The Manchurian Candidate has become an important film among both conspiracy theorists and academics studying conspiracy theory. For the former it offers a chilling portrayal of government manipulation of individuals and of the secret cabals who control the United States, while for the latter it provides a fictionalized representation of paranoia and mind control that offers an insight into a wider cultural paranoid consciousness. Released in 1962, a year before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the film has often been seen as a prescient foretelling of the political assassinations of the 1960s, although in actuality it is more a product and summing up of 1950s cold war paranoia.
The Manchurian Candidate is based on a novel by Richard Condon and was directed by John Franken-heimer, and has its origins in stories that emanated from the Korean War about the brainwashing of U.S. prisoners of war by Communist forces. The film begins with the ambush of a group of U.S. soldiers under the command of Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) and his unpopular sergeant, the well-educated Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey). This is followed by several brainwashing sequences (during which Shaw is brainwashed into becoming a mind-controlled assassin), after which the narrative shifts to the United States and the return of Marco as a serving officer and Shaw as a decorated war hero. The film then follows the stories of the two figures as Marco attempts to understand his strange dreams and his failure to comprehend how Shaw has, in his embedded mind, become a heroic and well-loved figure, even while he consciously knows that he and the rest of the platoon all deeply disliked him. This leads Marco into an investigation into, and ultimately a friendship of sorts with, Shaw as he realizes how the latter has been used as a mind-controlled pawn, while at the same time dramatizing Shaw’s embedding within a conspiracy to kill a presidential candidate in order to guarantee the nomination and election (on a sympathy vote) of his despised red-baiting stepfather, Johnny Iselin. During the course of this it is revealed that Raymond’s mother (played by Angela Lansbury) is his controller (and who is manipulating him through his unconscious incestuous desires, with the implication that she did this before his Korean brainwashing) and that the Communist plot to elect Iselin has deeper implications. The film ends with Shaw realizing he is a pawn and ultimately breaking his programming by shooting Iselin and his mother rather than his intended target.
The film’s significance for conspiracy theory lies in its mapping of the pathology of brainwashing and in its portrayal of the tangled webs and conspiracies of cold war politics. In both cases, nothing is what it seems and there is a sense that there are hidden realities to be uncovered beneath the surface of appearance. This is most obvious in the form of the mind-controlled Shaw, who has a surface personality and a deeper embedded assassin identity that is triggered by the appearance of the Queen of Diamonds playing card, after which he obeys the first command he is given. This is illustrated in one memorable scene when he jumps into a lake in Central Park after the accidental appearance of the card and a random comment when he meets Marco in a bar. The problematization of surface appearances is particularly shown in the opening brainwashing sequences, where the application of mind control alters the perceptual experiences of the soldiers. The soldiers do not see the conference room where they are being brainwashed, but instead believe that they are attending a garden party where they discuss issues such as flower arranging with prim middle-class women in floral dresses. Nor do any of them see Shaw kill another soldier on the command of one of his controllers because they are so embedded in the fantasy that has been created for them.
These sequences, and Raymond’s embedded personality, suggest that “reality” and identity in both mind control and conspiracy are constructed forms rather than objectively existing phenomena and that they can be altered according to the whim of the conspiracy controller. This is played out in the political narrative of the film in which reality twists and turns with the revelations, first, that it is Raymond’s mother who is his U.S. controller and then that the Communist plot involves the election of Iselin. The film, therefore, maps a complex relationship between identity and reality in the suggestion that both are constructs, because if one cannot be guaranteed, then neither can the other. The film does, in the end, rescue both with the awakening of the “real” Raymond and his concomitant ability to see “reality” for what it is, but there are still doubts as to whether the self or the world can be trusted anymore.
The uncertainties that the film raises are one of the reasons why it has been so influential in conspiracy theory, which is based on both the distrust of surface appearance and the belief in a deeper reality that is as knowable as the reality that Shaw finally perceives. The film has also been influential because of the widespread conspiracy belief that there are real “Manchurian Candidates,” but programmed by the CIA in its mk-ultra program, rather than by the Chinese or Russians. Such an idea was popularized by John Marks in his study of mk-ultra, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and has subsequently been applied to people such as Lee Harvey Oswald (through his hypnosis by David Ferrie) and Sirhan Sirhan. The idea has also remained in currency, making its appearance in recent years in relation to figures as diverse as John McCain, who many Vietnam veterans believe to have been brainwashed by the Vietnamese Communists; Ted Kaczynski, who, it is claimed, embarked on his terror campaign as a result of the mk-ultra programming he underwent while he was at Harvard; and the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who have been seen either as brainwashed victims of a conspiracy-controlled media industry or as part of a plot to outlaw guns in the United States.
