Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
[ kerry spot home | archives | email ]

Kerry campaigns in Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 8, 2004.

After overdosing on politics during convention week, I caught the new film The Manchurian Candidate. Maybe it's because I just came from 96 straight hours of Kerry-palooza, and maybe I noticed little bits of dialogue that other moviegoers won't. But I walked out of the theater wondering if the movie could cost John Kerry the election.

(Warning — there's no way to explain this point without revealing some of the movie's plot twists in this article. If you want to be surprised, bookmark this article and come back after you've seen it. If you have seen it or have no intention of seeing it, read on.)

First things first — this movie aims to slam Bush and Cheney harder than Fahrenheit 9/11. The Manchurian Global Corporation is clearly meant to be a stand-in for every rumor, conspiracy theory, and allegation — founded and unfounded — against Halliburton Corp. The evil ticket runs on the slogans "Secure tomorrow today" and "Compassionate Vigilance." Dean Stockwell and the other central-casting Old White Men in Suits who are the villainous CEOs might as well have "GOP" tattooed on their foreheads.

Director Jonathan Demme is quite open about the political point his movie is supposed to make. Appearing on The Today Show, he said, "In our picture the story suggests that the multinational corporation that profits on war may just be a huge ingredient of the great global threat today. Now with the war in Iraq going on we're reading about the misadventures of — of some of these multinational corporations, so I don't think we're making anything up in our movie."

(Nothing's made up? Must be a documentary then, and Dick Cheney really is a brainwashed sleeper assassin with a control chip in his brain.)

But despite the satirical scalpels aimed at the Bush administration, in scene after scene, the filmmakers have made stylistic decisions that unnervingly echo John Kerry and John Edwards. If Kerry campaign honchos Mary Beth Cahill or Bob Shrum watched this movie this weekend, they probably threw their popcorn at the screen in frustration.

The screenplay was finished years ago, and the movie finished filming in 2003. If the screenwriter, director, and cast knew how the political scene was going to evolve in the past six months, they almost certainly would have dramatically altered certain dialogue and scenes. But what we must conclude is an eerie coincidence, the evil candidate keeps emulating the men challenging George W. Bush.

Liev Schreiber, playing Rep. Raymond Shaw, is a long-shot candidate to be picked as his party's vice-presidential nominee. We watch the young, two-term congressman in an early speech: "We need to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. We need to bridge the gap between blacks and whites. We need to bridge the gap between the government and the people!"

Upon hearing that dialogue, I did a spit-take on my Sprite. It's John Edwards's "Two Americas" speech!

Then we see the most talked-about performance, Meryl Streep as the villainous Senator Eleanor Prentiss Shaw, mother of the congressman. After the trailers, some blogs buzzed that she was imitating Hillary Rodham Clinton. Then Streep revealed that she based her performance on two conservative women, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and Bush adviser Karen Hughes.

If you watch a lot of Noonan on Chris Matthews's show, you can pick up certain phrases and mannerisms of Streep's character that vaguely evoke the columnist. At one point, Streep says (paraphrasing as best I can recall), "Terrorists are going to hit us again and they are going to hit us hard. The American people know this, and can feel it in their bones." (Noonan is big on gut reactions and the public's emotional antennae.) But otherwise, for most of the movie, the audience is watching an iron-willed, powerful woman senator, wearing stylish, professional pantsuits who can be charming one moment and ruthless the next. At one point, dealing with co-conspirators who she finds gutless, she laments, "Where have all the men gone?"

For the chunk of the audience that isn't enough of a political geek to recognize the Noonan/Hughes mannerisms, Streep might as well be wearing a "HI, MY NAME IS HILLARY" button.

Shaw's qualifications for the nation's second highest office are limited. However, he has one sterling accomplishment that voters are constantly reminded of: He is a war hero.

Gulp.

Streep rallies her party's leaders, "Give them a war hero forged by enemy fire in the desert in the dark!" We are told he saved his platoon when they were ambushed during a routine reconnaissance mission during the Persian Gulf War. The biggest, clearest, and most squirm-inducing moments come during a scene in which Shaw's comrades, one after another, offer videotaped testimony of Shaw's bravery. "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."

It's just too creepily similar to the recent testimonies to Kerry in the convention video and commercials.

Now — the Kerry Spot is unflinchingly fair to the Democratic candidate, so let's come out and say it — John Kerry is not a brainwashed zombie assassin. Or at least, to date, no one has presented any compelling evidence that this is the case.

But we know a certain number of voters are, for lack of a better word, idiots. They believe what they see in the movies. They believed Oliver Stone's theories of about LBJ helping Kennedy's assassins, they think The Day After Tomorrow is a realistic depiction of global warming, and they opposed nuclear power after The China Syndrome. Top Gun boosted Navy recruitment, and there are anecdotes apparently a few young men thought that it was commonplace for naval aviators to "work undercover" with civilian aviation experts who look like Kelly McGillis.

Thankfully, the idiot vote is probably only a few percentage points nationwide. But one starts to wonder...how will this minute, gullible minority react to a movie that tells them that the political candidate running on his reputation as a war hero is actually a brainwashed zombie assassin?

One other oddity — the movie supposedly takes place "today." But the opening expository monologue, coming from Air America's Al Franken playing himself, refers to "the war on terror stretching into yet another year. Americans remain fearful after the terrible recent attacks including Black Friday, and the flag-draped caskets of America's soldiers continue to come home from every corner of the globe...."

Demme has created a terrifying vision in this early scene, an America where 9/11 isn't even mentioned as the worst terrorist attack in recent memory, but this mysterious (and never mentioned again) "Black Friday" is. There are also references to a U.S. military campaign in Indonesia, and rumors of an upcoming invasion of Sri Lanka. (Did the directors just throw darts at a map when picking future U.S. military operations?)

In light of all this, the movie actually feels more like 2008 than 2004, a near future of perpetual Orange Alert and ominous paranoia. And in an early scene with her party's top strategists, Streep laments that her party has been out of power for eight years.

Which party could be out of power for eight years in 2008?

The producers of The Manchurian Candidate have created a perfectly bipartisan political thriller: The text suggests that Republicans are the evil villains; the subtext suggests the Democrats are the bad guys.