Review of John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962)

Feeding American fears of Communist brainwashing and Sinophobia

John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate”

In Richard Condon’s Korean War novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) from which Frankenheimer’s film is adapted, the Intelligence and Reconnaissance patrol of nine soldiers, led by Major Ben Marco (Marco Polo?, played by Frank Sinatra), is first infiltrated by Chunjin, Marco’s orderly and interpreter, captured by North Koreans, transported to Manchuria, and finally brainwashed by Yen Lo. The brainwashing of the patrol members, particularly Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey, is accomplished in four short days, from July 8 through July 12, 1951. Any missing in action longer than that is likely to arouse suspicion and blow the cover for Raymond. Yet according to studies conducted in the fifties, thought reform practiced in China lasts months, if not years. Each of the three subjects in Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961) had undergone over three years of thought reform. The speeding-up of brainwashing relies on drugs and technology, but Condon never bothers to illustrate what kind of techniques is employed. In Frankenheimer’s film, the episode on brainwashing is composed of a single demonstration chaired by Yen Lo, who shows off to the Russians and Chinese the end result of his four-day program. Accordingly, the film skips the entire process of brainwashing except the demonstration, which occurs through fragmentary recalls from nightmares suffered by Major Ben Marco and Corporal Al Melvin.

These dream sequences, in addition to the opening shots, are the only representation of the Korean War, since the film is otherwise set in the U.S. The American soldiers, as these dreams show, are conditioned to experience the demonstration, in which two of their men are murdered, as a boring lecture at the Ladies Garden Club in New Jersey, a group of middle-aged and elderly women discussing plants and garden. Cinematographically, the switching between past trauma and displaced dream is accomplished through 360-degree pans from the stage to the audience and back, during which American matrons are replaced by Communist officers, flowers and plants by guns and deaths. Also in this crucial scene, Frankenheimer carefully interjects race and sex into the novel: the nightmares recalled by Marco and Melvin differ in that the former dreamed by an Italian American consist of white ladies exclusively, whereas the latter dreamed by an African American of Black ladies. More importantly, the ruthless tyranny imposed by alien patriarchs such as Yen Lo and other male Communist officers is disguised as a tiresome party of matron-like characters from Marco’s and Melvin’s respective lives. Yen Lo the puppeteer hides behind the hallucination involving middle(wo)men; foreign penetration of the mind masks itself as an irritable yet harmless pursuit, a feminine hobby for aesthetics. In contrast to Raymond Shaw’s Oedipus complex, Marco and Melvin suffer from patriarchal control (Yen Lo) in drag or disguised as conservative, bourgeois matriarchal conformity (Ladies Garden Club).

But the brainwashing proves, ultimately, a failure, for they repeatedly wake up screaming at the moments of the nightmare when Raymond, following Yen Lo’s orders, strangles a comrade and shoots another. These recurring nightmares, driven by conscience and guilt, are the undercurrent to minds which are otherwise perfectly dominated. Major Marco subsequently battles out of conditioned reflexes through domestic help of a nurturing, Nightingale-like Janet Leigh and the support of the U.S. Army. Hence, patriotic, red-blooded American parents join hands to defeat subversive, “red” parents. Likewise, while foreign intervention denies Raymond independent thinking and emotions, camaraderie and true love from fellow Americans such as Ben Marco break this spell, leading him to avenge his loved ones. The film declares that whereas Marxist-Communist control reduces human beings to animals with conditioned reflexes, American ways elevate individuals into higher love and sacrifice.

The killings during Yen Ho’s demonstration take place at the whim of Communist participants seeking concrete evidence of mind-control. However, these chance executions establish a pattern of placid, automaton-like facial expression and behavior of the American soldiers while prosecuting abominable crimes against one’s own. Since none but Raymond continues to revert back to this robotic state in the United States, it is essential for these scenes to showcase all nine American soldiers behaving uniformly, under the influence of brainwashing. Dictated by forces beyond their control, all of them appear to be entranced. Such possession is taken to be inherent in the Orient: the Orient is a trance, whether pseudo-scientifically engineered (The Manchurian Candidate) or opium- and sex-induced (Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu-Manchu series and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American). The master of disguise surfaces at the height of the Cold War. Set in the early 1950s, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer, is a complex thriller which epitomizes Cold War paranoia. It not only reflects the tension of the Korean War a decade ago but the abiding paranoia in the year of the Cuban missile crisis, a year that leads to assassinations, civil rights disturbance, and the Vietnam debacle. Paranoia suggests a subject plagued by insecurity, besiegement, and gnawing suspicion of conspiracy against oneself. One sure way to cope with paranoia is concealment or psychological transference, which The Manchurian Candidate accomplishes via a throwback to the Korean peninsula.

The Manchurian Candidate attempts the opposite, ratcheting up fear to the point of hysteria over losing one’s faculties to Communist brainwashing. Both hilarity and hysteria insulate the masses by eliciting either emotional release or defensive loathing and hatred. The myth of mind-control springs from the coupling of two sources: Pavlovian behaviorism and Communist China’s campaign of thought reform (xinao or brainwashing). Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) is a Russian physiologist whose experiments center on conditioned reflex. A pioneer of modern experimental psychology, Pavlov is widely recognized for bridging physiology and psychology, linking the body with the mind, for which he receives the Nobel Prize in 1904. Pavlov performs surgeries on dogs and measures their salivary and gastric juices upon stimulation of food, either consumed or — herein lies his theory of conditioned reflex — suggested. Marxist materialism sees in Pavlovian theories a confirmation that animal behavior results from brain function. Thus behavior and thoughts are all traced back to brain cells and nervous system. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Pavlov extends his experiments from dogs to human beings. And for The Manchurian Candidate to present a Chinese scientist, Dr. Yen Lo, from the Pavlov Institute, presiding over the brainwashing, it requires a leap of faith in Soviet and Chinese scientific breakthrough which is non-existent at the time, a “leap of imagination” essential to paranoia in Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1966 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (37). Moreover, this paranoia over conditioned assassins stems in part from the apparent mass defection of American POWs during the Korean War, believed to have buckled under intense and prolonged interrogation by their Communist captors.