Brainwashing as a concept in pop culture is epitomised by crime fiction author Richard Condons 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate. So effective was its exaggeration of the treatment believed to have been meted out to GIs in the Korean War that its title became a byword for mind control, and belief in the pre-programmed assassin. The novel even carried an epigram referencing Hasan-bin-Sabah, the leader of the middle-eastern Assassin cult during the Crusades. An all-enveloping international conspiracy is seen through the eyes of good soldier Captain Ben Marco, but the antihero of the novel is brainwashed assassin Sgt. Raymond Shaw winner of the Congressional Medal of Honour for saving his comrades. Back in Tungwha, a province of the sub-Arctic Chinese region of Manchuria, the Red Chinese have taken the Koreans brainwashing techniques through several evolutionary leaps. Inside this place the Korean captive Shaw is built into a trigger killer by Professors Yen Lo, from Red China, and Berezovo, from the Pavlov Institute in Moscow. His brainwashing runs deep, leaving him aware of his fragmented consciousness but powerless to disobey the mnemonics placed within. Beyond the factual realms of the North Koreans harsh interrogation techniques, this mythical form of brainwashing combines hypnosis, drugs and Pavlovian autosuggestion that turns Raymond almost into a science-fiction automaton. The American agent pulling the trigger when he returns home is his own shrewish and overambitious mother. In an oedipal twist, her lifelong browbeating of him is as profoundly damaging as the communists stealing his mind. Personified by the symbol of the Red Queen, the Queen of Diamonds in a pack of cards, her suggestion that he play a little solitaire is the behavioural trigger that sets Raymond on his mission. Just as Pavlovs dog was conditioned to associate the sound of a bell with food, Shaw is instilled with the playing-card signal that triggers the assassin within. Shaws mother is also remarried to a McCarthyite politician named Johnny Iselin, whose winning shtick is to smear seemingly half of the US Congress as communists. Mrs Iselin is no undercover commie but a woman so monstrously ambitious she would make a power play on behalf of her ideological enemies, and destroy her sons mind into the bargain. In screenwriter/producer George Axelrod and director John Frankenheimers classic 1962 screen adaptation, Condons paranoid narrative is de-kinked and made more linear. Where the movie matches the novel is in its Twilight Zone-ish surrealism. The brainwashed GIs believe they are in the genteel presence of the Ladies of the Garden of New Jersey, when they are really surrounded by their Red Chinese captors flanked by images of Stalin and Chairman Mao. Over 50 years on, the scenes where Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is instructed by Yen Lo (whom he addresses as Maam) to strangle one of the privates who supposedly went missing in action and to shoot another point-blank through the head are still chilling. The victims passive acceptance of their fate goes far beyond anything either the KGB or CIA are known to have achieved in all their years of messing with the human mind. ("The brain hasnt just been washed," jokes Yen Lo, "its been dry-cleaned.") In a climactic screen dream now touched by the taint of history, Shaw battles with the burden of his ultimate mission: to assassinate a presidential candidate with an army snipers rifle. In the movie version, the presidential nominees speech "Nor would I ask of my fellow American in defence of his freedom that which I would not willingly give up myself" has probably intentional echoes of President John F. Kennedys 1961 inaugural speech: "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." In fact, the films headlining star, Frank Sinatra (Captain Marco), had been a part of the highballing elite in the heady days of JFKs Camelot, partying at the White House in a hedonistic style that suggested the President may have been just a little more self-serving than his words let on. ("I was Franks pimp and Frank was Jack s," Sinatras fellow Rat Pack member Peter Lawford later boasted.) It was also Sinatra who brought The Manchurian Candidate to the production executives at United Artists, having optioned the novel to further his acting career. As screenwriter Axelrod reminded Ol Blue Eyes, many years later, "The President said, 'What are you going to do next?' You said, 'The Manchurian Candidate.' He said, 'Great, whos going to play the mother?' Jack Kennedy, the youngest chief, was hip to pop culture. Within just over a year, however, the end sequences of the film would play like a strange black and white portent, and the popular myth would be born that Sinatra had withdrawn it from distribution. When young ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the USA after briefly defecting to the Soviet Union, his solitary nature led him to visit movie theatres alone. Indeed, he would ultimately be arrested for the killing of the President at a cinema. He would walk daily past the Palace on Elm Street, close to Dealey Plaza, where THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE played in late 1962. We do not know if he took in that particular film, but the testimony of his widow Marina about the frequency of his visits to the movies suggests he would have done so. In cultural historian John Lokens 2000 study, Oswalds Trigger Films, he posits that the mnemonic for murder came from outside from the world-changing acts of the assassin onscreen but that it awakened something deep inside the frustrated political idealist: the need to step forward to take his place in history. It seems merely one of historys tenuous ironies that, at the time of his 1968 presidential campaign and his own assassination, JFK's brother, Bobby Kennedy, was staying at the house of John Frankenheimer - director of The Manchurian Candidate. In 2004, a team of producers including Sinatras daughter Tina would remake the film for the hi-tech age and the Iraq War era, their assassin programmed by a microchip in the brain. With the nightmare US demagogue/communist conspiracy made obsolete by the course of history, co-writer Daniel Pyne explained, "Corporate totalitarianism was the new philosophy that was scariest," and Manchuria Global is the name of the corporation seeking total power in the USA. It is also the narratives central flaw in the age of George W. Bush, why would a multinational have to go to such lengths? Could they not just get a few of their people into the administration?
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
