Emil Zatopek, maybe because I suspected him to be an outsider, on account of the ‘Z’ of his surname, the last letter of the alphabet. My father once tried to comfort me, by saying, after I told him that in the line-up in gym class I was always last, because of my height: “Mach dir nichts draus, die Letzten werden die Ersten sein”. Experience told me there was no reason to believe him, but Zatopek seemed to prove him right, and I still recall the Czech national anthem, played at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. In November 2000, I chanced to read about Zatopek’s death, and I suddenly had this image of a man running and running all these years, somewhere in the Moravian mountains, past Communists and Russian tanks, past the Velvet Revolution, past his country’s partition and Vaclav Havel’s presidency.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Ten years later, in 1962, a film appeared that left a permanent impression and may have changed my life. I saw Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in a cinema in Brighton, shortly after moving to Britain. The lean and bony features of Tom Courtney’s face instilled in me an intense yearning of wanting to belong to the English working class, one of the true aristocracies of the human race, as it seemed to me: noble in spirit, brave in adversity, resolute in action. The feeling is long gone, but its memory returned when I saw a young Tim Roth in one of Mike Leigh’s early films not so long ago. What made Tom Courtney special, though, was that he was a runner. As one reviewer put it: “You can almost smell the wet leaves of the forests and hills, and feel the cold of the morning air as you follow Courtney on his daily jog. England, with its crummy weather, declining manufacturing economy, post-imperial history and hugely varied terrain, is particularly well-suited to the sport. Distance running is primarily a solitary activity, designed for bona-fide introverts, obsessive individuals who do not mind pain, and in some cases, may actually enjoy it.”

Courtney plays Colin, a Nottingham boy in his late teens, who is sent to borstal for robbing a bakery. In the reformatory school he is spotted as a ‘natural’ by the upper-class governor with a mission. He gives Colin special privileges because he wants to groom him as a runner to lead the prison team in a much-anticipated long-distance race against a local public school. The ensuing conflict: can Colin be bribed into betraying his class, or would a victory be his alone? had a lot of resonance in the early 1960s, when – in the wake of the writings of Richard Hoggart and the education policies of the new Labour Government under Harold Wilson – working-class boys began entering British universities and the professions in significant numbers. “To join the establishment or to jinx it?” could have been the motto of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. In the film, Courtney decides on the latter. Far out ahead of his public school opponent (James Fox in one of his first roles as the archetypal upper-class cad) – he simply coasts to a stop within view of the finish line, casually dashing the ambitions of the governor as well as his own. Is the moral of the tale that “one is reminded that, in truth, there’s no real losing, only degrees of winning”, or do we witness “that essentially English state of mind, where it is better to fail than to succeed as long as you have chosen to fail?” True enough, for a first-year undergraduate reading Sartre and dreaming of Juliette Greco, the images of Courtney running through the open Notts countryside were like long riffs by Django Reinhard in the cellar-clubs of St Germain des Pres: the confusion was no doubt helped by the film’s beautiful jazz score, complete with trumpet solo, by John Addison.

The Marathon Man

A little more than ten years later, another memorable runner made it into the movies. This time, for a Hollywood production, set in New York, but it, too, directed by an Englishman. Instead of ‘angry young man’ Tony Richardson, it was the turn of ‘angry young man’ John Schlesinger to sign for The Marathon Man (1976). And instead of (Sir) Michael Redgrave as the governor, we have (Sir) Laurence Olivier as the older man, opposite the hero, played by Dustin Hoffman. His ‘Babe’ in Marathon Man is not altogether different from Courtney’s Colin. As David Thomson describes Hoffman: “his screen character is reticent but stubborn. He is small and often timid, but a nucleus of hard identity never wavers. […] A wary liberalism lurks in his anticipation of suffering at the world’s rough hands.”

In Marathon Man the rough hands are those of Olivier as Dr Szell, a former SS dentist, once known as “the White Angel” of Auschwitz, who after hiding for decades in South America, has come to New York to retrieve a cache of ill-gotten diamonds, once he learns that his brother, who kept the (other) keys to the safe, has been killed, but not before telling someone compromising secrets about Szell. In this convoluted tale of Nazi villains, CIA agents and New York Jews, better not ask how ‘Babe’, who is a graduate student at Columbia University, gets into the act. Rather, what matters to the viewer is how he gets in (and out of!) Dr Szell’s dentist’s chair, in a scene that nobody, absolutely nobody, who has seen the film will ever forget. Say to someone: “so, tell me … is it safe? is it safe?!” and chances are, they’ll twist their jaw in a grimace of agonized pain.

Whether Marathon Man – despite SS war criminals, Auschwitz, Jewish survivors and teeth – qualifies as a Holocaust movie is questionable, but it has one of the most stunning running sequences on film, as Hoffman puts to good use his stamina, gained through long hours of training for the New York Marathon, and weaves through the traffic on the interstate freeway, successfully outwitting his pursuers. No jazz-score this time, but a Manhattan cityscape every bit as gritty as that of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and almost as jazzy as Piet Mondriaan’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

Chariots of Fire

The 1980s, too, can boast of a runner’s movie. Mention its title, and most people will grimace, trying to hum its theme tune. The three or four chords that make up Vangelis (Papathanassion)’s score have stayed in people’s ears longer than they cared for, and now are probably as (in)famous as Beethoven’s ‘ta-ta-ta-taa’. This film is, again, set in Britain, even based on historical characters, and it involves class, race and ethnicity in politically correct proportions. Chariots of Fire tells the story of two British track athletes, competing in the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics. One, Eric Lidell, is a devout Scottish missionary who runs for God, the other, Harold Abrahams, is a Jewish student at Cambridge’s Caius College, who runs mainly to prove himself to the college snobs, and to escape anti-Semitic prejudice.

The plot runs their two stories in parallel, until they compete against each other, and the stakes for each of them are shown to be similar. Both are inspired by higher principles that underscore their dissidence, while giving them the outsider’s position in their respective peer-groups. The Presbyterian Scot Lidell has to explain to his sister who wants him to quit: “I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure. To win is to honour Him.” The orthodox Jew Abrahams has a showdown of his own with two Cambridge dons who question his “esprit de corps.” He defends himself by saying: “I want victory as much as you do. But you want it achieved with the apparent effortlessness of Gods. I believe in the relentless pursuit of excellence.” For after losing to Lidell in the qualifying heats, he had accepted the offer of a coach, Sam Mussambini: a decision that the Establishment considers un-gentlemanly, and a choice – Mussambini is not English – that further hardens racially biased resentment against him. Abrahams is the moral center of the film, as one viewer clearly noted: “The film is anchored in the character study of the introspective, brooding, and complex persona of Harold Abrahams, wonderfully portrayed by Ben Cross. Here is a man with all of the outward trappings of success: academic achievement, unparalleled athletic ability, wildly popular with his peers, yet tortured by an inbred inferiority complex and driven to lash out at the world in response. In the end, he conquers his inner demons through hard work, sacrifice, understanding of his fellow man, and the love of a good woman, to whom he opens his heart.” Chariots of Fire was a huge success in 1981, ensuring for its producer, David Puttnam, a significant, if brief Hollywood career as studio-boss, a prominence not given to a ‘Brit’ since Alexander Korda in the 1940s, though Korda, a naturalized Briton, was in fact a Jew and a Hungarian from Puzstaturpaszto!

It is not hard to see that running in Chariots of Fire once again serves as a metaphor for changes in British society, as it had done twenty years earlier in Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner. Abrahams already represents the new meritocracy of the Thatcher Years, where city gents, bank managers as well as politicians learnt at their expense that they could no longer rely just on the old school tie and the amateurism of the landed gentry, but needed to surround themselves with experts, think tanks and (if necessary, foreign) advisers. Slyly identifying this new professional (business) ethos with Jews – Margaret Thatcher famously had promoted several British Jews to cabinet rank – Chariots of Fire is prepared to attack amateurism as a now obsolete instrument of class warfare, no matter how disinterested it may present itself in the arena of sports, which thanks to television is, of course, now one of the least amateur branches of global media entertainment business. The fact that the only other prominent sportsmen in the film are Americans delivers this message loud and clear – and the Oscars the film received show that it was well received.

There are some exquisitely staged running sequences, not least the opening one by the seashore, choreographed and cut like a Pina Bausch ensemble piece. Yet although the film makes distinctions, and even establishes something like a morphology of runners – Lidell is called a ‘gut runner, digging deep’ – my sense is that Chariots of Fire (or maybe just Vangelis on the Walkman in Central Park) did finally more for jogging than for running …

Run Forrest Run

If only things had remained so simple. Clear ethical choices, running as a metaphor for social change, underpinned by the affirmative trajectory of self-transcendence, with ‘winning’ standing for an act of rehabilitation or the removal of a stigma in the arena of social acceptance. But in the 1990s, a film appeared – now once more coming from Hollywood – that also features running at a pivotal point in the hero’s life, in circumstances so much more enigmatic. Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks, is more of a puzzle than its commercial success would indicate, or the contempt of its enemies would be prepared to admit. A Vietnam veteran, decorated for rescuing the commander of his platoon, tells the story of his life to anyone who cares to listen, sitting on a bus-stop bench somewhere in the Deep South. It turns out that Forrest had a key role to play in practically all the events of the Sixties and Seventies: the invention of Rock’n’Roll, the assassination of John F Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, the Kent State shootings, the anti-Vietnam protests at the Washington Monument, the Watergate break-ins: Forrest was always there, as we can see from the newsreel pictures cut into his flashback narrative. There is only one problem: Forrest does not seem to have a clue about the significance of these events. His sweet personality and home-spun wisdom turns everything that has happened to him or that he was instrumental in bringing about, into an illustration of his mother’s motto: ‘life is a like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get’. For those who loved the film, here finally was a conciliatory version of America’s most troubled two decades in modern history. For those who felt offended, and there were many, the problem was not only that Forrest Gump wiped the historical slate clean of all the struggles, sacrifices and the fight against injustices, to which a whole generation had given its activism and dedicated its idealism. Forrest Gump also used the latest technologies of digital re-mastering to fake the historical record, by inserting Tom Hanks into ‘authentic’ television footage of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson or the Black Panthers.

How aware is the film of what it is doing? There is a period in Forrest’s life when he becomes something of a Messiah, following his decision to run across America, several times, all by himself. At first, people start lining the route where he passes, but then more and more imitate him, because of the mysterious saintliness that seems to radiate from his determined, unstoppable run from coast to coast, from Alaska to Baja California and from Maine to New Mexico. Perhaps in contrast to the pathetic jogging that US Presidents ritually perform in front of tv cameras – the film pointedly shows Forrest passing a tv-shop, just as the now famous footage of Jimmy Carter’s morning jog can be seen, when suffering from heat exhaustion, he collapses in the arms of one of his aids – Forrest Gump is like the original Marathon Man. He bears a message for his people, though it remains unclear whether of victory or defeat. After three years of perpetual running, and finding himself in the middle of Monument Valley, trailed by a group of devotees, whom he has never addressed, Forrest suddenly decides to stop running, and returns home, much to the consternation and then contempt of his followers.

No explanation for his decision is given. Perhaps he remembered the scene from his youth, when, still a boy with leg-braces and severely handicapped, he is pursued by a group of bullies on bicycles. At this point, his childhood sweetheart Jenny – herself abused by her father – comes out of the door and shouts to him ‘run, Forrest, run’. Miraculously, he picks up speed, the braces fly off, and Forrest is now free: running, running, running. Perhaps he realizes that this was in fact the true motto of his life, but that he had never figured out the direction of his running: was he running away or running towards something? This indeterminacy, this radical openness of his running, without origin or goal may have been his saving grace, the secret of his saintliness. Now was the time to return to Jenny, the evident mother-substitute, and found his own family, which he does, except that it is too late. Jenny, having barely given birth to a boy, is dying from a mysterious virus. And so, Forrest is once more in a loop, a time warp, for which the bus-stop is as useful a metaphor as was the leafless tree in Waiting for Godot. With Forrest Gump, the passion for running had left the world of linear-chronological narratives, of teleological life-plans or self-improvement. The fact that he stopped in the middle of Monument Valley, that archetypal Western landscape, seemed to signal the end of the grand récit of America’s frontier myths, even in mainstream movies. But what was the film hinting at?

Run Lola Run

Just as in Forrest Gump, the co-ordinates of historical chronology begin to bend, since the hero’s spectral body is present in every historical event, while his soul takes time out, running across America or waiting on the bus-stop bench, so the runner’s film for the new century – though dating from 1999 – opens up the time-loop across the metaphor of running. I am referring to Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run. This time, it is a young Berlin woman, who gets a phone call from her boyfriend, Manni, somewhere in the city, and is told to run, Lola, run. He is in deep trouble with a drug dealer, and needs to replace the 100000 DM he carelessly lost within the next 20 minutes, otherwise he’s dead. Three times we see her start on her ‘race to the rescue’, each time one slightly different micro-incident radically changes the course of events: once she arrived too late and Manni is killed by the police, the second time, she is killed trying to shield him, and the third time, she arrives in time, and Manni himself has found the money he had lost to a tramp. It is like winning the jackpot in a computer game that re-sets itself, balanced by the agonized pillow-talk between Lola and Manni separating the segments: “Why do you love me? – Why me?” Lola asks, to which Manni can only reply “why not you”? Running becomes a modality of being-in-the-world, to counter such epistemological scepticism as besets Lola about ‘other minds’. The techno-sound of her pounding heartbeat ensures lift-off to another realm of possibility, shifting gears between the unique event and the ‘what if’ of the “rippling consequences of chance”: “Twyker illustrates how the smallest change in what a person does can alter the rest of their life (not to mention the lives of others, including complete strangers she passes on the street).” Lending her athletic body to the idea that every act forecloses an alternative reality, and by that very possibility, makes it both preciously special and potentially meaningless, Lola’s running bends time’s arrow, to render obsolete that distinction between ‘last’ and ‘first’, once one is aware of all the forking paths and all the roads not taken.

“I wish I were a beating heart that never comes to rest”: Compared to Lola running, powered by an urgency due not just to Manni’s predicament, the usual city jogger to my mind resembles nothing more than a donkey on the water wheel: the eternal return of the same. Running, too, as we have seen, may be without where-from and where-to, but its intensity to the point of in-direction, and its acceleration to the point of movement in multiple dimensions makes for that repetition and reversibility which ensures that the last can be the first, and the first will (not) be the last: the further the runner runs, the closer he or she is to the point we all have to start from, up against ourselves. For the runner, distance and proximity fold inwards, suspending and even sublating the very idea of ‘first’ and ‘last’ in an altogether different topography of being and becoming. The Marathon Man is a Moebius man: as long as he is on the move, the actual and the virtual, the inner and the outer are the perfectly joined recto and verso of a figure, whose singularity is also a token of its infinity. Or as Emil Zatopek was fond of saying: “If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon.”