[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: 3 Hours Over 4 Nights With 1 Fear

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3 Hours Over 4 Nights With 1 Fear

July 25, 2004
 


 

YOU can't blame the broadcast networks for cutting their
convention coverage to a fig-leaf minimum of just three
hours of prime time spread over four nights. That's what
both parties deserve for having steadily sanded down their
quadrennial celebrations into infomercials with all the
spark and spontaneity of the televised Yule Log. But though
few want to say so aloud, there is one potential
last-minute ingredient that would instantly bring back
gavel-to-gavel coverage on the Big Three: a terrorist
attack. That fearful possibility is both conventions' sole
claim to suspense. 

It is also the subtext of this entire presidential
campaign. A late-June USA Today/CNN poll shows that 55
percent of Americans feel less safe because of the war in
Iraq - a figure that has spiked 22 points in merely six
months. Fear rules. Fear rocks. Fear of terrorism is George
W. Bush's only second-term platform to date (unless you
count fear of same-sex marriage). Let John F. Kerry roll
out John Edwards as his running mate, and Tom Ridge rushes
to grab back the TV spotlight by predicting that Al Qaeda
will "disrupt our democratic process." Never mind that he
had no "precise knowledge" of such an attack or any plans
to raise his color-coded threat level; his real mission, to
wield fear as a weapon of mass distraction, had been
accomplished. Odds are that the next John Ashcroft doomsday
press conference will be timed to coincide with the run-up
to Mr. Kerry's acceptance speech on Thursday night. 

In the fear game, the Democrats are the visiting team,
playing at a serious disadvantage. Out of power, they can't
suit up officials at will to go on camera to scare us. Mr.
Kerry is reduced instead to incessantly repeating the word
"strength" and promising to put "a national coordinator for
nuclear terrorism" in the cabinet. That will hardly cut it
against these ingenious opponents. Every time a Bush
administration official tells us the apocalypse is coming,
the president himself brags that he has made America
"safer." The message is in the bad news-good news
contradiction: the less safe we feel, the more likely we'll
play it safe on Election Day by sticking with the happy
face we know. 

Yet the Democrats still can't be counted out. They do have
one card to play that the Republicans do not: pop culture.
With a vengeance that recalls the Clinton-hating echo
chamber when it was fantasizing about the "murder" of
Vincent Foster, big guns in the culture industry are
rousing themselves into a war-room frenzy of anti-Bush
hysteria that goes well beyond fielding an inept talk-radio
network and producing documentaries for the base at
MoveOn.org. Their method for countering the Bush-Cheney
monopolization of fear is to turn the administration into
an object of fear in its own right. It can be seen at full
throttle in Jonathan Demme's remake of the classic cold war
thriller, "The Manchurian Candidate," which opens
nationally on Friday, the morning after the Democratic
convention ends. This movie could pass for the de facto
fifth day of the convention itself. 

I cannot recall when Hollywood last released a big-budget
mainstream feature film as partisan as this one at the
height of a presidential campaign. That it has slipped into
action largely under the media's radar, as discreetly as
the sleeper agents in its plot, is an achievement in
itself. Freed from any obligations to fact, "The Manchurian
Candidate" can play far dirtier than "Fahrenheit 9/11." Not
being a documentary, it can also open on far more screens -
some 2,800, which is more than three times what Michael
Moore could command on his opening weekend (or any weekend
to date). 

"The Manchurian Candidate" is a product of Paramount
Pictures, whose chairwoman, Sherry Lansing, is a loyal
Democratic contributor, according to public records. (So,
for the most part, is her boss, the Viacom chairman, Sumner
Redstone.) One of the film's stars, Meryl Streep, shared
the stage with Whoopi Goldberg at the recent Kerry-Edwards
fund-raiser. As Bill O'Reilly will be glad to hear, the
cameo role of a cable-news reporter is played by Al
Franken. 

The screenplay has holes as large as those in our still
woefully inadequate homeland security apparatus. (At the
outset the film actually posits that political conventions
are exciting events where even the vice presidential
nomination can still be up for grabs.) Hokey,
literal-minded sci-fi gimmickry usurps the wit of the 1962
original, which was faithfully adapted by the director John
Frankenheimer and the screenwriter George Axelrod from the
1959 Richard Condon novel. But the new version, even at its
clunkiest, could not be more uncompromising in its paranoid
portrayal of a political cartel with certain familiar
traits that will stop at nothing, including the
exploitation and even the fomenting of terrorism, to hold
on to power for its corporate backers. 

The original "Manchurian Candidate" was both anti-Communist
and anti-Joe McCarthy. It theorized that the Chinese and
Russians could try to overthrow the American government by
using covert Washington operatives disguised as
Commie-hunting American demagogues. The new "Candidate,"
which takes the first gulf war instead of the Korean War as
its historical template, finds a striking new international
villain to replace the extinct evil empires of Mao and
Stalin: Manchurian Global, a "supremely powerful,
well-connected, private equity fund" that is in league with
the Saudis and eager to scoop up the profits from
privatizing the American Army. Think of it as the Carlyle
Group or Halliburton on steroids, just as its primary
fictional political beneficiary, the well-heeled "Prentiss
family dynasty," with its three generations of Washington
influence, is at most one syllable removed from the Bushes.


Perhaps to fake out the right, the villain played by Ms.
Streep has been given the look, manner and senatorial rank
of Hillary Clinton. (The character's invective, typified by
her accusation that civil libertarians enable suicide
bombers, is vintage Fox News Channel, blond auxiliary
division.) She has programmed her son to be the "first
privately owned and operated vice president of the United
States" - in other words, the left's demonized image of the
current vice president. This conspiracy unfolds in a
sinister present-day America where surveillance cameras
track library visitors, cable news channels peddle
apocalypse 24/7, and the American government launches
pre-emptive military strikes in countries like Guinea to
prolong a war on terror "with no end in sight." The crucial
election at hand will use electronic touch screens for
voting, a dark intimation of Floridian balloting mischief.
It will not be an election at all, says the movie's
military-man hero (Denzel Washington in Colin Powell's
rimless specs), but "a coup - in our own country, a regime
change." 

The first "Manchurian Candidate" was, famously, a
box-office flop. But it labored under two handicaps that
its remake does not. Its premiere was just two days into
the Cuban missile crisis, a terrifying real-life drama that
would have dwarfed any fictional big-screen scenario of
Communist malevolence. And daring as it was by Hollywood
standards, the first "Manchurian Candidate" was not exactly
on top of the news. McCarthy was not only dead by 1962 but
had been out of power since his censure by the Senate in
1954. 

It's a fool's errand to predict the commercial success of
the remake. If it's a hit - always a big if - the audience
will be larger, more politically diverse and, given the
stars, older (and therefore more likely to vote) than that
of "Fahrenheit 9/11." The film carries too much
show-business establishment freight to be easily
marginalized as a fringe product of the "loony left," as it
surely will be by the same crowd who inflated Whoopi
Goldberg's tasteless sexual innuendos into a "hatefest."
Dismiss the movie's plot as an over-the-top fantasy and
you're still left with a foreboding mood of high anxiety
that may strike audiences as recognizably up-to-the-minute.


That atmosphere is one of sheer fear; Mr. Demme was, after
all, the director of "The Silence of the Lambs." "The
American people are terrified," says Ms. Streep's
villainous senator early on as, John Ashcroft-style, she
wields a national security report promising "another
cataclysm, probably nuclear." And so we watch her and the
rest of the Manchurian Global cabal exploit that fear in
any way possible, using the mass media as a brainwashing
tool, manipulating patriotic iconography for political
ends. "Compassionate vigilance" is one campaign slogan. A
televised election night rally features a Mount Rushmore
backdrop (as in a signature Bush photo op) and a chorus
line of heroic cops and firemen (reminiscent of the early
Bush-Cheney ads exploiting the carnage at ground zero). 

The new "Manchurian Candidate," in other words, plays by
the same nasty rules as the administration it attacks,
stoking fear for partisan advantage by making the
demagogues of fear almost as scary as the terrorists
themselves. Though the terminally cautious Kerry campaign
would never make this argument, its cultural surrogates are
bringing it to an expanding variety of venues, high and
low. 

In the weeks before the Republican convention, Alfred A.
Knopf, fresh from its merchandising triumph with Bill
Clinton's "My Life," will release Nicholson Baker's
incendiary vest-pocket-size novel, "Checkpoint," in which a
politically ambidextrous protagonist (he hates both
abortion and Dick Cheney) lays out a case for assassinating
the president. (It, too, includes a reference to "The
Manchurian Candidate.") Stars as big and demographically
disparate as Howard Stern (whose radio ratings have risen
since he started vilifying the "fascist right wing") and
the chart-topping rapper Jadakiss (whose single "Why"
suggests that Mr. Bush knocked down the twin towers) are
making the Dixie Chicks look like Young Republicans. On his
current crosscountry tour, Ozzy Osbourne is aping a recent
Bush-Cheney ad's blending of a shouting Hitler with images
of Al Gore and Michael Moore by just as crudely juxtaposing
the Führer's face with the president's. "The crowd didn't
seem to mind," reported The New York Times's Ben Ratliff in
his eyewitness account of one of the Ozzfest's recent dates
in suburban New York. 

You will, of course, see none of this at the Democratic
convention, where "optimism" will be the default setting
and even Mr. Kerry will once more, heaven help him and us,
attempt to smile. That's why the networks, not to mention
most viewers, are staying away. But starting on Friday at a
theater near you, fear will be back in the driver's seat of
a ruthless campaign in which the battle over our nightmares
about Al Qaeda will be bloody and decisive whether Al Qaeda
itself is heard from or not.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/arts/25RICH.html?ex=1091777271&ei=1&en=8b4d2a99757946ed


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