The Manchurian Candidate (1962)Politics is a game, and nations are the players, wielding ideologies and parties as stratagems. But the power brokers and kingmakers, who use all of us as the pawns in their grand machinations, who write the rules, lead us along like dogs on a leash. When Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) returns from the Korean War a decorated veteran and war hero, he struggles under the vice-like grip of his domineering mother, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury). Meanwhile, Raymond's fellow war ally, Major Bennett "Ben" Marco (Frank Sinatra), struggles with haunting dreams, hinting at a deeper conspiracy.
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The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is a provocative political thriller, where trust is a commodity in short supply. Made in the wake of the "Second Red Scare", it is a story less about communism and capitalism than the powers which secretly manipulate these ideologies as one would a lever, to sway the populations of nations to one behavior or another. Behavior is the key word to understand what motivates events in the film, and how it fits in to two similar philosophies: "Behaviorism" and "Behavioralism". In short, Behavioralism is a political science discipline which is designed to predict political response based on the behaviors of individuals, while Behaviorism is a psychological school of thought which purports that people respond to stimuli based on their conditioning. The combination of these two social systems represent the language of The Manchurian Candidate. The film is the story about two individuals--Raymond and Ben--men who were abducted and subjected to a series of brainwashing exercises in communist China to create a scenario and give them a foothold in the West, the foundation for events revealed in the plot. The audience for the display of this conditioning, administered by Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dheigh) of the Pavlov Institute in Moscow, includes the upper echelon of the communist movement in the East, all of which are depicted as amoral and indifferent to Lo's display of how he can make these American soldiers do whatever he wants courtesy of his brainwashing. The message on the surface of The Manchurian Candidate appears to be that of the moral vacuum and tyranny of communism, how they seek to suppress the basic American values of freedom and free will. But as the film progresses, consider who is really involved in this conspiracy, and who stands to gain by the shuffling of these political cards, and the distinction becomes fuzzy. A closer look reveals that communism is merely another facet of a complex control mechanism so deeply entrenched in global politics--like the brainwashing inflicted upon Raymond and the others--that it's nigh impossible to identify the lattice of control at all. Consider that Yen Lo is probably the only one who is most closely in contact with whomever he actually reports to, but whomever that is is never truly revealed. Virtually everyone is working for someone else, and no one really knows who the true puppet master is. And when applications like behavior conditioning are applied, and even a high-ranking puppet like Yen Lo isn't really pulling the strings, what hope does anyone have to resist the sway of control and the dissolution of free will?
The Manchurian Candidate is positively saturated in multiple levels of control, both overt and subtle, creating a constant sense of paranoia and distrust, with the swoop of communist infiltration being a persistent one. There isn't a moment in The Manchurian Candidate where there isn't a sense of some battle of dominance in some form. With respect to the communist encroachment, even small puns and diction imply the ubiquitous presence of the "red menace"; Raymond goes to work in a newspaper after coming home (what's black and white and "read" all over?) and his jibe about looking like Groucho Marx--which sounds like "Karl Marx", the author of "The Communist Manifesto". Raymond's stepfather, Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), is cut from the same cloth of demagoguery as Joe McCarthy, shouting varied numbers of "confirmed communists in the Defense Department", before settling on the number of fifty-seven, inspired by a bottle of red Heinz ketchup. And the persistence of the color red as a trigger is most apparent--even in a black and white movie--in the playing card which opens the door for Raymond's controller to issue him a kill command: the red queen of diamonds. There are movies that seem to exist at just the right time in American history, representing a key element of the national zeitgeist, underscoring the fears and anxieties of the nation. One wonders just how the perception of politics in the wake of McCarthyism or the assassination of John F. Kennedy would have been if a film like The Manchurian Candidate did not exist, or rather how this movie has worked in tandem with how Americans have processed these events in history.
Along with the idea that communism is a source of the disempowerment of free will, The Manchurian Candidate also suggests a "battle of the sexes", that the women in the lives of Ben and Raymond hold some sway or control over them, emasculating them by depriving them of independent thought, whether by accident or design. The most apparent example of this is Raymond's mother, a woman whose icy disposition and cutthroat efforts to propel her husband to the presidency is Machiavellian to put it lightly; even her manner of dress--even at the costume ball, dressed as a shepherd--underscores this. She also is clearly the one wearing the pants in the relationship between her and her husband, with the senator being a mere foil for her agenda, reciting speeches and following her lead as she condescends to him, calling her and Raymond her "boys" among other things. But there is also much speculation about the significance of a woman Ben meets on the train, Eugenie Rose Cheyney (Janet Leigh), including suggestions that as innocuous as their meeting is, that she is also a part of the communist conspiracy, a sleeper agent designed to control Ben. She makes asides which implicate this theory as jokes to Ben, such as when she teases that she was part of the original Chinese workers who laid the foundation of the railroad they are on, or that as a kid, she felt like she was the sole survivor of a spaceship shot to Mars--the "red planet". Even her name suggests darker connotations; Eugenie resembles yet another social philosophy, "eugenics", one which was infamously adopted by Nazi Germany as a means to artificially cultivate a global genetic direction in uniform race and biology--yet another facet of a tyrannical control system. And her middle name, Rose--although she prefers "Rosie"--more subtly suggests yet another parallel with the color red. Rosie's pointed, almost random, disclosure of her address and phone number to Ben--a man she's presumably just met--would appear awfully forward in any day and age, but the recitation with which she gives her information, like an avalanche of numbers, bears more similarities with that of a code or incantation delivered by a sorceress, designed to trigger something in Ben, even if it isn't apparent, unlike the obvious trigger for Raymond's conditioning. This moment is also echoed in a moment where Raymond hears his mother disparage a girl who helped save him from a snake bite--Jocelyn "Josie" Jordan (Leslie Parrish), daughter of his mother's apparent rival, Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver)--while she wears a gown with an overt Chinese dragon print on it. When Raymond and Josie are reunited at a costume ball in her honor, she is garbed in an outfit emblazoned with the image of the queen of diamonds playing card, and Raymond once again immediately falls under the spell of love. Even the nightmares which haunt the survivors of the conditioning experiment all have the same recurring dream--that they are at a garden party, and all the communists are in fact women talking about horticulture. And most of all, the emblematic trigger being a queen is as clear as any metaphor that it is women who hold the cards in the arena of power, even when it appears otherwise.
Just like the queen of diamonds is an image designed to provoke a controlled response in Raymond, there are numerous other faces and icons which are designed to accomplish the same thing in The Manchurian Candidate. Consider the predominance of images of the face of Abraham Lincoln as it equates to the underlying theme of freedom versus slavery. Lincoln was the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, which eventually led to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. The image of Abraham Lincoln is an iconic one, his statue erected in the nation's capital, and busts of his likeness to be found all over in The Manchurian Candidate. However, men like Iselin apply his likeness--Iselin even dresses like him for the costume ball--for purely political reasons, adopting this persona to convince his constituents that he is alike the 16th President of the United States. And this behavior is not unique to Iselin; take the communist theater where Yen Lo demonstrates his conditioning--it is filled with the likenesses of communist "heroes", including Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. The real reason for the predominance of faces associated with ideologies is that these images promote a line of thinking in its audience, and the associations that the audience makes with that face. But these associations are themselves social constructs--propaganda--designed to manipulate the audience in subtle ways, steering them toward one response or another. Consider today when you turn on the television set or look at a web article when the face of a celebrity or politician is shown, and what your reaction is to that image, what notions flood your subconscious about a person you've never met, but have only known by proxy? This is a conditioning effect by media, image as thought, a sly and almost imperceptible means of controlling an audience by appealing to the inner values in people that themselves were primed by an upbringing of propaganda itself. As cynical as it sounds, the deeper you analyze the message of The Manchurian Candidate, the more labyrinthine the complex web of control gets, as does the sense that freedom is an illusion on either side of the fence. The real threat in the world isn't capitalism versus communism, men versus women, or even freedom versus slavery, but an incomprehensible riddle about how our world works, something so deeply rooted into our psyches that to smash it would be to deliver a catastrophic shock to our collective system, like a fatal withdrawal from quitting a drug cold turkey.
Recommended for: Fans of a staggeringly deep metaphor for politics and control, a political thriller of the highest order. It is a stark assessment of how the individual is dwarfed by the shadow players in a global game of domination, of false flag politicians and insidious power plays, leaving you questioning if it is mere conspiracy theory or a sobering wake up from a hypnotic dream state.
The Manchurian Candidate is positively saturated in multiple levels of control, both overt and subtle, creating a constant sense of paranoia and distrust, with the swoop of communist infiltration being a persistent one. There isn't a moment in The Manchurian Candidate where there isn't a sense of some battle of dominance in some form. With respect to the communist encroachment, even small puns and diction imply the ubiquitous presence of the "red menace"; Raymond goes to work in a newspaper after coming home (what's black and white and "read" all over?) and his jibe about looking like Groucho Marx--which sounds like "Karl Marx", the author of "The Communist Manifesto". Raymond's stepfather, Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), is cut from the same cloth of demagoguery as Joe McCarthy, shouting varied numbers of "confirmed communists in the Defense Department", before settling on the number of fifty-seven, inspired by a bottle of red Heinz ketchup. And the persistence of the color red as a trigger is most apparent--even in a black and white movie--in the playing card which opens the door for Raymond's controller to issue him a kill command: the red queen of diamonds. There are movies that seem to exist at just the right time in American history, representing a key element of the national zeitgeist, underscoring the fears and anxieties of the nation. One wonders just how the perception of politics in the wake of McCarthyism or the assassination of John F. Kennedy would have been if a film like The Manchurian Candidate did not exist, or rather how this movie has worked in tandem with how Americans have processed these events in history.
Along with the idea that communism is a source of the disempowerment of free will, The Manchurian Candidate also suggests a "battle of the sexes", that the women in the lives of Ben and Raymond hold some sway or control over them, emasculating them by depriving them of independent thought, whether by accident or design. The most apparent example of this is Raymond's mother, a woman whose icy disposition and cutthroat efforts to propel her husband to the presidency is Machiavellian to put it lightly; even her manner of dress--even at the costume ball, dressed as a shepherd--underscores this. She also is clearly the one wearing the pants in the relationship between her and her husband, with the senator being a mere foil for her agenda, reciting speeches and following her lead as she condescends to him, calling her and Raymond her "boys" among other things. But there is also much speculation about the significance of a woman Ben meets on the train, Eugenie Rose Cheyney (Janet Leigh), including suggestions that as innocuous as their meeting is, that she is also a part of the communist conspiracy, a sleeper agent designed to control Ben. She makes asides which implicate this theory as jokes to Ben, such as when she teases that she was part of the original Chinese workers who laid the foundation of the railroad they are on, or that as a kid, she felt like she was the sole survivor of a spaceship shot to Mars--the "red planet". Even her name suggests darker connotations; Eugenie resembles yet another social philosophy, "eugenics", one which was infamously adopted by Nazi Germany as a means to artificially cultivate a global genetic direction in uniform race and biology--yet another facet of a tyrannical control system. And her middle name, Rose--although she prefers "Rosie"--more subtly suggests yet another parallel with the color red. Rosie's pointed, almost random, disclosure of her address and phone number to Ben--a man she's presumably just met--would appear awfully forward in any day and age, but the recitation with which she gives her information, like an avalanche of numbers, bears more similarities with that of a code or incantation delivered by a sorceress, designed to trigger something in Ben, even if it isn't apparent, unlike the obvious trigger for Raymond's conditioning. This moment is also echoed in a moment where Raymond hears his mother disparage a girl who helped save him from a snake bite--Jocelyn "Josie" Jordan (Leslie Parrish), daughter of his mother's apparent rival, Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver)--while she wears a gown with an overt Chinese dragon print on it. When Raymond and Josie are reunited at a costume ball in her honor, she is garbed in an outfit emblazoned with the image of the queen of diamonds playing card, and Raymond once again immediately falls under the spell of love. Even the nightmares which haunt the survivors of the conditioning experiment all have the same recurring dream--that they are at a garden party, and all the communists are in fact women talking about horticulture. And most of all, the emblematic trigger being a queen is as clear as any metaphor that it is women who hold the cards in the arena of power, even when it appears otherwise.
Just like the queen of diamonds is an image designed to provoke a controlled response in Raymond, there are numerous other faces and icons which are designed to accomplish the same thing in The Manchurian Candidate. Consider the predominance of images of the face of Abraham Lincoln as it equates to the underlying theme of freedom versus slavery. Lincoln was the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, which eventually led to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. The image of Abraham Lincoln is an iconic one, his statue erected in the nation's capital, and busts of his likeness to be found all over in The Manchurian Candidate. However, men like Iselin apply his likeness--Iselin even dresses like him for the costume ball--for purely political reasons, adopting this persona to convince his constituents that he is alike the 16th President of the United States. And this behavior is not unique to Iselin; take the communist theater where Yen Lo demonstrates his conditioning--it is filled with the likenesses of communist "heroes", including Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. The real reason for the predominance of faces associated with ideologies is that these images promote a line of thinking in its audience, and the associations that the audience makes with that face. But these associations are themselves social constructs--propaganda--designed to manipulate the audience in subtle ways, steering them toward one response or another. Consider today when you turn on the television set or look at a web article when the face of a celebrity or politician is shown, and what your reaction is to that image, what notions flood your subconscious about a person you've never met, but have only known by proxy? This is a conditioning effect by media, image as thought, a sly and almost imperceptible means of controlling an audience by appealing to the inner values in people that themselves were primed by an upbringing of propaganda itself. As cynical as it sounds, the deeper you analyze the message of The Manchurian Candidate, the more labyrinthine the complex web of control gets, as does the sense that freedom is an illusion on either side of the fence. The real threat in the world isn't capitalism versus communism, men versus women, or even freedom versus slavery, but an incomprehensible riddle about how our world works, something so deeply rooted into our psyches that to smash it would be to deliver a catastrophic shock to our collective system, like a fatal withdrawal from quitting a drug cold turkey.
Recommended for: Fans of a staggeringly deep metaphor for politics and control, a political thriller of the highest order. It is a stark assessment of how the individual is dwarfed by the shadow players in a global game of domination, of false flag politicians and insidious power plays, leaving you questioning if it is mere conspiracy theory or a sobering wake up from a hypnotic dream state.