Wednesday, February 22,
2017
The
Manchurian President
A classic Hollywood political thriller may tell us more about
what's happening in America than any history book.
Frank Sinatra as Bennett Marco, Laurence Harvey as Raymond Shaw
(center), and Khigh Dhiegh as Dr. Yen Lo in a scene from the 1962 suspense
drama The Manchurian Candidate. (Photo: John Springer
Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
As the Trump presidency unravels, unraveling the country along
with it, there is no real political antecedent, no lessons from American
history on which to draw and provide guidance. We are in entirely uncharted
waters.
But there is an antecedent in our popular culture that provides
a prism through which to view the contemporary calamity, especially the alleged
collusion between Trump’s henchmen and Russian intelligence to deny Hillary
Clinton the presidency. I am not the first observer who has noted the relevance of the movie The Manchurian
Candidate. But the relevance is more than skin or celluloid
deep. It goes to the very heart of this bizarre and frightening political
moment.
First, the fact that this implausibly plotted Hollywood thriller
could now be applied, not altogether implausibly, to a sitting American
president demonstrates just how far off the rails this country has gone.
Outlandish plots suddenly seem credible, and not just to conspiracy theorists.
It isn’t just the possibility that we had a Manchurian candidate
for the presidency. It is the possibility that we now have a Manchurian
president, a Manchurian Congress and a Manchurian government.
Second, and perhaps more significantly, the film demonstrates
not only how much our narrative bearings have been lost but also our political
and moral bearings, and how an admittedly paranoid movie may actually be
insufficiently paranoid when it comes to our new reality. It isn’t just the
possibility that we had a Manchurian candidate for the presidency. It is the
possibility that we now have a Manchurian president, a Manchurian Congress and
a Manchurian government.
The 1962 movie, directed by John Frankenheimer and
written by George Axelrod based on Richard Condon’s best-selling political potboiler, stars Frank
Sinatra as Major Bennett Marco, an army intelligence officer posted with a
platoon that withstands a fierce firefight during the Korean War. The platoon
leader, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey, returns to the States and
to a Congressional Medal of Honor awarded for his valor in saving all but two
of his men.
It just so happens that Shaw is the son of a politically
ambitious Lady Macbeth (Angela Lansbury) and the stepson of an opportunistic,
alcohol-addled Joe McCarthy clone named John Iselin (James Gregory), a US
senator who is angling for the presidency and for whom Raymond’s medal is a
boon.
But something is amiss. Marco and the other survivors of the
firefight are wracked by terrifying nightmares in which Raymond kills the two
soldiers who had supposedly died in battle. Marco is determined to find out
why.
It turns out that the platoon had not fended off the communist
attack. They had been captured, brainwashed by a Chinese-Russian cabal
and then released so that Raymond, who is now both a war hero and a programmed
assassin, can assist the Russians in getting their man into the American
presidency without anyone the wiser. Their man is Johnny Iselin.
In assessing how this old movie speaks to the current moment,
let’s begin with the surrealism. Implausible as the movie may seem, the
behavior of Trump as candidate and now as president is even more improbable. In
the movie, the Russians and their American helpers must, of course, act
surreptitiously. After all, the United States isn’t going to let a communist
stooge into the White House.
In fact, the conspirators also know they must act as fevered
anti-communists — the Red Scare and McCarthyism being the Trojan Horses they
can use to smuggle their way into control of the country. (A movie with a
clearly liberal bent, it shows liberals as the true defenders of American
democracy and the true enemies of the communists.)
This seems dated, right? When the
film was remade by Jonathan Demme in 2004 with Denzel
Washington in Sinatra’s role, the villains weren’t Russians, but corporate
oligarchs. But as we now know from our own real-life version, the Russians are
still villainous, and may not have required a complicated plot with a
brainwashed assassin to undo American democracy. They just needed political
hacks to collude with them to sabotage the Hillary Clinton campaign in what is
arguably the biggest political scandal of our lifetime. Then, whether as
payback for their help or just out of his affinity for bullies, Trump openly
declared, and continues to declare, his admiration for Putin and his eagerness
to work with him.
Imagine that in an American film: a candidate’s
staff cooperates with Russian intelligence to sabotage his opponent, and then,
once he’s president, openly embraces and even celebrates Russian adventurism
and violence in what can only be a quid pro quo.
Again, this is in plain sight, no sleight-of-hand or subterfuge
necessary, as if Russian repression and its autocratic, anti-democratic
behavior were just a small difference of opinion between two allies. Now
imagine that in an American film: a candidate’s staff
cooperates with Russian intelligence to sabotage his opponent, and then, once
he’s president, openly embraces and even celebrates Russian adventurism and
violence in what can only be a quid pro quo. Then, for good
measure, throw in the assistance of the FBI to lacerate your opponent while
covering up news of your Russian contacts. You wouldn’t have believed it for a
second. And yet, here we are.
I called it surreal, but it is beyond surreal. It out-Hollywoods
Hollywood.
There’s second way in which the film refracts American politics,
by how so much of the conservative political establishment has instantly
reversed course without so much as batting an eye. The modern Republican Party
was built largely on professions of reckless anti-communism. Though there were
courageous moderate Republicans like Sen. Ralph Flanders (R-VT), who led the
attack on McCarthy, McCarthyism was one of the primary engines by which
Republicans undermined Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy and won public approval by
conflating liberalism with America’s enemies. This conflation is deep in
Republican bones, so much so that when Raymond’s spiderish mother says that a
liberal senator stands on the side of “evil,” she might be speaking for the
last two generations of Republicans.
Although over the last decades it often has been difficult to
discern whether Republicans were more opposed to liberalism than
authoritarianism, in the last few months they have clearly recalibrated to make
it clear that they are. The movie seems to have anticipated this. In The
Manchurian Candidate, it isn’t really communism and its undemocratic
values that the conservatives abhor. It is democratic values
they don’t seem to like very much. (Raymond’s mother promises that when her
husband becomes president, there will be Draconian measures that will make
“martial law seem like anarchy,” which is something you can, unfortunately,
imagine Trump doing in response to a terrorist attack he seems intent on
provoking.)
They want power, and they don’t seem too choosy as to how they
get it. As the film’s liberal senator snarls to Raymond’s mother about her
husband, “There are people who think of Johnny as a clown and a buffoon, but I
do not… I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more
to harm this country than he’s doing now.” Sadly, that, too, sounds relevant
today.
The spectacle of the Republican Party standing idly by while its
candidate consorts with our Russian enemies and then, as president, kowtows
before them is hypocrisy and worse. Just imagine what they would have said if
Obama had kissed Putin’s ring. It makes you wonder whether the attraction of
authoritarianism to authoritarianism, of Republicanism to Putinism, is so
powerful that democracy cannot possibly withstand it. Granted, few ever accuse
the modern Republican Party of having principles. But its silence in the face
of Russian intrigue makes you wonder whether the GOP welcomes the Russian
dust-up as a useful distraction from its own efforts to dismantle the welfare
state and undermine a more robust democracy. Not too many people would have
even considered that possibility before Trump, but now? The Manchurian
Candidate almost seems like prophecy.
In the film, the candidate doesn’t become president, and there
doesn’t seem to be much of a groundswell to get him there. It presumes a
political establishment that Iselin must penetrate to ascend, beginning with
his scheming his way into the vice presidential nomination. That is why the
Russians must program Raymond to kill the presidential nominee and bring Iselin
to the top of the ticket, though the scare in the film is that if Raymond,
coming to his senses, didn’t finally swerve the rifle from the nominee to his
own stepfather, the United States would be a Russian puppet state.
This is hardly a reassuring view of politics, though this is,
after all, just a movie. And yet, gloomy as the film is, it is optimistic
compared to our current situation. In America today, there is no political
establishment to oppose Trump, only feckless Democrats. The Republicans, aside
from a few voices like John McCain’s and Lindsey Graham’s, seem in lockstep
with his Russia love, their historical anti-communism notwithstanding.
That means ordinary Republicans too. Trump may appeal to only 35
percent of Americans, but those 35 percent are the rank-and-file of the
Republican Party, which now has a monopoly on government. And they don’t seem
to be terribly lathered by Trump’s Russia love either. In fact, polls show Republicans’ views of Russia more
closely resemble those of Russians themselves than of their fellow Americans.
Something has gone so terribly wrong in America that The
Manchurian Candidate seems more like a docudrama than an absurd
thriller. An American government possibly controlled by a Russian puppet, a
major political party turning a blind eye to what may be treasonous conduct, an
FBI that cooperated by refusing to sound the alarm and the majority of the
American people helpless to do anything about it. That’s not Hollywood anymore,
that’s Washington.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 4.0 License.
Neal Gabler is
an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book
Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA
Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow
at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently
writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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