There's a point in Runaway when Kanye and his Phoenix, played by Selita Ebanks, watch a parade of marching men wearing red hoods and carrying a huge Michael Jackson head.
Kanye explains to MTV
"The hood, what it does represent to me ... in relation to the Michael Jackson thing is not the KKK but the concept of cult, because it's multiple people with this hood on. It's me taking [the phoenix] to my world and saying, 'Let me show you what my world is about.
"The greatest, biggest pop-cultural figure of all time, arguably bigger than Jesus Christ, is Michael Jackson. You have the band in front of him, marching ... and you have the cult around it."
"If you saw the kid in the beginning, he's running and running at top speed holding his torch, and his torch represents his thoughts and ideals. At the end, after he's been cultivated, he has the hood on now and he's walking extremely slow. That's basically how people think. It's the way society has set people up to be able to control them, slave mentalities."
"[By] just creating this mentality by cultivating the ideals ... you could just make people just stand in their own mental jails. "What happens when someone isn't in a mental jail?"
