803 The Manchurian Candidate

[therewillbeblus]

Great thoughts, as always, Sloper- and I revisited the film this afternoon with your reading in mind. I have a few scattered thoughts that complement your own:

Regarding the surreal moments that seem totally out of place: I love how, while brainwashed and about to kill his subordinate, Raymond continues to utter “yes ma’am” to the man commanding him, giving the scene an extra layer of fragmentation of roles and consciousness.

Also, in the first flashback of Raymond recounting his meeting of Jocelyne - her (practically-manic) joyous reaction to Raymond’s snake bite, talking about how happy her father will be while peppering in slight validation of his life-threatening predicament, is shockingly inappropriate! The scene is successful at presenting perplexing behavior for us, emulating Raymond's experience, even if it does evoke a new set of possibilities for him in approaching life through a less self-serious manner; refreshing after his awful upbringing (its own kind of negative conditioning- more on that later).

Thematically, the film's willingness to suggest the events that transpire are possible, by showing them even in a fictional film, mirrors a form of existential terrorism that can't be undone. In the first dream sequence, simply by recognizing that morality can be manipulated, the film serves as a gust of wind blowing down the stability of the belief that this quality is innate, and so morality becomes as vulnerable as a house of cards. The film doesn’t endorse nihilism, but it does reinforce the fear that John Locke was wrong and man’s goodness is not inherent to their God-given DNA; or if it is, that it can be stolen from them and thus supersede not only man’s willpower, but God’s. Of course, this is most successful as thoughts are changed, and regurgitated through verbal conditioning, while emotions continue to burst through- as would be psychologically fair to assume- but that spiritual core is fragmented. The men know somewhere deep down that this is ‘wrong’ and their moral fiber fights the intrusion. The frightening truth is that it’s not enough, and it’s unclear - both to us and to the characters - the degree to which we are truly lost, itself a catalyst for examining our fragility. The film shows how Ben can ‘remember’ and undo this violent reduction of human agency, but the idea that these actions could be successful in the first place is horrifying in its implication of the placement of mankind's Achilles heel.

As Sloper points out, Sinatra’s first meeting with Leigh is bizarre, but revealing to the mystifying psychology at play. She introduces herself as ‘Jennifer’ and then goes into an explanation about how she identifies as ‘Rosie’ which is preferable to the more “fragile” ‘Jenny’. When Ben points out the irregularity here, Rosie retorts, “it’s quite possible I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant.” These men, Rosie, America at the time, and we now, all want to believe they are securely moral, impenetrably self-actualized, and rooted in reality as masters over their selves, space, and culture; but in actuality we can and do become dissociated and are fragile in our powerlessness against external agents, in fellow mankind, macro-political movements, and enigmatic Godly forces. Not even Rosie can be sure why she called herself Jenny when she doesn't feel like a "Jenny." Ben says that he never understood what “more or less” means, and this statement grasps the ungroundedness he feels by all signifiers, including language, that marks a deviation away from the safety of concrete, lucid corporeal experience.

We as an audience are moved into a very strange position by Frankenheimer that reflects the experience of these two main soldiers, Ben and Raymond, but significantly-not as their full-surrogates. We are granted a sense of objectivity, seeing events play out in flashbacks/dreams that are from a more omniscient perspective as Raymond sits in a fugue state and we see the plans set in motion by the communists with clarity. However, we never see the conditioning happen- we are not permitted to align with the antagonists to learn the codes of their ominous practices of mind-control, which would thus help us feel Godlike, liberated with control, and armed with the capacity to liberate our protagonists (and ourselves) by proxy. No, we are kept at arm's length, and so alone from both the villains and the heroes, not wholly in simpatico with any party, left with the fear of Ben and Raymond, and the fear from the communists, linked only to the void of our own impotence of anti-mastery.

That deprivation of the secret to this horror is the most horrific move the film could make against us, the audience. We're at once abandoned from secure principles and forcibly kept in the film's erratic orbit of compelling, predictable narrative and jarring delusory information that triggers our unrest. We are afraid and lost on our own unique isolated space, dreading what has been philosophically suggested, psychologically demonstrated, and emotionally evoked in our own deep-rooted awareness of our submissive locus of control. From a purely logical standpoint, which the communists declare nonchalantly at one point, the removal of guilt and fear also remove moral fiber. The ease at which they say this, and show it to us, without any of the gradual progression of years of effort depicted, also cements an unnerving helplessness to such proficiency via segregated time. Even if the information is given to us in slices of executions over the course of an extended period of time, the medium's potential to hide any banality helps the antagonists strengthen their appearance of all-powerful, and cut us deeper through editing.

The provocations of this blurry line of "control" aren't only left only to the insoluble curiosity of the medium's omnipotence or the paranoia behind the communist collective's methods, which makes this chilling energy even less predictable since we can't resign its outlets to invisible spaces. We see with absolute sobriety that Raymond’s mother was brainwashing him into resigning his agency in his marriage to Josie long before the communists got to him! Her ability to smash his confidence and embrace his negative core belief of being “unlovable” is on equal playing field with the other reminders of our weaknesses that loosen our grips on the preferred narratives of our identity. This skill may be nebulous in essence but we can see it occur, and so the 'magical' and the 'tangible' merge with the only 'answer' of worth being the repercussions of our anguish as a result of such actions, be them on the scales of micro, macro, or cosmic.

This swarm of aggressive pressure, devolving the characters' capacity to act freely, elicits neo-noir fatalism. Especially in the last act, Raymond's failure to hold onto happiness is incredibly tragic. The most unsettling suggestion is that he isn’t even using his own strengths of character to rekindle his romance with Josie and become the man who cracks jokes, since the process of developing into this 'ideal' persona that challenges his core beliefs is all initiated by a conditioned response to Josie’s costume, completely without his consent, skills, or independent participation. How depressingly emasculating this is to his dignity and worth in one final grand gesture of life-affirming activity.

The final moments of Ben trying to grapple with his words, unsure what is truth and what are lies, as he eulogizes Raymond is yet another "more or less"-type disorientation. The film notably doesn't end with Ben smiling, walking away with Rosie toward a happy life together, but instead alone and unable to find any peace. It's possibly the most uncomfortable scene in the film, because he is only afforded the gift of termination of his agony by the fade to black; an intrusion by the medium-as-God coming in to absolve his suffering, that which he cannot do for himself. This ‘finality’ may be a caring gesture to eliminate the pain, but it is also a death sentence itself, suppressing consciousness and moving into perhaps another dream state, or worse, a permanent one.

[Altair]

Wow, what a post sloper - you just somehow perfectly encapsulated all the emotional unease of The Manchurian Candidate, The Parallax View, and Blow-up, all in one go! Although I would add that All the President's Men is somehow even more powerful, perhaps because it is based on real life, but also because it communicates the staggering, overwhelming difficulty of these two journalists trying to go up against the US government.

[Pavel]

I love All the President's Men, but I think it's not quite as powerful as Parallax because it's based on real life and because, despite overwhelming difficulty, the two journalists do succeed and make a difference in the end. What I love about Parallax is that Beatty's character never even comes close to cracking the conspiracy, and the forces at play are much larger and much more powerful than any one man. All the audience and our protagonist ever truly understand is that something is wrong and that there is, in fact, a conspiracy, and Beatty is eventually engulfed by something he cannot fathom. And all that is beautifully complemented by the cinematography. There are two types of shots — the extremely dark ones (characters and spaces completely obscured by shadows) and the extremely bright ones (frames consisting primarily of a white space), and they both serve a similar purpose, showcasing our protagonist navigating throught blank spaces, lost in a sea of information (made semi-literal in a shot where Beatty is struggling to escape an aggressive water flow, yet is barely visible; the camera foregrounds the water, with Beatty getting lost in the frame). The film is primarily told via "master shots" and Pakula frames his characters in a way that often doesn't make them important to the action. The main character is often minimized by the camera, made irrelevant to the narrative. There's rarely a scene that doesn't feature someone's face completely obfuscated by darkness until it slowly (or sometimes abruptly) illuminates, often with the revelation of new information. And yet the film ends exactly where it began — in complete darkness, with a committee of unnamed, barely-visible men telling us that there was never any conspiracy to begin with.

Wait, we were supposed to discuss The Manchurian Candidate? I don't have much to add to the previous posts. It's a great film, and all that I can think of in terms of negative aspects are some narrative contrivances and loose rules (nitpicks, really) that others elsewhere have pointed like Jocelyn showing up as a Queen of Diamonds and Shaw snapping out of the hypnosis instead of beginning to follow her every order. I like Peter Labuza's reading that the film is partially about the automation of society — not only in the mechanized Shaw and his automated responses, but in the salutes, the inexplicably hanging wires from many rooms and the usage of media ("It's not important what the VP says on television, just that it is seen as a triumphant TV moment.").
I'd also like to add that I think Demme's remake is also very good, and while my memory isn't good enough to comment in detail, I feel confident in saying that it's a remake that perfectly knows what to port over from the original and what to change. It's more immediately felt and often more emotionally potent because it's more interested in its characters as human beings than the original (not to the '62 film's detriment, of course) and it more explicitly ties the characters to PTSD. Plus, it has a very good cast, sometimes slightly expanding some very minor characters from the original's roles and letting them shine in a given scene. Wish I could be more specific, but I never wrote anything down about both movies.

[Sloper]

Sinatra’s first meeting with Leigh is bizarre, but revealing to the mystifying psychology at play. She introduces herself as ‘Jennifer’ and then goes into an explanation about how she identifies as ‘Rosie’ which is preferable to the more “fragile” ‘Jenny’. When Ben points out the irregularity here, Rosie retorts, “it’s quite possible I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant.” These men, Rosie, America at the time, and we now, all want to believe they are securely moral, impenetrably self-actualized, and rooted in reality as masters over their selves, space, and culture; but in actuality we can and do become dissociated and are fragile in our powerlessness against external agents, in fellow mankind, macro-political movements, and enigmatic Godly forces. Not even Rosie can be sure why she called herself Jenny when she doesn't feel like a "Jenny." Ben says that he never understood what “more or less” means, and this statement grasps the ungroundedness he feels by all signifiers, including language, that marks a deviation away from the safety of concrete, lucid corporeal experience.

The exchange about 'more or less' is such a great detail here - and it's so telling that this was removed from the equivalent conversation in the remake. You can just tell they looked at this and thought, 'We can't have characters debating the significance of a trivial phrase in the middle of a serious political thriller.' Also, spoiler for the remake here:

Spoiler

it's kind of boring that they make Rosie so integral to the plot, and that the ambiguity of her name ('I'm Eugenie / I'm not Jenny / I'm Rosie / I'm Eugenie Rose') becomes a clue to the fact that she is 'not all she seems'.

Like so much else in that film, it's ostensibly 'darker' than the original, but in fact much less troubling precisely because it creates a more coherent, genre-appropriate atmosphere.

Many other things you mention in your post, TWBB, reinforce this comparison. The moments when original-Raymond kills Mavole and Lembeck are less graphic than their equivalents in the remake, but much more frightening because of the cognitive dissonance between the murderer's (and victims') polite, compliant manner, and the images of a man being strangled to death or another's brains splattering on the wall. This dissonance is largely missing from the remake.

Having said that, I agree with some of Pavel’s comments about Demme’s film. In particular, Denzel Washington is a much better actor than Sinatra, and the way Ben’s PTSD is portrayed feels much more convincing – Sinatra’s eyes convey a nice sense of vulnerability at times, but in general his confidence and charm are just not suited to the character. There are moments in the remake when the performances, or the shots of characters staring directly into the camera (I guess this is a Demme trademark?), capture some of the strange terror of the original. In other ways, though, it feels like a very compromised film that plays it safe – and never really challenges the audience’s expectations or assumptions.

Although I would add that All the President's Men is somehow even more powerful, perhaps because it is based on real life, but also because it communicates the staggering, overwhelming difficulty of these two journalists trying to go up against the US government.

In response to your post and Pavel's: just over eight years ago, we had a really interesting discussion about The Parallax View, All the President's Men, and The Conversation, with some references to Klute and Antonioni thrown in here and there. The thread-split ended up being called Pakula, Coppola, and the 1970s Cinema of Paranoia - one of my favourite discussions on this forum. In short, I very much agree with your take on AtPM, except that I still think Parallax is scarier!

[In The Parallax View] there are two types of shots — the extremely dark ones (characters and spaces completely obscured by shadows) and the extremely bright ones (frames consisting primarily of a white space), and they both serve a similar purpose, showcasing our protagonist navigating throught blank spaces, lost in a sea of information (made semi-literal in a shot where Beatty is struggling to escape an aggressive water flow, yet is barely visible; the camera foregrounds the water, with Beatty getting lost in the frame). The film is primarily told via "master shots" and Pakula frames his characters in a way that often doesn't make them important to the action. The main character is often minimized by the camera, made irrelevant to the narrative. There's rarely a scene that doesn't feature someone's face completely obfuscated by darkness until it slowly (or sometimes abruptly) illuminates, often with the revelation of new information. And yet the film ends exactly where it began — in complete darkness, with a committee of unnamed, barely-visible men telling us that there was never any conspiracy to begin with.

The shots I remember most often from The Parallax View are the ones in Cronyn's office and the room where Frady hides out when he's 'Richard Paley/Parton'. They’re low-key scenes in many ways, but there’s something about the play of light and darkness in them, and the way the characters are framed in relation to each other and their context, that makes them linger in my mind. Sometimes the framing seems almost theatrically flat, with the room comfortably occupying the shot and the characters visible from head to toe. And yet it’s as if we’re not seeing the characters, or not seeing them as humans, but as components in a larger entity, positioned and manipulated in carefully prescribed ways, expressing themselves as though they are imperfect emulations of real people with real relationships. Again, you come away from these sequences feeling unsure of what you’ve actually seen – something happened in that room and you missed it, even though you saw everything.

As Frankenheimer points out in his commentary, the most typical shots in The Manchurian Candidate give more prominence to human faces, often placing one in extreme close-up in the foreground, with another somewhere behind them. One of these figures tends to be manipulating the other, or to have an ambiguous relation with them; it’s that sense of ‘relation’ between people that is the source of unease. One way or another, we find ourselves positioned in relation to other people, and anxious about the nature of that relation; unlike in Parallax, it’s people rather than structures or systems that are controlling us. But as with the structures and systems in the later film, these are not people we’re invited (or allowed) to understand or empathise with.

Sometimes this kind of shot serves to foreground the artificiality of what we’re watching, giving the film an exaggerated, confrontational, larger-than-life quality. At other times, it has an almost documentary effect, as when Raymond and his mother and stepfather are in the car and Raymond is heavily out of focus in the foreground, the handheld camera shaking as though being carried by a journalist who snuck into the passenger seat.

Frankenheimer’s commentary also talks about the mistake that led to Frank Sinatra being out of focus during the ‘de-programming’ scene, but in fact there are quite a few moments in the film where someone or something is a bit out of focus and you wonder whether they’re supposed to be. Accidental or not, these moments contribute to the blurring of boundaries between the aggressively cinematic and sometimes outright surreal elements in the film, and the parts that feel like a TV documentary (in one scene we’re actually watching a live TV news item on a screen, as it’s being filmed, while at the same time seeing Angela Lansbury brooding dramatically in the foreground).

It reminds me of the contrast between those towering close-ups of Jack D. Ripper smoking his cigar and the shaky handheld footage of the battle outside his office in Dr. Strangelove: in that case the effect is to underline the extent to which Ripper is lost in his own grandiose fantasies, completely divorced from the reality of the situation. The Manchurian Candidate is more paranoid. Those hypnotic, oversized faces give a more reliable insight into the truth than the flailing journalist’s handheld camera.

In Seconds, Frankenheimer (and cinematographer James Wong Howe) take this even further by using a handheld camera with a fish-eye lens, distorting human faces to inhuman proportions while simultaneously making us feel that we are really there in the scene, an invisible onlooker to a nightmare that is all the more terrifying because it feels so grounded.

[therewillbeblus]

Having said that, I agree with some of Pavel’s comments about Demme’s film. In particular, Denzel Washington is a much better actor than Sinatra, and the way Ben’s PTSD is portrayed feels much more convincing – Sinatra’s eyes convey a nice sense of vulnerability at times, but in general his confidence and charm are just not suited to the character. There are moments in the remake when the performances, or the shots of characters staring directly into the camera (I guess this is a Demme trademark?), capture some of the strange terror of the original. In other ways, though, it feels like a very compromised film that plays it safe – and never really challenges the audience’s expectations or assumptions.

I agree, though I suppose this is what makes Sinatra's casting perfect in my eyes. Even Sinatra, who has a reputation for contextually demanding his characters be painted with an affirming confidence to suit his image, can't completely overpower these forces or 'know' them implicitly, and suffers a subtle form of emasculation in the process. The ending really cements this for me, with Sinatra not seen riding off into the sunset, so to speak, with Leigh; but instead sits alone, broken, and attempting to grapple with his pervasive existential confusion on the implications of his (and Raymond's) powerlessness, into an empty void before the film swallows him up into said void with a fade to black. Sinatra may have played detective, 'snapped out of' his brainwashing, physically 'got the girl', but he has no more of a grasp on the philosophical insinuations that his mind was able to be assaulted in reference to both his and God's limitations, and that crisis of competence directly clashes with his confident, cool exterior- penetrating the impenetrable. He is physically alone, and in some respects, will likely continue on a fragmented person afraid of the evidence that his ideological comforts, psychological protectors, and spiritual sense of self are not entirely safe or dependable.

[Feego]

The ending really cements this for me, with Sinatra not seen riding off into the sunset, so to speak, with Leigh; but instead sits alone, broken, and attempting to grapple with his pervasive existential confusion on the implications of his (and Raymond's) powerlessness, into an empty void before the film swallows him up into said void with a fade to black. Sinatra may have played detective, 'snapped out of' his brainwashing, physically 'got the girl', but he has no more of a grasp on the philosophical insinuations that his mind was able to be assaulted in reference to both his and God's limitations, and that crisis of competence directly clashes with his confident, cool exterior- penetrating the impenetrable. He is physically alone, and in some respects, will likely continue on a fragmented person afraid of the evidence that his ideological comforts, psychological protectors, and spiritual sense of self are not entirely safe or dependable.

I read the original novel for the first time a couple of years ago, and while the 1962 movie is a pretty faithful adaptation, the few changes made are fascinating and occasionally quite significant even if they don't alter the story. Regarding the ending...

major, MAJOR spoilers for the novel below

Spoiler

The novel does indeed end with Raymond assassinating his mother and stepfather, but the reason he does so is because Ben used the full Queen of Diamonds deck not to undo Raymond's brainwashing but to reprogram him to kill them. Ben actually does his own brainwashing and walks away the victor, at least relatively speaking. He's still a badly broken man, but he finally exerts control over the situation. I imagine part of the reason for the change in the film was in concession to the Production Code, as Ben would then be a murderer, but as you say it also makes him a more interesting and complex "hero" who remains powerless.

Another spoiler below concerning Mrs. Iselin and the infamous scene in which she kisses Raymond...

Spoiler

It's of course remarkable that the film was able to get away with the mouth-to-mouth kiss between mother and son, but the film does not include the full context from the novel, which completely changes how we perceive this incident. In the film, it appears that Mrs. Iselin simply harbors sexual feelings for her son. In the novel, it's revealed early on that when she was a little girl, her father regularly had sex with her. in her innocence, she perceived this as a great act of love rather than assault, and after her father's death, she never had sexual feelings for another man. It's implied that this trauma (which she doesn't see as trauma) plays a key role in her mania as an adult, and she uses sex to get what she wants from various men because it means nothing to her. As an adult, Raymond grows to look very much like her father, which she comments on occasionally. Her seduction of Raymond goes much further than a kiss, and her reason is to relive that love she felt with her father, the only person in her life she ever loved in any capacity.

One more note of interest from the book that doesn't qualify as a spoiler. The bizarre first conversation between Ben and Rosie is taken almost verbatim from the book, although parts of it are slightly less confusing in the original text. Rosie is described as being dark-skinned, possibly of Middle Eastern descent. That's why Ben asks her if she's Arabic. Her comment about being one of the original Chinese railway builders is more tongue-and-cheek than possible code. Indeed, their conversation is still weird, with Rosie taking a seemingly unhealthy fixation to him right away and calling off her engagement. Incidentally, her fiance is not too heartbroken over it and even figures into the story. Whether or not she has some ulterior motive is left up to reader interpretation, just as in the film.

[therewillbeblus]

I never considered Rosie having an ulterior motive in the film, but I can see how her strange, cryptic presence invites such a reading. If anything, it's another reminder that Ben, or Sinatra's reflexively dominant ladies' man, has limited power over truly 'knowing' his partner. I mean, she doesn't even submit to him in a final scene and her anti-presence feels just as ominous since it's clearly working in friction against what we expect from Hollywood endings at this juncture in film history!

As for Mrs. Iselin's trauma history, that identification in your second spoilerbox to how a survivor would perceive sexual relationships is almost eerily accurate considering these psychological hypothesis on trauma weren't fleshed out until well after the novel came out, though the formulations had been made before. Your detailed account of it is fascinating, something I've experienced secondhand with many clients from children through adulthood, and makes me want to read the book if just for that exploration in a 50s time capsule.