The idea of government using advanced technology to control people has probably teased people’s collective imagination since before technology was even a word.
Technology means 'the science of the application of knowledge to practical purposes' or 'applied science,' according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Our knowledge of electromagnetic radiation, for example, brought us radar technology. That was practical considering that, in World War II, the Allied Powers won because they had better radars than Germany and Japan.
Electromagnetic radiation also made it practical for people to cook a hot dog in 15 seconds, even if it came out looking nasty. In the 1984 movie Gremlins, somebody uses a microwave oven to cook more than a hot dog, but that’s another story.
It does, however, raise the question of what applied science really means. Could our government be using our microwave ovens to study people’s capacity for radiation exposure? It did in the 1930s (though without the ovens), on soldiers and civilian hospital patients.
Could the government also be spying on us, and better yet, using us as spies without our knowledge?
Denzel Washington’s character thinks so in the new film, The Manchurian Candidate, about right-wingers at the highest levels of government posing as liberals to seize power, and using thought control to do it.
Washington plays Ben Marco, a captain leading a pre-Desert Storm convoy through Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War to assess Iraqi troop strength. The convoy comes under attack and one of Marco’s men, Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), ends up saving everyone, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor and becoming a senator.
Or so we think. The soldiers return to find that each of them can recite exactly how the ambush happened and recall clearly Shaw’s heroic response. But the men are also suffering from nightmares about alternate scenarios, where soldiers are calmly instructed to kill their fellow soldiers, while others of their comrades lazily look on.
It’s 2004 and a presidential election is at hand. The one person who isn’t having nightmares is Sen. Shaw, whose mother, Eleanor (Meryl Streep), is grooming him to be president. And she’ll do anything — with her son’s help — to make it happen.
'The Manchurian Candidate,' directed by Jonathan Demme, is a remake of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 classic with the same title, starring Frank Sinatra, who played the role of Marco. That film’s menace was Communism; the menace in the new film is terrorism.
Half the time, Washington’s character, Marco, is out of it. But his nightmares grow more vivid, and he tries to get Shaw, who is in la-la land, to understand them too — before he becomes president and the schnitzel hits the fan.
Both men play their roles convincingly, but Streep’s performance keeps you glued. Eleanor thinks the country is going to the dogs, and the only way to freedom and liberty is belligerent, armed conflict with the rest of the world. Her nemesis is a Halliburton look-alike, the Manchurian Global Corp., whose thirst for war has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with money.
The Manchurian Candidate is tinged with politics that parallel the current presidential contest, with liberals pitted against conservatives, each no less terrified by terrorism than the other.
The film raises the bar on what government, funded by private corporations, is capable of doing for the right price. And it makes you wonder how far it would go to invent many of the demons bedeviling us today.
--E-mail Salah Ahmed at
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