The Manchurian Candidate by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838719630
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The press conference: montage inside montage

You lose any real sense of the development of the plot; you’re captured by the weird spectacle of a high government official saying exactly what he means. You forget that, of course, the secretary of defense would know who Senator Iselin is. You revel in the secretary’s disbelief and refusal. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, you think, if our government actually talked like that? That’s the pleasure; that’s what stays in your mind. In the moment, you don’t care about Senator Iselin, about the strange and hideous conspiracy that’s unfolding. You want to see the secretary of defense keep talking – you want to see him take over the story. And he does, in away. Even though we never see him again, his spirit – breaking all the boundaries of what you’ve come to expect – is what the movie is about: what it’s for.

Then and Now

When you look, now, at this 1962 black-and-white movie made up of bits and pieces of Hitchcock and Orson Welles, of Psycho and Citizen Kane most obviously – perhaps less obviously, but more completely, taking Invasion of the Body Snatchers out of science fiction and returning it to history – made up of a lot of clean steals, workmanlike thievery, a second-class director with a first-class cast using whatever he can get his hands on – what’s overwhelming is a sense of what the movie does that movies can no longer do. The momentum of the film is so strong you may not catch this dislocation until the second time you see the picture, the third time, the tenth time – but that sense, that itch, may keep calling you back.

I remember first seeing it alone, when it came out in 1962, at the Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto, California, a Moorish wonderland of a movie house. The first thing I did when it was over was call my best friend and tell him he had to see it, too. We went the next night; as we left the theatre, I asked him what he thought. ‘Greatest movie I ever saw,’ he said flatly, as if he didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t. He said what he said stunned, with bitterness, as if he shouldn’t have had to see this thing, as if what it told him was both true and false in a manner he would never be able to untangle, as if it was both incomprehensible and all too clear, as if the whole experience had been, somehow, a gift, the gift of art, and also unfair – and that was how I felt, too.

We saw – as anyone can see today – too many rules broken. It’s one thing to have Raymond Shaw, the nasty, boring prig, made into an assassin; the zombie state he’s put into when he has to kill is not, really, so far from his everyday life. When his controllers make him kill his boss – in 1954, two years

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