The defining movie of the Trump era? It’s a remake from 2004
Image: Graphic: Natalie PeeplesScreenshot: The Manchurian Candidate (2004) Film Features The Manchurian Candidate
On a semiregular basis during the past four years, the same prompt has gone around Film Twitter: What is the defining film of the Trump presidency? Is it Todd Phillips’ Scorsese imitation Joker, all bluster and no substance? What about Bong Joon Ho’s Best Picture winner Parasite, about the ignorance of the wealthy and the desperation of class warfare? Or The Death Of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s exploration of the pathetic power squabbles between the followers of the Soviet leader? A case could be made for any of these films, either because of their unintentional reflection of the times or their purposeful cataloguing of our increasingly dystopian reality. But to truly capture the scope of what we’re living through—the wide-scale corruption, the deep-seated immorality, and the straw-man evil of our current president—you have to travel back to 2004, to the George W. Bush presidency, and to Jonathan Demme’s exceptional remake of the 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate.
With its pervasive sense of paranoia and its criticism of the American political process, the 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate takes on renewed life in light of this election cycle. Its unrelenting uncanniness is found in how effectively the film underscores its major deviation from John Frankenheimer’s Cold War-era original: The enemy is homegrown. They’re the politicians meant to represent us, and the special-interests lobbying groups and private equity firms who bought their loyalty long ago.
Through a combination of (white) America-first braggadocio, fascist methodologies, and persistent fear-mongering, the self-serving villains Demme warned us against have taken up residence in the White House, and the threat they embody is that of capitalistic individualism, nepotistic sleaze, and unchecked authority running amok. National unity, impassioned public service, a belief that the American Dream should be an opportunity for all—the black hats of The Manchurian Candidate would scoff at those ideas as they consolidate power solely around themselves and the similarly amoral elites whom they serve. Sound familiar?
Although it was made during the first stage of the War On Terror, the inciting event of The Manchurian Candidate is the Gulf War. During Operation Desert Storm, a unit of young white, Black, and brown men comes under attack during a nighttime raid. When their commanding officer, Captain Ben Marco (Denzel Washington), is knocked unconscious, second-in-command Sergeant Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schreiber) steps up. The story goes that he held off an enemy helicopter alone, led the group through the desert for three days, and only lost two men in the battle. After the mission, Shaw is heralded as a war hero and elected to the U.S. House Of Representatives. Serving in the opposite congressional chamber is his mother, Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), a full-throated supporter of American imperialism.
The words “September 11th” are never uttered in The Manchurian Candidate, but its depiction of early-2000s America is recognizably molded by that day’s terrorist attacks. With a presidential election weeks away, news coverage alludes to instability everywhere: At home, where people worry about economic insecurity, environmental pollution, and increasing crime. Around the world, where the United States is continuously involved in international meddling, causing a wave of “body bags coming from all over the globe.” In this time of uncertainty, Senator Prentiss Shaw, Machiavellian in her crisp pantsuits, pompadour, and pearls, sees an opportunity—not just to demand increased domestic surveillance, increased military presence abroad, and increased funding for security forces, but to magnify the Prentiss dynasty. While she manipulates Americans’ yearning for normalcy in order to gain outsized influence, and plots and schemes to get Raymond into the White House as the next vice president of the United States, her son’s ascension doesn’t sit quite right with the remaining men from his unit, particularly Marco.
A recurring nightmare is the clue, in both Frankenheimer’s original and Demme’s remake, that something is very wrong with the heroic myth built up around Raymond. In the latter film, Washington’s Marco is besieged by surreal visions so intense he goes through bottles of NoDoz at a time to keep from sleeping. Every so often, Demme briefly cuts to black, as if the camera has blearily blinked to hide itself from the onslaught of Marco’s revelations. Tattooed women in hijabs ululating in Marco’s face; the blurry red smear of the sun in a hazy desert sky; the men who served alongside Marco and Raymond being tortured, brainwashed, suffocated, and shot. The disconnect between what Marco remembers, but is constantly told by everyone that he doesn’t actually remember, hints at something altered deep within him, and some part of him irrevocably contaminated.
[pm_embed_youtube id=’PLZbXA4lyCtqrEX9kO_IvvmIJbDwsKS3Om’ type=’playlist’]That disorienting destruction of individuality is one of the many specialties of the mysterious Manchurian Global, a firm with ties to world leaders and rogue states. Their tactics are both macro—engineering coups, enacting government takeovers—and micro, in particular their pioneering research in mind control. Manchurian Global can take over anyone, infecting them with doubt and mistrust or compelling them to do whatever the company pleases, and their casual evisceration of an individual’s self-control for the pleasure of the powerful is an inconceivable evil. Manchurian Global has helped shape the trajectory of domestic and international politics for whoever has the most cash in hand, and suddenly Raymond’s campaign promise—“We must secure tomorrow, today”—seems unquestionably like a threat.
So many of the elements of The Manchurian Candidate are obvious reactions to, and distillations of, clashing American reactions to September 11th. By probing the relationship between the military-industrial complex and the jingoistic grandstanding that politicians and law enforcement used to expand power and quash dissent, Demme shifts the film away from the ideas of its predecessor. Instead of proposing that the greatest threat to Americans is the rest of the world, Demme made plain the havoc we’re wreaking both inside and outside our borders in a way that seems almost prescient. The thuggish tactics of Manchurian Global, funded with $1 billion in taxpayer dollars, bring to mind those of notorious security firm Blackwater. Methods akin to those Eleanor swears by to fight terrorists, including turning a blind eye toward torture, were revealed in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2012.
The Manchurian Candidate never identifies any politician, neither the Shaws nor the incumbent president they’re running against, by a particular party. But Demme builds an unsettled atmosphere that demonstrates how dangerous a charismatic personality with fiery rhetoric, zero morals, egotistical zeal, and deep pockets can be. There is no greater danger to the American people, Demme argues, than politicians who covet and amass power for its own sake, and who shake hands with the Manchurian Globals of the world to maintain their supremacy. So thoroughly abandoning the ideals of camaraderie and compassion toward which America claims to aspire is a particular kind of perversity and irreversible betrayal. And this is where we have to talk about Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, and President Donald J. Trump.
[pm_embed_youtube id=’PLZbXA4lyCtqrEX9kO_IvvmIJbDwsKS3Om’ type=’playlist’]In 2020, the villainous portrait of Eleanor slaps particularly hard. The film’s enveloping environment of suspicion and panic is furthered by every choice Eleanor makes, all of which are presented as grandiose declarations in solidarity with the American people, but truly serve only herself. As a way to embolden her own legacy, Eleanor sacrifices her son to the Manchurian Global mind-control program and grooms him for the presidency, condescendingly nicknaming him her “plucky idealist.” Under the guise of straight talk, she trivializes colleagues’ concerns about protecting civil liberties and freedom of speech. Eleanor makes enemies out of those concerned with the brutality of her tactics. She mocks the soldiers who served alongside Raymond and returned home with Gulf War syndrome and PTSD. She is shameless in her connection to the infamous Manchurian Global, and amused when they self-effacingly tell her that business “could always be better.”
Eleanor’s array of misdeeds foreshadow our current moment. Such a do-more-harm ideology, under the guise of American patriotism, is what has guided the ruling party’s politics for the past four years: Destroy the environment, stifle the working class, ignore basic human dignity, and laugh at the idea of empathy. Serve only the wealthy, and preferably, only the white. Kick out anyone who doesn’t agree. Trump’s presidency has been an unending nightmare of policy decisions born not only out of racism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia but also a desire to consolidate power and crush opposition—an endless yearning for more.
Demme wasn’t incorrect in his suggestion that certain members of the political class serve the same masters and are united in their devotion to maintaining a staunch status quo: Manchurian Global, as Eleanor so defensively says, has donated to “both sides of the aisle.” There is a fair amount of fluidity in our political center. But unlike in The Manchurian Candidate, what is more glaringly obvious in our world is how those working against their fellow citizens’ best interests don’t need to go through the elaborate ritual of being kidnapped, tortured, and brainwashed to do so. They just do it of their own free will, cheered on by those for whom the cult of personality is a lure, politics is a zero-sum game, and conspiracy theories are a choose your own adventure of outlandishness.
And you don’t have to go digging through microfiche to find evidence of highest-bidder business principles—that sort of thing is just going on casually and blatantly in the open now, no shadowy cabal required. Trump openly courts relationships with oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Russia while those same regimes kill journalists and undermine our democracy. As private citizens, Andrew Wheeler lobbied for the coal industry and Betsy DeVos funneled her family’s questionably accumulated riches into efforts to dismantle public schools; naturally, Trump chose them to head up the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department Of Education. Senator Tom Jordan’s (Jon Voight) concern that Raymond Shaw would become the “first privately owned and operated” person in line for the presidency seems quaint given how obvious the Republican Party has been about their intentions in the past four years. (Voight now seems to live in a reality that treats the 1962 Manchurian Candidate as a documentary; the less said about his hard turn toward conservative reactionary politics and his zealous support of Trump, the better.) The Manchurian Candidate’s premonitions about politicians who work for themselves, rather than for us, went unheeded.
Re-watching the film accomplishes a crystallization of the myriad ways those in power will work to marginalize us and deny us: They’ll make us doubt our own motivations, second guess our own memories, and question our own identities. (The term “fake news” wasn’t in the lexicon yet, but you can practically hear Streep’s Eleanor snarl it before launching into praise of her son, “forged in the desert in the dark.”) The only solution to such broad disenfranchisement, The Manchurian Candidate insists, is steadfastness and awareness, curiosity and commitment. No grand power will save us; certainly not Marco’s ultimate saviors in the film, the FBI. We have to save ourselves. “The future and survival of modern civilization, democracy, freedom—all depend upon it,” Eleanor says of the climactic election in The Manchurian Candidate. She was wrong about who to vote for, but otherwise? Senator Prentiss Shaw had a point.
70 Comments
Ok. I never saw that film, out of mild hostility for classic films remakes. I should maybe give Demme a chance there.
I never saw it either, because I didn’t think it could work outside the context of the Cold War. This article hasn’t changed my mind.
Good call. It doesn’t.
I don’t have the original to compare it to, but Demme and Washington absolutely nail that sense of confused disorientation and disassociation that’s so crucial to the plot. I was drained at the end of it.
I did see it, and it didn’t make much of an impression. Now I’m thinking I should give it a second look — I am running out of lockdown entertainment so maybe it’s worth a look through the Trumpian lens.
It sucks, and no “Trumpian lens” will fix that.
The movie sucks.In the article writer’s defense, their belief that Saudi Arabia is a client state of the current White House, rather than a client state of the bipartisan U.S. government for many decades, suggests someone too young for the necessary perspective on cinema.
They’re the politicians meant to represent us, and the special-interests
lobbying groups and private equity firms who bought their loyalty long
ago
Trump raised less money than his opponents, and even bragged about that fact: since he was already rich he didn’t need to be beholden to any donors.The usual film said to be about Trump before Trump is “A Face in the Crowd”, so I’m surprised you didn’t mention that here. Although that (and “Batman Returns”) were both more optimistic about voters once the truth was revealed than seems warranted (so I suppose Kang winning in a Treehouse of Horrors episode works better). I’ve read that “Born Yesterday” is really an allegory of the press vs special interests competing to influence the ignorant but not stupid American public. Perhaps a more cynical remake is necessary in which Billie dismisses everything Paul tries to teach her.
I would have thought it was “All The King’s Men” given that was really about a thinly disguised Huey Long, who was the Trump of his era, although America (if not Huey) dodged a bullet that time.
Huey Long certainly didn’t dodge any bullets. He took quite a few of them in the chest actually.
Long was to the left of FDR.. Trump got elected because he was perceived as the most “moderate” (due to being generally incoherent ideologically and not having a political record to falsify his claims).
https://www.vox.com/2019/7/2/20677656/donald-trump-moderate-extremism-penalty
Long’s views (much like Trump’s) were wildly inconsistent. Sure, some of the populist ideas Long had (such as “share the wealth”) sounded leftist, but actual leftists like Sinclair Lewis weren’t convinced — Buzz Windrip, the Fascist dictator of his “It Can’t Happen Here” is (much like Willie Stark) an obvious caricature of Long.
What was the inconsistency exhibited by Long?Redistributing wealth from the haves from the have-nots doesn’t merely “sound” leftist, I’d say by any normal standard it is leftist. Perhaps his stated support for it was total BS and he wouldn’t have done it even if he could, but that’s for the alternate history books.
That’s also kind of what the Fascists promised too. It isn’t leftist, just populist. Leftism is about improving society for everyone — for instance, having universal free health care and university tuition, even for the rich who could afford to pay full price. It’s accepting that these things are rights for all and not just things the poor should be helped with.
But in other affairs, Long (much like a certain orange fellow) hated the media because they printed “lies” about him when he was govenor, and wanted to create a special tax on newspapers calling it a “tax on lying”. He also became quite a wealthy man himself through graft despite claiming to want to clean it up.
Long wanted to ramp up federal spending, and taxes would be necessary to pay for that. As governor he expanded access to healthcare & college financial aid. One of the things he did to help the poor with education was to distribute free textbooks, and when Catholics (who tended to use private schools) objected his reply was that it was a universal program for all children.I think all politicians dislike it when the media criticizes them. And in the USSR newspapers faced a lot worse than a tax on ad revenues, but that didn’t make the Bolsheviks “inconsistent”.
Bob Roberts
Dead Zone
…but then he incorporated his re-election campaign on January 20, 2017 and bilked something like a billion dollars in small donations from individuals for 4 years (A billion dollars that had all but disappeared a month ago, when the Trump campaign had to stop airing ads in some competitive media markets because they couldn’t afford to blanket the airwaves. Meanwhile, former campaign manager Brad Parscale was in a psychiatric hold following his breakdown, but there were multiple luxury automobiles parked in front of his McMansion.)Besides, who needs direct donations when you merely can request that visitors wishing to meet with the President stay at his properties when they’re in town? Or charge the federal government to house his Secret Service officers at his own resort every weekend? Trump’s grift has been vast and wide-ranging, he just didn’t funnel it all through campaign coffers.
I have to think Day 1 of his administration started with Redford’s great line from The Candidate.“What do we do now?”
Yeah, to me this article is such a weird read of the remake, which is so clearly not about a Trump-like figure, some blundering but charismatic outsider who seizes power by plugging into the normally unspoken shadow side of a major political party. Senator Shaw is the ultimate insider, daughter of a legendary diplomat/industrialist who married a senator, then took over his seat when he died and served in the Senate herself for twenty years.And despite the fact that the film never names the political parties, her party is pretty clearly meant to represent the Democrats of the mid-2000s. They’re the beaten-down opposition party, divided among themselves about how to take on an unpopular incumbent party that has despoiled the environment and gotten the US entangled in devastating wars overseas that were intended to combat terrorism but have in fact further inspired it. Shaw is one of those “centrist” Democrats who insists that you have to beat the Republicans on their own turf, whereas her intraparty rival Senator Jordan is a liberal Dem who wants to make a principled stand against the Republicans’ bloody-minded authoritarianism. The film is much more about that ideological conflict than any Trumpian faux-populist takeover.
The film is much more about that ideological conflict than any Trumpian faux-populist takeover.Exactly, too much strategic thinking, not enough incompetence/indifference to stand in for Trump.
Bingo.
But Trump is both: the politician *and* the lobbyist in one. The man not does understand the *concept* of conflict of interest. Ironically, because people choose to see the business man but not the lobbyist, they see a man who cannot be bought. He comes pre-bought. I don’t see how him not having be “bought” via traditional means invalidates the metaphor.
Who would Trump be lobbying? And who has “pre-bought” him? The mold for Trump strikes me as older than the “lobbyist” as a concept: he is a self-interested demagogue. There have been many around the world and throughout history. I don’t think Manchurian Candidate applies that generally.
“Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life…”Cult 45.
You sound like Smithers ……uh I mean Lindsey Graham
oh
The most important question is … how much solitaire is in the remake?
The solitaire trigger is completely replaced by a specific order in which their names and ranks are said.
Yeah, everything about the 2004 remake just sucks the life out of the premise. Terrible movie.
The “solitaire” trigger is so much better. Love the idea of Harvey hearing the word and starting to play until he sees the Queen of … Diamonds (?). In theory he could get stuck and never see that card and have to start over.
None, but she played in “The Absolute Truth” (1997), about a pussy-grabber running for US presidency. Different thing.
The defining movie of the Tr*mp era? Dumb and Dumber To.
Death To Smoochy for me.
Nothin’ But Trouble for me (where are you when we need you, random Digital Underground cameo?!)
I still find the original Manchurian Candidate to be far superior and considering the links that Trump has to Russia, also the more relevant movie, even today. Plus, there’s nothing more terrifying, to me at least, then Angela Lansbury at almost any age
For people like me who were introduced to Lansbury via Murder, She Wrote, those roles are even more chilling. Like maybe she’s actually the one killing all those people on the show and pinning it on innocent neighbors. You know, for sport.
The murder rate in Cabot Cove made NYC in the 70’s look like a picnic, so yeah, that was a stealth serial killer show.
Reminds me of Hudson University on the various versions of L&O, with a murder/rape rate that would have only parents looking to cash in life insurance policies sending their kids there.
Or maybe it’s a sinister version of Hunter College and the tuition is so low parents are willing to send the kids there despite their being a 25% chance of coming to a violent end.
I think when L&O first started the victims weren’t quite as upscale. But they quickly learned what gets better ratings.
When my wife told me Elliott Stabler’s daughter went to Hudson University, I was like, “DaFuQ? Does Stabler want some asshole Preppie wearing his daughter’s skin for Rush Week…?”
“Where was the assault?”“Right over there in the middle of the quad.”“The hell? Really??”
Got it in one, bfred!
You can see it in the eyes.
Interesting article. Since there are no mentions of any writers of this screenplay, I have to assume that Jonathan Demme is solely responsible for everything you’re praising it for.
It’s sort of fitting that the best film for a game show President would be a movie remake. He’s second rate to the very end.
“Fear of increasing crime.” Unfounded fear IRL to wedge voters. Scriptwriters should know better by now.
I just watched The Death of Stalin the other night, and that’s really going to be hard to beat as a film that speaks to our current moment. Also, it was funny as hell, which was nice.
When Trump was hospitalized, I honestly wondered who was going to have the pleasure of asking Mike Pence, “Did Coco Chanel take a shit on your head?”
I did too! It was rather cathartic, given the circumstances. “I’ve had nightmares that made more sense than this.”
This is an odd one cus the film is already the defining film of the GWB post 9/11 era and doesn’t have any themes that can really reflect on the 08 crash or Obama’s subsequent failures. Without those contexts you can’t make anything that defines the Trump era.
The 2004 Manchurian Candidate is not the defining anything of anything. It’s just a crappy remake that doesn’t understand what was compelling about the original.
I’ll go Cheap Thrills. Rich gauche asshole with younger trophy wife takes advantage of economic devastation to pit desperate people against each other in order to feel powerful and impressive and didn’t think through the consequences.
Jeffrey Wright, in a small role, is great in this, too.
I don’t disagree with this in general, but it does seem to ignore the last 50 years of the republican party. Pretending that trump is the only problem is how you guarantee that it happens again.
I’d say the defining movie is actually “Southland Tales”, which was rejected around the time time that it came out for being too unbelievable.I mean, it literally contains the line “Destroy capitalism and dethrone God” several times, isn’t that the Antifa credo according to Fox News?
I have said that so many times. That movie was so far ahead, it nails our current reality crazily.
I’d definitely put forward “Sorry To Bother You” as the 2016-2020 film of note.
under the guise of American patriotism, is what has guided the ruling party’s politics for the past four years: {…} stifle the working classIt’s a bit more subtle than that. More like: pretending to give voice to them while convincing them that it’s patriotic, and exemplary of some kind of old-fashioned virtues like self-reliance, to vote against their own interests, not to mention pitting them against various other sorts of people with whom they might have made common cause. That’s been an effective right-wing strategy for some years now, but never more openly on display than 2016-2020.
The odd thing about the idea that Trump won by demonizing minorities is that racial polarization has declined while educational polarization increased. He’s expected to lose because he lost support among (college educated) whites, even though minorities have become more favorable to him (having already been more favorable to him compared to Romney).
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-vote-rising-among-blacks-hispanics-despite-conventional-wisdom-ncna1245787
before the climax of the movie, was there supposed to be a hint of incest in that final Streep/Schreiber meeting before his nomination? Because there seemed to be a lot of tension there, so much in fact that I wondered if I had missed an important part of the setup that she wasn’t really his biological mother. (it would also fit very well with the current administration and Dipshit’s unseemly interest in his daughter)
I just finished Cody Showdy’s very long breakdown of films that clearly portrayed Trump, and less specifically greed, as the bad guy.
So I’m here to talk about Super Mario Bros is what I’m saying.
I cannot watch this film after seeing the wonderful original.
More absurdly moronic tripe from the libtards who have taken over AV Club.I’m old enough to remember when this was a place one could come for some quality film/TV/music criticism. Sadly no longer the case.
Sounds about reich.
This movie also contains the sole acting credit (to my knowledge) of great singer-songwriter, neo-psychedelic pioneer and indie cult darling, Robyn Hitchcock, supposedly because Deppe wanted to make it up to him for the studio failing to properly market the concert film they did together. As a big fan, it was kind of a charge to see him in such a different context.
(He’s the agent of the shady cabal who seems in charge on location of the brainwashing project in the flashbacks, briefly appears to Washington’s character in a hallucination on a train, and is the guy warning them about the terrain in the first scene.)
Funny, I always thought the remake of The Manchurian Candidate was a much-deserved flipoff to Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom I do not doubt for a second is capable of the evil Eleanor Prentiss Shaw does….
It’s just some crappy attempt to recreate an interestingly written & directed Cold War thriller as a tepid mid-2000s audience pleaser about private-sector whistleblowing. It’s a bad idea executed poorly.
No, that’s a bad remake of a good movie that tries to recreate its story around private-sector whistle-blowing. It fails. It’s very much of its time, 2004, and has little relevance to anything today, let alone the current White House.
This is one of the few remakes I like – it doesn’t take away anything from the original, and doesn’t merely bring the story into the post 9/11 era. Denzel is fantastic; it’s interesting to see him vulnerable and confused. Schreiber is great, and Meryl Streep is fucking perfect. Oh, I also like the way they worked “Manchurian” into the script.The original is also great, and well adapted from the novel (if you haven’t read the book, do). It does have that odd screwball-comedy introduction of Sinatra and Leigh which… I don’t know, I should watch it again soon, but that part was a bit jarring and sort of misleading to me when I first saw it.