Alan West-Durán looks at a classic film of Cold War paranoia, The Manchurian Candidate, and dissects a quintessential American fear: the fear of ideology. The obsession with Communist (or Fascist) brain-washing is a fear of self-loss; a fear of zombification, and there lies its paradox. There is only one way to escape ideology, and that is its excess.
“Paranoia is having all the facts.”
—William Burroughs
“I was sitting in a room and Angela Lansbury turned over a Queen of Diamonds.”
—John McCain (on why he changed
his mind and decided to run
for president after 1996)—
Now that Cuba seems to be finally exiting the Cold War, we can’t forget that Korea is still immersed in its grip. Korea was the first major “hot” war of the Cold War (1950-1953) and it cost over two million military and civilian lives, aside from the devastation of cities and towns, especially in the North. However, once the fighting ceased, a curious phenomenon arose that defined some of the ideological battles and fears of the time. In September of 1953, twenty-three American POWS were released, and as they made their way towards the repatriation compound, they began to intone the Internationale and stated in a press release that “they love their country and some day will return— when the American people have achieved freedom.” Their behavior caused not only consternation, but outrage, to be followed by concern in the U.S. press about the “propaganda power of Communism” and the nefarious effects of “brainwashing”. Twenty-one of the original twenty-three chose to remain in China.
Nothing reminds me of those events as much as The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film, considered part of his paranoia trilogy that includes Seven Days in May (1964) and Seconds (1966), the latter two excellent films as well. Frakenheimer brilliantly features political deception, cynicism, and shocking violence, as it combines naturalistic details, dark humor, surreal images, the eeriness of sci-fi, all with the relentless rhythm of a political thriller. The plot centers around Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who returns from the Korean War with a Congressional Medal of Honor, and Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), one of the members of his platoon. Shaw is a decorated war hero with a visceral dislike for his mother (Angela Lansbury) and his stepfather (James Gregory), who is a Joe McCarthy-type senator with presidential ambitions. Both of them want to use Shaw’s war hero credentials for their political advancement. Captain Marco, on the other hand, is suffering from terrible nightmares that go back to the time when he, Shaw and seven others from their group were POWs.
Marco’s nightmare, of course, is one of the most memorable scenes in film history. The soldiers, in uniform, are waiting out a rainstorm in a New Jersey hotel lobby, where a ladies garden club meeting is taking place. The camera moves around while the matronly speaker delivers a lecture on hydrangeas, and we see all the ladies in flowery dresses, with the soldiers —including Raymond and Marco— behind them. As the camera passes the half way mark in a 360 degree shot, we find the ladies have become Chinese and Soviet officials in an auditorium, and the lecturer has become a Chinese scientist, Yen Lo (Khigh Diegh), from the Pavlov Institute, flanked by two huge portraits of Stalin and Mao Zedong. He explains that the American POWs have been “brainwashed”. The officials ask Yen Lo to prove the success of their experiment and he obliges: he orders Shaw to strangle Ed Mavole, one of the American soldiers, which he does while the other POWs sit idly by or yawn.
Marco wakes up from his dream in a cold sweat. Except, as we find out later, that this was no dream. Another of the POWs, Al Melvin, an African-American, has the same dream, the only difference being that Shaw shoots another POW (Bobby Lembeck) and the ladies in the garden club are black. The news of Melvin’s dream sets Marco on a troubling investigation about the nature of his own, and what really lies behind these disturbing images. In The Manchurian Candidate nothing is at it seems: Shaw is not a war hero, Marco does not have a firm grip on things, Shaw’s mother is not a right-wing patriot, Shaw’s house servant is a North Korean spy, rabid anti-communists turn out to be communists. Not surprisingly, with so many levels of deception in the film, it has often been described as a classic case of Cold War paranoia. This paranoia never tired of discovering plots or conspiracies, threats of “communist infiltration.”
This threat to the body politic was often described as an “infection” or “virus” and efforts to contain it an act of immunization. In the film, ideological otherness (communism, the red peril) is linked to ethnic/racial otherness (orientalist cruelty, evil, the yellow peril) since Yen Lo is Chinese. (The actor was actually Egyptian, which is no stranger than having Henry Silva, a Puerto Rican, play the deceitful Chunjin, a Korean house servant). At one point Marco says of Yen Lo: “I can see that Chinese cat smiling like Fu Manchu.”
In his celebrated essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), Richard Hofstadter compares personal and political paranoids as such: “both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression”. While the psychotic sees conspiracies and hostility directed against their self as individual, “the political paranoid finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not only himself alone but millions of others”. In American politics the paranoid style has been more prominent among the right, but Communist systems have been no stranger to this style, either: witness Stalin’s obsession with plots to overthrow him, or Mao (Lin Biao’s “intended coup”), not to mention Pol Pot’s murderous suspicion of anything Western. Cultural historians of the 1950s often speak about a “culture of paranoia” or a “culture of conspiracy”, both driven by Cold War imperatives of fighting communism.
In the Richard Condon novel (1959), when Yen Lo is explaining the success of the “brainwashing” he states unequivocally: “[T]he psychotic group known as paranoiacs had always provided us with great leaders of the world and always would. This was a clinical, historical fact. With their dedicated sense of historical mission (a condition that has been allowed to become tainted semantically, he pointed out, with the psychiatric label of megalomania), with their innate ability to falsify hampering conditions of the past to prevent unwanted distortion of the future, with that relentless protective cunning that places the whole world, in revolving turn, into position as their enemies, paranoiacs simply had to be placed in the elite stock of any leader pool.”
In the film the character who epitomizes the paranoid style is Senator Iselin, the McCarthyite senator (Raymond’s stepfather), who is seen denouncing the number of communists in the U.S. government. He is often played for laughs as he cannot agree on the number of communists to be outed, but finds the figure inadvertently when he picks up a bottle of Heinz ketchup (57), and later, when at a costume party he dresses up as Lincoln. But Shaw is also a paranoid, and so is Marco; the former for both family reasons and his conditioning by his Communist captors, the latter because his dreams start him questioning what really happened to their platoon in Korea (and Manchuria). It is thanks to Marco’s tenacity in pursuing the issue that some elements of the identity and political puzzle are solved, although this is not a film with a happy ending.
Eventually, Marco figures out that Shaw has been programmed for a mission but doesn’t know its nature. Using a deck of cards, Marco is able to de-program Shaw enough to derail the original mission, which is the assassination of a presidential candidate so that Iselin, his running mate can take over and eventually gain the White House. Instead, Shaw shoots Iselin and then his mother with a high-powered rifle before turning the weapon on himself. Shaw, in a perverse way, has become the hero by eliminating “the threat” (Iselin and his mother, who turns out is a Communist agent). But what kind of hero is he? He has killed two of his fellow soldiers, been manipulated into believing that he has won The Medal of Honor, murdered his boss at the newspaper he works for, gunned down a Senator (the father of his girlfriend become wife); then he murders his wife, and finally assassinates his stepfather and mother. Seven violent deaths before he takes his own life.
Beneath (or along with?) the paranoia in the film is a lethal amount of violence, and not all of it is physical. There is psychological, mental, emotional, and spiritual violence, not to mention the looking glass world of intrigue and deception where our notion of reality seems to be violated as well. Raymond Shaw is both hero and villain, not unlike Oedipus, and the film is drenched in Oedipal angst, and is a Freudian’s wet dream. Aside from the trauma of combat, Shaw has a tormented relationship with his mother (who abused him, but it is unclear whether sexually, although the kiss she gives Raymond suggests an incestuous bond). The novel is more revealing: Raymond’s mother had an incestuous relationship with her own father and is addicted to heroin as well. In any event, Raymond has undergone what the shrink lit refers to as “soul murder”, first by way of the crushing upbringing by his mother, then at the hands of his Communist brain engineers.
Many have commented on the film’s Momism, a term coined by Philip Wylie referring to the destructive aspects of male child rearing by overindulgent mothers that led to the “feminization of the American male”. During the Cold War this Momism was seen to have been a key factor in America’s weakness in fighting Communism. Momism was offered as an explanation for the choice of the POWs who remained in China instead of returning to the US. The ideological battle began at home. As Rebecca Bell Metereau states: “Hatred of the feminine resides at the emotional core of the film, and at a more profound level rests fear and hatred of the feminized male.” So not only does Raymond’s mother emasculate him emotionally she also turns out to be secretly working for the Commies: the betrayal and destruction is double, personal and ideological.
The film indulges the Oedipal structure of an unresolved attachment by males to their mothers as a cause for homosexuality and Raymond’s passivity and remoteness furthers these associations. It is easy to forget that along with the red scare, the McCarthy period also had its lavender scare, and the persecution of homosexuals was seen as part of the ideological struggle in rooting out all types of “deviation”, be it political, personal, social, or sexual. The Communist world was no stranger to deviation, either, seen in either political purges, show trials, persecution of “decadent” and “bourgeois” behavior, the uncovering of CIA plots (some real, others fabricated), and a strict adherence to traditional family mores.
The “brainwashing scare” of the fifties not only spoke to a fear of Communist influence, but wider issues of conformity and loss of personal autonomy. In an increasingly industrial and structured society there was the fear of loss of self, anxiety, a lack of spontaneity, of being subjected to outside forces. Hence terms arose like “the manipulated consumer” (Packard), “the organization man” (Whyte), “the cogs in the corporate machine” (C.W. Mills), “the hapless specimen of other-directedness” (Riesman) and “one dimensional man” (Marcuse). Richard Condon spoke of Americans being submitted to “unrelenting conditioning to violence” which not only included war, but crime, relentless advertising, “the brutality of popular culture” and the deceptions of government and politicians.
This might allow us to see the Cold War fifties in another light: that perhaps some of the inner dangers and failures of U.S. society were projected onto the Communist enemy, not the other way around. Many critics have argued that director Frakenheimer was condemning two types of extremism, left and right, and sardonically showing how they can sometimes mirror each other. Louis Menand says the following: “It is not, in Condon’s vision, the Communist world on one side and the free world on the other. It is just the manipulators and the manipulated, the conditioners and the conditioned, the publicists and the public.” But Frakenheimer’s film is not apolitical, it is the work of a Cold War liberal, both resolutely anti-Communist and vehemently anti-right wing, and spoofs the paranoid elements of both, though clearly its focus is on the U.S.
The Manchurian Candidate did not do well at the box office. It opened, unbelievably, on October 24, 1962, in Dallas, of all places, where 13 months later President Kennedy would be assassinated. With the world holding its collective breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Hollywood film about Communist “brainwashing” and political assassination might seem almost trivial, but the film eventually became a “cult classic” and has continued to attract the interests of viewers and scholars, as well as a remake in 2004 with Denzel Washington (but no longer with the Korean War and Communism as the context). The film’s mood of Cold War paranoia certainly resonates with the tensions between the U.S. and Cuba, and, of course, the USSR. A year and a half earlier the U.S. attempted to overthrow the government through the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, opening the way for the introduction of Soviet missiles and the ensuing crisis. Nothing in the 15-year history of the Cold War up to that moment brought the world as close to the unthinkable: mutual nuclear annihilation (also referred to as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD).
Because of the theme of presidential assassination, the film is often seen as prophetic; soon after not only will Kennedy be shot, but then Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, and later attempts at Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Amazingly, at the time of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, director Frankenheimer was making a documentary on his campaign, and was originally supposed to appear alongside him at Kennedy’s acceptance speech, but the campaign decided against it. If Frankenheimer had done so, he would have likely taken a bullet from Sirhan Sirhan as well.
Missing in the analysis of presidential assassinations is the U.S. obsession with killing Fidel Castro, with some of the attempts (exploding cigars, making his beard fall out, contracting the Mafia) as fantastic as some of the plot twists in The Manchurian Candidate. A British Channel 4 documentary titled 638 Ways to Kill Castro (2006) documents some of the attempts, many hatched by the CIA. For a while, it was even rumored that Lee Harvey Oswald had been used by the Cubans to assassinate Kennedy as payback for all the attempts on Fidel’s life (false, of course). Fidel himself, in a moment of anti-imperialist and mischievous glee has stated: “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the Gold Medal.” Indeed.
Is the Manchurian Candidate the first openly ideological zombie film? I say openly, because other films, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), do so allegorically. Shaw, in a sense, is like a zombie in that he seems to have had his soul taken over, first by his mother and then his masters who have “brainwashed” him. Actually, he is better than the classical movie zombie because he follows orders; he is not an out of control killer, but one who does so only when triggered (the Queen of Diamonds playing card). However, the act of brainwashing hardly applies to him; he has been programmed. If he had been truly brainwashed, he would be a true believer, that is, a real, committed communist and performed his mission consciously and without needing to be hypnotized. Are zombies a new political category, or proof that political thought has been in a deep freeze for a while?
A new sci-fi show, programmed to air in the summer of 2016 takes place in Washington and is described as follows: “The government has stopped working and alien spawns have come to earth and eaten the brains of a growing number of congressmen and Hill staffers.” The series is called, appropriately, “Brain Dead.” Not a bad description of the Cold War brain, which almost led us to nuclear annihilation. To a degree, all of us Cold War survivors were intensely conditioned and manipulated, though not as severely as Raymond Shaw. This brain has persisted under a new guise, one that is now out in the open since zombies’ rotting flesh are a dead giveaway as to their condition. Raymond Shaw might have lost his soul (and mind) but physically he remained intact. In Manchurian Candidate terms, sometimes the deck is stacked. The question is: how do you resist when the Queen of Diamonds turns up?