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

252 Pages·2006·3.28 MB·English

by  Matthew Frye Jacobson

What Have They Built You to Do?
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What Have They Built You
to Do?
The Manchurian Candidate and
Cold War America
Matthew Frye Jacobson and
Gaspar González
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2006 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 1958–
What have they built you to do? : The Manchurian Candidateand Cold
War America / Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4124-6 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4124-2 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4125-3 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4125-0 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Manchurian candidate (Motion picture). 2. Condon, Richard.
Manchurian candidate. 3. Cold War. I. González, Gaspar, 1968–
II. Title.
PN1997.M2578J33 2006
791.43'72—dc22 2006021196
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and
employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my TAs, who have taught me more than they know;
and to the memory of Shafali Lal
—M. J.
For my mother and father
—G. G.
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Contents
0. Introduction ix
1. Backstory: Frank Sinatra and the Politics of
Cold War Cultural Production 1
2. A Culture of Contradiction: Affluence and Anxiety 30
3. Five from the Fifties: Threat, Containment, and
the Rise of the Security State in Postwar Film 52
4. Bullwhip and Smear: Reading McCarthy 82
5. Like Fu Manchu: Mapping Manchuria 100
6. The Red Queen: Sexuality, Subversion, and
the American Family 130
7. Strangers on a Train: The Perils of Cold War Courtship 150
8. Cold War Redux: From Kennedy to Reagan’s America
and Beyond 168
0. Postscript 185
0. Acknowledgments 195
0. Notes 201
0. Index 219
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Introduction
Near the conclusion of The Manchurian Candidate,as Bennett Marco
begins to peel away layers of false memory and dimly to make out the
communist plot whose method has included his own brainwashing,
he urgently presses Raymond Shaw, another pawn in this monstrous
game, “What have they built you to do?” This is of course the ques-
tion within the cosmos of the film: Marco’s mind has been tampered
with and his memory of events rewritten; Shaw’s will has been oc-
cupied, as it were, by a foreign power, his very agency made the instru-
ment of another’s intention, but to what end? The answer will be
revealed only in the tautly paced final scenes.
But the question “What have they built you to do?” resonates well
beyond the film itself. Within the context of the Cold War, the ques-
tion eloquently expresses the fears and anxieties of a political culture
in which some nearly omnipotent “they” are presumed to be both
encircling from without and gnawing from within. The “they” who
have designs on us, the “we” who have been rendered partly or wholly
untrustworthy, and the nation’s overarching inability to compose its
own destiny—this is the very stuff of the Cold War’s Manichaean
plotlines, from Hollywood B movies to President Harry Truman’s
ix