CAPC Exclusive: Read the First Chapter From Gina Dalfonzo’s The Screen and the Mirror – Christ and Pop Culture

Longtime CAPC editor and writer Gina Dalfonzo has just published a new book titled The Screen and the Mirror on Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock. Drawing on a wide range of movies that include Knives Out, Vertigo, and The Godfather, Dalfonzo’s book explores how movies—and their flawed characters—can teach us deeper truths about our own fallen nature.

As a gift for our readers, Dalfonzo and Wipf and Stock have graciously allowed CAPC to share the book’s opening chapter, “We Are What We Fear,” which focuses on John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. The 1962 political thriller, which stars Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, focuses on a Korean War veteran who has been brainwashed into becoming a Communist assassin. And as Dalfonzo writes, its bizarre story highlights how our desire to condemn and vilify our enemies can have some truly shocking consequences.

If you should ever come to me and say, “I feel like watching something weird tonight,” I will most likely point you in the direction of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. 

And it does have to be the 1962 version. The 2004 Jonathan Demme remake of this film features a strong, brooding performance from Denzel Washington, but little else of note. It lacks the tensions and the pathos of the original, and most of all, it lacks the weirdness. In fact, I’d say few films can beat Frankenheimer’s film for sheer, unsettling weird. You have, among other things:

• Prim American ladies at a garden club meeting who abruptly turn into Chinese Communist Party officials.
• A love interest with no background who appears out of nowhere and randomly starts spouting off about Maryland and Ohio to a soldier having a meltdown on a train. 
• A woman who coincidentally dresses for a costume party as the playing card that triggers a hypnotic trance in a brainwashed veteran.
• Angela Lansbury being more sinister than you ever imagined she could be.

To my mind, it doesn’t get much weirder than that.

To my mind, I said. Not everyone sees it the same way. Of course there are even weirder movies out there, movies where things immediately go off the chain and never go back on it. David Lynch, Charlie Kaufman, David Cronenberg—filmmakers like this have long been out there taking viewers to bizarre places and scenarios undreamed of. The Manchurian Candidate, by contrast, is set in an almost recognizable universe.

But it’s that almost that gets me. So many aspects of the film are so real—so grimly real—that the unrealities sitting beside them take on a horrifying realness of their own. And in fact, The Manchurian Candidate isn’t fantasy. Despite the mind games and brain-tampering going on, it isn’t even true science fiction. Everything that occurs in it is meant to be something that really could occur. 

The weirdness isn’t just on the surface. It’s bubbling up from somewhere deeper, a sign that something has gone very wrong at the heart of the 1950s American society it depicts. That something has its origins half a world away, in a mysterious incident that takes place during the Korean War. But the ease with which it infects the hearts of fervently patriotic Americans is enough to make anyone break out in a cold sweat. 

Of the garden club scene I described above, more surreal than any tea party the Mad Hatter ever threw, film critic Greil Marcus writes, 

The sequence is visually irresistible—lucid, as anything beautiful is lucid. At the same time it’s unacceptable—confusing, at first, then an impossibility, then perfectly possible. As dramatised by the gestures and speech of the people within it, the action is completely naturalistic. . . . You realize that in the world posited by the movie, this actually happened.

Technically, yes, we’re first shown the garden club meeting in a dream. But the fact that the meeting continues in another man’s dream, and then another, signals that either this bizarre event really took place, or there’s some kind of mass hypnosis going on. 

Or, as it happens, both. 

“Kindest, Warmest, Bravest”

It all starts in “Korea, 1952,” as the onscreen text vaguely tells us. A pre-credits sequence shows us a night patrol, during which a US Army platoon led by Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) is ambushed, captured, and loaded into helicopters—for what purpose we don’t yet know.

Immediately after the credits, the scene shifts to the homecoming of Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who has won the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving the lives of that platoon. Shaw’s mother, Eleanor Iselin (Lansbury), has prepared a proper hero’s welcome, complete with brass band, but Raymond wants none of it. He takes off his medal the first chance he gets, and he shocks and disgusts his mother and his stepfather, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory), by telling them he’s leaving for New York to work for a newspaper columnist who politically opposes them.

“That Communist?” blurts Eleanor. “He’s not a Communist, Mother,” Raymond responds coolly. “As a matter of fact, he’s a Republican.” What matters, he goes on, is that he and his new employer have something important in common: “We discovered that we both loathe and despise you and Johnny.”

Meanwhile, Ben Marco, now promoted to major, keeps having horrible nightmares about a garden club meeting.

In these dreams, as the people grouped around his platoon shapeshift back and forth between smiling old ladies and Chinese and Russian officials, Ben sees these people order Raymond to strangle another member of the platoon, and he sees Raymond calmly and methodically obey those orders. But, as Ben tells his boss, and a psychiatrist, and others, this cannot be true—because, he says, “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Visibly upset, Ben is reassigned to the Public Relations Corps to give him a chance to destress and get himself together.

Elsewhere, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) bolts awake from a nightmare in which he saw Raymond Shaw shoot a member of their platoon at a garden club meeting. The worst thing about this recurring dream, he tells his wife as she tries to soothe him, is that “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

We know now that something’s up. The truth is, we’ve known for a while. It’s not just that Ben Marco and Al Melvin parrot their praise of Raymond Shaw in the exact same words—Al practically snapping to attention in bed and rattling the sentence off like an automaton. It’s that we saw, back in the pre-credits sequence, how the men of his unit really felt about him. We knew, with an unsettling feeling, that what we were being shown was different from what we were being told.

As Ben will protest to his commanding officer a little later in the film: 

I tell you, there’s something phony going on. There’s something phony about me, about Raymond Shaw, about the whole Medal of Honor business. 

For instance. When the psychiatrist asked me how I felt about Raymond Shaw, how I personally felt about him and how the whole patrol felt about him, did you hear what I said? Did you really hear what I said? I said, ‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.’ And even now I feel that way, this minute. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, something tells me it’s not true. It’s just not true. It isn’t as if Raymond’s hard to like. He’s impossible to like! In fact, he’s probably one of the most repulsive human beings I’ve ever known in my whole . . . all of my life. 

Ben’s not wrong. As played by Laurence Harvey, Raymond Shaw does indeed repulse in this first part of the film. There’s an almost reptilian quality in his gaze, a clipped impatience in his voice. He at least has the good sense to see through his buffoonish stepfather and manipulative mother, but he seems to extend his contempt for them to the rest of humanity as well. 

And where is Raymond himself while his brothers in arms are trying to sort out their conflicted visions and feelings about him? As his stepfather the senator, down in Washington, is raising a racket about suspected Communist infiltrators in the government, Raymond sits in his New York apartment, reading a letter containing a desperate appeal for help from Al Melvin. But before he can finish reading, his phone rings and a voice on the other end suggests, “Raymond, why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?” 

Memories of McCarthyism

We need to pause here and take a closer look at what exactly is going on with Raymond’s stepfather, John Iselin. In 1962, there probably wasn’t a movie viewer alive who didn’t recognize exactly who and what Senator Iselin represented. 

During the first half of the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin seized and held the national spotlight with a campaign against suspected Communists in the government, in Hollywood, and elsewhere. He cost a number of people their jobs and generally wrecked a lot of lives, even though he couldn’t prove his accusations—mainly because he was making them up. 

In fact, a scene in The Manchurian Candidate where Iselin keeps changing the number of Communists he claims are in the Defense Department (“207 . . . 104 . . . 275”) is lifted straight out of the McCarthy playbook. McCarthy too kept changing numbers, though presumably not in a span of just a few minutes. The movie is exaggerating this tendency for comic effect, winding up the bit with Eleanor Iselin settling on the number fifty-seven after watching her husband pour Heinz ketchup (“57 varieties”) on his steak.

The movie isn’t just trying to be funny here—there’s a method to the madness. As Eleanor points out to her husband in the same disdainful, dismissive tone she usually uses with him, “Who are they writing about all over this country and what are they saying? Are they saying: ‘Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?’ Of course not. They’re saying: ‘How many Communists are there in the Defense Department?’” In other words, Iselin’s buffoonishness and ignorance serve a purpose. 

But if you think you know what that purpose is at this point, you’re almost certainly wrong.

Back in New York, Raymond, following instructions from the phone, plays solitaire until he turns up the queen of diamonds. The phone rings again, with more instructions. And from here we start to learn who brainwashed Raymond, who is still controlling him, and what his controllers want him to do. He has, in fact, been turned into an assassin by Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), the Chinese doctor whom his fellow platoon members keep seeing in their nightmares, with the help and cooperation of Russian and North Korean forces. The perfect assassin, according to the doctor:

Without memory of his deed, he cannot possibly feel guilt. Nor, of course, will he have any reason to fear being caught. And having been relieved of those uniquely American symptoms, guilt and fear, he cannot possibly give himself away.

To prove to his Russian accomplices what their new tool can do, Yen Lo sends Raymond to kill his new boss, the one Mrs. Iselin smeared as a “Communist.” Raymond, still in a hypnotic trance, carries out this killing without a sign of remorse or any other kind of emotion.

We now have our antagonists well established: Communist forces infiltrating the mind of an American veteran and forcing him to commit murder on command. Who are the good guys in this surreal scenario? 

They seem a little thin on the ground here, and ill-equipped to grapple with what’s facing them. It falls to Major Ben Marco to go find Raymond on his own and try to figure out what’s going on, and what with all the nightmares and the mind games, he’s not in the best shape to do so. In the scene where Ben takes the train to New York, Sinatra plays him as a man on the verge of collapse, dripping with sweat, his hand too shaky to light a cigarette. It takes all the off-kilter wit and charm of Rosie (Janet Leigh), a mysterious woman he meets on the train (the woman I mentioned who keeps talking about Maryland and Ohio), to pull him back from the brink. 

But hold on a minute, you may be saying. We’re dealing with a legitimate Communist threat to the United States. How is it that a lone Army major fighting off a nervous breakdown is the only one looking into this threat? Weren’t we just talking about a prominent anti-Communist voice— Raymond Shaw’s own stepfather—in the Senate? Can’t he and his cohorts do anything? 

We’ll get to that. In the meantime, Ben finds Raymond, pushes past his prickly exterior (having first gotten into a bizarre and explosive fight with Raymond’s valet), and begins to unravel the truth. A key piece of the puzzle falls into place when a chance remark by a bartender causes Raymond to exit the bar and literally go jump in a lake. 

A Little Solitaire

Ben finally begins to connect the nightmares and the incongruous feelings to a very real brainwashing operation that took place overseas, with the result that a simple instruction to play solitaire can lead his former sergeant to murder innocent people in cold blood. But what he still doesn’t know is who’s giving that instruction, and who the ultimate target will be.

Raymond himself is little help in finding out. As we’ve seen, he has no clear understanding of what he does in his trances, and no memory of it after he comes out of them. But from here on, as the focus of the movie shifts more and more to him, we see just how completely and fully he’s being manipulated. Even a joyful reunion with former girlfriend Jocie (Leslie Parrish)—arguably the only person Raymond has ever loved in his entire life—has been orchestrated by his mother, who had previously forced Raymond to give her up. 

“That little, uh, ‘Communist tart’?” is John Iselin’s remark when his wife tells him she wants to get Jocie and Raymond back together. “All right, so I might have been a little bit hasty,” Eleanor Iselin concedes.

Mrs. Iselin, of course, has her own reasons for her abrupt change of heart about Raymond’s love life. Those reasons involve Jocie’s father, Senator Thomas Jordan (John McGiver), a vehement opponent of Senator Iselin. 

At the costume ball where Mrs. Iselin maneuvers Raymond and Jocie back together, she also confronts Senator Jordan with a question: “If Johnny’s name were put forward at the convention next week, would you attempt to block him?” She wants her husband to get the nomination for vice president of the United States, and she needs to sound the depths of Jordan’s opposition. 

Senator Jordan’s answer is unequivocal:

Will I block you? I would spend every cent I own and all I could borrow to block you. There are people who think of Johnny as a clown and a buffoon. But I do not. I despise John Iselin and everything that Iselinism has come to stand for. I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more to harm this country than he’s doing now.

There’s more to his speech than that, but let’s stop right there. Because Thomas Jordan has accidentally and unknowingly hit on the truth. 

Mommie Dearest

Or something very close to the truth, at any rate. It is in fact Mrs. Iselin who is a paid Soviet agent. As Ben Marco will later discover while trying to “deprogram” the entranced Raymond, the puppeteer pulling Raymond’s strings—the person at the other end of the phone giving him orders to kill—is his own mother.

It’s the ultimate twist: The loudest despiser of all things Communist, the woman pushing her husband to the vice-presidential nomination on an anti-Communist platform, is herself a Communist. She spells it all out for Raymond near the climax of the film—leaning over him as he slumps in a chair, too deeply hypnotized to grasp what she is saying—in what has to be one of the greatest villain monologues ever performed:

I know you will never entirely comprehend this, Raymond. But you must believe I did not know it would be you. I served them. I fought for them. I’m on the point of winning for them the greatest foothold they will ever have in this country. And they paid me back by taking your soul away from you. 

As Mrs. Iselin goes on, we learn something more about her. It’s not anti-Communism that’s driving her, as we once thought—but it’s not Communism either. Or rather, it’s not just Communism. What drives her is something even deeper and more fundamental, a level of self-interest that will lead her not only to fake alliances but also to turn on her genuine allies when they cross her: 

. . . When I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously underestimating me. 

McCarthy himself couldn’t have imagined things getting to this level. 

(Speaking of imagining, what no one involved with the film could have imagined at this point was Angela Lansbury’s future career as a cozy, grandmotherly type, but in the long run, it would work to the film’s advantage. Think of Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher or Beauty and the Beast’s Mrs. Potts as a cold-blooded aspiring dictator—with leanings toward incest, to boot. It makes her icy portrayal of Mrs. Iselin extra horrifying, doing even more to enhance the film’s reputation with modern viewers.) 

But yes, what about McCarthy? Why this particular twist on a well-known and, at the time, very recent episode in American history? The film gives us a political landscape dominated by McCarthy-like figures, and dares to ask: What would happen if the most rabid anti-Communists were Communists themselves? 

Beyond the Horseshoe

Perhaps you’re familiar with the horseshoe theory of politics. Blogger L. T. Wright defines it this way: “Horseshoe theory argues that the political spectrum isn’t a line. Instead, it’s a horseshoe shape. The rounded part of the horseshoe is the center. The ends of the horseshoe are the extreme left and right. This theory argues that rather than being opposites, the extremes actually closely resemble one another.”

 Using this theory to interpret the strange events of The Manchurian Candidate, one might speculate that the film is trying to show us that the Communists and the radical anti-Communists are pretty much the same at heart.

But I’m not so sure that’s what the filmmakers are going for here. I think it goes deeper than just a comparison of one ideology to another. I believe the film is asking us a question—more than that, it’s forcing us to face a particular fear that probably most of us have known at one time or another. Because most of us at some point have had an enemy, whether it’s a person, a group of people, or an entire political system or ideology. If I ask you right now who your enemy was or is, you can probably picture him or her or them before I get to the end of this sentence. 

Now ask yourself this. If you thought your enemy might take over the country or even the world, what would you do about it? The question can have very different ramifications, depending on who your enemy is. If it’s just the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning, or the woman who keeps letting her dog poop in your yard, you might not be too concerned. Annoyed, but not concerned. 

But seriously, suppose your enemy is a lot bigger and more dangerous than that—what would you do to keep them away from power? Just how far might your desperation drive you?

We Have Met the Enemy . . .

There are reasons we have enemies. Sometimes they’re very good reasons. Many American movie viewers in 1962 would have been well aware of the horrific human rights abuses going on in Communist countries—the purging of dissenters, the gulags where millions were tortured and killed, widespread starvation brought about by government policies. No country or government is perfect, including our own; all governments, like all institutions, are made up of deeply flawed, selfish, prejudiced human beings with much to answer for. But the Soviet government was both waging outright war on its own citizens and posing a threat to the rest of the world, a threat that understandably preoccupied people. (And in a way, the panic over Soviet Communism was a swing of the pendulum from when public figures like Walter Duranty and Joseph E. Davies served as apologists for Joseph Stalin, deliberately lying to the American public in order to conceal the dictator’s brutal policies and their results.)

Additionally, by a curious coincidence, The Manchurian Candidate opened right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that thirteen-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought the world closer to nuclear war than it ever was before or since. 

In short, Americans had reason to consider Communism the enemy. And for all its satirical tendencies, The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t try to downplay or avoid or joke about that. It tells people that the thing they fear, the enemy at their gates, is real. But that’s not where its unique form of terror lies. Many horror movies have told us as much. 

The film goes a step further, and tells us that the people we’ve chosen to fight the enemy for us are the enemy. That our desperate fight has delivered us right into the enemy’s hands. 

. . . and He Is Us

Though Eleanor Iselin in the movie doesn’t believe her husband can gain his party’s nomination for the presidency, she correctly guesses that he can become the nominee for vice president—just a heartbeat away, as the saying goes, from the top spot. His clownishness, his obvious dishonesty, his blatant willingness to smear the innocent don’t matter; his party is willing to overlook all those things and put him on the ticket anyway. All because of fear. 

Mrs. Iselin is very much aware of that fear, and she knows how to exploit it. As Thomas Jordan wryly observes to Raymond at one point, “One of your mother’s more endearing traits is her tendency to refer to anyone who disagrees with her about anything as a Communist.” Few tactics are more powerful than slapping a scary label on anything you disagree with and whipping people into a panicked frenzy over it. And it’s so easy to do. Such great reward for such little effort. 

I know this from experience, on a very small scale. I know what it’s like to be labeled a “cultural Marxist,” for example, simply for expressing an opinion different from whatever Facebook had decided was the correct opinion that day (even though I’m decidedly culturally non-Marxist). Perhaps you’ve had something like that happen to you, too. Or perhaps you’ve been the one to slap a label on someone else. 

The sad truth is, most of us have been all too willing to do that to someone at some point or other. Fear of differing opinions, fear of other groups outside our own, fear of someone exploring and expressing ideas we’re not used to, can drive us to say and do things that go against our own principles, all for the sake of preserving our own principles. It sounds counterintuitive at best and insane at worst, but we see it every day in politics and in media and in everyday life. 

Our group must be right, no matter what. Our group can lie and cheat and break laws left and right, but we can live with it—we must live with it—because it’s our group, and our group will always be better than that other group over there. (And if, right now, you’re thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly how that other group behaves, but not mine!” then thank you, you’ve just proved my point.) Under enough pressure, driven by enough fear, we will do anything to see our group triumph.

And because Mrs. Iselin understands and manipulates that attitude so well, she brings an entire country to the brink of disaster.

In such a bleak scenario, there could not be a more unlikely hero than Raymond Shaw—“poor friendless, friendless Raymond,” as Ben Marco will ultimately describe him. Though Ben gives him all the help he can to try to undo his brainwashing, in the end Raymond must act alone to destroy the threat posed by his mother and stepfather. And he will not know a happy ending.

What We Fear

The Manchurian Candidate, let me reiterate, is a very weird movie. In several ways, that’s a good thing. Its jarring images and often disjointed dialogue make an impression, staying in our minds, forcing us to ponder what it’s all supposed to mean and how it’s all supposed to fit together. But more than that, all that weirdness refuses to allow us any complacency. The movie is not what we today like to call “relatable.” How could we begin to relate? Who is there to identify with, among a zombified assassin, his power-mad dragon of a mother, and a nightmare-ridden Army officer trading gibberish with a mysterious blonde on a train and throwing punches at a secret agent posing as a valet? 

Even if we’re tempted to relate to Ben Marco’s attempt to unravel the truth or to Raymond’s final, heroic effort, I believe that if we’re honest with ourselves, you and I are more likely to find ourselves in the crowds who fall under the sway of the Iselins. If observing the political scene teaches us anything, it teaches us this. If those who lead us wallow in hypocrisy, committing in private the very sins they rail about in public, they’re able to keep doing it, often without any repercussions at all, because we enable them. 

One need only look the long-running social media uproar over the massive sex trafficking operation of Jeffrey Epstein, which keeps flaring up again and again after every fresh development in the case: after Epstein’s arrest, after his suicide, after the arrest of his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and so on. Epstein’s plentiful connections with politicians and leaders of all kinds, all over the world, led to partisans on all sides consistently getting online and identifying him with the politicians they opposed. Each side rushed to point out the taint of the other, ignoring the taint on their own side. As I write this, and more and more of the Epstein files become available, you can still witness people talking eagerly about the sins of their opponents and refusing to recognize the sins of their own favorites.

None of us likes to admit to these tendencies in ourselves, for obvious reasons. We hardly want to think of ourselves as the reason that corruption flourishes in high places. If we see ourselves in a political movie, we want to believe we’re the titular Senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, filibustering heroically on the Senate floor in the name of truth and justice. Or Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, following the money to the very heart of the Watergate scandal. Or the sixteenth president of the United States in Lincoln, calmly but firmly steering the nation through the Civil War while fighting a moral battle to end slavery. It’s natural, even good, to aspire to be like such heroes; the trouble starts when we flip the script and start believing that those heroes must be just like us. That’s when we start to develop blind spots about our own sins and weaknesses.

The Manchurian Candidate, as I’ve said, doesn’t let us do that. It takes all the trappings that we associate with the good guys and shows the villains wallowing in them. “Images of American patriotism gone mad,” as Filmsite puts it.

 Speaking of Abraham Lincoln, Johnny Iselin is constantly surrounded by pictures of the man, along with American flags. He even dresses as Lincoln in the costume party sequence—during which he cuts into an American flag. The flag, it turns out, is made of caviar, but if you’re paying attention, the implication is unmissable. 

The question is, do we pay attention? When someone uses all the right symbols and says all the right buzzwords and validates our fears and our insecurities, do we embrace that person without a second thought? The way we answer that question may point us to the danger of being too eager to find someone relatable. If we insist on projecting our vision and our values onto whoever can speak our language well enough, we run the risk of making personal heroes out of dangerous villains.

For a person of faith, this should not be a new idea. The Scriptures are full of warnings against those who “mouth great swelling words, flattering people to gain advantage” (Jude 1:16). We shouldn’t be surprised when evil presents itself to us in an attractive guise, saying exactly what we want to hear; we should be surprised if it doesn’t. It’s the oldest trick in the book. 

“The devil . . . always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites,” wrote C. S. Lewis. “He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.” 

The Manchurian Candidate plays out like a commentary on this passage. It’s not enough to avoid one sin; if you let your horror and fear of it run away with you, you can rush headlong into committing an equally great sin. We may walk away from this film wide-eyed with shock or torn by pity, but above all, we should take from it this idea: If we let fear consume us, to the point where we will abandon every principle and commit any wrong to save ourselves, we will become what we fear.

The Screen and the Mirror: What Movies Show Us About Ourselves, the World, and God is now available from Wipf and Stock.