We are pleased to present a lecture by author and cultural critic Greil Marcus, who recently published a monograph on The Manchurian Candidate that has been acclaimed for its “magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry” (Uncut).
Marcus is the author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975), Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), and Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2000). A UC Berkeley graduate, he has taught courses in criticism and American studies at Berkeley and Princeton. He is currently working on a book about prophecy and American identity.

John Frankenheimer's outspoken satire The Manchurian Candidate played with America's oversized horror of Communist infiltration while dealing on another level with the brainwashing potential of media-induced fear. Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra return from the Korean War after the Communists have taken them and their entire platoon to the cleaners, and made Harvey a walking time-bomb set to assassinate the presidential nominee. Harvey's sensitive portrayal of this much-used soldier is a sobering antidote to the Kubrick-like absurdity of the plot. The fact that the president-to-be(-murdered) is Harvey's stepfather is only the beginning of the film's reverberating Oedipal complex; Angela Lansbury's portrayal of the mother, steeped in the milk of politics, gives new meaning to the age-old struggle. She is the Queen of Diamonds incarnate. The sequence involving that memorable playing card, presented from three mental perspectives at once, is the key to the disorientation that is basic to the film.