Films can be overpowering, more real than reality, and they may shape our ideas more profoundly than sober critical prose. We sit back, relax, the screen has our full attention. We forget about ourselves, our own worries, fears, hopes and dreams, and live in this world before us with its powerful soundtrack on which we are transported into a brighter, more vivid, world where we are taken over by the feelings of characters with whose lives we identify but whom we do not control because we are not controlling agents in this world which absorbs us.
We are already brainwashed.
We live the life of characters whose actions we cannot influence and we suffer with him or her as the drama unfolds.
When the film is about brainwashing our experience is compounded. We are being brainwashed into living the feelings of a character who is being brainwashed.
Jonathan Demme's version of the Manchurian Candidate is a challenging film to watch. In this film we are required to think about the unthinkable when it seems that our capacity for independent thought is an illusion.
The strongest character in the film is the mother of the vice-presidential candidate played impressively by Meryl Streep. She is the arch manipulator and her son, in what she perceives as his own, and America’s, best interest, must be brainwashed to win power. She seems to have brainwashed herself. She is a determined woman and her behaviour appears totally determined by her single-minded ambition. The people in the company, Manchurian Global, may have superior technical expertise in mind control, yet she is the person with the most dominating personality. The scientists and experts working for the company seem anonymously robotic in the performance of brain operations and hypnotic induction.
In contrast, the characters who have actually been brainwashed appear more free, more spontaneous, critical of their own conduct and to be struggling with themselves.The main hero, played by Denzil Washington, tries to persuade his old comrade to recognise that he has been brainwashed, to fight it. He believes that there is a part deep within that the brainwashers cannot control, cannot touch, so they can resist if they can somehow reach out.
It seems that this is the message that the director, Jonathan Demme wants his film to convey.
Yet although the film is compelling viewing, in real life we don’t need brainwashing to induce us to torture and kill, we will do that to order, or under the influence of social pressures. The independent spirit within that is invoked as resistant to brainwashing appears to be strangely elusive. We just accept that the world is ruled by group of global capitalists who plunder the planet.