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.