The Long Walk‘s exact time period is ambiguous, which is one of the reasons the film is so powerful. The Long Walk takes place in a version of the United States that has fallen into very hard times. The people are shown to be broken, businesses shuttered, and the public has accepted a brutal form of military authoritarianism as government.

The result is a broken country where something like the Long Walk could not only take place, but become an accepted norm. The conflicting elements of the movie make it tricky to place the movie’s exact year. However, that’s a big part of the appeal of the original story, something that lends a timeless quality to The Long Walk movie.

The Long Walk Takes Place In An Unclear Time Period

The Long Walk has a unique approach to world-building that leaves many elements of the world, such as the exact time period, somewhat mysterious. In The Long Walk, the state of the world is less than positive. The film never cuts away from the United States, but it’s clear that the country has suffered in some serious ways.

Garraty and his mother listen to the radio and hear reports about a civil war years prior. While the country was seemingly reunited at some point, the nation has been left broken by the experience. It seems that there’s little forward momentum in technology, with all the machinery and society of The Long Walk appearing dated or broken.

The focus on classic music and books as banned art, as well as the lack of any real futuristic technology (even the cameras used to broadcast the long walk live are throwbacks to older camera models) suggests that The Long Walk could be happening in a broken version of the 20th century instead of the present day.

This would correspond with the book of the same name. Written by Stephen King and released in 1979, The Long Walk is connected on many thematic levels to the Vietnam War. In the book, the world is implied to be the result of a Nazi victory in Europe during World War II, leading to a stalemate with the United States.

After the ensuing economic collapse that came with global trade collapsing, the America of The Long Walk novel devolved into an authoritarian military state. While the movie doesn’t feature those teases, the collapse of the nation into civil unrest seems to have opened up a vacuum for the Major and his government to roll in.

The Major implies that the rest of the world has moved beyond the United States and believes the Long Walk will make America “great again” on a global scale. The technology and society make it unclear when exactly the events of the film take place, but that’s a big part of what makes the story so powerful.

The Long Walk’s Ambiguous Time Period Is What Makes It Timeless

The Long Walk has long been seen by critics as a metaphor for the Vietnam War, with the lottery system, televised deaths, and young male contestants all recalling the draft and horrors of the conflict. On that level, The Long Walk still works as a metaphor for the terror young men feel being drafted into a conflict they didn’t start.

However, The Long Walk introduces more modern touches, such as a more overwhelming concern about wealth disparity and the rise of American authoritarianism. It’s not coincidental that the Major’s claims about the younger population’s lack of “work ethic” wouldn’t feel out of place in modern political discourse, especially on the right.

The Long Walk is a distinctly American dystopia. That aspect of the story is more important than any specific time period or setting, which is why the movie works so well as a metaphorical story. It still feels relevant for the original Vietnam-era, but it also hits just as hard as a reflection of modern society.

The power in the story is the way it feels relevant to so many different fears and trepidations about America. It has a timeless story of young men being used and chewed up by a system that numbers them instead of names them. While it can make the world feel ambiguous, it also means the world feels timeless.

The Long Walk may have been one of Stephen King’s very first novels, but it remains one of his most emotionally devastating. This is in large part to the universal elements of the characters, which feed well into the film’s focus on unexpected friendship and brotherhood.

The horror and heartbreak of The Long Walk is the idea that it could always happen. The country could only be one unresolved conflict, one economic collapse, one bad stretch away from the dystopia depicted in the film. The young men of the film could have been born in 1956 or 2006.

The universal aspects of The Long Walk are why it has endured so well over the last few decades, and why so many filmmakers were drawn to the story. There’s something all-encompᴀssing about The Long Walk that makes it hard to place in a specific year, but easy to apply to any era.