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The premise of the original film is that Chinese Communists use mind control, hypnosis, and assassinations in an effort to surgically install a far-right McCarthy-like president of the US who is secretly sympathetic to their agenda. The 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate was suppressed under pressure from the studio owners, politicians, and even the stars who made the film, especially Frank Sinatra. It represented the ultra right a little to realistically and implied (if erroneously) its unwitting complicity with international communism – an alliance which was the real enemy of America. The 2004 version of this classic film picks up similar conspiracy theory inspired plot twists and presents a modern day version.
A brilliantly nuanced performance by Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington as Persian Gulf War veteran Bennett Marco, Academy Award-winning actor Meryl Streep’s excellent portrayal of the politically savvy Senator Eleanor Prentiss, a cross between Hillary Clinton, Condoleeza Rice and Norman Bates’ mother, drive this complex political thriller. Liev Schreiber, playing the role of gifted and heroic Raymond Prentiss Shaw, an old Army buddy of Marco’s, gives a performance of a character who is more than a dupe or a one-dimensional pawn. A bright, if far too brief, appearance by Jeffrey Wright is strong and crucial to the development of the tone and premise of the movie.
If the original film insisted on portraying the People’s Republic of China, and communism generally, as the real enemy of America, our modern version offers another reality. This time the Manchurian candidate is the pawn, not of the Chinese, but of Manchurian Global, a powerful multinational corporation, which, as one character states, has in one way or another controlled much of the policy decisions of every president since Nixon. This corporation also funds most federal level political candidates, including Eleanor Prentiss. Manchurian's name keeps popping up everywhere Bennett Marco looks for answers to the puzzles haunting him. Even with a constant barrage of terror alerts, terrorist attacks and the "war on terror" in the background of this film, the real culprits seem to be in the corporate boardrooms and legislative cloakrooms. Is globalized capitalism, rather than terrorism, our real modern enemy?
The fodder of conspiracy theory – implanted microchips, mind control, assassinations by lone gunmen – fuels the plot of this film (as in the original). As rational people we might instinctively reject such a film as it seems to project fanciful and distorted versions of reality that distract from our real goals: our struggle for democracy and working class liberation.
I offer an alternative interpretation, however. Aside from the conspiracy fluff that will have some of our more slightly paranoid friends looking for parallels between the film’s characters and real life, I suggest that this film asks us to think about the relationships we have with some of the plot’s (and society’s) main institutional actors: the political system we are forced to deal with, globalized capitalism, and our class. You see, conspiracy theories tell us that humans are simply pawns in a struggle they aren’t meant to understand, that they have little or no power over their own destinies, and that they are isolated individuals flailing against a system (or a secret cabal) that dominates them. This basic theme of conspiracy theories is why rational progressive people reject them.
The Manchurian Candidate, in my view, bucks that trend. In one crucial scene, just before the climax of the film, Raymond Shaw and Bennett Marco meet in one last effort to try to understand what happened to them and what is going to happen. It is no accident, I think, that their relationship was originally forged in the military, an institution composed primarily of working-class men and women trained to the do the bidding of US imperialism, or, more simply put, to fight and kill in the interests of large corporations. But they are convinced that what they do is in their patriotic interests, which transcends, they believe, the interests of their class or even the interests of the ruling class. It was into the Army that Shaw, the son of a politically elite family, ran away in a youthful attempt to reject his family and status. Symbolically, he refused an officer’s rank for that of an enlisted person. During the Persian Gulf War, both Marco and Shaw recall, that Shaw bravely fought off the enemy saving the lives of the men in their outfit.
During their final meeting, Shaw asks Marco, "Were we friends?" Shaw is desperate to find out if, underneath his false memories, an imagined friendship and a bond of loyalty, was real. Marco replies, "We have a connection." For Marco, that connection, whatever it was in reality, was enough for both of them to care about each other’s lives, about the truth of what is really happening, and about their destinies. It is an extraordinary moment because in this moment, these two men, so irreversibly caught up on a path to a present which they did not create, want, or had the power to alter, are struggling to redefine and understand themselves outside of their received reality. Through a last attempt to uncover the truth about their past, they have hope for refashioning the future.
Will they succeed? It’ll cost you $9 to find out.
--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs.
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