In the Flesh: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

When congressman Raymond Prentiss Shaw (Liev Schrieber) sees his one-time girlfriend Jocelyn Jordan (Vera Farmiga) at a political event at the Botanical Gardens, she’s so luminous she’s almost bleeding color onto the film. Her eyes are a wild electric blue, her skin glowing, as though she and she alone has been painted with some divine brush. With only lighting and color grading, director Jonathan Demme sets us up to understand that Jocelyn is one of only two things ever to change the direction of Raymond’s life. The second, of course, is the nightmarish brainwashing program overseen by his mother Eleanor (Meryl Streep) and Manchurian Global, the effects of which the film heralds with a slow, deliberate change in lighting during focused close-ups on Schrieber’s eerily still features breaking into a smile. It’s as though he’s opened an otherworldly door onto vistas of wonder and terror.

The film’s material about manufacturing reality (complete with a repugnant South African man stuffing microchips into people’s brains) feels almost eerily prescient, invoking not just the layered hoaxes and information wars that brought us to our present moment but the hollow, artificial quality of the people nominally opposing it. To go from packaging life stories and personalities as saleable products in the arena of national politics to designing your own from the ground up seems almost inevitable in hindsight, a place we were always going and simply never stopped to discuss. Schrieber’s enigmatic 1960s good looks are a perfect fit for the inscrutable Raymond, a man whose own mother sold him to unscrupulous butchers in exchange for the promise of ultimate power. The scene in which Eleanor caresses and kisses a nearly nude Raymond is almost unbearably freighted with incestuous tension, which Streep sells with harrowing ease. Her role as Eleanor, so clearly inspired by the mannerisms and affectations of Hillary Clinton, streaks along the line between parody and horror, never putting a single foot wrong.

Mother and son are presented here as things lacking interiority, Eleanor as firmly controlled by her own unthinking lust for the trappings of power as her son is by his elaborate conditioning and behavior-altering implant. Behind them, a smug and inscrutable corporate presence. Power for its own sake. Power for the chance to wield it against others. It’s no accident that Raymond is forged into a nationally beloved war hero in the crucible of the so-called War on Terror, a ceaseless, directionless ideological conflict concealing simple greed and a towering contempt for anyone outside the edifice of centralized power. Demme lingers on countless shots of lone figures in distorting or disorienting spaces, from the shadowy ghosts that move behind the frosted and doubled glass of Shaw’s campaign headquarters to the eerily flat shots of Rosie (Kimberly Elise) in her apartment, a place the camera tells us she doesn’t truly occupy or belong in long before we find out who she really is. By the time we realize the depth of the conspiracy in play, we feel so alienated from normality that we’re powerless to shake it off, lost in its cold, empty world sleeping just beneath the skin of our own.