What Have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America. By Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar Gonzalez. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xvi, 234 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8166-4124-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8166-4125-3.)

Abstract

The Manchurian Candidate may not quite have led nine lives, but it has undergone more reincarnations than most cultural texts. First a novel by Richard Condon (1959), it was transformed into a feature film by John Frankenheimer in 1962. Often thought suppressed, under suspicion of inspiring Lee Harvey Oswald to emulate the programmed assassin played by Laurence Harvey, the movie was re-released a quarter century later. Then Jonathan Demme gave the plot a twenty-first-century makeover in 2004. With its serial ability to channel a zeitgeist—whether of the early Cold War, the late Ronald Reagan era, or the present—The Manchurian Candidate “might very well represent the repressed history of modern America,” propose Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González (p. 193). Like any emanation of the subconscious, this “waking, recurring dream” invites multiple interpretations. Twinning an assault on Joseph McCarthy with a Sino-Soviet takeover conspiracy, the Condon/Frankenheimer version has been variously read as a critique of anticommunism and a sly vindication of countersubversion. In Jacobson and González's reading, it is both: a perfect Cold War paradox. Focusing on the most iconic of the Manchurian candidacies, Frankenheimer's, the authors work both into and out from the film. Layering on context, they also strive to peel back layers of encoded meaning. Some chapters duly explore the director's cinematic intertexts, while others isolate key motifs such as McCarthyism, sexuality, and orientalism to probe the era's conflicted relationship with individualism, conformity, and “perversion.”