Long walks, incredible journeys: popular fantasies of escape and returning home
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1956, Slawomir Rawicz published an account of his daring escape from a Soviet gulag in 1941 which led to a 6,500 kilometer trek across Siberia, Mongolia, Tibet and through the Himalayas to freedom eleven months later in British India. The Long Walk was translated into 25 languages and sold over half a million copies worldwide. This was a Cold War text for Reader’s Digest to get behind and behind it they got. In 2010, it was made into a film called The Way Back, directed by Peter Weir and produced and distributed by National Geographic. In 1961, Sheila Burnford published The Incredible Journey about the 400 kilometer trip across the Canadian wilderness of three animals, two dogs and a cat, to be reunited with their owners. The story was taken up by Disney in 1963 as a feature film and marketed confusingly as a “True-Life Fantasy.” It was remade by Disney in 1993 as Homeward Bound: the Incredible Journey. What these two books and three films have in common is that they are not true as told, perhaps not true in any useful sense. So what is it about such narratives that makes us want to believe in them? The film critic J. Hober-man recognized The Way Back in 2011 as part of a newly emerging genre, the drama of attrition, where comfortable audiences can enjoy the spectacle of protracted suffering providing it leads to some uplifting outcome. The Revenant (1915) for instance shows that the genre has finally been noticed and celebrated by the academy. This article looks at the appeal of the attritional epic journey, also referencing Leon Uris’s Exodus, the novel (1958) and film version (1960) of which fell between Rawicz’s and Burnside’s books
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".