Paranoia for our times

The Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate has been remade for our troubled times. And it has already got Washington in a stew, reports Andrew Gumbel

The jury may still be out on the critical and commercial fortunes of the remake of The Manchurian Candidate (it opens in the US today), but it's already one of the burning talking points of a highly political summer. Given that we are dealing with a paranoid thriller, a genre whose revival is surely long overdue in these stressed out, media-saturated, terror-inflected times, the rumours have been almost as intriguing as the film itself.

Weeks before its opening - at the climax of the Democratic National Convention, no less - conservative websites began muttering that it was an anti-Bush screed masquerading as mainstream entertainment. Advance word of mouth certainly made that seem possible. The original film's plot line - an international communist conspiracy to subvert American democracy and plant a mole in the Oval Office - had, we were told, been modified so the bad guys were now a giant corporation called Manchurian Global. Manchurian's description as a provider of military and other key government services made it sound awfully like Halliburton, the oil and infrastructure company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run and continues to shower with administration largesse.

Was this Fahrenheit 9/11 by a different name? The bloggers dug up political campaign contribution records on Jonathan Demme, the director, Meryl Streep, the female lead, and Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount Studios, and concluded this could be nothing other than a stalking-horse for the Democratic Party. But then, also from the conservative side of the political spectrum, came the contrary rumour that Streep - playing the overbearing mother first incarnated by Angela Lansbury in the 1962 original - was doing a thinly disguised version of Hillary Clinton, an unflattering study in driving ambition from the left-wing feminist perspective.

So which was it? The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compounded the rumours, by positing - without seeing the new film - that President Bush might himself be seen as the perfect model for an enemy mole in the White House. Here, Krugman wrote, was a man positioning himself rhetorically as a terrorist scourge while allowing Islamic terrorism to prosper and multiply on his watch: call him the Arabian Candidate. Not to be outdone, one conservative contributor to a political web forum wrote "John freakin' Kerry is a Manchurian candidate!".

Such arguments seem destined to continue long after partisans on both sides have actually seen the movie. The film, as might be surmised by the confused suppositions about it, is actually much too clever to be easily pinpointed as coming down on one side of the political fence or the other. In real life, corporations corrupt Republicans and Democrats alike: fake populism concealing a corporate-led agenda is a vice of both major parties, as Ralph Nader loves to point out.

What the film does do is transpose the atmosphere of Cold War paranoia that infused John Frankenheimer's original, and make it work brilliantly for our present jittery world. In the 1962 movie, a company of soldiers was kidnapped during the Korean War and brainwashed into believing that the least popular, most cold-hearted of them had in fact saved their lives through acts of uncommon bravery. Laurence Harvey played the accidental hero, Raymond Shaw, who is subsequently programmed to become a ruthless presidential assassin. Frank Sinatra, meanwhile, played his commanding officer in Korea, Captain Marco, who heroically sees through the delusions of his own brainwashing and works to break the conspiracy plot before it is too late.

The new storyline is both updated - with the first Gulf War standing in for Korea - and modified, so the lines of heroism and villainy are much more fractured and ambiguous. The Sinatra role, in particular, has been heavily modified; Denzel Washington plays Marco as a man frantically seeking to establish his sanity - to himself and others - as he rants about nightmares, plots and threats to the political establishment. While he is accused of paranoia, the political landscape is depicted as one where plots are ubiquitous and ever threatening.

Like Frankenheimer before him, Demme wisely gives the overheated political tensions the feel of a dreamscape, which in turn gives him licence to throw in all kinds of elements from real life without seeming to preach any particular message. In other words, he describes a state of political paranoia without ever saying what, if anything, he believes himself.

He throws in everything he can think of, and then some - the idly touted threat of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, surreptitious computer-chip implants (which were, incidentally, a genuine subject of rumour during the 1991 Gulf War), television news that tranquillises its audiences instead of informing them, fears that the electoral process will be subverted by secretive electronic voting machines, and the even greater terror that biotechnology will blur the distinctions between human beings and machines. We even have a deliciously understated sighting of Elvis.

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The characters, too, suggest real-life personalities without ever becoming cyphers. Streep doesn't come across as Hillary Clinton nearly as much as she does one of the domineering women in George W Bush's life - his adoring political adviser Karen Hughes, perhaps, or his own mother. (Not only does Barbara Bush regard George W as her favourite; her family nickname is "The Enforcer", which tells you something about her own driving ambition.) The young actress Kimberly Elise transforms the original Janet Leigh character into an ambiguous femme fatale-cum-undercover-FBI- agent - and has some of the facial mannerisms of Condoleezza Rice. Washington, meanwhile, gives us little glimpses of Colin Powell. The steel-rimmed glasses certainly bolster that impression, as does his character's evolving persona as the good soldier who can be programmed to do just about anything by his unscrupulous masters.

It usually takes a moment of political and social fracture in a society to bring out the best in paranoid thriller-making. The genre flourished briefly in the 1960s, then roared back to life around the time of Watergate - think of The Parallax View, Three Days of The Condor and The Conversation.

One can argue that the original Manchurian Candidate, which despite its cult status now was not a commercial success on its release, managed to be both behind and ahead of its time. The Cold War paranoia it described was in a lull, between the excesses of the McCarthy era and the rabid rhetoric of the Goldwater Republicans, which would find full voice only after John Kennedy's assassination. It had the further misfortune of coming out just before the Cuban missile crisis, at which point it was withdrawn from distribution, and kept off American cinema screens for the next 25 years.

In the mid-1960s, the social historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous essay entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, in which he ascribed the hunt for Communist plots to "the moral shock of our nascent imperialism". He was referring to the establishment of the United States as a superpower in the wake of the Second World War, with a military and national-security apparatus to match.

One can just as easily adapt Hofstadter's words to the terrorism-fuelled paranoia of post-September 11 and the neo-imperialist urges of the Bush administration. All of a sudden, America is expanding an already mighty military, rewriting its long-standing national security doctrines, and invading countries half a world away. Scary? You bet. The mood Demme fingers in his film is all too genuine; there could be no more opportune moment for a queasily familiar entertainment like his.

'The Manchurian Candidate' opens on 5 November