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Corporate headgames in "The Manchurian Candidate"
by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith
Jonathan Demme’s remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”
is gripping from beginning to end and features a
stellar cast. Denzel Washington plays Major Bennett
Marco; Meryl Streep is right-wing conservative Senator
Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, with Liev Schreiber as her son,
Raymond Shaw, a Gulf War hero.
The cast also includes John Voight as a liberal
senator, rival to Senator Shaw, who falls victim to
Raymond Shaw at Senator Shaw’s direction, not only for
his politics, but because Raymond is engaged to his
daughter.
The original 1963 “Manchurian,” directed by John
Frankenheimer, was a Cold War-era thriller shot in
black and white. It starred Frank Sinatra as Marco,
Lawrence Harvey as Shaw, and Angela Lansbury as
Senator Prentiss Shaw.
Both films are based on Richard Condon’s 1962 novel
and both retain basically the same plot-lines. Yet the
original film, in contrast to Demme’s, has the plot
unfolding subtly, allowing the audience to figure out
stuff on its own rather than have it telegraphed in
living color.
Frankenheimer remained true to the novel’s
anti-Communist message, which was as powerful a tool
for ruling-class politicians at the time as the term
“anti-terrorist” is today. In a rather improbable
plot, “Manchurian” referred to Chinese Communist cells
operating in the United States, behind the scenes,
through a cadre of McCarthyite politicians, with whom
Senator Prentiss Shaw was tied.
In his film, Jonathan Demme departed both from the
novel and Frankenheimer’s version in that he conveys a
contemporary anti-corporate message, rather than an
anti-Communist one.
“Manchurian” in the current film is the name of a
giant bio-tech corporation, Manchurian Global.
Manchurian Global’s CEO is brilliantly played by Dean
Stockwell. Scriptwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean
Georgaris gave him few lines and instead have his
“outriders” speak for him while he remains silently in
the background. Nevertheless, Stockwell’s projection
of his character makes one aware of his power.
In Demme’s film, veterans from the first Gulf War are
having very bad headaches and nightmares because
(instead of the Maoist “brainwashing” techniques they
suffered in captivity in Frankenheimer’s film) their
maladies are caused by small, cylindrical steel “bugs”
implanted just under the skin of the veterans’
shoulder blades and from holes drilled into their
skulls for the insertion of microchips into their
brains.
The operations were performed by an Army doctor (the
actor who plays him bears an uncanny likeness to Paul
Wolfowitz) who works clandestinely for Manchurian
Global.
In one flashback, the doctor, in order to test the
implants, commands that Shaw commit an egregious act
against a war buddy in front of the others. This
proves that he will carry out commands from those with
access to his chip.
Whether hypnotized or implanted with chips, the
outcome in both films is the same—veterans are unable
to remember any atrocities they might have committed
during the war and they believe sincerely that Raymond
Shaw is a war hero. But a decade later, they start
having those damn migraines and nightmares.
Regardless if it’s Frankenheimer’s or Demme’s film,
the premise is that Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw will
go to any extreme to get her son elected president of
the United States. That this film was remade and
released in this presidential election year, 2004,
could attest to Demme’s prescience.
Demme’s depiction of the biotech industry’s power,
under the sway of a ruthless politician, to program a
person to become president is a more dramatic, though
just as insidious, premise than the U.S. government’s
actual saturation of the media with war-mongering
propaganda crafted to hypnotize the unaware to vote
people into the highest offices so that the ruling
class can best continue its imperialist agenda.
This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
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