Make Room for Mom: America and Maternal Sadism in “The Manchurian Candidate”

The Manchurian Candidate presents a sort of motherhood that complicates the very term, especially given the film’s unabashed inversions of the idyllic nuclear family. Jackson (2000) posits that the film’s keen “mix of family sexual dynamic with cold-war political ideology” is underexamined. (34) He claims that the film’s focus on the “cultural failure” brought upon by gender-role reversal implies broader cultural reflexivity regarding toxic political culture in America as well as “the dead-end of androcentrism.” (Jackson, 2000:40) In Jackson’s sociohistorical reading, Raymond’s submissiveness to feminine and feminized authority figures (including Gaines and Jordan) could “explain away” his status as a functionary within a Communist conspiracy. Yet something more fundamental regarding his relationship with his mother lurks beneath the surface, without necessarily stripping the film of its political reverberations.

            Raymond’s inability to defy his mother, his milquetoast presentation, and his constant admissions of how “unlovable” he is all collaborate to make an unorthodox male hero. What Raymond lacks in masculine aggression and suave determination, Marco has in spades (or diamonds). On the filmic level, then, The Manchurian Candidate subverts audience expectations in its failure to provide a fully realized male protagonist. Raymond might be the object of pity, but he is an emotionless cipher, whether under hypnosis or not; Marco is the nuanced victim of his own PTSD but ultimately will lack the narrative motivation to foil the conspiracy in which he too is ensnared. This absence of a “proper” leading man (that is, an appropriate and “sexually healthy” male protagonist as understood within the context of normative narrative structures) symbolically reaffirms Mrs. Iselin’s diegetic centrality.

            Similarly, the film’s mise en scène alludes to Mrs. Iselin’s omnipresence and status as controller. During Senator Iselin’s bombastic, McCarthy-esque speech, the unmoving profile of Mrs. Iselin dominates the foreground, implying her mastery over the proceedings. (20:00) But the creeping horror of this moment is not that Mrs. Iselin is truly in control, but that she is the puppet master of a full-fledged political operation that is mediated by screens. Mrs. Iselin’s political ambition must always be displayed through calculated and imagistic manifestations of her power and wealth (her husband’s televised outbursts, her costume party, her plots to assassinate the presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention...) A product of the rise of contemporary mass media, her ambition is a consequence of cold-war grandstanding and distinctly American jingoism that is a far cry from the oft-invoked “party of Lincoln.” (Jackson makes note of these constant visual associations between the Iselins and iconic renderings of Lincoln, that male icon of the GOP. (2000:35) Notice how his portrait is temporarily “blinded” by the foreground lamp when Mrs. Iselin instructs her son to no longer be associated with Josie, “that Communist tart.” (1:12:00))

            Indeed, The Manchurian Candidate posits an America in which Cold War paranoia converges with the rise of mass media. These overlap in one potent theme: control. To have an ambitious woman literally “behind the camera” as such reifies the viewer’s sexist presuppositions of who should and should not have such control over matters of the state. Yet, we, like Raymond, are hypocritical in this revulsion: we, too, should “[n]otice how [we are] always drawn to authority.” (16:15) Therefore, if Raymond is the prototypical masochist—and so are we, caught under the spell of the film’s hypnotic intrigue and subconsciously eager to be dominated—Mrs. Iselin is necessarily the sadist. In the hypermasculine world of warfare and political corruption, this role reversal implies its own sort of gender trouble. But it also presents an uneasy vision of the horrific potential of motherhood and its impact on the psychosis of the son.

            The film’s opening sequence presents Raymond’s uneasy characterization. His distaste for deviant sexuality is typified by his awkward encounter with the two lovers he encounters in the Korean brothel’s entryway and his rejection of a clingy prostitute. (0:55 – 1:19) American flags adorn the entryway to the brothel; one conveniently covers the “Bless” on graffiti that reads “God Bless America,” an image that prefigures Lincoln’s “blindness” in the Iselin parlor. (1:20) “It’s just our Raymond, our lovable Sergeant Shaw,” a sarcastic soldier quips with the cynicism of an unimpressed mother (1:24). Raymond is at once obeyed but also infantilized—the soldiers continue to dub him “our Raymond,” as if he, too, is a body to be shared between them. A prostitute fixates on “Movie Life” magazine as the men file out on Raymond’s orders; in the same frame, more graffiti on the wall spells, “Home Sweet Home.” (1:51) In the thick of war, the soldiers have carved out a space for themselves—a microcosm of capitalist exchange (of female bodies, alcohol, and cigarettes), crude reflections of Hollywood glamour, and homosocial bonding. They perform the social and economic systems of their “home sweet home” and indulge in pleasures of the flesh. Raymond is here to break up the party, and in doing so dismantles the aura of liberated Americanicity the soldiers have built up for themselves.

            Before her introduction, however, Mrs. Iselin’s omnipresence still lingers in this opening sequence. In an environment that is unabashedly sexualized and adorned in the images of (“bless”-less) American imperial ambition—complemented by glitzy Hollywood magazines—Raymond might as well be entering his mother’s bedroom. Like Psycho’s Lila Crane excavating the contours of Mrs. Bates’ boudoir, Raymond could easily turn around and find that the true horror in this room is himself—the manifestations of his fears and desires, implanted in him by a domineering mother. Internalized hatred thus functions as a major element of Raymond’s own sexualized masochism. Mrs. Iselin purports an unawareness that the communists would choose Raymond to be their pawn, yet in this sense, Raymond is the perfect tabula rasa. He is a veritable cipher—psychologically broken and yet integral in what hypnotists would call his “suggestibility.” But how suggestible, too, are the image-obsessed Americans after the formal war has ended? The America in The Manchurian Candidate is nothing more than a collection of signs—Polish caviar made up into an American flag; senators limboing and dressed as Abe Lincoln. Even devastating political rhetoric draws inspiration from bottles of ketchup. The film thus posits an America in which images of patriotism are reduced to mindless consumption and frivolous folly; how does this diverge from the Korean brothel? Where does Mrs. Iselin’s bedroom end?

            Apparently, nowhere, as it pertains to Raymond. The sexualized dynamic between Mrs. Iselin and Raymond comes to a head in her final speech to him; she notes her superiors will be “ground into death for what they did to you.” (1:53:24) The unsubtly sexualized, sadomasochistic domination of Raymond culminates in an awkward kiss from his mother—perhaps a kiss of death, a gesture that soon Raymond will subvert by destroying both his mother and himself. This act of sacrifice is predicated by a false sense of hope and liberation, emblematized by Marco’s reminder to Raymond that “they can’t touch you anymore. You’re free.” (1:39:40) This “they” is dubious. The implication that to be touched by your mother is necessarily to be probed by “the enemy” and countless others constitutes a failure of the maternal that opens Raymond up to a sexualized vulnerability that is not simply “Communist,” but “other.”

            Similarly to Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate establishes a mother-son dynamic that is subtextually structured around “unhealthy” sexual impulse and impotence. Yet unlike the figures of maternal horror in the inter-female relationships of Coraline and Mildred Pierce—which too invoke sexualized imagery—Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Iselin are not self-multiplying hosts or parasites. They are, instead, omnipresent manipulators of their sons, subtly guiding the hands of destiny and mobilizing the destruction of the (male) bodies around them in a manner that is necessarily informed by sexualized self-hatred and mutually assured destruction. That the chilly and demeaning mother figure must mobilize the male bodies—often the male bodies they themselves have produced—to achieve their murderous desires is worth examination. Perhaps this mechanism of control is a comment on the disempowerment of women within 20th-century social politics: Only the men can truly effect change, and in the hubbub of cultural and “family failure,” mothers are those to blame. (Jackson, 2000:34) But I posit that the sexualized dimension of this domination also lends an important qualification to this mechanism. The mother-dominatrix ekes out a kind of pleasure from her submissive son that is at once transgressive and rousing: it channels a desire that the “proper” heterosexual partner cannot provide.

            Yet The Manchurian Candidate strives to say more about the sociopolitical context of its production than it does succeed in simply displaying another reductive stereotype of the monstrous (in this case, incestuous) feminine. What is most frightening about the film’s narrative progression is that until we are certain that Mrs. Iselin does indeed have Communist ties (that she, in turn, manipulates to her own ends), her hold over Raymond might as well be its own type of sexualized hypnosis unrelated to a far-flung political conspiracy. Like the media mogul she is, Mrs. Iselin develops her brand of allure and dominance, thereby ensuring that she fulfills her own nefarious (and possibly apolitical) motivations and subverts the mechanisms of control she has inherited from a male-dominated sociopolitical milieu. The Manchurian Candidate hereby constructs a villain who, barring actual patriotism, is the consummate American: image-conscious, ruthless in pursuit of her desires, and domineering to a fault. Mrs. Iselin mobilizes all of the worst aspects of American social and political culture to advance a necessarily sexualized sense of control over her progeny. By this reading, Jackson’s interpretation is not invalidated, but merely complicated: the film’s degradation of the feminine “brings the androcentrism of Cold War culture to an impasse,” not simply in its paradoxical ramifications for the nuclear family, but also in its indictment of America as a national breeding ground for Mrs. Iselin’s particular brand of maternal horror. (Jackson, 2000:39)

            Consistent with Jackson’s opining, the link between Mrs. Iselin’s villainy and the film’s satire of American politics only makes sense in the context of Cold War handwringing. Perhaps Mrs. Iselin’s alluring (albeit masculinized) femininity does not necessarily inform her distinctive brand of American cruelty, but it does link eerie psychopathologies of motherhood with a critique of unabashed Americanism that informs Cold War paranoia in the first place. Indeed, perhaps “the real danger, the real fear” is made manifest in Mrs. Iselin’s transcendence of both gender and politics (Jackson, 2000:39). But that her insidiousness can be read as a metonym for the evils of American culture confers a deeply disturbing, psychoanalytically informed, new meaning to “home sweet home.” 

Citations 

Frankenheimer, J. (1962). The Manchurian Candidate. United States: United Artists. Film.

Jackson, T. (2000). The Manchurian Candidate and the Gender of the Cold War.

            Literature/Film Quarterly, 28(1):34-40.