Flak Magazine: Review of The Manchurian Candidate, 08.11.04

A far cry from the group hug of the Democratic National Convention, there was a time when John Kerry was thought of as an uneasy presence by the hardcore left: ties to several special interests, more corporate money than almost any other Democrat, a somewhat unexceptional Senate record for such a long-serving senator and a history of Clintonian pandering. This is the subtext of Dean's "I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" comment: He was saying that he, not Kerry, really represents the party's interests.

Kerry's speeches are famously meandering, as if his digressions really do venture through every position possible on a given issue … except, of course, when he speaks of Vietnam. He mustered some passion in the week before the Iowa primary by bringing his band of brothers to the forefront, implying to Democrats that his war record inoculated the left from assaults on their "will." Kerry's convictions, whatever they may have been, mattered far less than his ability to beat Bush. A resurrected Kerry paraded through the primaries on a platform of "electability," his corporate and special-interest ties largely forgotten in the glare of his war medals.

The convention did nothing to dissuade voters that Kerry's war record was central to his nomination, and the Republican National Convention will probably remind us that Kerry's Senate record is largely undistinguished. To be fair, Kerry has been an effective investigator: Working with John McCain to re-establish diplomatic ties with Vietnam, prosecuting the Saudi-terrorist-linked financial corporation BCCI and helping unravel the maze of Iran-Contra allegations. Still, Kerry's moderate voting record and relationships with special interests are the kernels of truth from which the slogan "flip-flop" springs, that internal struggle between his leftist ideals and the corporate money and party politics fueling his presidential ambition. Jonathan Demme's remake of the John Frankenheimer classic The Manchurian Candidate, opening on the heels of the Kerry convention, seems like an allegory for the candidate himself. It's also a reminder that to many liberals, he's not quite one of us — in Demme's movie, corporations have taken over for the Communists, fabricating a war-hero narrative and drilling holes in the candidate's head.

Liev Schreiber plays Raymond Shaw, a candidate of privilege who is very uncomfortable in his own skin. The film opens during the Gulf War with a convoy of soldiers playing poker in a truck, with Raymond obviously outside the group. In fact, it's very difficult to tell what exactly happens because the action is filmed as it was often broadcast during the Gulf War — through the green glow of night vision, by the light of gunfire flashes or by some dim light through crosshairs. Demme's movie is a flashback seen through the eyes of a sufferer of Gulf War syndrome. Guns fire, people die and the next thing we know, victory is declared, medals are handed out and everyone goes home. But not everyone goes home well.

Raymond's mother, Sen. Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep), is the Hillary Clinton figure, right down to her agressive pantsuits. Streep plays Eleanor as a Republican nightmare of Hillary, the smoky-room shrew hypocritically glad-handing the hoi polloi. Knowing that she's too much of a lightning rod to be a viable candidate herself, Eleanor bullies the party brass (including Jon Voight as the presidential nominee Thomas Jordan, a conservative Democrat of the Joe Lieberman type) into nominating her son for the vice presidential slot on the Democratic ticket. She's trying to fit a populist suit on a silver-spoon candidate, and the only way to make the sale is with a war record in which the candidate unmistakably, physically fights alongside the common man. Demme's film works out the director's cynicism with the political process: He frames Shaw's convention speeches in front of giant video screens with blinding artificial light, an electronic flag waving in the background, responded to with seemingly piped-in canned cheers from the crowd. Demme's vision of the Jordan/Shaw convention is a little too kinetic; it's more like an epilepsy-inducing NBA arena than the actual convention, with its smoother, Spielberg-directed video presentations.

The rest of the movie follows Ben Marco (Denzel Washington), who senses that something isn't right about his platoon-mate Shaw. He's not the only one; Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright), another platoon member, has been reduced to a mumbling mess, even confronting Shaw after a speech he gives at a school. Marco, picking up the scent, tries to investigate, following Shaw around the country. The more Marco learns about the truth surrounding the candidate, the more confused he gets. The reality of what happened in the war is intruded upon by the candidate's image as a crusading everyman. The spin begins to dominate all else; it's so pervasive that it eventually pushes the less savory reality of privilege aside. But inside Marco's mind, he still knows that the image and facts don't mesh. Washington, best known for his tough-guy roles, plays Marco as a fragile, confused, self-doubting paranoiac. When he finally does break down, it's in Times Square — the media onslaught fells him when bullets never could. It's as if Marco represents some sort of informed everyvoter: We know that this politician has a dark past, we know that he's programmed by special interests, we know that he's part of the political machine. And yet … if everyone else is buying it, then I must be the one who's crazy.

Writing on the remake, David Denby says the original was a brilliant satire of paranoia, whereas the dead-serious tone of this movie makes it just paranoia. Demme probably wouldn't take this as an insult — the only rational characters in the movie are the paranoid minorities. Are politicians, once threshed in the Washington machine, brainwashed corporate cyborgs who pander for particular ethnic votes? What evidence has Congress or the current president offered to the contrary? Why shouldn't black men like Marco and Melvin feel like their government isn't telling them everything? Demme argues these points in his direction. He mixes the video-game syntax of the Gulf War coverage with a hallucinatory visual quality he equates with Gulf War syndrome. The result is a blurred, barely comprehensible mish-mash of the sounds and images of postmodern politics. In this world, mad scientists perform human experiments like Buffalo Bill in Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, except that the victim ends up being democracy itself. This may be a little paranoid if one accepts Demme's vision at face value, and it certainly comes off as the work of a self-hating Democrat. Demme's a Democrat, no doubt — the smoke from Iraqi oil fires glows as red as blood in the opening frames — but one deeply distrustful of his own party. More simply put: This is the work of a Dean supporter.

The Manchurian Candidate won't have the political immediacy of Fahrenheit 9/11 or even Wag the Dog because the parallels to real-world events aren't as obvious. And besides, perhaps there's not as much reason to be paranoid; after all, according to Richard Clarke, it turns out that Bill Clinton really was fighting Al Qaeda with those missile strikes in Bosnia during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Still, there's no denying that the body politic's general apathy about anything other than Kerry's war record turned out to be accurately predicted by the movie; in other words, John Kerry is the Manchurian Democrat. Hell, at one point in Demme's movie Shaw is even referred to as "the real deal." That the left is so unified behind Kerry is a testament to their will to unseat Bush, but it should not be forgotten that if Kerry is elected in November, there will be a cold war for the heart of the Democratic party. Demme's metaphor is still apt: Without the medals to hide behind, the souless, corporate-programmed cyborg president will no longer be able to dodge questions of conviction. Will he be undone by minorities who feel like they've been lied to? Will he collapse under the pressure of party establishment to present an "electable" image? Will his soft line toward corporate greed revive the flip-flop charge? Will the Kerry presidency be like one big Iraq War-induced hallucination, the American people all with chips implanted in our shoulders, believing that hope is indeed on the way? Maybe John Kerry will shed his Manchurian facade and re-earn those medals, but Jonathan Demme won't be banking on it.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)