Yesterday I read Stuart Klawans review, in the August 30 edition of The Nation, of The Manchurian Candidate (two left thumbs up). I concur for the most part: fine performances, steady direction from Jonathan Demme, interesting updated story (and conspiracy).
Klawans points out one major problem with the film which speaks more to our society than to the film-making art: why a global, corporate hegemon such as Manchurian Global would need to employ the elaborate brainwashing and implanting as depicted in the film. Advertising and media supersaturation would seem to be enough.
As Klawans puts it: "Demme has filled The Manchurian Candidate...with examples of the actual mind-control technology that drills into our heads today: the twenty-four-hour, 360-degree yammer of cable news shows and talk-radio programs." Not to mention ubiquitous advertising.*
That's why I assert that sitting on a cushion meditating, or reading a book-- anything that entails throwing off the aural shackles of one or many of the electronic voices that surround us--is a revolutionary activity.
* I have a theory that the word "ubiquitous" did not become ubiquitous until ubiquity itself became ubiquitous--sometime in the mid 1990s.
Posted by jeb at August 26, 2004 1:46 PM | TrackBack