I: Introduction and Quotes

The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 political thriller directed by John Frankenheimer and written by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon. It stars Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, and Janet Leigh, with Angela Lansbury, James Gregory, Henry Silva, Khigh Dhiegh, John McGiver, Leslie Parrish, and Douglas Henderson.

The story is about a communist conspiracy to use a sleeper agent, Raymond Shaw (Harvey), to assassinate the American president so his chosen vice-president, Senator John Iselin (Gregory)–a McCarthyite red-baiter in public, but secretly a communist–will become the new president, using the assassination to gain emergency, dictatorial powers, thus making the US into a socialist state. Put another way–and as a leftist myself, I must be blunt here–this film, as entertaining and thrilling as it is–is simply a piece of Cold War, anticommunist propaganda.

So, Dear Reader, you might ask why I would choose to write up an analysis of a film to whose ideology I’m so opposed? Because, apart from my ability to distance myself emotionally and ideologically from such a film in order to appreciate its artistic merits (good acting and writing, etc.), I find it interesting to do a kind of psychological study of the story, to unearth the unconscious motives of the writers (Axelrod and Condon). Since, apart from the McCarthyist paranoia of the time, there were very real capitalist conspiracies aimed at subverting and undoing the socialist states, to restore capitalism to them, I shall endeavour to prove that the writers were projecting their own conspiracy-mindedness onto the USSR and Maoist China, while little Freudian slips popping out here and there reveal who the real conspirators were and are.

Here are some quotes:

[Repeated line] “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” –said by Major Ben Marco and Cpl. Allen Melvin (James Edwards)

“Allow me to introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to forgive their somewhat lackadaisical manners, but I have conditioned them – or brain-washed them, which I understand is the new American word. They believe that they are waiting out a storm in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey where a meeting of the ladies’ garden club is in progress.” –Dr. Yen Lo

Chairlady: You will notice that I have told them they may smoke. I’ve allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes… Are you enjoying your cigarette, Ed?
Ed Movole: Yes ma’am.
Dr. Yen Lo: Yak dung!… hope tastes good – like a cigarette should!

“The Queen of Diamonds is reminiscent in many ways of Raymond’s dearly loved and hated mother and is the second key to clear the mechanism for any other assignment.” –Dr. Yen Lo

[repeated line, to Raymond] “Why don’t you pass the time with a game of solitaire?” –Mrs. Iselin, etc.

“His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it’s been dry-cleaned.” –Dr. Yen Lo

Dr. Yen Lo: Attractive plant you have here.
Zilkov (Albert Paulsen): Thank you, doctor. It’s actually a rest home for wealthy alcoholics. We were able to purchase it three years ago. Except for this floor and the floor above it, which is sealed off for security purposes, the rest functions quite normally. In fact it’s one of the few Soviet operations in America that actually showed a profit at the end of the last fiscal year.
Dr. Yen Lo: Profit? Fiscal year? Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Beware, my dear Zilkov, fires of capitalism are highly infectious. Soon you’ll be lending money out at interest. [Chuckles] You must try, Comrade Zilkov, to cultivate a sense of humor. There’s nothing like a good laugh now and then to lighten the burdens of the day. [To Raymond] Tell me, Raymond, do you remember murdering Mavole and Lembeck?

“I have here a list of the names of 207 persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party… I demand an answer, Mr. Secretary. There will be no covering up, sir, no covering up. You are not going to get your hands on this list. And I deeply regret having to say…” –Senator Iselin

Mrs. Iselin: Would it really make it easier for you if we settled on just one number?
Sen. Iselin: Yeah. Just one, real, simple number that’d be easy for me to remember.[Mrs. Iselin watches Sen. Iselin pour Heinz Tomato Ketchup (with its “57 Varieties” slogan on its label) onto his dinner plate]
[Cut to Senate chamber]
Sen. Iselin: There are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time!

“Why don’t you go and take yourself a cab and go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake?” –Bartender, overheard by Raymond, who had just primed himself to receive a command by dealing the Queen of Diamonds

“I keep telling you not to think. You’re very, very good at a great many things, but thinking, hon’, just simply isn’t one of them. You just keep shouting “Point of Order, Point of Order” into the television cameras and I will handle the rest.” –Mrs. Iselin, to Senator Iselin

“What was Raymond doing with his hands?… How did the old ladies turn into Russians?… What were you doing there?” –Marco, to Chunjin, while they’re fighting

“My mother, Ben, is a terrible woman. A terrible, terrible woman… You know, Ben, it’s a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I didn’t always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her. But after what she did to Jocie and me, that’s when I began to hate her… Jocie Jordan – Senator Jordan’s daughter… Thomas Jordan’s daughter and Johnny Iselin’s step-son… Years later, I realized, Ben, that I am not very loveable… Some people are loveable and some people are not loveable. I am not loveable. Oh, but I was very loveable with Jocie. Ben, you can’t believe how loveable I was.” –Raymond Shaw

“I despise John Iselin and everything that Iselin-ism has come to stand for. I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more to harm this country than he’s doing now.” –Senator Thomas Jordan

“I’m gonna beat that vile, slandering, son-of-a-numbskull to a bloody pulp.” –Shaw, of Iselin

“So the red Queen is our baby. Well, take a look at this, kid… and while you’re looking, listen. This is me, Marco talking. Fifty-two red Queens and me are telling you – you know what we’re telling you? – it’s over. The links, the beautifully-conditioned links are smashed. They’re smashed as of now because we say so, because we say they ought to be smashed. We’re bustin’ up the joint, we’re tearin’ out all the wires, we’re bustin’ it up so good all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men will never put ol’ Raymond back together again. You don’t work anymore. That’s an order. Anybody invites you to a game of solitaire – you tell ’em: ‘Sorry, buster, the ball-game is over!'” –Marco, to Shaw

“You are to shoot the Presidential nominee through the head. And Johnny will rise gallantly to his feet and lift Ben Arthur’s body in his arms, stand in front of the microphones and begin to speak. The speech is short, but it’s the most rousing speech I’ve ever read. It’s been worked on here and in Russia on and off for over eight years. I shall force someone to take the body away from him. And Johnny will leave those microphones and those cameras with blood all over him, fighting off anyone who tries to help him, defending America even if it means his own death, rallying a nation of television-viewers into hysteria to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy. Now this is very important. I want the nominee to be dead about two minutes after he begins his acceptance speech, depending on his reading time under pressure. You are to hit him right at the point that he finishes the phrase, ‘nor would I ask of any fellow American in defense of his freedom that which I would not gladly give myself – my life before my liberty.’ Is that absolutely clear?” –Mrs. Iselin, to Shaw

“I know you will never entirely comprehend this, Raymond, but you must believe I did not know it would be you. I served them. I fought for them. I’m on the point of winning for them the greatest foothold they would ever have in this country. And they paid me back by taking your soul away from you. I told them to build me an assassin. I wanted a killer from a world filled with killers and they chose you because they thought it would bind me closer to them. [She places the sides of his face in her outstretched hands.] But now, we have come almost to the end. One last step. And then when I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously under-estimating me.” –Mrs. Iselin, to Shaw

“You couldn’t have stopped them, the army couldn’t have stopped them. So I had to.” –Shaw, to Marco, after killing his mother and Senator Iselin

“Made to commit acts too unspeakable to be cited here by an enemy who had captured his mind and his soul, he freed himself at last and in the end, heroically and unhesitatingly gave his life to save his country. Raymond Shaw… Hell… Hell.” –Marco

II: A Brief but Necessary Digression

American paranoia about foreign governments trying to undo American “democracy” is not limited to communist conspiracies, of course, though in recent years such paranoia has been linked with communism. For the past four years, we’ve heard nonsense about Trump being a supposed puppet of Putin and the KGB (which hasn’t even existed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union!); now, Trump’s supporters are claiming that Biden is a puppet of Xi Jinping…a Manchurian candidate for our times, as ridiculous and unfounded an idea as the Russophobic one.

What is never acknowledged in any of this paranoia and red-baiting is that the US and its capitalist and fascist allies, past and present, have conspired to undo socialist governments all over the world. The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s, bankrolled by capitalists, thwarted attempts at socialist revolution in such places as Italy and Spain, and helped Hitler rise to power.

Elsewhere, corrupt Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD and traitor, helped the imperialists in their attempt to tear apart the USSR from within, necessitating Stalin‘s purge. Trotsky, though paying lip-service to antifascism, was willing to work with fascists in his attempts to overthrow Stalin, who as General Secretary was so far from being an actual dictator that he attempted to resign from the position four times, but he couldn’t because the Central Committee knew he was doing such a good job, and because the Russian people loved him. Decades of treasonous acts in the USSR slowly helped weaken the system until its final dissolution in 1991.

Elsewhere and more recently, Juan Guaido is a kind of ‘Manchurian candidate’ for imperialists in Venezuela, as Añez was in Bolivia. Then there are the pressures being put on China now, from such collective ‘Manchurian candidates’ as the imperialist collaborators in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

During the Cold War, the CIA manipulated the media through such diverse methods as Operation Mockingbird, the diverting of left-leaning intellectuals away from Marxism-Leninism towards Trotskyism, postmodernism, abstract expressionist art, etc., and through the production of such anticommunist movies as The Manchurian Candidate.

III: Nothing Is As It Seems

The point I was trying to make in the last section is that what we’ve been taught was true during and since the Cold War (including this current cold war) has typically been far from the truth. This sense of deception pervades the film, too…in ways both intended and unintended.

The world is tricked into believing that Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw rescued his squad from the enemy during the Korean War. Two of his men were killed during the rescue…or so the story goes. Actually, Shaw killed the two men himself. We are also tricked into believing that his mother and stepfather, the Iselins, are ultra-patriotic, far right-wing fanatical anticommunists. Actually, it seems they’re working for the USSR and Maoist China, in full knowledge that Shaw is their sleeper agent.

I’m arguing that we can carry the film’s deception even further. The fear of communist ‘totalitarianism’ is, as I said above, a projection of the Western imperialist ambition to rule the world and impose predatory capitalism on all countries, whether they wish it or not. So, the narrative of a communist takeover attempt on the US is itself a deception. There are occasions even in the film itself that suggest that the narrators are, if only unconsciously and in a piecemeal fashion, willing to reveal this deception.

IV: The Korean War

To put the opening scene–of the American soldiers with the South Korean prostitutes in the brothel–in its proper context, we have to understand the true context of the origin of the South Korean state. It was never a democracy to be contrasted with the ‘totalitarian’ North. South Korea was always an American military occupation, part of the Cold War effort to contain communism.

The two Koreas are more than willing to have their nation reunited, but the West would want the North first to embrace capitalism, even if only in the way that Vietnam did. Continued military exercises between the American military and their South Korean collaborators have continued to build tension, justifying the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program, since they’ll never allow the US to repeat their having bombed every inch of the North during the Korean War.

The procuring of South Korean prostitutes, something these conservative, modest people would never have normally allowed, for American soldiers was one of the many ways that the US forced their way on the Korean people. Now we see who is really trying to take over another country…and we see it right at the beginning of The Manchurian Candidate, the film’s first Freudian slip.

Chunjin (Silva) appears to be a collaborator with the Americans until their ambush by the communists. Later in the film–once we’ve understood him to have been working with the communists–he’s become Shaw’s personal servant, and here we see Chunjin as the stereotypical Asian: meek and subservient. (It’s also interesting to point out here that the two main Asian characters in the film–Chunjin and Dr. Yen Lo–aren’t played by Asian actors, but by American ones in Yellowface.) In his service to Shaw, we see no connection with the communist conspiracy; he doesn’t do anything to advance the Iselins’ cause. It’s as if he were just working for a bourgeois, just for the employment. This mundane employment of him is another Freudian slip.

V: Sleeping With the Enemy

The scene with the demonstration of Shaw’s abilities as a killer–that is, the first of the nightmare scenes–begins as a seminar of sorts on the topic of flowers, held by a group of daintily dressed old ladies. What strikes me about the ladies we see, be they the white ones of Marco’s dream or the black ones of the dream of Cpl. Melvin (Edwards), is how bourgeois they look, in stark contrast to the Soviets and Maoists who, we understand, are really in attendance. And bourgeois is bourgeois, regardless of sex or skin colour.

We’re to understand that these recurring nightmares are, as it were, video replays of the exact same incident that occurred with the communists; even the soldiers’ impression that they’re actually with the ladies discussing flowers, as a result of brainwashing, is a repeat of their experience as captives in Manchuria during the Korean War. Since when are dreams ever detail-for-detail repeats of past experiences from beginning to end? The only aspect of the dreams that seems dream-like is Shaw playing solitaire, but with no cards in his hands.

I would say instead that these dreams are just dreams, symbolic of a more general experience of being indoctrinated and transformed into mindless, remorseless killers–the unthinking American soldier who just obeys orders. The traumatic element of waking up screaming from a nightmare is just symbolic of soldiers’ PTSD. As far as the communists are concerned, their giving of orders to kill people, without mercy or pity, is a projection of ruthless imperialists onto their enemy. In any case, according to the Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War (pages 17 and 51), there is no evidence that ‘brainwashing’ results in the kinds of permanent radical changes in personality and loyalty of those subjected to it, as seen in The Manchurian Candidate.

As I see it, the ladies, symbolic of the imperialist bourgeoisie, are the ones giving the orders to kill. We are led to believe that they are the illusion, and that the communists are the real indoctrinators; I’d say it’s the other way around. Recall that the triggering of Shaw to obey orders unquestioningly is–upon playing a game of solitaire (a card game played alone, this solitude being symbolic of alienation), caused by the uncovering of the Queen of Diamonds–symbolic respectively of both maternal authority and capitalism.

That it’s also called the red Queen may, on the surface, suggest the red of socialism. It may also be the red of the Republican Party, of which the Iselins are more than likely members. And the maternal authority of the red Queen links well with Shaw’s domineering mother.

It’s important also to link the notions of sleeping, dreaming, brainwashing, and the unconscious. These soldiers are unaware of what they’re doing; they’re being hypnotized into a state of unquestioning obedience. In a larger sense, this is what happens to soldiers in general, regardless of their political affiliation or what country they’re loyal to: they’re transformed into unthinking, killing machines–unthinking, unconscious, unaware automatons.

And while we’re on the topic of the unconscious, Jung noted a tendency, called enantiodromia, in which an extreme conscious urge can provoke its dialectical opposite in the unconscious. This notion in turn leads us to a discussion of the dialectical unity of opposites. One tendency will phase into its diametrical opposite if pushed to an extreme, an idea I’ve symbolized in previous posts with the ouroboros, the serpent’s biting head and bitten tail representing those meeting extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which is symbolized by the coiled length of the serpent’s body.

So, in the unconscious, in this dream of a switching back and forth between ladies discussing flowers and communists discussing the brainwashed American soldiers, we can switch from the notion of the former discussion being the illusion, and the latter being the real event, to the notion of the former being real and the latter being the illusion. We switch from one extreme opposite to the other, through Jung’s enantiodromia.

In other words, in a dream in which the writers of this story would have us believe that ladies discussing plants is really communists discussing their plot involving Shaw as their sleeper agent/assassin, I would argue that it’s the communist conspiracy that is only apparent, and that the bourgeois ladies, symbolic of imperialism, are the real conspirators whose schemes are projected onto the Soviets and Maoists. The ladies’ inclusion in the dream, however symbolic it may be, is therefore the key to understanding who the real manipulators are.

VI: A Few Capitalist Freudian Slips

One Freudian slip, in my interpretation, occurs when the chairwoman of the flower ladies talks about indulging the American soldiers’ smoking of cigarettes; then she turns into Dr. Yen Lo (Dhiegh), who jokes that this indulgence “tastes good, like a cigarette should,” a reference to a commercial slogan, something inherently capitalist. What seems to be a communist joking about capitalism should be seen as a capitalist promoting her economic ideology.

Later in the film, when Shaw is in a rest home the Soviets have purchased, supposedly healing from an injury from a hit-and-run incident, he has actually had the brainwashing mechanism activated, and he finds himself part of a conversation Yen Lo is having with the Soviet Zilkov (Albert Paulsen) over whom Shaw should kill to test if his brainwashing is still functional. In his brainwashed state, Shaw can be described as being in a dream, unconscious; therefore the sight of conversing communists can be deemed an illusion, an unconscious projection of American, imperialist plotters.

So when Zilkov tells Yen Lo that the purchasing of the rest home has yielded a profit, and the latter light-heartedly speaks of the evils of the profit motive, we can see this as yet another Freudian slip revealing capitalist, rather than communist, plotters (at least symbolically speaking); for communists would never speak of worker exploitation in a spirit of levity. To show further what a capitalist in communist clothing Yen Lo is, we learn that he leaves to go shopping at Macy’s [!].

VII: Who are the Oppressors, and Who are the Liberators?

It is assumed throughout the movie, as it was throughout the Cold War and up until this day by most people, that the Soviets and Maoists have just wanted power for its own sake. No reference is given anywhere in the film to all of the achievements of the communists in their efforts to eliminate famines (contrary to the lies that communists deliberately starved people), illiteracy, unemployment, homelessness, discrimination against women, etc. There’s no reference to their efforts at establishing universal healthcare, free education, the reduction of poverty, or the transformation of backward, peasant societies into modernized, industrialized superpowers in a matter of a few decades. Since the end of the Soviet era, we find a consistently large number of East European people nostalgic for the old socialist states, as well as having a love of Stalin.

On the other side of the coin, the US is portrayed as a bastion of freedom and democracy rather than a nation founded on the slavery of blacks, the genocide of the American aboriginals, and a class system that keeps the poor poor in spite of the lies of the “American Dream.” On the one hand, we have an African-American psychiatrist in the film (played by Joe Adams), but on the other, the supposedly leftist Mrs. Iselin mocks Chunjin’s name in the typically racist bourgeois fashion.

Hence, my charge that the accusation of a tyrannical nature in the communist characters is really a projection onto them from the real tyrants, the capitalists. An epidemic of homelessness can be seen in such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Dublin. Such forms of hostile architecture as spikes put on the ground and bars on benches, to prevent the homeless from resting on private property, and laws against feeding them, are clear indications of the cruelties of capitalism; yet millions are still deluded that capitalism is freedom, and that socialism is oppression.

The liberal bias of this film would have us believe that the extreme right-wing thinking publicly displayed by the Iselins–a reaction formation against their, as we understand, private communism–is no more uncomfortable an extreme than socialism is, and in fact is also virtually identical with it. This is that old, pernicious horseshoe theory, as unfair to communism as it is inaccurate.

VIII: Shaw’s Relationship with his Mother

It is clear from the outset that Shaw is a sick man. His brainwashing, being made to follow orders that would be repellant to his nature, can be seen as symbolic of a kind of psychotic break with reality; for if one’s sense of reality were intact, one would never put a bullet in the head of one’s beloved wife or her father, and one would never ride in a taxi to Central Park and jump in the lake.

(Recall the link above [Part V] that concluded that there’s no evidence of brainwashing having a permanent effect on the psyche; in fact, the original Chinese use of brainwashing—xinao, had a positive meaning, that of purifying the mind of unwholesome attitudes and beliefs, which the Maoists used with the intent to rid people of reactionary thinking…though not with the sense of forcefulness and manipulation that the anticommunist propagandists have accused the Maoists of.)

Shaw’s being triggered to obey on the sight of the Queen of Diamonds–associated with his “dearly loved and hated mother,” as Yen Lo says–shows how powerful Mrs. Iselin’s influence is on Raymond. His being made to play solitaire, as I mentioned above, is symbolic of his loneliness, for as we know, “Poor friendless, friendless Raymond” is “not loveable.” In Condon’s novel, Raymond’s father divorced Raymond’s mother (then committed suicide) long before the beginning of the story (when he was a twelve-year-old boy), so for many years, it is as if he never existed for Raymond at all.

Lacan‘s theory of psychosis, of which delusional paranoia is a manifestation, is based on something he called foreclosure, which is a disavowal of, and a refusal to acknowledge, the existence of one’s father. Shaw is so repudiating of his father that he won’t even acknowledge his stepfather, Senator Iselin, when Chunjin makes the faux pas of referring to Iselin as Shaw’s father.

According to Lacanian theory, the father is crucial in bringing a child out of the dyadic relationship with the mother (part of the narcissistic, mirror-like Imaginary Order) and into the broader society (the Non! du père forbids the child to indulge in an Oedipal, incestuous relationship with Mother, making him enter the Symbolic Order, a world of language, social customs, laws, culture, etc.). Any child who fails to make this transition from one-on-one with Mother to a wider relationship with friends is going to be in trouble. Such trouble is what we see in friendless Shaw.

Something that is only implied in the film (Mrs. Iselin giving Shaw a long kiss on the lips) is made explicit in the novel: her committing incest with him. Though partly motivated by sexual perversity (she had powerful Oedipal feelings for the father who sexually abused her as a child, and she transfers these feelings onto Shaw towards the end of the story because he reminds her of her father at this time), she seduces her son, in all likelihood, as an extension of her long-existing narcissistic wish to control him.

So the trauma of having an incestuous relationship with his mother has compounded the difficulties he has in his dyadic relationship with her, this trap that won’t allow him to have healthy relationships with other people. This makes it easier for her to control him.

Now, her total control over him raises a significant question: if she and Senator Iselin are secretly communists, how come Shaw doesn’t know anything about it (until the end of the movie), or even suspect it? Perhaps the novel, which I haven’t read, has a rationalization for keeping him in the dark for so long; but I don’t buy it, whatever it is. With Mother and son being so close [!] for so many years, something had to have slipped out at some point, exposing her hidden ideology.

We can suspend our disbelief that his brainwashing has made him unaware that he’s a sleeper agent (for this assassination mission is classified information), but not for his ignorance of his mother’s ‘communism.’ For if her right-wing blustering is just a charade, why does she do it with him in private places, too?

Her maternal dominance would be enough to make him not only keep her secret, but make him a secret ‘commie,’ too. Her dominance pervades his life in more than her physical presence: it’s symbolized in the Queen of Diamonds (symbol of a capitalist mother, in my interpretation), in the old ladies’ discussing flowers, and in his transference of his mother onto Jocelyn Jordan (Parrish), his sweetheart when she wears the card as a costume at the party meant to reunite her with him.

It’s interesting to contrast his relationship with his mother with that of Jocelyn. His mother is the whore, the bitch; Jocelyn is the sweet, nice girl, the angel. A similar submissiveness can be seen in Eugenie Rose (Leigh) and her relationship with Marco. This Madonna/Whore dichotomy is typical of the right-wing ideology of the writers, who would project the whore aspect onto communism, rather than admit that their sexism is a part of capitalism.

IX: The Assassination

It’s understood that, according to Dr. Yen Lo, the key to triggering Shaw’s obedience (as well as freeing him from it, as Marco will realize) lies in the Queen of Diamonds, symbol of his (as I’d have it) capitalist mother’s dominance. Marco presents a forced deck of all Queens of Diamonds to Shaw’s face in the hopes of freeing him from the brainwashing.

We don’t know if Marco’s plan works (Shaw is supposed to call him before the assassination of the president, but he doesn’t) until the very end, when Shaw, instead of pointing the rifle at the president, points it at the Iselins and kills them.

The plan has been to kill the president, followed by a short but rousing speech by Senator Iselin, giving him sympathy and emergency, dictatorial powers: those of a communist, or of a fascist?

If the Iselins really are communists, then the film’s lampooning of paranoid McCarthyism through clownish Senator Iselin is self-defeating, since the very premise of the film and novel is that there indeed were communists who had infiltrated American politics. The Manchurian Candidate intends both to satirize and to justify Joseph McCarthy, an odd thing to do.

On the other hand, contrast the obvious opulence of the Iselins (private jet, Mrs. Iselin’s pretty clothes, their beautiful home) with the far more modest possessions of even the top-ranking Soviets and Maoists, whose privileges over those of the proletariat were small compared to the privileges of the bourgeoisie over the poor in capitalist countries. Neither Mao nor Stalin ever wore finery or had scores of luxuries, but Mrs. Iselin does.

She leads me to another point: she says to her son that she’s worked and fought for the communists, and that once she and Johnny Iselin have taken power after the president’s assassination, she will get revenge on those very communists who have taken Raymond’s soul away from him, they who have also underestimated her. How has she, who wants revenge on them, worked for them? As Yezhov did? That is, pretending to be a communist while secretly working to undo them?

Such duplicity on her part makes perfect sense, given the nature of the film’s themes. At first, the Iselins seem like McCarthyist cartoon characters; then they seem–in a shocking plot twist–to be the very communists they accuse other American politicians of being; and finally, upon blaming the assassination of the president on the communists, the Iselins assume emergency, dictatorial powers and–in my interpretation–reveal themselves to be outright fascists!

Since the liberal writers of this story think, as many today do, too, that there is little if any difference between fascists and communists, it should matter little to them if the Iselins are on the far right or the far left. But to leftists like me, who know of the huge sacrifice that Stalin’s Red Army made in defeating the Nazis and saving the world from fascism (for the time being, at least), losing about 27 million Soviet lives in the process, the difference between fascism and communism is like that between night and day. Indeed, the only unity to be found between these opposing extremes is a dialectical one, that is, a struggle between the two, of the one passing into its opposite once the former has been defeated, like going past the ouroboros’ biting teeth over to its bitten tail.

When I write of the projection of conspiratorial intent from the capitalist West onto the socialist East, as I sense is in the creators of the novel and movie, I understand the use of this defence mechanism, to deflect guilt away from the writers, to be unconscious. The writers weren’t consciously aware of how they were denying their own guilt in slandering socialism with the attribution of imperialist vices. Ego psychology explains how much of ego defence is unconscious, and thus more effective when undetected (see also Mitchell and Black, page 26), since much of the ego itself is unconscious and preconscious.

This unconscious state is perfectly symbolized by the way Raymond doesn’t know of the crimes he’s committing. He imagines someone else has shot his wife and father-in-law, just as we assume that communists are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, rather than capitalists.