echoes of Bush blood-money empire in new movie

[pynchonoid]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/arts/25RICH.html?pagewanted=all&position=

[...] Their method for countering the Bush-Cheney
monopolization of fear is to turn the administration
into an object of fear in its own right. It can be
seen at full throttle in Jonathan Demme's remake of
the classic cold war thriller, "The Manchurian
Candidate," which opens nationally on Friday, the
morning after the Democratic convention ends. This
movie could pass for the de facto fifth day of the
convention itself.

I cannot recall when Hollywood last released a
big-budget mainstream feature film as partisan as this
one at the height of a presidential campaign. That it
has slipped into action largely under the media's
radar, as discreetly as the sleeper agents in its
plot, is an achievement in itself. Freed from any
obligations to fact, "The Manchurian Candidate" can
play far dirtier than "Fahrenheit 9/11." Not being a
documentary, it can also open on far more screens —
some 2,800, which is more than three times what
Michael Moore could command on his opening weekend (or
any weekend to date).

"The Manchurian Candidate" is a product of Paramount
Pictures, whose chairwoman, Sherry Lansing, is a loyal
Democratic contributor, according to public records.
(So, for the most part, is her boss, the Viacom
chairman, Sumner Redstone.) One of the film's stars,
Meryl Streep, shared the stage with Whoopi Goldberg at
the recent Kerry-Edwards fund-raiser. As Bill O'Reilly
will be glad to hear, the cameo role of a cable-news
reporter is played by Al Franken.

The screenplay has holes as large as those in our
still woefully inadequate homeland security apparatus.
(At the outset the film actually posits that political
conventions are exciting events where even the vice
presidential nomination can still be up for grabs.)
Hokey, literal-minded sci-fi gimmickry usurps the wit
of the 1962 original, which was faithfully adapted by
the director John Frankenheimer and the screenwriter
George Axelrod from the 1959 Richard Condon novel. But
the new version, even at its clunkiest, could not be
more uncompromising in its paranoid portrayal of a
political cartel with certain familiar traits that
will stop at nothing, including the exploitation and
even the fomenting of terrorism, to hold on to power
for its corporate backers.

The original "Manchurian Candidate" was both
anti-Communist and anti-Joe McCarthy. It theorized
that the Chinese and Russians could try to overthrow
the American government by using covert Washington
operatives disguised as Commie-hunting American
demagogues. The new "Candidate," which takes the first
gulf war instead of the Korean War as its historical
template, finds a striking new international villain
to replace the extinct evil empires of Mao and Stalin:
Manchurian Global, a "supremely powerful,
well-connected, private equity fund" that is in league
with the Saudis and eager to scoop up the profits from
privatizing the American Army. Think of it as the
Carlyle Group or Halliburton on steroids, just as its
primary fictional political beneficiary, the
well-heeled "Prentiss family dynasty," with its three
generations of Washington influence, is at most one
syllable removed from the Bushes. [...]

See also: "Bush" in _Vineland_, pp. 353-354

=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"
http://neoconservadroid.org
"android warriors of the right"


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail