The Manchurian Candidate, Directed By John Frankenheimer

Force turns everything into a thing. In other words, force takes away agency, the power to act upon free will, from both the victims and the users of the force, turning them into no more than objects. The Cold War was a clash between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, over two different political ideologies and took away the agency of many people in the process. The movie, The Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, depicts the United States during the Cold War. In the movie, a brainwashed main character, Raymond Shaw, is treated as a tool by his parents and communists to rise into power. Moreover, the director uses various cinematic techniques to demonstrate how the political and international forces can easily turn an individual into a tool by taking the agency away. Although the Cold War is often romanticized as a war between good and evil, during the Cold War period, regardless of the sides, exercising the great forces in the political and inte rnational conflicts eventually ended up taking many people’s agency away. [Secondary Source Explaining about how limited people’s life styles were during the Cold War] In the first seven minutes of the movie, Shaw and his mother’s behaviors demonstrates how political forces can turn normal people into a mere puppet. After Shaw got off from the plane, his mother forces him to take a picture with his stepfather, senator Iselin, while she excludes herself from the photo. The movie cameraShow MoreRelatedThe Manchurian Candidate by Johnathan Demme Essay1106 Words   |  5 PagesThe Manchurian Candidate, Johnathan Demme directed the remake. Both films portray paranoia, mind control, and conspiracy. Frankenheimer utilizes satire, humor, and symbolism to convey the themes, whereas, Demme uses modern fears, camera angles and focus, and mental illness to achieve similar results. Many of the elements of the 2004 remake have been modernized. While the original movie placed the soldiers in Korea, the remake placed them in Kuwait. Demme did changed the location of the war, in orderRead MorePlot Summary and Review of The Manchurian Candidate Essay739 Words   |  3 PagesThe suspenseful thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, was directed by John Frankenheimer, and written by George Axelrod. The movie is based on a 1959 novel written by Richard Condon. It was released in 1962 but was pulled after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, only to be re-released in 1987 and remade in 2004. The Manchurian Candidate is a movie about a government conspiracy mainly involving a former Korean Prisoner Of War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw, played by Laurence Harvey who was thought to have