Film Class IV: The Manchurian Candidate

The 1962 Manchurian Candidate is a new addition to my film roster.  It found its way into the curriculum because of the two directions I am following in the course.  One is a technological theme, kicked off by Modern Times (1936), usually the first film I show to students.

I continued with The Truman Show (1998), a film less about the problems of factory dehumanization than about the degradation of television watching.  Industrialization’s assembly line, is a sense, has been replaced by the service economy’s version of it.  Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp and Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank are innocent creatures trying to find meaning and happiness in their respective oppressive environments.

My other approach with The Truman Show concerns a person involved in a situation whence the truth about the world is unknown to him.  In this case, Truman is the subject of a reality show in which everyone around him is an actor.  The Matrix (1999), which came out around the same time, presents the inverse of The Truman Show’s world in which very few people know their world is not real.

My next two films extend this latter concept to the audience’s relation to a film.  We do not know in Psycho (1960) who the real murderer is; in fact, the film consciously deceives the audience, better, allows us to make assumptions about what we are hearing and seeing.  When we learn who or what Norman Bates is, our perspective on what we have seen completely changes. 

My next film uses a similar ploy is used when, at the end of Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), we learn that Edward G. Robinson’s character has been dreaming.  It is one of the most controversial endings in film history.  Some see it as a cop out, Robinson waking up just after he has, in the dream, taken an overdose of drugs and is dying.  My students generally haven’t liked it either.  But I try to tell them that the film challenges many movie conventions, as well as the way we watch a film.

When they see the first scenes of The Manchurian Candidate, the previous film still in their heads, they are disoriented and want to know is what they are seeing real or not.  Is it an hallucination or a dream?  Younger viewers want certainty and want it quickly.  The film’s contexts – the Korean War, The Cold War, and McCarthyism – make it difficult enough for them to follow the film.  They must be patient.

The first sequence shows an army squad captured by the Chinese.  They are taken prisoner for four days and released.  During that time, a Chinese scientist, Dr Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh) has brainwashed the soldiers for as yet an unknown purpose.  The squad’s commander, Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra), has the first flashback.

The men are sitting across a stage in relaxed positions.  The first part of the memory or hallucination has Marco imagining a woman lecturing to a room of women about hydrangeas.  As the camera pans the room, a few incongruities appear, one of the first being a woman smoking a cigarette in an ornate holder.  Finally, we see the room full of Chinese and Soviet Russian military men.

The doctor explains what has been done with the squad, demonstrating how throughly conditioned they are.  One soldier, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Lawrence Harvey), is the direct object of the entire exercise.  To prove that he has been brainwashed (even “dry cleaned” adds the doctor), Lo has the Sergeant shoot two of the men.

The brainwashing of American prisoners by the Communists during the Korean War has spooked the American public for a while.  The Manchurian Candidate depends on this psychological method to advance its plot, regardless of the reality of its use by the Chinese.  It also serves to connect to a larger issue: the manipulation of the public mind. 

While the soldiers are sitting before the Communist officials, a soldier is smoking a cigarette made of yak dung.  Dr. Lo comments: “Tastes like a cigarette should.”  The paraphrasing of the Winston slogan: “Tastes good like a cigarette should” suggests another form of brainwashing, advertising, that is an accepted manipulative method for making people want and want to do things.

The subsequent plot to put a communist agent in the White House will depend on specific actions and words taking place on television.  Mrs. Iselin says that at the key moment they will rally “a nation of television viewers to hysteria.”  This theme nearly makes The Manchurian Candidate a nominee for my “films about television”, much like The Candidate (1972) and A Face in the Crowd (1957), especially the latter.  In Face in the Crowd, the manipulative menace is advertising/fascism, with an American public primed for manipulation, though a bit less hysterically.

Another premise of the film, one underlying its “manipulation” theme, is that Americans have become weak, presumably from watching television and becoming a consumer culture.  Raymond Shaw, Ben Marco, and Corporal Allen Melvin (James Edwards) represent this weakness.  Raymond Shaw above the others.  His weakness grows out or, perhaps better put, is exacerbated by his mother’s (Angela Lansbury) dominance over him.  He despises her, her political views, and her husband, his stepfather, Johnny Iselin (James Gregory).  Raymond verbally abuses her and Johnny, he purposely lives in New York away from them, but he can’t help bending himself to his mother’s will.

Johhny Iselin is a cartoonish McCarthy figure, a drunken idiot dominated completely by his wife, Raymond’s mother.  She plans his media events and is trying to pave his way to being the Vice-Presidential nominee in the coming election.  The film’s quaint premise, ultimately, is that a man who is a profound anti-communist turns out to be an agent for the Communists.  For, Mrs. Iselan is Raymond’s handler who will direct her son to shoot the Presidential nominee at the convention during the acceptance speech.

Two elements about Raymond Shaw convinced me to add Manchurian Candidate to this semester’s film list.  First is the way Raymond is referred bluntly as a “mechanism” by Dr. Lo.  Raymond has no will of his own.  The technique, as the doctorexplains it, is to erase the man’s conscience.  Without it, he will do whatever his controllers’ want.  Raymond is a killing machine, not unlike the models in the Terminator movies.  This falls in line with tmy technological theme (later in the course I will show the first Terminator and Blade Runner).

Secondly, Raymond’s relationship with his mother resembles that of Norman’s with Mrs. Bates in Psycho.  Both men are possessed by their mothers’ spirits.  At least with Raymond, we have a clear picture of the mother and don’t have to depend on hearsay, voices in heads, and a psychologist’s explanation.

If we believe the psychologist, Mrs. Bates is overbearing and dominating.  Norman becomes unhinged when she ditches him for another man, the one who induces to build the motel.  Norman kills both of them.  Raymond also kills his mother and stepfather.  He’s less broken by their remarriage than by the fact that his mother is responsible for Raymond killing his wife and father-in-law.

The key for him becoming a “mechanism”, a killer, is the words” “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”  His trance is complete when he plays the Queen of Diamonds.  Ben Marco eventually breaks the hold that the Chinese have over Raymond when he has Raymond play solitaire with a deck of cards with 52 queens of diamonds.  But Raymond’s guilt is too great for him to redeem himself.  After shooting his mother and Johnny on the Convention stage, he turns the gun on himself.  He dies as a martyr in the war for the American soul.

By comparison, Norman Bates’s fate is a more psychological suicide.  He becomes “all Mother”, perhaps because he was always infatuated with her.  He has surrendered himself to the woman he had killed many years before.

The presence of Janet Leigh in Manchurian Candidate promises to bind Psycho to Manchurian Candidate even more but this proves to be nothing but a tease, a coincidence.  She plays a woman who meets Frank Sinatra on a train from New York to Washington.  They are attracted.  She helps and consoles him in several scenes but never plays a decisive role in the movie's plot.  She may or may not be a government agent keeping an eye on Ben Marco.