Chapter 1 : A Critique of the Manchurian Candidate Anass Fourati - blog.quintoapp.com If your organization uses OpenAthens, you can log in using your OpenAthens username and password. To check if your institution is supported, please see this list. Contact your library for more details. Within this, the film explores the threat and moral panic of homebred communism, unidentified and living amongst Americans, and the distinction or lack of distinction between right and left wing politics. The film begins in Korea, towards the end of the Korean War, wherein a group of troops and the main characters of the story are led by their Korean advisory, unknowingly into a trap in which they are taken by a Russian airborne unit. The scene ends with them unconscious, being led away by helicopter. His dream reveals, through an elusive and constant switch in which ladies of a garden party are substituted for communist members, that the troops were kidnapped and brainwashed, or conditioned, by Dr. Yen Lo, into believing that they are waiting out a storm in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey where a meeting of the Ladies Garden Club is in progress. This meeting in actuality revolves around an academic discussion and demonstration for other communist members concerning the practice and implementation of brainwashing. In a demonstration to prove that under this trance, one can preform acts against their free will or mortal nature, Shaw is instructed to murder two members from his platoon. Shaw is reactivated, two years later, through a game of solitary when he lands on the Queen of Diamonds, his trigger card. Marco, after being placed on indefinite sick leave, identifies the people from his dream through photographs and is placed on an intelligence unit focused on Shaw whom he gets close to. Shaw dressed as a juxtaposing priest kills both his stepfather and his mother, and reveals to Marco that he was the only one who could stop them, before shooting himself while wearing his medal. Cold War Culture and Society explains that in August, Operation Big Switch-the exchange of remaining prisoners of war-was enacted, and in which 21 American soldiers defected to Korea The United States maintained through a propagandist like ploy that these soldiers were POWs that underwent harsh treatments making them susceptible to brainwashing, therefore explaining why the defectors participated in North Korean propaganda films However, many soldiers, like James Joseph Dresnok, crossed over to enemy lines of their own free will. The concept of brainwashing was significant in elaborating the Cold War conception of totalitarianism, shifting the concept from coercion to the enslavement of the helpless psyche, but it was more significant in forming public attitudes than transforming the mind Nevertheless, as a result the military training program SERE survival, evasion, resistance, escape was created to train and prepare soldiers on how to survive and resist the enemy- surrendering free will, and being disloyal to ones country-in the event of capture. S Senate, Iselin gained momentous support before being assassinated by his step-son in an effort to prevent him from becoming the President of the United States; censoring him permanently. Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies, he states that Philip Wylie referred to America as an ultimate matriarchy where the women raped the men, dominated husbands and encouraged the dependence of sons 6. Expanding on these examples, the film also shows America as a transformed matriarchy where Eleanor will gain indirect power of the country through the success of her husband who is running for presidency. However the other female characters in the film also illustrate the United States as a matriarchy: All three female characters are strong independent women who are clearly in control of their relationships, rendering their men weak. It also explains the underlying reason for Shaw killing Jocelyn while under the trance. By extension of this distinction, the cold war differs from regular wars in its inability to clearly identify its enemy. It is customary in war, that the enemy is stereotyped, often dehumanized in its personification accomplished in part, on the basis that the enemy is abroad. However, in cold war, the enemy has penetrated the barrier, entering the state, under the guise of its invisibility. In this case, the enemy is not a face, but an ideology, surpassing the visibility of aliens of the enemy state, to include American citizens. In Subverting the Cold War in the s: The first is the films challenging the fundamental ideological beliefs in which the United States policy was built on 40, in a distinctly un-american fashion, through the ease in which an American solider, Harvey Shaw, is brainwashed Page 1
into a killer, forgoing the premise of a society based on the eminence of the individual and their free will However Kirshner falls short of explaining how this is achieved in the film, through those who denounce communism, like Senator Iselin and Eleanor, who turn out to be a communist agent and her puppet. Where Kirshner falls short on his in-depth explanation and use of cinematic evidence, Rogin expands on this idea that far right and far left politics become indistinguishable in the film through his premise of American demonology explored through representations of the subversive and countersubversive. These three developments can be traced throughout The Manchurian Candidate. The countersubversive imitating the subversive is seen in two parts of the film. Secondly, the glorification and fear of maternal influence that Rogin describes, stems from the failed ideological division between a rising national security state and the maternal influence security of the domestic family. Because of the parameters of domestic ideology and the indirect power women were given as guardians of public morality, motherhood became a target for subversive coercion, threatening the sanctity of the family. Rogin states that in the film, domestic ideology promised that the American family would triumph over communism which worked to defeat communism only by first generating it I however disagree with his statement arguing that communism was defeated by the family in the film, but in actually led to its breakdown and ultimate collapse via Shaw murdering his parents. Lastly, Rogin states that because of the emergence of mass society, difference was normalized which made identifying the enemy difficult 3. Because communism was an ideology, it expanded beyond the borders of race. For instance, Americans were assisting the South Koreans against communist North Korea, and had difficulty identifying who the enemy was like their Korean advisory. With his inclusion of multiple concepts and their detailed explanations it was difficult to trace its connection to demonology. Despite the additional research required to better understand the article, Rogin made many valid arguments that I not only agree with but also was able to expand on in my own analysis of the film. The cleverly thought out allegories in the film, from the priest costume to the queen of diamonds, not only delivered a subtle humor and satire, but also made a significant political statement concerning the war. War in general as this film confirms is turmoil of happenings and confusion, where right and wrong was a matter of perception and interpretation by each side, and where both sides at times compromised their ideologies. Atrocities were committed and the effects and fears of war were often brought home. Cold War Culture and Society. Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies. Page 2
Chapter 2 : Project MUSE - Ronald Reagan The Movie Title: Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies Created Date: Z. The Eisenhower Era, Allsop, Kenneth The Angry Decade: The 50s Foreword by Hugh Downs. The Studio System in the Fifties. The Man, the Senator, Boston: The Poet of Nightfall. Foreword by Jesse Oppenheimer. New York, London, Toronto, et al: The Johns Hopkins Univ. The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference. Notes of a Native Son, Boston, London, et al: The Evolution of American Television. New York and Oxford: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, The Making of a Body Politic. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Baudrillard, Jean The Mirror of Production. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Edited, with an introduction by Mark Poster. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Belfrage, Cedric The American Inquisition: Indianapolis and New York: Belfrage, Sally Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. Belgrad, Daniel The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, et al: The Macmillan Company, New York and London: Disease or a Way of Life? Glenth non, Lorraine, ed. The Illustrated History of the 20 Century. The Black Writer at Mid Century. Dress Up to Your Role. Bischoff, Peter Saul Bellows Romane: Ontologies of Television in the Golden Age. Drummond, Philip, and Paterson, Richard, eds. British Film Institute, CBS and Television, The Industry and Its Critics. Bogart, Leo The Age of Television: Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art. American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism. American Culture in the Long s. Boskin, Joseph Sambo: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London and New York: Carl Winter Verlag, Foreword by Judith Harte. Braudy, Leo The World in a Frame: What We See in Films. Method Acting and 50s Culture. Breines, Wini Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. Cultural Codes in The Catcher in the Rye. James Baldwin und der amerikanische Rassenkonflikt. Maroney Good Health Is Fun. Burns, Glen Great Poets Howl: Carson, Dittmar, and Welsch, eds. Campbell, James This is the Beat Generation: Carson, Rachel Silent Spring. Foreword by Paul Brooks. Cartwright, Lisa Screening the Body: Progress of a Novelist. Two Choices of Material. Simon and Schuster, Ciment, Michel Kazan on Kazan. The Promise of Plastic in s America. Penley, Constanze, and Willis, Sharon, eds. Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. The Catcher in the Rye. The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky. Cook, Bruce The Beat Generation. Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. The South in the s. Atlanta, Dallas, et al: The Career of Mayard Rustin. New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, et al: Deutelbaum, Marshall, and Leland Poague, eds. Philadelphia and New York: America in War and in Peace, Theorising the Female Spectator. Doherty, Thomas Patrick Teenagers and Teenpics: Television News and American Public Life, Dorner, Jane Fashion in the Forties and Fifties. From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Doty, Alexander Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon. Film Stars and Society. British Film Institute, Cinema Series. Ehrenreich, Barbara The Hearts of Men: Eisler, Benita Private Lives: Men and Women of the Fifties. New Brunswick et al: Ewen, Stuart Captains of Consciousness: The Undeclared War Against Women. Page 3
Chapter 3 : Films of the Cold War In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content. C H A P T E R V I I I Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies The history of dcmonology in American politics comprises three major moments. Leave a comment Following the fifteenth and final assassination attempt on Hitler, the last nine months of the war in Europe took more lives than the sum total of the previous five years of conflict. Members of the resistance included the Kreisau Circle, which was a group of prominent military, political and religious leaders and intellectuals. The most famous of these conspirators was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg who after serving in, and becoming a casualty of the battle in North Africa, spearheaded the assassination attempt and its subsequent takeover of Berlin. After many previous attempts, Operation Valkyrie took place on 20 July within Gaestebaracke, in Rastenburg, Prussia. Following this, Stauffenberg flew to Berlin to take over the aftermath of Operation Valkyrie, where every part of the initial plan failed due to natural causes, personal dispositions and unaccounted for deviations in plan. In completion of analyzing the film and comparing it to its historical counterpart, I believe that supplementary knowledge and texts are required to fully understand the political structure of the individuals involved, their personal dispositions, and the time-line to the sequence of events. Through a comparison of history to film, I will explain some of the ways in which the Hollywood version provided an accurate historical interpretation, and the ways in which the director made stylistic choices that simplified Operation Valkyrie for easy viewing. Upon completion of my analysis, I will examine historical film as a medium of history, and how it alludes to the messages the film draw from the resistance. In that, careful consideration was taken when writing the script to maintain historical accuracy. Writers McQuarrie and Alexander consulted a variety of primary sources in order to properly represent the individuals, locations and the development of events. They visited the actual locations, met with relatives of the conspirators, and referred to first hand accounts, photographs, news reels and various other historical records in order to ensure that the film had layers of historical dimension. One of the imaginative ways the director was able to explain the various components that made up Operation Valkyrie was in using meetings between the key conspirators. Not only did it work to represent the secret gatherings that took place wherein Valkyrie was proposed and planned in detail, but was also a stylistic foreshadowing tool, outlining the requirements needed for Valkyrie to be successful, so that as the operation was enacted, only subtle cues such as imagery and reactionary dialog were necessary for the audience to deduce what went wrong. Goerdeler, Operation Valkyrie is proposed- said to be by Stauffenberg-as a modification to its original purpose. The outlining of the events in the three scenes of the meetings, allowed the audience to understand the historical context and therefore pay attention to the details of the actual events. From the details of historical accuracy in those scenes such as the type of bomb used, the specially made pliers for Stauffenberg, Trusckow leaving to go to the front lines, and the leading role Stauffenberg played in constructing Operation Valkyrie, it is clear that the film consulted historical resources. July 20th Prior to the final assignation attempt against Hitler, there were two other attempts or trial runs made before 20 July The first was on 11 July in Berchtesgaden where Stauffenberg smuggled the bomb into the conference, but upon telephoning Olbricht, the conspirators had decided that he should not proceed unless Himmler is there as well. On 20 July, shortly after Stauffenberg flew into the Rastenburg airfield carrying only the papers needed for his reports and the bomb wrapped in an extra shirt. Stauffenberg is led to a room where he over hears that the meeting has been moved up to The ambiguousness of the information given over the phone was expressed through illegible and static dictation on the receiving end. The next four hours in the War Office was frenzied with activity as the various conspirators transmitted instructions for Operation Valkyrie within and beyond the Reich, as illustrated in the film by the conspirators engaging in frequent telephone conversations and marking off territories. Orders were issued by the Nazi government that contradicted the orders coming from the War Office and once again the War Office was frenzied with the major military districts calling for clarification. In that, the film accurately recalled that Tresckow committed Page 4
suicide via hand-grenade, Witzleben who was executed slowly by being hung to death, suspended from a meat hook, and Fromm who was later captured and executed. By simplifying history through film, it allows for these events and occurrences to be known to mass populations. In actuality, the conspirators were not the spot-less heroes the film portrayed, although they preformed many acts of heroism. Political, social, and religious motives, Anti-Semitic backgrounds, and initial support for Hitler was omitted, played down or only faintly hinted at within the film. And this is cause for concern, as viewers should be shown both truths of the resistance. However, in conclusion, the film Valkyrie successfully conveyed its message to its viewers, that there were many people within Germany who opposed Hitler and his government and did attempt to right his wrongs. Even should it fail, the attempt to seize power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon in. Compared with this, nothing else matters. The Story of the German Resistance. Translated by Bruce Little. German Resistance After Operation Valkyrie. The History of the German Resistance Little, Brown and Company, Inspired by True Events: Directed by Bryan Singer. Jonathan Cape,, Page 5
Chapter 4 : Kiss Me Deadly - Wikipedia By Michael Paul Rogin. Kiss Me Deadly Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies Kiss Me Deadly Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies Article The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, Vertigo, and the Film Canon The world of art, a sacred island systematically and ostentatiously opposed to the profane, everyday world of production, a sanctuary for gratuitous, disinterested activity in a universe given over to money and self-interest, offers, like theology in a past epoch, an imaginary anthropology obtained by denial of all the negations really brought about by the economy. The recent development of a group of film intellectuals within the American academy can be examined as an example of this interaction. Given the body of radical theory produced by many members of this newly constituted intellectual group, one might well assume that the function they have served has been a progressive one. However, these progressive goals operate in a far more limited way than is generally understood. Because the work of film intellectuals leads to practical valuations of film texts, one can view current scholarly practices in the light of these valuations. Why are certain cinematic texts chosen for special attention? Which elements in these texts are singled out for critical discussion? Film studies, with its fluid and shifting canon, lends itself particularly well to this kind of sociologically oriented inquiry. The appearance of the three American titles may be partly accounted for by the continuing vitality of the auteur theory. An analysis of the politics of contemporary film scholarship must take such historical specifics into account. Of the three American films on the list, Vertigo is the text that says most about the relation between film aesthetics and the ideology of criticism. Of the three films, Vertigo most owes its preeminence to the opinions of cinema scholars rather than the enthusiasm of less "committed" film fans. In terms of evaluation, what is noteworthy about this critical writing is the centrality it grants to this particular film. The film is canonized even by those who argue against it. As Janet Staiger has pointed out, "Some films will be chosen for extensive discussion and analysis, others will be ignored As ideal fathers, these select films are given homage or rebelled against. Richard Nere New York: Cambridge University Press, p. In a survey of critics conducted by the Belgian Film Archives regarding important American films, Vertigo was ranked only eighteenth. Royal Film Archives of Belgium, International Publishers,, p. The making of Vertigo is discussed on pp. Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. University Publications of America,, pp. Simon and Schuster,, p. Page 6
Chapter 5 : HISTORY â bronwynmarieblog Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies - Michael Paul Rogin Women and the Inner Game of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Nancy Steffen-Fluhr. Additional Information In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The first is racial, pitting whites against peoples of color and placing race at the center of the most important divisions in American political life. Class and ethnic conflict define the second demonological moment. The targets of countersubversion moved from the reds and blacks of frontier, agrarian America to the working-class "savages" and alien "Reds" of urban, industrializing America. The defense of civilization against savagery still derived from repressive conditions of labor and internal, imperial expansion against autonomous communities. Class struggle did not displace racial combat, moreover, but rather rested on the older foundations; the most widely seen single cultural document of the industrial age was The Birth of a Nation. But that movie, I have argued, cannot be understood apart from its location in immigrant, modernizing America. I am indebted to Linda Mylcs former director of the archive and Nancy Goldman for arranging the series and to Judy Bloch for her notes on the films printed in the University Art Museum Calendar. The class and ethnic Red scare defined American politics from the s to the New Deal. The third moment has had its vicissitudes, its surges and declines; we still live within it. At each moment the free man has both depended on and defined himself in opposition to his subversive twin. The discourse of expansion and slavery acknowledged that dependence, for proslavery apologists made black slavery a condition for white freedom, free labor ideology counterposcd itself to slavery, and the free man created himself in western Indian combat. Capitalists depended on workers, just as free men needed Indians and slaves. But the persistence of a free labor ideology and the influx of immigrants buried that dependence, shifting a class opposition into an ethnic one that pitted Americans against aliens. Now, however, countersubversive doubling justified not the free man but a centralized, secretive, inquisitorial state. Although liberals blamed McCarthyite attacks on responsible policymakers for the cold war Red scare, the rise of a security-oriented state bureaucracy was the most important new factor in the modern history of countersubversion. American history in each countersubversive moment has constituted itself in binary opposition to the subversive force that threatened it. Demonology begins as a rigid insistence on difference. That insistence has strategic propaganda purposes, but it also derives from fears of and forbidden desires for identity with the excluded object. In countersubversive discourse, therefore, the opposition breaks down. Its cultural and political productions register the collapse of demonological polarization in a return of the politically and psychologically repressed. The subversive in all three stages has threatened the family, property, and personal and national identity. But subversives melted into their surroundings as the racial and cultural differences that stigmatized them Ronald Reagan, the Movie disappeared, and the imagined danger shifted from the body to the mind. Instead of representing only disorder and loss of restraint, the subversive signified control by a sophisticated, alien order. That danger was met in two new ways, each of which mirrored the enemy arrayed against it. One was the rise of the national You are not currently authenticated. View freely available titles: Page 7
Chapter 6 : Bibliography Culture Am Fifties - blog.quintoapp.com CHAPTER VIII Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies (pp. ) The history of dcmonology in American politics comprises three major moments. Department of American and Canadian Studies Is there a tension in the Manchurian Candidate between a satire that targets the specific political moment of McCarthyism and one that forwards a broader critique of American politics and national identity? It concerns an American soldier who has been brainwashed in Korea and turned into an assassin. This period heralded the most critical moment of the Cold War, an era of political tension between the two world leading powers, the USA embodying capitalism and the USSR embodying communism. This strain was exacerbated in the U. It was a Red Scare focusing on the fear of communists, which reached its peak during the Korean War. Although The Manchurian Candidate appears to set up a tension between a specific satire of the era of McCarthyism and a general critique of American politics and national identity, in fact the film uses McCarthyism to criticize the American society of the s. To argue this point, the movie first creates a parallel between the dissemination of McCarthyism through the propaganda of mass media and politics, and the brainwashing of American prisoners of war POWs in Korea. Despite the fact that Senator Iselin uses the media to further his 1 E. Foner, Give Me Liberty! Thus, this portrayal of McCarthyism reflects the anxieties about individual autonomy, gender identity and the American family. This second strand of the argument begins with the crisis of masculinity which makes American men weak against the communist threat. Then momism is introduced as the source of McCarthyism. Finally the issues of the American family will be viewed through the domestic ideology of sexuality and marriage, bringing into question the wider issues facing American politics and national identity. To begin with, the Manchurian Candidate creates a parallel between the dissemination of McCarthyism through the propaganda of mass media and politics, and the brainwashing of POWs in Korea. Throughout his criticism of the brainwashing of POWs, Frankenheimer criticizes the brainwashing of the society by advertising and media: More and more, I think our society is becoming manipulated and controlled. This is why Senator John Iselin is often brought into the spotlight in the film. This makes him ridiculous and unreliable. Her aim was to create confusion: Furthermore, Iselin is despised through national identity when he reflects himself in the portrait of Abraham Lincoln and dresses up as him in the party. On the other hand, his rival Senator Thomas Jordan illustrates the true American, respectful to the values of the nation. For instance, the American eagle behind him has a symbolic value when he converses with Raymond at his summer house. His daughter Jocelyn Jordan symbolises the romantic young female character. She enjoys her relationship with Raymond and only sees his qualities, hiding his faults. Her affection for Raymond makes her blind, emphasizing the traditional Hollywood vision of love. Even though he focused most of his policy on the communist threat and the escalation of the Vietnam War than domestic affairs, his extramarital affairs and his friendship with actors made him popular, mixing the private with the public. In spite of the fact that McCarthy died 7 G. Marcus, The Manchurian Candidate, London,, p. It is mostly a concern about a lack of will, as critics state that the American modern man is too weak and too selfish to stand against the communist threat. Thus, from the very first scene of the film with the Korean prostitutes, his failure to find a girl is considered to be a crisis of sexuality. Instead of noticing a hinted declaration of love, he replies: Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd edn. Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies. His behaviour emphasizes his male identity crisis. He confesses to Marco that he is not liked: She controls every single aspect of his private life, including his sexuality. In the film, Eleanor is the embodiment of mom through her control of Raymond, in order to achieve her aims. Hence she orders him to kill the candidate for the presidential 11 Ibid, p. The perfect Cold War film? Indeed, her search for social respectability subjugates her husband and sons. However, the crisis of American masculinity and the issue of momism bring the anxieties about American family. The American man is not ready 14 G. Wylie, Generation of Vipers, Champaign, Page 8
Illinois,, pp. This is illustrated in the film when Marco asks Rosie to marry him: She escapes the question, retreating to the kitchen and replying afterwards: In addition, Marco wants to marry Rosie whereas he does not know her. She tells him that she grew as an orphan, using a metaphor: To conclude, the Manchurian Candidate first creates a parallel between the dissemination of McCarthyism through the propaganda of mass media and politics, and the brainwashing of POWs in Korea. Despite the fact that Senator Iselin uses the media to further his political interests, he is despised through it, as his wife controls him to achieve her personal goals. This has been argued with the crisis of masculinity which has made American men weak against the communist threat. Then momism has been introduced as the source of McCarthyism. Finally the issues of the American family have 19 G. Foner, Eric, Give Me Liberty! From â, 3rdd edn. Page 9
Chapter 7 : Invasion of the Body Snatchers Open Library On postwar domestic ideology, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, ) and "Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies," chapter 8 of Michael Paul Rogin's Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: U of California P, ). Films of the Cold War: Landon The Cold War influenced nearly all aspects of American political and cultural life from -- when Winston Churchill announced the descent of an Iron Curtain separating the Soviet Union and her Eastern European satellite states from the non-communist West -- to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in The influence on the American film industry was deep and long-lasting. Hollywood became a highly visible target of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the late s and s. Uncooperative witnesses were blacklisted by the studios, and some, like the Hollywood Ten, served time in jail. To prove their "Americanism," studio bosses not only fired and blacklisted employees, but they also turned out a string of films warning against the dangers of communism at home and abroad. Behind the Iron Curtain, adapted from the life story of Russian code clerk Igor Gouzenko Dana Andrews, who, together with his family, had defected to the West with evidence of Soviet espionage operations in North America. Charles Bickford plays the defiant Cardinal who endures arrest, torture, and prison rather than capitulate to his godless enemies. Shot on location in Berlin using documentary techniques, the film focuses on the ability of American technology to carry the day, and love affairs between the central characters Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift and two German women stress the importance of seeing Germany not as a totalitarian enemy but as a fledgling democracy and an ally in the struggle against communism. Walk East on Beacon, based on an article by J. Edgar Hoover, recounts the efforts of Soviet spies to penetrate a top-secret scientific project. The Reds proves no match, however, for a team of F. The film owes much of its sense of realism to the clever blending of a fictional narrative with the style of a documentary. Although the project the communists seek to penetrate is never explicitly identified, it has something to do with atomic secrets, a subject very much in the news at a time when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been charged with passing atomic secrets to the Russians. While Walk East on Beacon enthusiastically endorsed the F. Wayne and his assistant James Arness interview repentant ex-communists as they seek out Soviet agents for interrogation by the Committee. The film celebrates the activities of HUAC by playing fast and loose with historical facts. Unlike the fate of uncooperative witnesses called before HUAC who were jailed for contempt or blacklisted for invoking the Fifth Amendment, the agents rounded up by Big Jim escape punishment by what he describes as "abusing" their constitutional rights and refusing to testify. The Woman on Pier 13 It verges on self-parody in its anti-communist zeal, but it still manages to evoke the paranoid fears that haunted the McCarthy era. John Jefferson Robert Walker, the son hard-working, patriotic, and religious parents is a member of what seems to be the State Department where, presumably, his communist sympathies, his intellectual arrogance, and his nasty temperament go unnoticed. Rejected by his family after they discover he is a Soviet spy, he plans to flee the country with government secrets. A sudden change of heart prompts him to reveal his treachery, and in retribution he is murdered by communist agents. A large number of "B" films featuring American citizens serving as communist agents helped create the impression that the country was overrun by Soviet spies. Most of these films failed as both anti-communist propaganda and as thrillers. In the first a petty criminal, Skip McCoy Richard Widmark, steals a wallet containing scientific secrets. His theft sets touches off a series of events in which he and his acquaintances are hunted by both federal agents and a group of Soviet agents. The action unfolds in a dark, urban environment where characters find themselves caught up in events they neither control nor fully understand. McCoy, who claims no political allegiances, finally decides to cooperate with the federal agents after Soviet agents have murdered a friend Thelma Ritter and savagely beaten his lover Jean Peters. Like McCoy, Mike Hammer stumbles upon a case of nuclear espionage and cooperates with a team of federal agents whose leader, Pat Chambers Wesley Addy, appears to be as mysterious and sinister as the Page 10
Soviet agents pursuing a box of radioactive material. His search leads him deeper into a dark underworld of multiple deceptions and sadistic cruelty from which there appears to be no escape. Although Cold War espionage triggers the events which set these last two narratives in motion, neither of the central characters are motivated by patriotism or by anti-communism. McCoy, like Hammer, finally cooperates with the federal agents for personal motives. Both films reveal how easily Cold War tensions could be invoked for narrative rather than ideological purposes. The film was written by Carl Foreman, his last before being blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He intended the film as a political allegory in which Hadleyville represented Hollywood and its citizens the cowardly studio executives who refused to resist what he considered the unlawful behavior of the Committee that had cited him for contempt. Unlike Foreman, Elia Kazan had been a cooperative Committee witness, giving it the names of friends and colleagues who had been associated with communist organizations in the past, and, in On the Waterfront, he treats informing as an act of heroism. Terry Malloy Marlon Brando is a washed-up boxer working as a longshoreman on the Hoboken docks. Work on the docks is controlled by a corrupt labor union which uses violence and murder to keep workers in line. Under the moral influence of his priest Karl Malden and the sister Eva Marie Saint of a murdered worker, Malloy risks his life to testify against the union leaders. By the mids, the threat from the enemy within tended to give way to the threat from the enemy without. Reflecting this shift in political attitudes, Hollywood turned its attention from the communist subversion to communist expansion around the world. Resisting the latter demanded, in the minds of policymakers, a strong military and a willingness to go to war if necessary. The anxieties aroused by the prospect of a permanent struggle between East and West which might erupt into a third world war fought with nuclear weapons were evident in all the major Hollywood film genres, including the musical Silk Stockings,, but these fears were most fully expressed in science fiction and war films. In films such as The Man from Planet X and Invaders from Mars, the earth was repeatedly threatened by alien invaders whose relentless quest for new planets to colonize or destroy. Under the leadership of Captain Pat Hendry Kenneth Toby, a group of scientists and Air Force personnel at a remote arctic research station manage to incinerate a carnivorous alien that nourishes itself on human blood and thus fend off "the first invasion from another planet. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers introduces a more subtle invader in the form of giant seed pods which take over sleeping human bodies. When asked what he intended the pods to symbolize, Siegel was always evasive, allowing audiences and critics to draw their own conclusions. The genre, which had virtually disappeared from the screen at the end of World War Two, was revived as the Cold War intensified in the late s. Those set in World War Two show how the virtues of patriotism, professionalism, and teamwork have saved America from totalitarian predators See: World War Two ; the Korean War films raised questions about the willingness and the ability of Americans to live up to those ideals See: The Korean War ; and the Cold War films showed how those ideals can be called on to prevent war while at the same time containing the Soviet Union. They also favored subjects that featured those weapons most closely associated the nuclear war they were designed to prevent: He is cast as "Dutch" Holland, a professional baseball player who is recalled to active duty, during which he realizes that serving with the Strategic Air Command is more important than returning to the baseball diamond. His wife June Allyson wants him to return to civilian life, but she understands the importance of defending America and remains steadfastly loyal. All of these films depict a tight-knit, patriarchal family as an ideal to be emulated. American Families in the Cold War, were considered essential to a strong America. By the late s, the Cold War had begun to thaw somewhat. In Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States; Vice President Richard Nixon attended the Moscow Trade Fair; and the nuclear standoff between America and the Soviet Union came to be regarded less as a frightening possibility than as an unnecessary threat to human survival. The crew of an American submarine has taken refuge in Australia to await the arrival of a deadly atomic cloud moving south from the northern hemisphere. Both films imply that neither the Americans nor the Soviets can claim the moral high ground and that the threat of dangers of nuclear war outweighs the claims of any ideology. The anxieties aroused by the ubiquitous presence of the Bomb had been appearing in films for Page 11
nearly a decade, but they were largely displaced onto the horror film. The effects of radiation spawned a variety of gigantic sea creatures The Beast from 20, Fathoms,, ants Them,, and even grasshoppers The Beginning of the End, These events only sharpened the criticism of Cold War policies and elicited two responses that were embodied in two of the most memorable of Cold War films: In both films American bombers attack the Soviet Union, and the American President and his military advisors try to prevent the attack from escalating into a thermonuclear war. Consequently, from the moment a demented right-wing SAC general Sterling Hayden orders an attack on the Soviet Union, the film mounts a comic attack on Cold War ideologues, ineffectual politicians, doomsday planners, and military brass. Strangelove Peter Sellers, the wheelchair-bound scientific advisor, combines the intellectual arrogance and the urge to destroy that Kubrick suggests is at the heart of nuclear policy making. The desperate attempts to recall or destroy the attacking fails when a single aircraft gets to its target, triggering a Soviet "doomsday machine" capable of destroying all human life. Thrillers in which the Cold War adversaries met in the labyrinthine world of espionage rather than on the battlefield saw a similar ideological transformation. Peck prevails because he can be as ruthless as the communists, but, as the film makes clear, he does it in the service of democratic ideals. A disillusioned British agent, Alec Lemeas Richard Burton, is sent on a final mission into East Berlin, where he discovers that he has been set up by his superiors to preserve the cover of a "mole" Peter Van Eyck they have planted in East German intelligence. When the one person he still has faith in Claire Bloom is treacherously gunned down at the Berlin Wall, Lemeas refuses to escape alone and is shot dead. Alfred Hitchcock addresses East-West espionage activities in two of his less successful films: Torn Curtain and Topaz During the later s, the war in Vietnam escalated, destroying the Cold War political consensus and left the United States politically divided into supporters and opponents of the American presence in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the detente between East and West secured by the Nixon Administration in the early s lowered tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Neither promised to be good box office. As the decade came to a close, however, political conflicts in client nations and plans by the United States and the Soviet Union to implement new intercontinental ballistic missile technology led to renewal of Cold War hostilities and prompted the long-time cold warrior Ronald Reagan, who was elected President in, to declare the Soviet Union and her allies an "evil empire. Invoking the specter of the "evil empire" did more to recall an era when America was more prosperous, more unified, and more capable of heroic action than the nation that had endured defeat in Vietnam and a general disillusionment with national institutions. The sense of the Cold War as theater or as an exercise in nostalgia informs many films dealing with Cold war subjects. He is persuaded by a fatherly F. Tom Highway, an anachronistic survivor of the old Marine Corps, manages to instill in an insolent, undisciplined, and very s group of young Marines the virtues exemplified by John Wayne and his men in the earlier film. Their training serves them well during the invasion of Grenada, where victory, Highway makes clear, has redeemed the defeat in Vietnam. The year of its release saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Unless noted, the titles are available on video tape. Big Jim McLain Dr. Page 12
Chapter 8 : Brainwashing, McCarthyism, and Momism: a review of The Manchurian Candidate â bronwyn In Michael Rogin's article, Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies, he states that Philip Wylie referred to America as an ultimate matriarchy where the women raped the men, dominated husbands and encouraged the dependence of sons (6). Rogin successfully traces these ideas in Eleanor's role as Shaw's American agent, and. For more than a century, psychiatrists have had to live with the cultural consequences of how their profession has been depicted in the movies. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard identify a brief moment in the late s and early s when representations of the profession were largely so positive as to constitute a Golden Age of movie psychiatry. First, they down-play the fact that there are two psychiatrists in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of whom is implicated in the pod-people plot. And thirdly, they misrepresent The Manchurian Candidate. The fact that Yen Lo is neither a psychoanalyst nor a psychotherapist but a behaviourist does not account for his exclusion, because the Gabbards claim to encompass all kinds of mental-health professionals in their study. The Manchurian Candidate is so far from being an obscure film that its title has entered the popular lexicon on account of the brainwashing Yen Lo performs. On the contrary it persisted, and closer attention to how it operated in the films of that era will yield insights into the cultural work being done by movie psychiatrists. As they remark of Glen and Glenda? In so doing, they render the psychiatrist himself suspect â open to interrogation, subversion, parody and camp representation. Writing about camp in, Christopher Isherwood associated it with Freudian psychoanalysis. This motivates the detective phase of the drama, in which Ben discovers that Yen Lo has programmed Raymond to act as a sleeper assassin, a fact of which Raymond remains unaware for most of the film. It emerges, however, that his American handler is none other than his mother, who is a secret Communist agent. Acting under her orders, he murders both his new wife and his father-in-law, and very nearly assassinates the Vice-Presidential nominee. Her unwholesome influence is emasculating at all levels. Both hinge on the crime of matricide. Both treat us to expository lectures from their resident psychiatrists. And both feature cross-dressing. Whittaker â or rather, Mrs. Whittaker becomes Yen Lo. The psychiatrist in Psycho merely explains gender hybridization, but in The Manchurian Candidate actually embodies it. By comparison with the unimaginative police who have failed to solve the murders Norman has committed, they find Dr. Richman a model of competence. Its mode of delivery contains clear markers that the psychiatrist is being subverted. The visual clues are all present: Cold War gender ideology treated the feminized man as one of the most serious and phobic of subjects because its national implications were so significant. After citing psychiatric literature, Yen Lo jokes with his audience before demonstrating the efficacy of his brainwashing techniques by ordering Raymond to murder two members of his own patrol. In this most serious context, Yen Lo has fun. And he also changes his sex. Throughout these dream sequences, Mrs. Whittaker and Yen Lo share the lecture narrative by alternating on both the visual and auditory tracks. The relationship between Yen Lo and his American psychiatrist counterpart unnamed in the film illuminates the question of how psychiatry was represented in movies. As Packer points out, it even divides its psychiatric disciplines along ideological lines. For whereas behaviorism and hypnotism are depicted as totalitarian and mind-controlling Communist practices, psychoanalysis â with which Hollywood had more sympathy â is associated with freedom. More importantly, both films derive their dramatic energy from a specifically American paranoia that associates Communism with mind control. In both films the psychiatrist is rendered camp, particularly in his theatrical performance as a lecturer. It is worth noting that before George Axelrod wrote the screenplay for The Manchurian Candidate he had demonstrated his sophisticated Freudian and post-kinsey credentials by introducing a parodic psychiatrist into the screwball comedy The Seven Year Itch Billy Wilder, The kind of camp he helped create in The Manchurian Candidate does not permanently undermine status quo assumptions about gender binarisms and heterosexuality. Initially, it certainly appears to disrupt Cold War norms of masculinity. I now turn to some films that feature psychiatrists since the s. The psychiatrist in Dressed to Kill, Dr. In so doing he is rendered both ridiculous and monstrous. It becomes easier Page 13
to see connections rather than contrasts between Dr. Richman talks about transvestism and sexual confusion, Yen Lo embodies it. Like Psycho, Dressed to Kill calls upon a psychiatrist â Dr. Levy David Marguiles â to explain the dysfunctionality of Dr. Levy is tarred by association with the gender dysphoria he describes: He suffers from this condition because he was deliberately traumatized by his father, who was also a child psychologist. For the bulk of the narrative, we are led to believe that an older Dr. The skeptical reactions of local police indicate that her explanation stretches credulity. Cross-dressing is again invoked: And that wig is not incidental. It becomes important late in the narrative, when Dr. Waldheim is deployed to extract answers from Carter, much as Richman is deployed to extract answers from Norman. During a session in which Dr. Waldheim, steals her clothes and her wig, escapes dressed as a woman, and foils the child-abduction plot by attacking her father. In Raising Cain, as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, psychiatry or psychology and cross-dressing are mutually implicated in ways that render both suspect. The Silence of the Lambs likewise presents us with two psychiatrists: Hannibal Lecter Anthony Hopkin and Dr. Frederick Chilton Anthony Heald. Nor does Chilton provide redemption for the psychiatric profession, incompetent and over-confident as this case represents, he fails either to treat or to contain the monster. By the end of the film, Lecter, set free, is seen tracking down Chilton, presumably with the intention of eating him. I agree with the Gabbards that Dressed to Kill, Raising Cain and The Silence of the Lambs depict psychiatry negatively, because these mental-health professionals are either mad and bad or frankly incompetent to deal with the madness that confronts them. On the contrary, their camp monstrosities and inadequacies correspond with types found in films of the alleged Golden Age, and notably The Manchurian Candidate and Psycho. We have subsequently seen signs that cinematic representations of the psychiatrist are being revised in response to contemporary concerns. It also refigures the sources of fear, which are now corporate control, genetic manipulation, and technological surveillance. Its depictions of the psychiatric profession are altered accordingly. Since brainwashing is achieved by surgical means rather than by behavioural conditioning, computer chips are implanted in the members of the lost patrol. Yen Lo disappears in the new hysteria about technological surveillance. The evil psychiatrist is now not a psychiatrist at all, but a geneticist named Dr. Atticus Noyle Simon McBurney, whose tools are drills, computer chips, and virtual reality simulations. He is neither humorous nor a cross-dresser. Nor does he deliver theatrical lectures. He is characterized by his ubiquity and insinuation. Because the focal concern is no longer gender liminality, Demme does not give us a camp psychiatrist. Karen Fletcher Betty Buckley at first appears to be Dr. Her theory that DID alters are physiologically distinct turns out to be correct: But for all her insight, she disbelieves the stories the alters are telling her and badly underestimates the situation. Fletcher is not rendered monstrous or camp by association with the cross-dressing serial killer. But she pays a high price. She dies fatally outmatched by the monster she has partially explained but failed to fully understand, treat or contain. The figures cut by Dr. Richman and Yen Lo reveal an ambivalent attitude to the psychiatric expert: He is at once revered and resented for the uncomfortable truths he might reveal about sex and gender. Yen Lo and Dr. Far from participating in a Golden Age of movie psychiatry, Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate yoke psychiatry with gender liminality in a way that renders both profoundly equivocal. This casts a long shadow over horror and thriller movies until at least But the tendency to camp up psychiatry subsequently abated as the cultural work being done by psychiatrists altered. We need to pay more attention to the specific ways in which they are stigmatized by association with the phenomena they are either invoked to explain or embody. It is time for a new, and subtler, taxonomy of movie psychiatry. Here, the horror and thriller films have been examined with a view to beginning the discussion of such taxonomy; the next step will be to turn to genres like the melodrama and comedy to explore the broader implications of the argument made here. American Psychiatric Press, University of Minnesota Press, Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,, p. Edinburgh University Press, pp. Rowman and Littlefield, Cambridge Scholars Publishing,, p. Barton Palmer eds, A Little Solitaire: Rutgers University Press,, N. Page 14