On Manchurian Candidates and Media Failures
Few kinds of writing are more exciting than one of the two totemic figures of the art form — see, in this instance, film critics — citing the other. Roger Ebert dares to pull from Pauline Kael’s review of The Manchurian Candidate for his own recounting of John Frankenheimer’s genre-scrambling thriller:
‘“The Manchurian Candidate” is inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a “classic” but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released. “It may be,” Pauline Kael wrote at the time, “the most sophisticated satire ever made in Hollywood.” Yes, because it satirizes no particular target — left, right, foreign, domestic — but the very notion that politics can be taken at face value.’
By rebuilding something fresh from the ashes of such a bizarre, indefinite original like The Manchurian Candidate (which was in turn based on the Richard Condon novel of the same name), Jonathan Demme crafted a new movie that remained as equally cynical and sinister as its inspiration, while faring lighter on the side of satire. Take the opening credits sequence, for instance, where Wyclef Jean’s cover of CCR’s “Fortunate Son” arrives with vicious drums and a guitar with an echo that ripples like a rolling boil. The original film came out in October 1962, during a valley period in the grand War on Communism. Joe McCarthy was dead; the Gulf of Tonkin incident was twenty-two months in the future, when American forces would directly engage in Vietnam. “Fortunate Son” is the song most frequently associated with the Vietnam War, and Demme’s use of a much different version than the one we hear in more authentically patriotic material reflects the oblique way Demme planned to reference not only the original film, but the paranoia of the era in which it was released.
“Fortunate Son” was described by John Fogerty as a polemic on the unfairness of class; on how, in America, the rich men create the wars but leave the necessary fighting to the poor. The irony of such things is never lost on Demme, least of all here. Take the scene in which politicians, soldiers, and businessmen and lobbyists — a literal depiction of the Iron Triangle — mill around a space which now appears unsettlingly similar to the Amazon Spheres, shaking hands, making deals. “I mean, isn’t that supposed to be the point of this great country of ours?” Raymond Shaw, a strapping young vet-turned-vice president nominee played by Liev Schreiber, ponders, basking in the antiquated eyes of interested parties decades his senior. “That everybody matters. Not just the people at this party.” Although we can tell from the jump that Schreiber’s Sgt. Shaw is not the same detached, nearly sociopathic statue that Laurence Harvey portrays in the original film, this is one of the few moments where Schreiber plays Shaw as truly going for broke with powerful voters. He wears a sly but charismatic smile and preaches the wonders of America. What a candidate! And yet that smirking works so effectively because you know Demme doesn’t believe a word Shaw says — and neither does Schreiber.
Not for a single moment in the 1962 film does Frank Sinatra’s perspirant Maj. Bennett Marco appear to fully comprehend the logistics or the scale of the conspiracy he’s caught up in. The overlap of what Sinatra’s Marco did or did not experience as a POW lends to Frankenheimer’s film an extreme (and occasionally outright satirical) off-kilterness; the highlight of the Oscar-nominated editing by Ferris Webster is the surreality of the scene in which Marco recalls his altered memory of the brainwashing. Marco’s dream shows us a pleasant scene of him and his platoon sitting in on a ladies’ garden club; reality famously interrupts these moments of reverie, the camera panning in a circular motion throughout the entire garden club meeting and after one three-hundred-and-sixty degree trip, revealing where the soldiers really are, which is somewhere they cannot see. The Chinese brainwashing expert Dr. Yen Lo (American character actor Khigh Dheigh; the racial politics of the original Manchurian adaptation — like many others of its time — have not aged well) shows to a group of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean officials and scientists his successful experiment. It’s a magic trick of mise en scene, of camera movement, and of editing: It’s impossible to tell where reality ends for Marco and Shaw and where fiction begins.
Denzel Washington, meanwhile portrays Marco as a truly traumatized man, perhaps by more than war. Sinatra’s Marco carries a sleekness, however skeptical, that Washington altogether avoids. He’s awkward, vulnerable in a way we rarely get to see; even if it isn’t among the pantheon of the quintessential Denzel performances, it’s nonetheless a treat to watch.
There are brief scenes where Demme seemingly uses him to evoke an image of a schizophrenic drifter — perhaps the most bizarre moment of this entire version is when Marco asks Shaw if he ever dreams about Kuwait on a crowded New York City sidewalk, surrounded by hundreds of citizens and media members. Yet, nobody other than Shaw and his bodyguard seem to even notice a potentially deranged man emerging from the crowd. Demme, as he so often does in this film and others (famously in Silence of the Lambs, less so in zanier projects like Something Wild) shoots each actor from a physical midpoint so that the actors look directly into the camera when speaking to one another. The strange ambiance of this meeting between Marco and Shaw is both propped up and enhanced by the tunnel vision effect Demme’s famed straight-on shot lends to the interaction.
Nobody, not even Shaw, takes Marco’s conspiratorial claims seriously. Marco himself had to first brush aside another former platoon member, Col. Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright). Melvin pumps up the volume on the schizophrenic shade which Marco adopts throughout the film’s runtime; it’s plausible that Melvin could be homeless, though he rejects Marco’s offer of money. Melvin presents Marco with drawings that a psychiatrist would have a field day with; Marco’s own schizophrenic nightmares and trauma materialize shortly after. Complicating things slightly, of course, is the fact that Melvin and Marco are correct, disturbed as they may seem.
It’s the conflation of threats in original and reimagining which drives the impact of each Manchurian Candidate as individual films. The baseless hurling of accusations of radical leftism or socialism or communism (or claims of fascism thrown in the other direction, though I find this to be less common generally and used more appropriately), particularly as a means to obscure signs of activity beneficial primarily to the people and companies who require little to no assistance in agglomerating wealth, is now commonplace at every level of popular American media. It’s unavoidable.
In an interview with the British Film Institute shortly after the film’s theatrical release, Demme implied that he was less interested in remaking one of the definitive pictures from the McCarthy era than in updating it. It was writer Daniel Pyne’s replacement, Demme said, of the existential global threat of communism with an onslaught of intensely powerful corporations continuing to feed the military-industrial complex that drew him to the project.
Demme clearly takes great pains to never mention Shaw’s political affiliation (nor his mother’s, though she is explicitly more conservative relative to Raymond), presumably to underline the fact that neither side of the aisle is immune from the lustful promises of power which can come from aligning with a private-equity firm like Manchurian Global. “They contribute to half the Senate,” Meryl Streep’s senator Eleanor Shaw tells the less cynical, more liberal Tom Jordan (Jon Voight). “Both sides of the aisle.” (Eleanor’s role in the 2004 film is one of the main alterations to the 1962 film, where Angela Lansbury’s iconic performance of the same character — known as Eleanor Iselin in that film — is of a behind-the-scenes puppeteer who controls the exploits of her commie-hunting husband in the Senate, John Iselin, played by James Gregory. The couple, each of whom possess Raymond’s earnest contempt, have their eyes on the vice presidency. In the 2004 version, Eleanor is herself a senator and her son is the vice presidential candidate — cutting out the stepfather in the process and intensifying the Shaws’ intense and strange Oedipal dynamic, which the book apparently references more directly than either movie.)
Frankenheimer’s film is ultimately interested in just how far the power-hungry are willing to go to maintain and multiply their power; Demme knows that the twist that the Iselins were working with the communists the whole time, and the brainwashing plot was entwined with a plot to assassinate the president and put John Iselin in the White House — that is neither shocking nor particularly compelling as it might have been in 1962. That was a time, I think, when more Americans had faith in their own government, insofar as they can with such things. But you take the anti-government crusades of the 1980s, the failure of the Clinton administration to move back in the opposite direction in any sustainable manner, and then the presence of privately owned and operated politicians like Dick Cheney (whom Demme explicitly references in interviews as a figure he had in mind during production) in the White House at the turn of the century, suddenly skepticism towards powerful politicians feels a little bit like this:
In 1962 as well as nearly fifty years on, the cries of “The commies are going to eat your children!” have never fully faded from the American vernacular. The 2004 film examines the kind of people who let that behavior slide. The media figures who repeat it; politicians who, on both sides of the aisle, have a fundamental stake in the status quo; the members of both groups who have a similar duty to analyze contemporary misery while begging for progress — except not really.
My friend Antonia wrote a superb piece about mass movements and how people fall for them, which in turn cites an essay by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who wrote that efforts by echo chamber curators like Rush Limbaugh rely on terms like “Mainstream Media” as indicators, like blinkers on a racehorse, that any other source of knowledge is not one to ever listen to or agree with. On the one hand, I find it silly to accuse CNN or The New York Times of being unfairly “liberal” as if that’s the worst thing to ever happen to centrist and right-wing Americans. “Liberal” might traditionally denote government change and support, but events throughout the pandemic should tell you that the liberal wing of the American body politic is neither interested nor invested in permanent forward momentum. Their chips are too tightly tied to the current state of affairs, as regressive and exploitative as they may be. We should stop defining media outlets as liberal or conservative based solely upon what they cover, what they don’t; who they hire as talking heads should not have an outsize impact to who’s hiring them. Because the employer (in this case, it’s exclusively multinational conglomerate corporations controlling huge media outlets) is ultimately using their on-air personalities as cover in the hopes that viewers will forget their loyalties are not with left or right, but with profit. And the (moderately conservative) status quo rewards those who chase profits and don’t ever stop chasing them. Why should any company, especially AT&T (owns CNN) or Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal, which owns MSNBC), seek to alter the parameters of such a status quo in any way?
Our conventionally left-leaning politicians are equally deserving of blame. Congressional Democrats’ performance in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder — Kente cloths, Nancy Pelosi thanking George Floyd for sacrificing his life — should serve as a reminder of how out of touch our federal representatives are. State and local reps are important but their words, progressive or otherwise, will never have the effect of federal legislators, who often become celebrities in an arena that ought not to incentivize celebutante behavior. It’s their words that will find the most people, the most televisions, the most News Feeds and the most posts. And it’s these words that will most objectively reflect the collective subjective beliefs of American liberals. They may not be the ones howling about radical leftists (or even radical rightists), but they’re not about to shut anyone up either. And why would they?
