It’s a well-known fact around these parts that I love a conspiracy thriller. I couldn’t have been more excited that my local arthouse theater programmed a month-long series of 1970s American thrillers, and I bought a ticket for almost every one of them. The first of these is a cornerstone of the genre, and one that was a sorely lacking blind spot in my checklist of canonical films of said phenotype. The Parallax View, a 1974 release from director Alan J. Pakula just two years before his second-best picture nomination for All the President’s Men (his first was for To Kill a Mockingbird), stars Warren Beatty. Beatty plays Joe Frady, a reporter in the Pacific Northwest, three years after he was present at the base of the Seattle Space Needle when a high-profile politician was assassinated in the restaurant above. He wasn’t in the room when it happened, but his ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) was, and she’s convinced that six of the other eyewitnesses who have died in the intervening time were the victims of foul play; Frady waves off her concerns as anxiety born of self-medicating, until she, too, turns up dead. Now convinced, Frady starts to pull at the frayed threads presented to him and discovers a conspiracy that permeates the fabric of the country’s leadership, one whose reach is far wider than he could have imagined.
In the book upon which The Parallax View is based, the inciting assassination was that of JFK, making it a part of the subgenre of conspiracy media that specifically appeals to the Dale Gribble set. Here, the assassination that precedes the opening credits is that of a generic independent politician with an eye on the presidency, as the film was released too late to attach itself to the Kennedy assassination without making itself a period piece. That didn’t stop this one from becoming as locked into a certain time as a period piece would be in the intervening half century, however, while also remaining unfortunately (if not unsurprisingly) relevant to the current greased-by-blood American political machine. Sure, there’s a lot of culture shock upon seeing Frady purchase a plane ticket with cash after he’s already boarded the plane. On the other hand, the film seems almost prescient in its depiction of the abject terror of living in a society shaped by shadowy forces that can arrange car accidents for reporters, poison newspaper editors in a way that mimics a heart attack, and knock a passenger plane carrying a progressive candidate out of the sky. It’s not that hard to make a connection between the fictional conspiracy at play here and, for instance, the sudden death of a whistleblower who raised safety concerns about airplane manufacturing just six weeks ago. That’s not really prescience, really, any more than The Simpsons “predicted” any of the things it’s been credited with foreseeing in recent years; it’s just an indictment of the fact that we’ve made much less progress in the past sixty years than we would like to think. It’s all just the pageantry of empire.
The Parallax View falls short of being a masterpiece. It has some really wonderful set pieces, and the picaresque nature of the narrative keeps things moving even when the story starts to feel a little slow. First, Frady goes to a tiny Oregon community where the political aide to the dead senator was last seen and where one of the witnesses was drowned while fishing when a dam was opened. This sequence is great, as you can feel the immense tension as the dam opens again while he’s investigating the area. This is preceded by an impressive fist fight between Frady and a local oaf, then followed by an exciting car chase that I would bet money was an inspiration to the future creators of The Dukes of Hazzard. Even after he manages not to drown, Frady’s editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) still isn’t convinced that there’s a conspiracy afoot, until Frady miraculously survives the assassination of in-hiding political insider Austin Tucker (William “Mr. Feeney” Daniels), at which point Rintels relents. In his investigation, Frady discovers that an organization known as The Parallax Corporation is using mail-in personality tests to find sociopaths and recruit them to become assassins. From here, we get to the film’s most famous sequence (and it, in and of itself, is a masterpiece): a five minute montage to which Frady (undercover after submitting a false test) is subjected to as a kind of orientation/brainwashing. You can see it here, and although it functions beautifully in isolation, it’s obviously much more effective in the film itself.
In a lot of ways, this is the platonic ideal of a 1970s political thriller, disillusioned after a decade that saw the death of a beloved president, the murder of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, the unmasking of another president’s illegal surveillance of the public. While the book was solely focused on the assassination of JFK, this one explicitly talks about the demoralization of an entire nation as there’s the murder of another public figure “every other week, it seems.” It’s also unrelentingly grim, as everyone turns out to be corruptible and already under Parallax’s sway despite initially seeming to be trustworthy, or genuinely good and invested in getting the truth out but very easy to kill and cover up, or less safe than they thought they were despite taking every precaution. No one is unreachable, no one is untouchable, no one is safe, and no number of civilian collaterals is considered too much, whether it be eighteen eyewitnesses, a plane full of people who were unlucky enough to be on the same flight as a senator, or an entire marching band that has the misfortune of having been selected to perform at a congressman’s campaign announcement. It’s bleak, but worth seeking out.
At this point, you can’t fault Quentin Tarantino for hiding or obscuring his influences. Maybe around the time he first made a splash with Reservoir Dogs on the 1990s film festival circuit, he could’ve been accused of lifting images & ideas from the Hong Kong action cinema that directly preceded him without citing his sources, but by now we’re all used to his schtick. Tarantino is more of a genre film DJ than a traditional director, remixing & recontextualizing pre-existing media in an act of creation through curation. Still, there is something a little deflating about catching up with those sources of inspiration after seeing them regurgitated in one of Tarantino’s post-modern mashups. I understood as a teenager that Kill Bill, vol. 1 visually referenced a long history of vintage Japanese cinema & manga, but it wasn’t until recently watching Lady Snowblood for the first time that it really became clear how much more potent & vivid those source texts can be compared to their photocopied American version. I loved Jackie Brown when I first saw it in high school as well, but at this point in my life I’m way more likely to return to Pam Grier classics like Coffy & Foxy Brown than I am to their adoring echoes in Tarantino’s homage. This exact phenomenon hit me again while watching the 1975 Hal Ashby comedy Shampoo for the first time last month, which in retrospect made Tarantino’s most recent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feel a little hollow in its redundancy. There was already a perfectly executed post-mortem on the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s, made just a few years after the fact, while the corpse was still fresh. Only, Ashby’s film ties that world’s death and the sinister hedonism of the hippie-dippy takeover that followed to the presidential election of Richard Nixon in 1968, while Tarantino ties it to the Manson Family violence of 1969. There are no murders in Ashby’s day-in-the-life story about a fuckboy hairdresser who sleeps his way across Beverly Hills, but you can still distinctly smell the stench of death bubbling up from the canyons below.
Warren Beatty is a producer & co-writer of this bad-vibes hangout comedy, in which he satirizes his own real-life reputation as a handsome playboy & sex addict. He plays an extremely popular, promiscuous hairdresser who compulsively sleeps with all of his clients. He’s proud of his actual, professional salon work and insistent that he is not a gigolo, since he sleeps with the women purely for the pleasure of the act, and they return for more because he’s genuinely talented with hair. The hairdressing is 100% part of the foreplay, though, as he practically dry-humps his clients’ heads while blowing them dry, then thrusts his instruments into his waistband like a cowboy’s phallic pistol. Haircuts are unavoidably intimate acts in all circumstances, but there’s something especially shameless about his technique. Usually, he gets away with this slutty, unprofessional behavior because the men outside the salon assume he is gay, a stereotype he gladly exploits for cover. Only, Beatty’s promiscuity gets the best of him when the insular small-town community of Beverly Hills offers no new conquests he hasn’t serviced, and he finds that he’s already screwed over a potential investor in his dream to open his own salon by screwing the man’s wife, mistress, and teenage daughter (a baby-faced Carrie Fisher) on separate occasions – all seedy, all within 24 hours. Meanwhile, satisfying his monogamous girlfriend at home while satisfying every other woman in the county proves to be trickier by the minute. The sitcom juggling of these conflicting, overlapping relationships can be funny in a Three’s Company kind of way, but a lot of the film feels like a bitter autopsy on the recently concluded Free Love era, dissecting it more as a covert extension of classic male entitlement than as some progressive far-out experiment. It’s a damning self-indictment that set public relations for the himbo community back for decades, so there’s something bravely vulnerable about Beatty’s involvement in the project in particular (assuming that Hal Ashby was not quietly known around town as an insatiable fuck machine).
Shampoo has somehow maintained a lasting reputation as a zany screwball comedy, which is mostly only paid off in the two party sequences at its climax. In its clearest culture clash between the old-world Los Angeles of the 1960s and the upcoming druggy sleaze of the 1970s, both of the opposing sides in the hippies vs Nixon voters divide cross into enemy territory during simultaneous parties. An absurdly Conservative, buttoned-up Jack Warden plays the central figure in this sequence: the businessman investor who’s been triple-cucked by Beatty’s assumed-queer hairdresser. There’s a lot of awkward tension wound up by Warden’s Nixon-election-night party, where he’s unknowingly invited a small cadre of counterculture types, including his mistress (Julie Christie) & Beatty’s girlfriend (Goldie Hawn, looking like a boardwalk caricature of Goldie Hawn), who both get into Real Housewives-style glaring matches with Warden’s wife (Lee Grant). Where the movie really gets funny, though, is when Warden leaves his Nixon-voter safe space and follows his younger, druggier associates to a hippie party in the Hills, chaotically drunk. Warden explores the hippie party like he’s walking through an alien planet, poking at the locals like extraterrestrial specimens before experimenting with the idea of joining them. It’s a short-lived cultural exchange, but it is a memorably funny one, especially since it releases a lot of the social tension of the election-night party that precedes it. That tension immediately returns in full force when Warden catches a direct glimpse of Beatty’s passionate heterosexuality, though, and an ambient threat of violent retribution hangs over the rest of the picture. It’s the same low-key hangout turned sourly sinister vibe shift that Tarantino echoed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and although neither film explicitly marks the end of the Old Hollywood era with the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, it’s a feeling & a memory that hangs over both pictures like a dark cloud (something rarely seen in sunny LA).
If Warren Beatty’s slutty hairdresser has any direct corollary in Tarantino’s film, it’s clearly Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth: a has-been movie star whose handsome face only covered up his rotten personality for so long before the good times came to an abrupt stop. If we’re tracking the way that influence reached Tarantino’s pen, it starts with a real-life friend of Warren Beatty’s, Jay Sebring. A famously talented hairstylist, Sebring was also a close friend & former lover of Sharon Tate’s and one of the five Manson Family victims murdered in Tate’s home. Tarantino cast Emile Hirsch in a small role as Sebring in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but there’s a lengthier, indirect representation of him through Pitt’s part as the co-lead. Cliff Booth partially plays as an homage to Beatty’s hairstylist protagonist in Shampoo, who was in turn partially written in homage to the real-life Sebring. Everything in Taratino’s films works this way. It’s all fragments of reflections of ephemera from decades past, rearranged in loving homage to the media he genuinely, passionately appreciates as a consumer. His work can be incredibly rewarding & entertaining, but there’s something limiting about that practice when compared to the original movies that inspire it. Somehow, Beatty was able to convey the same darkness & brutality that concluded the Free Love 1960s in his homage to Sebring (mixed with winking reference to his own reputation) without ever evoking the death-cult violence that ended his friend’s life. It can be fun to pick apart the academic collage of art & history in Tarantino’s work, but there’s something much more direct & powerful about the original works they reference. Maybe Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was partially made as a corrective to Shampoo‘s discordant reputation as a goofy sitcom, intended to accentuate the more tragic undercurrents of its real-world context that are muffled under the humor of its hippies vs Nixonites culture clash. If so, it’s a shame that Taratino has reportedly abandoned his planned project that dramatizes the art of film criticism, since that what he’s mainly good at.
The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns. That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect. Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart. Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics. That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography. Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths. It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.
Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses. Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states. Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics. The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity. They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that. Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures. They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.
There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide. Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement. They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal. As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera. It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny. It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust). However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent. Nor does it really need to.
Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater. Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures. If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature. The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests. If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap. It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given. Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it. Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.
How to Build a Truth Engine is a documentary about disinformation and how we can try to combat it. Bookended by footage of the terrorist insurrection on January 6th, 2021, the film features journalists, software engineers, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and other talking heads as they tackle the topic of information warfare. The bitter irony, as one of those interviewed says, is that we live in an era in which people have access to more information than ever before, but that same mechanism which has enabled that access has also provided such a fertile breeding ground for misinformation that people have been algorithmically partitioned off into different realities. As we move from expert to expert, an idea of consciousness is constructed for the uninitiated: that among the strengths of the human mind are its abilities to recognize patterns and then complete those patterns. They don’t get into the nitty gritty about it overmuch, but if you’ve ever taken an anthropological literature course, it’s familiar, and it isn’t overcomplicated to the point where the viewer is going to have a syllabus’s worth of Michelle Sugiyama articles to read or need to learn the word “pareidolia.”
The film rests on several pillars that all of us living in reality understand to be fundamentally true. Neurologically speaking, humans find patterns in everything, even when there isn’t one (in the same way that we see a cloud and superimpose “bunny” or “whale”), and it’s become clear that information warfare is the new frontier of mankind’s conflicts. Journalism is a dying industry despite the fact that we need the fifth estate now more than ever, and the root cause of this has been the dissolution of legacy and local newspapers as advertising revenue dried up (the connection between this and capitalism, however, is not made by this film). There was a time when there was a (mostly) functional journalistic body wherein the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world were capable of bringing down men who abused their power – sometimes, anyway. Now that most people get their news from social media, there is no longer any official entity or body that can be held legally liable for spreading and disseminating information that is not only not fact-checked, but which is often patently false upon its face. People’s algorithmically driven social media feeds exist solely to drive engagement on the platform, not deliver factual or truthful content, and we are all living in a bit of a hellscape because of it.
The people to whom we are introduced as experts in their field have very impressive credentials. There’s Susan Benesch, the current faculty associate of Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. She’s also the founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, an initiative that attempts to balance concerns about inflammatory, inciting rhetoric and the necessity of protecting free speech through the tactic of “counterspeech,” a form of providing alternative narratives in an empathetic way as a means to counter hate speech and misinformation. Zahra M. Aghajan, a clinical neuroscience researcher, is interviewed several times. There’s also Vwani Roychowdhury, a professor who has been with UCLA’s electrical engineering department since 1996, and who is also Director of The Roychowdhury Group in Computational Science, which specializes in machine learning and application; along for the ride is Behnam Shahbazi, a student for whom Roychowdhury was the advisor for Shahbazi’s paper a”StoryMiner: An Automated and Scalable Framework for Story Analysis and Detection from Social Media.” There’s also Itzhak Fried, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and Professor In Residence and Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at UCLA Health, who has been recognized several times for his advancement of the science.
Rounding things out are a host of New York Times employees, some of whom operate across multiple departments but all of whom are involved with the “Visual Investigations” team, which they themselves describe as “combin[ing] traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and the forensic analysis of visual evidence to find truth, hold the powerful to account and deconstruct important news events.” There’s Malachy Browne, who’s the “enterprise director” of this team, who has won the Pulitzer twice, first in 2020 for exposing Russian culpability in Syrian hospital bombings, and again in 2023 for the team’s involvement in exposing which Russian unit was responsible for the murder of over two dozen civilians in Bucha, and the name of the commander of the unit. We’re walked through a lot of the reconstruction of this particular investigation, which establishes the credibility of the team, which also includes Haley Willis, who mostly covers human rights topics with the V.I., and Muyi Xiao, whose beat includes covering the news out of China. Her credentials are established through her coverage of COVID-19 as early as mid-January 2020, initially through reconstructing forensic digital data of communication between medical professionals but which was quickly silenced by the Chinese government.
Several years back, I made a new friend who told me that he never watched documentaries, citing that he had taken a specific rhetoric of film class that made him too savvy to all of the ways that documentaries are manipulative, so he simply couldn’t trust any of them any more. I thought about him a lot while watching this doc, one that I was genuinely excited to see. As someone who has lost family members down the rabbit hole of bizarre, impossible conspiracy theories in the past ten years as they have approached mainstream metastasis, I was hoping for something new, something fresh, perhaps some new idea about how to break through to the brainwashed masses. And I was still mostly appreciative of the film, even as it repeated tired old canards that all of us who have watched as logic and reason were beaten back into the darkness in the past decade already know. I was a little surprised by the sloppiness of the proofreading for the subtitles (my screening featured them for the entire run time, not simply when translation was needed). I raised an eyebrow at the idea that A.I. (in the form of StoryMiner, a potential contender for the “truth engine” of the title) could somehow be harnessed for good to help seek and map out online conspiracy theories so that counterspeech could be developed to fight back against misinformation (it’s telling that I saw this just two days after another SXSW event featuring a sizzle reel of A.I. salespitching was booed). And, in the wake of the way that the Overton Window on trans liberation has been moved further and further into right-wing conservatism because the NYT is a chickenshit rag that has started acting as a mouthpiece for the exact kind of vile rhetoric that this documentary is (correctly) identifying as evil, I was skeptical of how much this documentary was dick-riding the erstwhile newspaper of record.
All these things, in combination with very style-over-substance editing (the visuals in this documentary are, at my estimation, 85% semi-related drone footage with voice over), were matters of concern. I was still willing to go along with the presentation, all while wondering if there would be a mention of Palestine’s apartheid and the way that even people who consider themselves “liberal” have been silent about the issue for years and have revealed themselves as genocide apologists in the past six months; as the film went on, I thought “well, perhaps that’s a topic that’s outside of the scope of this particular documentary.” After all, it was difficult to tell when this was produced, or when the footage was shot. Muyi Xiao appears in some footage with braces, and some without (and, simply to clarify and not to belittle, when I saw “without” I mean “before”). When she is walking around Times Square, advertising can be seen for the final season of Insecure—which aired its finale the day after Christmas in 2021—but then again, I’m 98% percent positive that some of the drone footage included an advertisement of the 2011 film Real Steel (it could be an advertisement for something else entirely that simply has the same name and a similar typeface, but I couldn’t find evidence of anything like that while researching in prep for this review). And then. And then.
As I mentioned before, this film milks the NYT Visual Investigations team’s coverage of the Bucha massacre for all the credibility that they can, and there’s no argument that they did damn fine journalism there. Their coverage of a Syrian bombing is likewise impressive, including their demonstration of how satellite imagery is combined with cell phone footage to triangulate where the videos are taken and establish their veracity. Before we get to see a recap of the Bucha investigation, we hear a phone call, translated from Russian to English via on-screen subtitles, in which a soldier (presumably one of the paratroopers from 234th Air Assault Regiment) calls his mother. He asks her what the news at home is saying, what she is hearing from people around her, tells her that they keep being told of victory after victory, but that he and his companions have no idea how much of what they are told is true, if anything. Although we then go on to learn just how depraved the activities that this caller et al went on to perform in Bucha were, I can’t help but interpret that there’s an attempt at an invocation of empathy for him; you don’t play the audio of a confused, possibly scared soldier calling his mommy without an agenda. An hour or so later, after dozens of interviews and countless minutes of footage of jungles, oceans, and city skylines, another voicemail is played, one which is identified as being a call from a “Hamas terrorist” in October of 2023, and which is translated on-screen with a speech I won’t transcribe, but one which aligns with the narrative that Israel has attempted to put forth to justify their ongoing genocide of the people of Palestine. It’s horrific to hear, so brief that you wouldn’t even have to take a bathroom break to miss it, just have a thirty second coughing fit. It’s so out of place that it feels like it was inserted at the last minute, a quick little virtue signal to the bloodthirsty neoliberals who think (or pretend to think) that it’s antisemitic to criticize starving millions to death in their homes or cutting them to pieces with death from the sky.
I was shocked at this. I kept expecting that the film would loop back around on it, bring it up, maybe even use this as a demonstration piece to say, “Look how easy it is to use media to persuade; we told you that this audio recording was from Hamas and provided a translation that makes the blood boil, when in fact this is a recipe from a podcast.” In fact, it is one of the never-verified messages provided to the West by the Israeli military, and is treated not as a potential piece of propaganda to be analyzed, dissected, and verified. At best, in a text that is taking a moral stance on the literally society-sustaining importance of journalistic rigor, it feels like a half-baked and careless attempt at relevance that compromises the film’s integrity. A less charitable reading would be to say that this segment shatters any pretense that Engine could otherwise make that it maintains a clear set of ethics, and is therefore useless as a document of fact. The latter is my personal reading, and it renders what is otherwise a strong (if atypically slick) “documentary” which makes strong points about disinformation … as disinformation itself. I’m not going to pile on the contributors to the documentary for this; from what I can tell from additional research, Haley Willis spoke out against the firing of Emily Wilder from the Associated Press in 2021 when conservatives fought for her to be ousted because of her collegiate involvement with a pro-Palestinian justice organization. Further, although I was initially annoyed that there appears to be zero commentary about queer rights from Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project (despite the overt hate speech that the community, especially trans people, have been subject to in recent years), they did issue a statement that they concurred with the ICJ’s denunciation of Israel’s genocidal rhetoric. As for searching for the names of the other participants in conjunction with this topic, most of the results keep leading back to the same Variety article, in which Siddhant Adlakha comes to the same conclusion that I do.
As I sat in the auditorium before my screening, I overheard an older group of people behind me talking about another documentary that they had seen during SXSW, which I assume was The Truth vs. Alex Jones. They were discussing how they hoped that the film would open some people’s eyes about the man, and about how broken the system is when the justice system can find a man guilty of defamation on a scale that boggles the mind and that same person can get right back to grinding, telling more lies and spreading more misinformation and warping more minds, with no real consequences. They hoped that they could get others to watch it and that it would open some minds about just how much damage Jones has done to democracy. I couldn’t help but think about that Vonnegut quote about how artistic resistance to governmental malfeasance and war is as effectual as a custard pie, and I never really lost the feeling that reminder brought on throughout the rest of Engine, even when I was attuned to it. The ability that this documentary had to change hearts and minds was infinitesimal to begin with, and its lack of conviction in its ethics eradicates that potential.
The latest Jason Statham action vehicle The Beekeeper is “John Wick with bees” in the same way that the recent Nic Cage culinary thriller Pig was “John Wick with a pig”. Stylistically, neither film emulates the tactile, close quarters fight choreography that John Wick has inspired in the past decade of DTV action schlock. In Pig, Nic Cage disposes of his enemies with carefully prepared meals; in The Beekeeper, Jason Statham specializes in rapidly firing guns & quips, not performing balletically brutal stunts. However, both films do borrow from John Wick’s preposterous character motivations and worldbuilding indulgences for narrative convenience. In John Wick, Keanu Reeves’s dog is killed by home invaders, sending him on a one-man revenge mission where he processes grief for his dead wife by avenging his favorite animal. In Pig, Nic Cage’s pet truffle pig is kidnapped, sending him on a one-man revenge mission where he processes grief for his dead wife by avenging his favorite animal. In The Beekeeper, Jason Statham’s beehives are blown apart by shotguns, and . . . you fill in the blanks. All three men are pulled out of retirement for one more job, re-entering absurdly well-organized underground societies of mafiosos, chefs, and Deep State government supersoldiers, respectively. In terms of action movie aesthetics, The Beekeeper hails from a much older style of inane shoot-em-ups that long predate John Wick, the kind of movies that star Arnold Schwarzenegger as a retired small-town American supersoldier with an unexplained Austrian accent and a crippling addiction to situational puns. It clearly adheres to a “John Wick with bees” narrative template, though, if not only for the sake of convenience.
It may be a mistake to cite either Commando or John Wick when singing the praises of this disposable January schlock, since those comparisons set expectations a little too high. Really, The Beekeeper is the kind of Newsmaxed out conservative fantasy that usually gets developed into a CBS procedural you’ve never heard of but tops the Nielsen ratings every week. Thankfully, it’s an easily digestible 100min gunfight oozing with an excess of bee puns instead. Statham stars as both a literal and a figurative beekeeper. He was once trained as a Deep State supersoldier for a secret government agency known as The Beekeepers, who are explained to be more powerful & secretive than the FBI & CIA combined. After retirement from the organization, he took up legitimate beekeeping – a peaceful pastime that allows him to meditate on the violence of his past while lovingly providing jars of honey to his impossibly sweet landlord. When that beloved landlord is targeted in an online phishing scam that drains all of her bank accounts, he suddenly comes out of retirement to avenge her against the anonymous crypto bros who’ve ruined her life. When the crypto bros strike back by killing his bees, he goes ballistic, following their trail of misbegotten funds all the way up to the White House. There, he finds a thinly veiled avatar for Hunter Biden (Josh Hutcherson), a drug addict playboy who uses his parents’ government connections to line his own pockets with the retirement funds of kindhearted American taxpayers. The whole ordeal culminates with Statham effectively storming the capital, guns blazing as he takes down the wrongful president of the United States and their corrupt brat kid in a storm of bullets & bee puns.
The Beekeeper is delicious rubbish with rancid politics. Its novelty as January action schlock is twofold. Firstly, it leans hard into the beekeeping ephemera of its premise every chance it gets. Between kills, Statham constantly mumbles about “protecting the hive” (over his individual desires) and “smoking out the hornets” (murdering the bad guys) who threaten that hive (the elderly Republican voters of America). When asked what his deal is when meeting anyone new, he simply explains “I keep bees.” Enemies quickly latch onto this internal logic, taunting him with inane phrases like “Where you at, Bee Boy?”, “You’ve been a busy bee,” and, inevitably, “To bee or not to bee?” The other source of novelty is the film’s fixation on the politics of America’s great generational divide. Statham self-anoints himself the hero of Boomers everywhere the same way Godzilla routinely emerges from the sea to save children from other fire-breathing monsters. While the Hunter Biden avatar he brings to justice lives in a “Metaverse meth lab” world of espresso, skateboards, sushi, and transcendental mediation, Statham often saves the day with old-school tools like ratchet straps and pickup trucks. It’s a clash between authentic living and modern ills, one where the bad guys barter for their lives with the promise of transferred NFTs. It doesn’t take much for that disgust with newfangled youth culture to fully tip into a hateful Conservative power fantasy. Its pro-cop, anti-FBI paranoia over Deep State governmental control is just as well suited to director David Ayer’s history of knuckle-dragging Conservative action cinema as it is to the cursed YouTube conspiracy videos that actually prey on the elderly citizens of America every day. There’s nothing that overtly evil to overlook in the ideology behind Pig or John Wick, but those movies also don’t prominently feature a how-to guide titled Beekeeping for Beekeepers so, you know, choose your battles.
Welcome to Episode #167 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of political propaganda films, starting with Dinesh D’Souza’s anti-Democrat screed Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016).
00:00 Welcome
02:00 Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) 06:23 Switch (1991) 11:11 Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) 14:00 Inu-Oh (2022) 17:30 A Kiss Before Dying (1956)
There’s something hilarious to me, a dipshit Millennial, about the fact that Baby Boomers have been the generational enemy #1 for over a half-century and counting. Currently, they’re losing an online culture war against the youths, who complain that the elder generation is gobbling up a majority share of the nation’s wages & structural power while Millennials and Zoomers struggle to make do on a monthly basis – let alone accumulate savings or property. Even when the Boomers were the youth, though, the were already a major target for wide cultural scorn. As pot-smoking, Civil Rights-demanding teenagers, Boomers terrified their Nixonite parents, especially since the hippie-sympathetic youth comprised 52% of the US population. Bitter about being drafted to die in the Vietnam War as literal teenagers while not being afforded full rights as citizens, Boomers successfully lobbied to have the legal voting age lowered to 18 years-old, a display of generational political power you rarely see in any demographic below the age of 60 anymore. It freaked adults out, so much so that schlocky movie studios like AIP could make an easy buck producing teenage-Boomer scare films about youth culture gone wild.
Wild in the Streets is at least cheeky about late-60s Conservatives’ anxieties over their activist children’s impending right to vote (passed two years after the film’s release). It presents that political shift as a slippery-slope doomsday scenario, wherein the youth of America unite to lower the age to hold office while they’re at it, then elect their favorite long-haired hippie rock star as the youngest US President in history. The hip new President has no real political platform beyond pushing this youth culture movement as far as it will go – forcing all workers to retire at 30, forcing them to macrodose LSD at the age of 35, and turning the White House into a hippie squat for all his groovy friends. It’s a satirical mockery of Conservative adults’ fears of teenage-Boomers’ collective political power, but it’s also aimed at those same adults’ aesthetic tastes (notably narrated as if it were a gravely serious documentary about a series of murders). The film dabbles in the same brand of “How do you do fellow kids?” satire as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: so tragically unhip that it’s somehow incredibly cool. It’s a youth culture headlinesploitation piece made by embarrassingly square adults desperate to be seen as “with it” enough to draw teenagers to the box office but freaked out enough by those teenagers to also appeal to their parents.
It kinda worked. Wild in the Streets was hastily shot in two short weeks and relied heavily on Vietnam protest & rock concert crowd footage to bolster its production values. It made millions off a meager budget, earning a few high-profile raves in publications like The New York Times, and even landing an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing (which it lost to Bullitt). The rapid-fire, collage-style editing is the closest the film ever comes to being interesting in its craft, but since it’s such a cheap knockoff of Russ Meyer’s superior, unawarded style it’s okay that it inevitably lost out. Besides likely inspiring the title of a Circle Jerks album, I’m not sure the film has had much cultural impact long-term. The most I can recommend for its relevancy to contemporary audiences is the familiar imagery of teenage activists “storming the Capitol” to demand Congress lower the minimum age to hold public office to 14. It’s not the most important political issue activists could have stormed the Capitol to advocate for in the late-1960s, considering the mostly white faces in the crowd and the much more urgent racial exploitation issues of the time. Still, it’s not nearly as idiotic as the reasoning behind attempted coup we saw on TV a year ago, and the imagery is strikingly similar.
Given Wild in the Streets‘s immediate financial success as a quick cash-in headlinesploitation picture, I’d say it’s high time for another tasteless satire in which Boomers are the generational enemy #1. The closest modern example I can think of where they’re cast as the terrifying Other is Don’t Breathe, but that’s just one Boomer alone in a house against a group of teens. Imagine a modern update to Wild in the Streets where Boomers vote en masse (and they are the only demographic who vote en masse anyway) to strip all other generations of their political power, locking up youngsters in “Safe Space” camps as punishment for not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and wasting all of government hand-out money on smart phones & avocado toast, or whatever. The truth about generational culture wars is that they’re a bullshit distraction from the racial & class divides that are actually rotting this country’s core, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get some fun novelty movies out of the tension. Wild in the Streets is a hoot, but it’s wildly out of date, and could use a geriatric spiritual sequel.
Verhoeven is back, baby. I was less than amused by the Dutch prankster’s outrageous rape comedy Elle—despite its broad critical consensus as a sharply observed satire—so it feels nice to rejoin the cheerleading squad for its nunsploitation follow-up. Benedetta is part erotic thriller, part body-possession horror, part courtroom & political drama, and pure Paul Verhoeven. It’s great! It’s a shame that the master provocateur has been relegated to scrappy indie budgets in his late career, though. It’d be a lot more fun to watch a mainstream audience squirm under his thumb instead of the self-selecting freaks who are already on-board with his blasphemy against good sense & good taste. Even at 83 years old, Verhoeven is still raising neck hairs & eyebrows; he just used to be able to rile up an even wider audience with flashier budgets & celebrity stunt casting. I mourn for a world where Benedetta would’ve been a controversial water cooler movie instead of an obscure reference that makes your coworkers think you’re a pretentious snob. Even the small Catholic protests that have followed around the movie’s premieres in cities like Chicago & NYC like The Grateful Dead are living in a fantasy world where it will have any cultural impact beyond plumping up a few sicko film critics’ Best of the Year lists. I enjoyed joining them in that fantasy for a couple hours during its brief theatrical run in New Orleans, but I do question the usefulness of a provocation that no one shows up to be offended by.
Like with all nunsploitation movies, whatever hoopla & headlines Benedetta will be able to generate will likely focus on its onscreen depictions of lesbian sex. Verhoeven shamelessly indulges in that salacious aspect of his historical source material, but it’s not the main thrust of the film’s blasphemy. The kinkiest his young nuns in love get is in fashioning a dildo out of a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, which seems more like a circumstance of convenience than anything; sometimes you just have to make do with what’s lying around. The real button-pusher here is the political rise-to-power story of the titular Italian blasphemer: a 17th Century nun who claimed to experience miraculous visions of Jesus Christ, resulting in a powergrab takeover of her small-village convent. Benedetta’s political rivals are other local higher-ups in the Catholic Church who are both fearful of the power she wields among the villagers (claiming to protect them from encroachment of the Bubonic Plague) and willing to humor her blasphemy as long as it brings money & attention from the religious tourism industry. The blasphemy is in how openly the movie takes Benedetta’s side in the battle, even while questioning whether her miraculous visions are genuine. The second she arrives at the convent as a young child, she’s taught that bodily pleasure is an affront to God, that she should live in constant agony on Earth to honor Him. Watching her claim to have an even more intimate relationship with God than her superiors, and that He said she should be allowed as many orgasms & daily comforts as she desires is delightfully transgressive, even if she’s flat-out lying about it. Speaking as a lapsed Catholic with long-lingering issues with guilt & self-hatred thanks to the Church’s fucked up views on pleasure & morality, Benedetta is essentially a superhero to me. I’ll leave it to your imagination to guess who the supervillain is.
As much fun as I had with Benedetta as political theatre, I still missed the slicker Hollywood budgets Verhoeven used to be afforded in his heyday. The closest the film gets to recalling his 80s & 90s crowdteasers is in its illustrations of Benedetta’s religious visions, in which she fantasizes in-the-flesh erotic encounters as Jesus’s bride. I was fully prepared for the film’s sexual theatrics & religious torments, but I was blindsided by its visions of Jesus as a sword-wielding warrior from a romance novel, riding into the frame on horseback to sweep his young nun-bride off her feet. Unfortunately, the film backs off from illustrating those visions in its second half in a ludicrous effort to “play both sides,” questioning whether Benedetta was a shameless blasphemer or a true believer. It’s fun to root for her even when you believe her to be a liar, but I still would’ve loved to see more fantasies of Jesus as a hunky heavy-metal badass with Fabio hair & glistening abs. No one has depicted “religious ecstasy” so erotically since Ken Russell was still kicking around, so it’s hard not to feel a little let down when Verhoeven eases off that indulgence. It’s also just a welcome return to the high-style genre filmmaking of his Greatest Hits, while the rest of the film is shot more like a muted costume drama despite the sensationalist story it tells.
There are parts of Benedetta that outraged me, from Catholicism’s reverence for Earthly anguish to the film’s own preoccupations with sexual assault & torture. It’s also a movie that opens with several shit & fart jokes, just so you know it’s okay to have a good time despite its many discomforts. Verhoeven’s been incredibly adept at that exact clash between cruelty & camp for longer than I’ve been alive, so it’s honestly just nice to see that he’s still got it. I just find it shameful that we’re not throwing more money at him to offend & titillate on a larger scale.
Writer’s Note: This was originally submitted for publication December 20, 2020, over two weeks prior to the insurrection in the U.S. Capitol Building. Life comes at you fast, doesn’t it?
While on my recent writer’s retreat, I spent some time free of wi-fi and, when I had run out of ideas for the day, enjoying the cornucopia of DVD delights that my cabin’s hosts had left behind. There were 21 DVDs, of which three were things that I had at home (Stranger than Fiction, Cabin in the Woods, and something I’m too embarrassed to admit), four that were exercise/yoga related, and a number of westerns that I obviously ignored. Most of them seem to have come from that 2003-2009 “Blockbuster’s Twilight Years” era, having been purchased from the now-defunct company during its last years, with a decidedly independent bent. And so it came to pass that I have now seen Silver City, the 2004 political satire directed by Passion Fish-helmer John Sayles.
The plot is relatively labyrinthine and cribs from Chinatown (there’s even discussion of water rights in a potential real estate development) and the then-contemporary election year political discourse du jour, which is depressing both in how unbelievably stupid the whole thing was and how much more dignified it was than 2020. Our lead is Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston), a former reporter turned private investigator after filing an explosive, provocative story whose informants later recanted under pressure from the political establishment, ending that phase of his career and ultimately bankrupting the paper that employed him. Danny is brought in when dim-witted Colorado gubernatorial hopeful and George W. Bush analog Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper) accidentally hooks a dead body while shooting a bucolic political ad that sees him fishing in a pristine lake. His cutthroat campaign manager Karl Rove Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) hires Danny’s agency to help determine where the body, that of a tattooed Latino man, came from while keeping the whole thing under wraps. Danny is aided in his investigation by Mitch Paine (Tim Roth), a former colleague in his past life as a newspaperman who now keeps the public informed in his own jaded way: leaking enough of the incomprehensibly large, true evil done by government that is too tied up in corporate interests, in the hopes of getting legitimate news outlets to pull the thread enough to take down bad political actors. Along the way, he also receives assistance from Tony Guerra (Sal Lopez), who works within the undocumented community to try and identify the dead man.
There are three major enemies of the Pilager campaign that Danny is sent to investigate/quell: right wing radio pundit and political commentator Cliff Castleton (Miguel Ferrer); former mining safety inspector Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite), who was ousted in disgrace following a falsified scandal involving an accident; and Maddy Pilager (Daryl Hannah), Dickie’s disgraced “nympho” sister, the free-spirited black sheep of the family and once-and-current Olympic archery hopeful. Of them, we spend very little time with Castleton, but Ferrer makes an impression as what a right wing nutjob used to look like: power-hungry, conceited, and exploitative, but educated, tempered, and articulate, back when the people in such positions were merely obstructive backward, not completely insane or opposed to scientific progress, immoral but not amoral (Ben Shapiro clearly thinks he’s the heir apparent to William F. Buckley but he could never, and Buckley himself was a terrible person, but I’d take him over Charlie Kirk or Alex Jones any day of the week and twice on Sunday). It’s a stark reminder of how far we’ve fallen in so short a time—I’m in my mid-thirties, and I wasn’t even old enough to vote in the presidential election that happened the year this movie was released, so chew on that for a second. As a mirror of American politics of the new millennium, it feels like this movie is a reverse portrait of Dorian Gray that, though depressingly hideous, has grown more lovely with time as the body politik visibly betrays every hidden malice, every wicked act of greed, and every failure of decency.
The titular “Silver City” is a proposed land development deal to build a planned community in land that is beautiful but unfit for human habitation: mining has made Swiss cheese of the hills and rendered the groundwater contaminated, but Pilager patriarch Senator Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy) made a bad investment in it and was bailed out when family friend and multi-millionaire business mogul Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson) purchased the land from him far above its value. In exchange, Benteen wants to skirt the regulations that have prevented the development of Silver City and, one presumes, swim around in his profits like Scrooge McDuck. Kristofferson is fantastic here, appearing in only a few scenes but leaving a lasting impression and an air of malice, casual evil-by-way-of-enterprise. In his major scene, he takes Dickie on a horseback ride through beautiful, uncorrupted nature while decrying the regulations that keep it so; he can barely contain his bile as he curses the name of the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies, and it’s evident that in his dreams he sees the purple mountain majesty in the background as crawling with excavators and bulldozers like ants, but he paints his vision of the future with such a lovely palate that Dickie buys it.
Benteen is aided in this endeavor on multiple fronts. There’s sad Mort Seymour (David Clennon), who’s trying desperately to sell local government authorities on the Silver City idea, and who gains ground when Benteen puppeteers a casual, ostensibly coincidental run-in with Dickie at a local restaurant (Dickie’s election to the office of governor is treated as a foregone conclusion). Also on Benteen’s bench is slick, sleazy lobbyist Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane at his absolute oiliest), who presages the Kirks and Shapiros of the present as someone with utterly no moral compunction about flat-out lying with a straight face. His moral compass points due south, as he demonstrates in one of the film’s best, most nauseating lines: “Every idea, no matter how politically incorrect, deserves an advocate.” What he’s talking about in that moment is his previous testimony to Congress that there is no identifiable link between smoking and lung cancer. The idea was absurd, even for 2004, but it foretells a time when the general public would fall for easily disprovable scientific fact, like that the earth is (generally) round, that climate change is real and affected by human action, and that COVID-19 is real and deadly.
Narratively, Danny’s investigation is complicated by two issues in his personal life: his employer Grace (Mary Kay Place) is married to Mort, which we learn late in the film, and the impending marriage of Tyson to Nora Allardyce (Maria Bello), a morally just crusading reporter who has a huge blindspot regarding Tyson’s lack of a conscience and also happens to be Danny’s ex. It’s clear to everyone paying attention that Dickie is completely out of his depth when he’s confronted without extensive preparation and coaching, at which point he repeats himself, cites jingoistic jingles, and makes it clear via an inability to express a single intelligent thought extemporaneously that he lacks any real savvy or acumen. (Remember, this was made in a time before The Right realized that they could get people to slurp that up with a spoon as long as it was sufficiently combined with white supremacist rhetoric.) This isn’t really relevant to the mystery of the watery corpse, however, except in the way that evil breeds evil. As it turns out,the deceased Lazaro Huerta (Donevon Martinez) was an undocumented day laborer who died in one of Benteen’s facilities. To prevent the exposure of Benteen as both (a) a hypocrite who exploits immigrants for cheap labor while decrying the practice and (b) a manufacturer who fails, mortally, to meet the OSHA regulatory guidelines that he derides as part of his deregulation agenda, Huerta’s body was hauled into the hills and thrown down an abandoned mineshaft that had previously been used to dispose of Benteen’s toxic waste. Casey Lyle (remember him?) had been trying to blow the whistle on the fact that the mines were now prone to collecting water in times of torrential rains and causing flooding in the future home of Silver City; one such flood had washed Huerta’s body into the lake, as will everything that’s hidden there, eventually.
There’s one man who could help reveal all of this: Vince Esparza (Luis Saguar), a cutthroat who obtains and arranges laborers, including for Benteen on the site where Huerta was killed. He threatens Danny and is shot by an overzealous sheriff’s deputy, the two men who initially told Danny about the mineshaft are captured by I.N.S. and prevented from corroborating Danny’s information; when he returns later, the entrance to the mine has been sealed. Grace also fires him, and all hope seems lost as Benteen’s organization has bought up the news outlet for which Nora writes, killing any chance of exposing the rotten heart of American politics. Except … Paine and his team have managed to expose the thread, if someone else in the media can only pull it and see where it leads. But, as every fish in the picturesque lake that girds Silver City dies in a mass event that leads us to the credits, the message is clear: even if the truth is learned, it won’t un-destroy the ecosystem.
Silver City received mixed reviews in its time, and that’s well-deserved. The core of the film’s narrative at first presents itself as a murder mystery, and it ultimately is exactly that, metaphorically—who killed Lazaro Huerta? The system. We just get there through a roundabout investigation, and by that time we’ve pulled the thread of something bigger, more insidious, and, worst of all, entrenched. Conceptually, that’s a rich vein to be mined, so to speak, but what we’re left with teeters on the edge of being a little too on-the-nose. We need to care about Danny, at least a little bit, and it’s hard not to—Danny Huston can pull of “charismatic loser journeyman” with charm to spare—but his trail of discovery has in its margins a truly harrowing story about oppression under a capitalism that seeks to consume nature for no other reason than because it’s there, and does it on the back of exploited labor while paying silver-tongued lobbyists to lie, baldly. That something like this is offset by conversations between Danny and Nora about their former relationship, in which she basically tells him that he was just too damn good and married to the job, or a scene in which Nora waxes philosophical about Danny with Tyson while the latter gears up for a bike ride while expounding on the lack of objective morality, feel very Sorkin-y and pedestrian. The comedy is just too broad, perhaps as best epitomized by Hannah’s Maddy character, a manic pixie middle aged woman who smokes pot, has a weird hobby (archery), and delivers huge pieces of exposition while jumping on a trampoline.* There’s a deadly serious thing happening here, but the whole thing feels very flippant, because—did you notice it? “Pilager” sounds like “pillager”! That gets a Perfunctory Liberal Chortle™ and then we’re on to a scene in which a man is crushed under a car while trying to learn Huerta’s identity. It’s a three-flavor swirl of political satire that’s too broad, a background event with implications that encompass broad ecological destruction and consequence-free manslaughter, and also Danny and his ex-girlfriend considering getting back together. The narrative throughline is solid, but everything hanging off of it makes the thing unwieldy. Worst of all, the film has made me wistful for the immediate post-9/11 years. Is this really what it’s come to?
The Manchurian Candidate is a masterpiece of Cold War paranoia and pro-American propaganda, visually stunning and chilling. It was talked about a lot these past four years, since during the Trump presidency people were experiencing increased Russophobia and witnessing Eastern European scandals and intrigue. However, given the film’s message about patriotism and military force, I don’t think it’s the safest comparison to modern events. Centering around the struggles of two soldiers, Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) and Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) after being kidnapped and brainwashed by Communists, the film mainly concerns the American military and political handling of The Red Scare, taking an inherently critically flawed and culturally problematic viewpoint. That being said, it has an amazing handle on the psychological power of editing and features wonderful performances by everyone involved.
The film opens with the company of Marco and Shaw at the Chinese/Korean border during the Korean War. They are a gang of rough and tough men, the typical everymen of the 1960s, cutting loose during wartime: drinking, gambling, and objectifying and exotifying the local women. However, their leader, Shaw, is a wet blanket. He is a cold and prim rich boy who thinks they’re all lowly trash. Of course, his fellow soldiers find him intolerable. During a mission they are deceived and captured by a group of sinister Communist scientists who intensely brainwash them. Without revealing too much of the plot’s twist and turns, I’ll say that they are returned home suddenly with warm feelings for Raymond Shaw. Marco gains a high-up position in the military and Shaw works for a newspaper relishing in writing smear pieces against his simpleton presidential-hopeful Conservative stepfather (James Gregory), who is merely a pawn for the domineering Mrs. Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury). Marco is tasked with deprogramming Shaw, who lives a sad and lonely life haunted by his mother’s overbearing shadow. Eventually, we realize that his mommy issues are the key.
One of the most effective scenes in the film is the demonstration of brainwashing by the Communist scientist. It cuts back and forth from what the soldiers see (a boring talk from a ladies’ garden club) to the panel of red leaders from all of the world in an amphitheater decorated with huge portraits of Stalin and Moa in the background, in case you forgot what side this sinister cabal was on. There’s a jarring effect created by the juxtaposition of the mundane droning on of the women’s club and the scientific enthusiasm and twisted plotting. The clash of the mundane and “the evil” is a chilling way to set us up for constant doubt and paranoia for the rest of the film.
Now, let me get to my real issue with this movie: it reeks of misogyny. The mother is set up to be the ultimate villain. The idea that an ambitious woman is more dangerous than world powers that have extreme scientific advances in the realm of psychology is, quite frankly, sickening. I have no sympathy for Mrs. Iselin. Angela Lansbury delivers a performance that renders the character utterly reprehensible and unforgivable. That said, the whole idea of a mother’s failures being the downfall of the country is a special kind of good old fashioned American woman-hating. It’s really drilled home with the idea that the only way any of this is uncovered is through a team of highly trained military personnel. It just feels a little overkill. But there is only one thing that pro-military rhetoric in the USA wants to kill, torture, and demean more than a Communist: a powerful woman Communist. There’s enough analysis of the treatment of women during these wars and missions “to spread democracy” to inspire entire dissertations so I’ll leave that to more skilled folks than I. Suffice to say, there are serious consequences to this line of thinking. The only sympathetic women in the film are those who stay on the sidelines being supportive and nurturing. This includes one whom gets killed off, in an example of an ambitious woman trampling a traditional, attractive feminine figure. A true 1960s man’s nightmare and the nightmare of many contemporary men as well.
In a political vacuum, I’d say that this is a spectacularly made film, a real classic. It is technically wonderful, with extremely talented performances. But we are not in a vacuum. As a country, if this is the narrative we turn to again and again, we will probably never get over gender disparity. The Manchurian Candidate is a chilling piece of paranoid propaganda. It upholds the rhetoric of the status quo: xenophobia, misogyny, and a hyperbolic love and trust of the troops. It’s an entertaining and effective film, but culturally we need better narrative touchstones.
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