MOTHER'S DAY
The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon
“Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
Mother’s Day is coming up, so what better choice of hypno-themed reading (or viewing) than Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, first published in 1959.
(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the original novel, and the two movie adaptations.)
The Manchurian Candidate is a political thriller and satire about the son of a prominent American political family who is brainwashed into unknowingly being the puppet-assassin for a communist conspiracy.
The son, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, together with Major Bennett Marco and the rest of their platoon are captured by Chinese and Soviet intelligence officials during the Korean War in 1952 and taken to Manchuria. There, they are brainwashed, with operators testing the post-hypnotic ‘kill’ trigger they’ve given Shaw by having him shoot two of his comrades.
The remaining platoon, including Shaw and Marco, leave Manchuria none the wiser. They believe the fatalities were the result of Korean combat, during which Shaw saved all their lives; heroics for which he was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.
Back in civilian life, Shaw becomes a newspaperman and Marco moves into his swanky New York apartment in order for Marco to shag an assortment of women, and for the friends to drink beer and bourbon. But soon, Marco is having night terrors of Manchuria, and is stirring up the past with his former, also traumatised, comrades, and the FBI and CIA…
Meanwhile, Shaw’s “jezebel” mother, Eleanor, is revealed as her son’s American operator. She has a hit-list of political enemies standing in the way of her plan to make her senator husband the next president of the United States. Shaw and Eleanor’s Oedipal relationship plays out across Shaw’s tragic love affair with the daughter of a political opponent and a spate of unconscious murders… including those of the political opponent father and his daughter, who becomes Shaw’s much-loved wife.
Thanks to Marco & Co’s meddling with the post-hypnotic trigger, however, the final assassination – of the presidential nominee for whom Eleanor’s husband is running mate – doesn’t go to plan. Instead, it is Eleanor and her husband who are shot on stage by Shaw; Shaw then shoots himself just as Marco reaches him.
The author, Richard Condon, worked in Hollywood in publicity and advertising before becoming a novelist. It’s interesting to note that the Manchurian brainwashing and training programme devised for Shaw is inspired by Pavlov’s classical conditioning – just the sort of experiment to capture the hearts and minds of ad men!
Condon also quotes, via the commie programme’s mastermind, Yen Lo: papers by Margaret Brenman (‘Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Anti-Social and Self-Injurious Behavior’, 1942); and Wesley Raymond Wells (‘Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Crime’, 1941); and a 1949 book by Andrew Salter, Conditioned Reflex Therapy.
There are titbits about hypnosis, but hypnosis is mostly just the result of a cocktail of brainwashing and conditioning, such as “narcotics, techniques, and suggestions”. In short, the ‘brainwashing’ rather than the hypnosis is the star – as this quote neatly sums up: “Their brains had not merely been washed, they had been dry-cleaned.”
A hypnosis meme which has endured, however, is the post-hypnotic trigger used on Shaw. The phrase “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” prompts Shaw to deal a deck of cards; on upturning the Queen of Diamonds, the trigger card, Shaw becomes silent and still, awaiting instructions.
Shaw overhears this phrase in a bar whilst with Marco and others, and demands a pack of cards from the bartender. A suspicious Marco, seeing Shaw in his altered state, suggests he go jump into a lake – which Shaw duly does. This discovery allows Marco, and the FBI and CIA men to do their own mind-meddling with Shaw. While this is mostly to no avail, Shaw’s psyche is starting to suffer. When his future wife turns up to a costume party dressed as the Queen of Diamonds, Eleanor unknowingly has lost full control.
It’s all very MK-Ultra – the real-life CIA mind-control project that preceded this novel.
The cultural infidel that I am, I’d seen the 2004 Denzel Washington film of The Manchurian Candidate thrice before Kev and I finally watched the 1962 version. I was really looking forward to reading this book to complete the trilogy… but I did not love it.
Condon’s writing style is not very accessible; it’s quite wordy and referential. It was interesting to get into Shaw’s head (and that was a surprise as the Denzel film is more about Marco), but dialogue and internal monologue are difficult to distinguish between characters. Some parts just come across as essays by the author – Yen Lo’s speech on brainwashing techniques or a rich description of Broadway, for example. I note Condon was accused of plagiarism – there is certainly a patchiness to his writing that suggests as such.
However, the dénouement at the national convention is fantastically powerful political satire. (And if only it had stayed satire!)
The 1962 film, starring Laurence Harvey as Shaw, Frank Sinatra as Marco and Angela Lansbury as Eleanor, is faithful to the novel. But I prefer *gasp* the 2004 version. Saving the truth about the ‘Manchuria’ experiments as an Act II climax, making Marco the protagonist, and raising Shaw’s stakes as a rising political star, etc, are, IMHO, far more powerful.
I also felt, as I read the detail of Condon’s deeply psychoanalytical descriptions of the lead characters’ expressions and behaviours, that Denzel, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep absolutely nail this aspect of the book irrespective of the wider changes.
I’ve never before read a book that seemed so ripe for adaptation and reinvention on the big screen; but that seems somehow fitting for a story about taking a shell of a person and shaping them to suit your own tastes and purposes.
