Agency: The Manchurian Candidate

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Human agency involves both deliberation and action. In times of war, individuals’ capacities for agency are often limited through either of these conditions. For instance, during the Cold War (1945-1991), Americans were bombarded with anti-communist propaganda, which severely warped their thoughts about communist countries; since the media affected Americans’ collective deliberation, they had a huge impact on citizens’ agency. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) explores different degrees of agency, each limited in its own way: Sergeant Raymond Shaw’s agency is limited by hypnosis, Senator Iselin’s agency is limited by his wife, and American citizens’ agency is limited by the media; on the opposite end of the spectrum, Communist doctor Yen Lo …show more content…
Ominous music plays as the camera zooms into Ben’s mind and continues well into the garden sequence. However, the music suddenly stops when Mrs. Whittaker, the flower lecturer, says, “From this, it might appear that the hydrangea is a fairly simple plant but there are more complications” (The Manchurian Candidate). The music stops on this particular phrase to signal the audience to pay close attention because there is something more implicit at work, rather than just a garden convention. This scene involves crosscutting with the communist hypnotist scene, which shows the deeper level of what is happening. These indistinguishable transitions between the two events mirror Raymond’s lack of awareness of what is going on around him. In addition to that, when the scene first switches to the hypnosis event, the close-up of Yen Lo flanked by images of notorious communist rulers—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong—aligns him with the Communist party and establishes him as the main agent of this conspiracy. In contrast, Raymond has little agency while he is under communist control. The hypnosis scene presents two opposite poles of agency: Yen Lo, who orchestrates this complex ploy, and Raymond Shaw, who, under hypnosis, mindlessly kills whoever he is instructed …show more content…
In “The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the Cold War Brainwashing Scare,” history professor Susan Carruthers explains that during the Cold War, “[w]hen stories of communist mistreatment of American POWs began filtering back . . . many Americans became highly alarmed at Red brainwashing and its seeming efficacy” (Carruthers 76). Americans were convinced that Communists’ brainwashing techniques worked when some veterans deserted their country to support the Soviets. This obsession with mind control becomes apparent in The Manchurian Candidate; the film centers around Chinese and Russian Communist forces using psychological techniques to condition Raymond Shaw to kill. According to Weil’s description of the onset of war, “[d]anger then becomes an abstraction; the lives you destroy are like toys broken by a child, and quite as incapable of feeling” (Weil 38). As a result of the hypnosis, Raymond is not consciously aware of what he is doing; this detachment from his actions prevents him from experiencing any remorse. Since agency involves both deliberation and action, and Raymond is incapable of reflecting on his thoughts before he acts, Raymond does not exercise much agency. Raymond’s hypnosis reflects a subject that many Americans worried about during the cold war: mind control by the
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