The Manchurian Candidate Political Satire

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The Manchurian Candidate (1962) by John Frankenheimer provides great satirical the tone that the Korean War set forth in Cold War United States. The movie itself released while the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding in 1962 certainly sets the context of the viewers at the time. The movie depicts the fear of communism washing up on American soil as the 1950s were heavily marked as fearing the communists who might be seated within the United States government. The film critiques United States’s apocalyptic worst fears when it drafted its post-war foreign based on the Truman Doctrine and quivers over communism. Nevertheless, Manchurian Candidate is a political satire about the negative impacts of the transformation of United States society emerging …show more content…

The United States involvement in the Korean War heightened the fear of communism resulting in the skeptically based anxieties within the central government. The title of the film itself satirically reflects the anxiety-induced nature of United States domestic and foreign policy in the 1950s that communism would spread starting with the Korean peninsula. The Manchurian Candidate embodies these anxieties were fictionally brought back from the Korean War and situated itself into the sacred United States electoral system like that of a spread of a plague. These skeptical anxieties would materialize in McCarthyism and the HUAC investigations of the 1950s. The film embodies skepticism that even though the fight was halted in Korea, communism could cross oceans and invade the dominant foundation of capitalism without a trace. This strikes great parallels with today's ongoing discussion of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election and even alleged Russian connections to President Trump's campaign. The movie’s most dramatic part is that it was unknown to all until one step from the presidency. The Manchurian candidate makes it clear that anxieties like this really did exist in the …show more content…

Deemed a communist in disguise by the head of state his mother Eleanor Shaw. These conflicting views that Raymond had to constantly listen to how Eleanor Shaw Ischloen demonized Chaney in spite of hiding that herself were the “American operator.” Much like how the forbidden love between Raymond and Jocelyn, the Korean War pinned the concept of communism as never compatible with democracy because of the unending discrepancies from the rivalry that was unwinding in the early 1950s. That there was no co-existence other than obliteration. This climatic section of Raymond's life could represent a greater aspect of the perceived incompatibility with the United States and communism furthering the war was waged on behalf of the American policy of condemning

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