What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America

by Matthew Frye Jacobson, Gaspar González

Considered by many to be the best political thriller ever made, The Manchurian Candidate is as entertaining, troubling, and relevant today as it was in 1962. Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, and directed with probing insight by John Frankenheimer, the film was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Largely out of circulation for the next two decades, it acquired a well-deserved cult following until it was rereleased during the last year of the Reagan presidency, when its pointed satire of political and media manipulation seemed more timely than ever. In What Have They Built You to Do?—a key line of dialogue from the original film—Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González undertake an ambitious reexamination of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 novel by Richard Condon on which it was based, and—critically analyzed here for the first time—the 2004 remake directed by Jonathan Demme. Based on close readings of the film and broad investigations into the eras in which it was made and rediscovered, the authors decode the many layers of meaning within and surrounding the film, from the contradictions of the Cold War it both embodies and parodies—McCarthyism and Kennedy liberalism, individualism and conformity—to its construction of Asian villains, overbearing women, and male heroes in a society anxious about race, gender, and sexuality. Through their multifaceted analysis of The Manchurian Candidate (in all its incarnations), Jacobson and González raise provocative questions about power and anxiety in American politics and society from the Cold War to today. Matthew Frye Jacobson teaches American studies at Yale University. His books include Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Gaspar González is an independent scholar and journalist in Miami. He has taught American studies at Yale University and film studies at the University of Miami.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American Studies at Yale, is the author of Whiteness of a Different Color and Special Sorrows. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid contextualization of The Manchurian Candidate in histories of film, gender, national security, Orientalism, and more. Smart, detailed discussions of how the film bounces its train scenes off of multiple canonical Hitchcock bits, and an especially interesting, to me, analysis of various strands of paranoid 50s cinema (Panic in the Streets and My Son John, to name two, plus a bonus discussion of the equation of football and Americanism, and, more importantly, not playing football and un-Americanism, in the latter that I wish I'd recalled for the book--which also recalls a student point in a recent paper that Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" mentions instant replay, which, double doh). As a bonus, it bounces off of/refutes a Greil Marcus take on the movie, which sounds like every Greil Marcus take on everything, featuring a bunch of people not totally clear on what they're doing somehow producing a piece of art that captures and subsumes the entire mysterious national consciousness in ways of which they're not even aware. I appreciate that their research here points out that the opposite is in many ways true of this film, which represented a unique collision of personal/professional/political circumstances in the early 60s. Though it's odd to then see them end on a note that sounds like nobody so much as...Greil Marcus. Ah well--those mystic chords of memory are hard to resist. Gotta watch the film again (fifth time?) to make sure it will show well in the US/Film class. Showed them Strangelove this year, which was not universally beloved, though one student said it was more interesting to think and write about than to see, which, fine with me.