In the remake of 1962's "The Manchurian Candidate," in theaters now, the original's communist villains have been replaced by a more timeless bogeyman, the evil corporation.
Manchurian Global, the remake's antagonist, is a multinational conglomerate whose revenue exceeds the European Union's and which has designs on controlling the White House. It is the latest of a long line of corporations, factual and fictional, that have served the cinema as capitalist villains, either as active agents of evil or omnipresent dehumanizers of the human soul. First captured by Fritz Lang's 1927 "Metropolis," the concept endures, appearing as recently as the 1999 comedy "Office Space," a near-documentary of cubicle culture.
Manchurian Global represents the American loss of trust in the corporation to the extreme -- it is Evil Inc. During a time of protests over globalization and media conglomeration, white-collar perp-walks, wrong-headed mergers that enrich executives but force massive layoffs, million-dollar corporate bacchanalias and indicted energy company executives on a first-name basis with the president, many are willing to believe corporations have the access and avarice to do anything. If Manchurian Global does not exist, it is recognizable enough to contemporary movie viewers that it might as well be trading on Nasdaq. (Ticker symbol: BLZB.)
Contrast this with a time when American corporations inspired nearly blind faith in their stability and stewardship -- consider the third-generation Detroit assembly-line autoworker or the college grad who went to work for IBM and retired from management 45 years later, having spent his entire career with one company.
"The notion that businessmen were examples of probity and prudence is classic in all the '50s movies," said Philip Scranton, professor of history of industry and technology at Rutgers University. ". . . Now, we think of irrationality in business as everyday lunch meat."
And as many of the 20th century's evils have been dispatched -- communism, Nazism, fascism -- barely restrained capitalism-gone-bad has persevered as a go-to hobgoblin. Some may see the Kozlowskis and Rigases and Fastows of today and think of the robber barons of the 19th century, who were so feral and exploitative that they led to government regulation and the rise of labor unions.
The U.S. financial crises of the '70s -- stagflation, the oil shortage, the rise of foreign competition -- were followed by the ethical lapses of the '80s (S&L meltdown, junk-bond high jinks) and the legerdemain of the '90s (Enron, et al.), said Christine Rosen, a professor of business history at University of California at Berkeley, contributing to the "The Manchurian Candidate's" potential resonance in the mind of 2004 movie audiences.
"There is a real crisis of distrust and suspicions and concerns about business," she said. "The movie picks up on that and reflects that."
"The Corporation," a current Canadian documentary, takes the novel approach of psychoanalysis in arguing that capitalism is ultimately an unsustainable system. Noting that U.S. law recognizes corporations as individuals, giving them broad rights, it asks the question: What sort of a person would a corporation make? The answer, according to a lefty's laundry list that includes Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky: a psychopath who tries to manipulate thought, lies without guilt and is dangerous to himself and others.
"All these behaviors are in the extreme but are the sort that enterprises do all the times in one subset or another, except for those like Enron that tried the whole bundle," Scranton said.
Some audience members laugh knowingly during scenes in which Manchurian Global is referenced. Amid the chuckles, the name "Halliburton" could be heard wafting about Washington theaters at several recent showings.
Not quite. Halliburton, the Texas energy firm formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, may reach beyond oil fields and into the Defense Department, but in the film, Manchurian is said to be made up of past presidents and prime ministers -- the ultimate geopolitical insiders' club.
If you're a conspiracy theorist, you hear "Manchurian Global" and think "Carlyle Group," the world's largest private equity firm, which buys and sells companies like Monopoly properties and whose roster of current and former staff and advisers includes George H.W. Bush, James A. Baker III, Richard G. Darman and former British prime minister John Major. Director Jonathan Demme even said that Carlyle was one of the models for his film.
But even that's not big enough. Maybe Manchurian Global is Carlyle after buying Halliburton and Genentech, if it were run by crazy, chip-implanting Boer scientists.
