New Age Paranoia
Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate effectively updates John
Frankenheimer's classic 1962 Cold War conspiracy thriller - with Gulf rather
than Korean War veterans brainwashed into becoming political moles and
assassins by corporate, not Russian, agents. Given the present 'War on
Terror' and the better-understood amoral criminality of the
military-industrial complex (as well as the prevalence of government via
mythology, mystification and spin), these revisions seem appropriate - as do
the science-fictional (but only just!) electronic surgical implants
replacing good old-fashioned behavioural conditioning. The unfolding plot
(in both senses) shows the Army bureaucrat (Denzel Washington in Frank
Sinatra's role) and Vice Presidential candidate (Liev Shrieber for Laurence
Harvey) gradually resisting their 'Gulf War Syndrome' zombification amid
manipulation by Shreiber's Senator mother (Meryl Streep) and sundry
political, big business and media masterminds, crooks, lobbyists, lackeys
and lickspittles.
However, while the new denouement is very neat, we lose much of the
political sharpness of the source novel by Richard Condon,* wherein
McCarthyism succeeded thanks to Soviet plotters who found it thoroughly
congenial to their authoritarian aims - a fascinating, if muddled, attempt
to disentangle the contradictions of right-wing politics. Unfortunately, the
supposedly liberal-left Demme substitutes benign intelligence agencies which
only ever use dirty tricks to foil the multinational menace (I kid you not!)
and honourable patriotic Party patricians who have fought corporate takeover
for years (yeah, right ...).
Conspiracies have long been fertile territory for cinema - where the
close-up simulation of intimacy renders historical phenomena in individual
terms. Action films hysterically mobilise adolescent masculinist muscle in
desperate response, whereas at least political thrillers sense the world's
complexity. And given that paranoia represents the psychotic underbelly of
individualism, parapolitics likewise seductively suggests that humanity's
ills result from the hidden agendas of evil elites. Of course the latter
exist, and create havoc. But the more difficult truth - that domination is
sedimented into the routine material of institutions, discourses, bodies,
societies and economies - remains opaque to mainstream media, culture and
politics. Both Manchurian Candidates aspire to stir up the murky
depths. In their different ways, both fail enjoyably.
* author of Winter Kills - which similarly smuggled unusually
interesting political speculation into Hollywood (dir. William Richert,
1979).
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