Cyber-noia? Remaking The Manchurian Candidate in a Global Age

Abstract

“Imagine not just a corporation, Marco, but a goddamn geopolitical extension of policy for every president since Nixon. Cash is king, Marco, cash is king.” These are the words that the underground expert in biotechnological warfare Delp, a character in Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, says to Major Bennett Marco when the latter confronts the scientist with extensive research on a corporation with the name of Manchurian Global and a conspiracy theory about the corporation’s illegal biotechnological experiments on American soldiers during the Gulf War. Suggesting that the corporate influence goes far beyond a senator’s or even president’s power as it is deeply rooted within international policies and global economics, Demme’s remake of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 version, which was adapted from the 1959 novel by Richard Condon, takes up the theme of Cold War paranoia of the earlier film and sets it in a post-9/11 context where the effects of globalization and information technology on the American society and the country’s “war on terror” dominate US politics and television news. Reviewed as a “political thriller” (Scott), the remake combines characteristics of cultural anxiety about the “communist other” of the earlier version with what Wendy Chun calls “techno-orientalist” imagery of science fiction (9).