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The Manchurian Candidate

15 November 2004
Filed under Film and Television, Politics, Text

Manchurian Candidate logoWhen I was in New York in June, billboards for the new Manchurian Candidate were going up all over town. I remember thinking that it was a timely remake, and an interesting fictional parallel to another film that was about to be released, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. The film only made it onto Australian screens a couple of weeks ago, and last night (after some persistent projection problems that resulted in free tickets being given to the entire audience), we finally got to see it.

My overwhelming feeling was that in the light of the obvious impropriety at the heart of American politics these days, the film's premise - that Raymond Prentice Shaw, vice-presidential candidate for a carefully unnamed major political party, has been elevated to his position because his old army platoon has been brainwashed into believing that he single-handedly defended them against the enemy and led them through the Kuwaiti desert to safety - is comparably tame. Maybe in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the idea of having a 'sleeper' in the White House was horrifying; these days people are, quite sensibly, more intent upon unraveling the conscious manipulations of democracy by big money than subscribing to paranoid brainwashing scenarios.

To a small extent, this shift in the way we perceive the possibilities for corruption at the highest level has been addressed by the filmmakers, who have re-written the communists of the original as an all-powerful corporation, Manchurian Global, which has a Halliburton-esque profile of political infiltration and war profiteering. The brave (and, I'd suggest, logical) extension of this altered setting would have been to acknowledge that in these greedy times, money itself is as powerful an agent for mind-control as brain-implanted microchips; instead, the arch-manipulator is Mom (Meryl Streep at her most fabulously awful), and the somewhat unsatisfying driving force behind the murder and mayhem her thirst for Raymond's personal advancement.

These days I prefer my politics straight up.

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