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Manchurian Candidate 2: negative redemption

Thread ID: 14603 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-08-01

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TexasAnarch [OP]

2004-08-01 22:05 | User Profile

A Psychoanalytic Review

Manchurian Candidate 2: negative redemption

The main message of this movie, in context, is one of personal reconciliation by individual’s pursuit of reality and truth, over against the flow of accepted popular assumptions shared by the group at large.  The opening scene has Denzel Washington in military uniform awarding the Congressional medal of honor to two soldiers who had served under his command.

The media had dubbed it “the lost patrol”, with an official story of their being ambushed, followed by with valorous acts by himself and “Shawn”, who is really a future candidate for U.S. Vice-President. (He gets called “the Manchurian Candidate here after the corporate global influence running him – like “the Bilderberg Candidate”.) Young, talented, handsome, of proven courage; reclusive and shy by nature, his mother talks Shawn into playing the game she knows he knows how to play perfectly. Under her teutalige – turns out to be esoteric or cultic mind-control, hi-tech implant; more on this later – he winds up One shot away from the Presidency. Which the plot has Denzel Washington programmed to deliver, at the end, with surprise twist I won’t divulge here.

Both characters can be put into a trance state, in which they will act what they are ordered and pre-programmed to do.  They are, in effect, humanoid psycho-puppets.  This was also the premise of Manchurian Candidate 1, one of the few points of agreement.  It was and is an ethically and existentially shocking idea.  The myth one likes to cling to, as  liberal, is that the deepest part of a person, his or her humanity -- that which neuro-physically reinstates itself each waking morning as personal consciousness, is something essentially incorruptable, as a substance.  A person cannot be made to do something against that inner will, which is conscience. .

However, over against this is much solid evidence for the hypothesis of hypnotic mind-control. In the late 19th century,  Freud, in the wake of the great hypnotist Mesmer, experimentally estanblished in numerous cases that people could be induced into a light  ‘trance’ state of consciousness in which suggestions can be implanted (“you will begin to feel warm when you wake up”), with the meta-suggestion that that communication be forgotten!  “You will not remember any of this happening.”   The content thus cut-off from conscious recall then emerges as the person acting ‘freely’ in accord -- “Could some one open a door? It has gotten warm in here”.  This proves that action can be both consciously intended, and taken responsibility for, conforming exactly to known  stimuli from the unconscious side.  It proves the existence of two memory systems operating simultaneously.     . .

The tension between the two dialectically opposited points of view, liberal optimism vrs. proven unconscious post-hypnotic control, is resolved at the general group level in the theory of trauma-implants (Chapter 1). This, again, amounts to a three phase procedure: A. induce altered state; B. imprint suggestion; C. return to normal (“default”) state of consciousness for dealing with reality. The situation of one who has undergone this procedure (D) will cause them to act out what they would ordinarily do by invoking the trance state, thus go against their deepest nature. (Hint: Denzel’s inner self is stronger.). Though the victim has been prepared to “go off”, they will not do so until an external stimulus removes the memory-block (induces the trauma).

SYMBOLIC CONNECTIONS IN CONTEXT

The symbolic factors in a drama, such as the film’s plot unfold, connect its parts to the deeper layers of personal memory, bound together by/under the symbol’s content. Thus, “The Lost Patrol”, recollection of which reappears throughout the movie in a group picture tokenizing their commraderie. In the last scene it is carried by a gentle, lapping wave back out into the ocean, presumably to re-enter the life-chair and await rebirth. That’s not very good, and the reason it isn’t touches the vital core of its meaning.. Denzel Washington may have found redemption for his soul by trusting the evidence of his own senses, even aware of their being damaged (“They have ****ed with our heads.”), vs the ‘truth’ accepted by everyone except those sharing his “flashbacks”.

The purpose of the implant is to prevent these from ‘going off’ (“cathecting” was the term Freud used for the discharge of neural energy in the relevant brain-nodes), except when triggered and under control. They act both as memory blocks, against recall of the original implanting experiences, and launching “countdown” sequencers to launch the action (shooting the candidate). A person who ‘loses their implant’ will have the flashbacks; they may, even with it. The memory bloc wears off, or is gotten around.

Possibly no theme is more frequently encountered than this, these days: we have a memory bloc, which occasionally wears off permiting glances of reality, perhaps wildly distorted. The split-off, traumatic content has found a way around the censorship into consciousness via the dream-work. The dream work allows it to appear under the guize of the grisly, grotesque, and disgusting. Only by such repulsive stratagems can it be made conscious at all. Yet there is an absolute compulsion to do so, because we are impelled to love the boys of the Lost Patrol, who brought it all back. That is where we came in, the group’s gratitude for their sacrifice. They are us, as children; the child inside each man and woman. “Lost” means, symbolically, abandoned and/or betrayed by parents; alone; in dire straits, no help no hope.

What is evoked in the group, as a group, then, is the memory of those lost in the Gulf War 1. The war of this George W. Bush’s father. In the movie Shawn’s father is dead (JFK allusion?), and he has become “a(n) (a-)Prentiss” – inductee to mother’s cult.

At a still deeper level, it is also the Vietnam war generation perpetually trying to come to terms with the Fathers – WW II, who were supposed to be so great, lauded as the greatest generation on earth ever by many, in somewhat hysterical over-reaction, to any sane observer. Stephen Speilberg and Tom Brokaw have virtually idolized them, each gaining from the inflation in their own way.

All the guilt and shame of these two wars will be brought back, when the memory bloc wears off. The resolution individuals arrive at, at such moments, represented by Denzel Washington’s character will be OK for them, but where does that leave America? -- still hanging out there utterly unredeemed. The resolution remains entirely narcissistic.

The broken world reels on; but for how long?.

Ponce

2004-08-02 02:59 | User Profile

Those three missing months from Bush military service?,,,,,,, maybe he was in the Zionist state of Israel being brainwashed?

No wonder Bush does everything that Sharon tells him to do, the cat is out of the now.

I keep saying that his eyes looks funny when he looks at the camara, like if he was in the twailight zone.