Example research essay topic: Bonnie And Clyde Presidential Nominee - 1,913 words

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Chronicle of a death foretold The Manchurian Candidates plot is an exploitation of terrors floating in the air in 1959: the terror of McCarthyism, which meant any US citizen could at any time be called a Communist and then blacklisted, deprived of her job, cast out of his community; the terror of Communist brain-washing, good American boys in Korea tortured with beatings, castor oil and drugs until they denounced their own country and praised their own enemies. The Soviets and the Chinese Communists have made an amnesiac assassin out of US soldier Raymond Shaw. Their comrade in the US is Shaw's mother, whose husband is Senator John Iselin, a stand-in for Senator Joe McCarthy. Posing as rabid anti-Communists, Senator and Mrs Iselin are Communist agents. Ultimately, Senator Iselin will win the vice-presidential nomination of his party; his stepson Raymond Shaw is to assassinate the presidential nominee in mid-speech, then Senator Iselin will take his place with a great patriotic address. And then Senator Iselin, or rather his Communist masters, or rather Eleanor Iselin, will be swept into power.

The plot is an excuse, an excuse for the pleasure of its violence. That is: youre going to see everything you ever believed suspended in the air then dashed to the ground. Thats a thrill. Youre going to believe the notion that a single person could, by means of a single bullet, change history, transform it utterly. Nonsense even if it happened, in the years after The Manchurian Candidate was made, again and again. Historians tell us it didnt happen; that solitary individuals, even solitary individuals acting out great, historic conspiracies, dont make history.

History is made by invisible hands. When you look now at this 1962 black-and-white movie made up of bits and pieces of Hitchcock and Orson Welles, of Psycho and Citizen Kane most obviously (perhaps less obviously, but more completely, taking Invasion of the Body Snatchers out of science fiction and returning it to history), whats overwhelming is a sense of what the movie does that movies can no longer do. The momentum of the film is so strong, you may not catch this dislocation until the second time you see it, the third, the 10 th but that sense, that itch, may keep calling you back. I remember first seeing it alone, when it came out in 1962, at the Varsity Theatre in Palo Alto, California, a Moorish wonderland of a movie house. The first thing I did when it was over was call my best friend and tell him he had to see it, too. We went the next night; as we left, I asked what he thought.

Greatest movie I ever saw, he said flatly, as if he didnt want to talk about it and he didnt. He said what he said stunned, with bitterness, as if he shouldnt have had to see this thing, as if what it told him was both true and false in a manner he would never be able to untangle, as if it was both incomprehensible and all too clear, as if the whole experience had been, somehow, a gift, the gift of art, and also unfair and that was how I felt, too. We saw, as anyone can see today, too many rules broken. Its one thing to have Raymond Shaw, the nasty, boring prig, made into an assassin; the zombie state hes put into when he has to kill is not really so far from his everyday life. When his controllers make him kill his boss, the manner in which Shaw performs the act is not all that different from the way he speaks or gestures to anyone else he might encounter. But its something else to see him enter the house of Senator Iselin's sworn enemy, Senator Thomas Jordan, who is, for one day, Raymond's father-in-law.

On orders from his mother, Raymond shoots the senator through the heart, as he stands by his refrigerator, welcoming his new son-in-law. When the film played in the Castro Theatre in San Francisco in 2001, some in the audience were laughing as milk spurted from the carton and the senator fell to the floor. The action is too direct, unhesitating, too unadorned to be anything but a hole in the story it is advancing. But then Raymond, being careful not to step in the milk on the floor, approaches the body and puts the necessary, professional second shot into the dead mans brain. As he does so, his wife, the senators daughter, comes running down the stairs in her nightgown, into the frame and then Raymond, who has been programmed not only to kill his target but to kill any witnesses turns and shoots his wife through the forehead. And at this point the audience in the Castro sucked in its breath in a single, audible gasp.

You could feel the air go right out of the room. We dont take our stories straight any more, wrote Pauline Key in 1967, in her famous New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, written to save the film from a flood of condemnation by liberal critics appalled by its violence and amorality. This isnt necessarily bad, she went on. Bonnie and Clyde is the first film demonstration that the put-on can be used for the purposes of art. The Manchurian Candidate almost succeeded in that, but what was implicitly wild and far-out in the material was nevertheless presented on screen as a straight thriller. Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces.

To be put on is to be put on the spot, put on the stage, made the stooge in a comedy act. People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that theyre not stooges that they appreciate the joke when they catch the first bullet right in the face. But it is precisely the straightness of the presentation that allows Raymond Shaw's bullet to hit the audience in the face, and with more force than any shot fired in Bonnie and Clyde. And Raymond Shaw's shot through his wifes forehead is not even the worst. At the end of the movie, as Raymond perches high in Madison Square Garden -positioned to assassinate the presidential nominee but instead shoots his stepfather Senator iselin there is an instant cut to Raymond's mother, seated next to the senator, as she realises whats coming.

A second bullet goes through her forehead, and her hands jerk to her head just as everyone who has seen the film since November 22 1963 has to remember, President Kennedys hands would go to his neck. The Manchurian Candidate was taken out of circulation not long after it was released. Not that quickly, not right after the assassination of President Kennedy; while director John Frankenheimer refused to allow a second theatrical run, the film played on television. Then it went missing. Certainly, among those who remembered it, as year after year people continued to tell others about it, about how they had to see it, only to discover that they couldnt, there was a feeling that the film might be part of the inexplicable cycle of assassinations that followed it a feeling that went far beyond anything in, say, Richard Condons Manchurian Candidate in Dallas, published in the December 28 1963 edition of the Nation: I was reading about how Senator Thurston Morton of Kentucky absolved the American people from any guilt in the assassination of the President when a reporter from a South African press association telephoned from London to ask if I felt responsible for the Presidents killing, inasmuch as I had written a novel, The Manchurian Candidate, on which had been based a film that had just been frozen in the United States because it was felt that the assassin might have seen it and been influenced by it.

I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to write the novel. Rather it was a feeling that the film was part of the supposedly scattered but obviously whole, complete, singular event that the cycle of assassinations comprised: its transformation of what in the United States had been taken as open, public life into private crime or hidden conspiracy. And there must have been a feeling, as the film itself stayed hidden, that the countrys real history, history as it is lived out every day, its fundamental premises of work and leisure, love and death, might be a kind of awful secret that no one would ever understand. It was at a party at John Frankenheimer's house in Malibu, California just before the California primary that the novelist Romain Gary approached Robert Kennedy and said: You know, dont you, that somebody is going to kill you? Frankenheimer had spent 102 days on the campaign with Kennedy, filming speeches and appearances and making advertisements; on the day of the California primary Kennedy decided he wanted to watch the returns at Frankenheimer's house in Malibu. The campaign staff insisted Kennedy be at the Ambassador Hotel for a network interview.

Frankenheimer drove him. He went in and did the telecast, recalled Frankenheimer in 1995, speaking to Charles Champlin, but Kennedy nevertheless insisted on returning to Frankenheimer's house as soon as he was able to make his victory speech. Eugene McCarthy was refusing to concede; finally he did. Bobby said, I want you standing next to me on the podium, ' Frankenheimer said. I said, Bobby, I dont think it looks good for you to have a Hollywood director standing next to you. Its not the image.

He said, Youre right. And the man who stood next to him was shot, too. That would have been me. Bobby said, When I say, Lets win it in Chicago, go and get the car. Ill come right out. I was standing there in an archway, feeling like someone in The Manchurian Candidate, Frankenheimer said; in the scene in his own movie set in the briefing room used by the secretary of defence, he found the action taking place both in the flesh and on TV screens.

I can see Bobby's face on a big television monitor in the ballroom and I can see his back for real. As I stood there a figure went by me and it was as if there was electricity coming out of his body. Ive never felt anything like it before or since. Of course it was Sirhan Sirhan. Frankenheimer waited; then came the last act. When Bobby said, Lets win it in Chicago, I left and got the Rolls and brought it to the entrance.

The next thing I knew there were policemen banging on the car and saying, Move it! I said, This is Senator Kennedys car. They shouted, Move it, then a black woman ran out of the hotel shouting, Kennedys been shot! The cops started hitting the car with their batons. It had to be repainted later. I drove off and turned on the radio and got a CBS flash which said, Senator Robert Kennedy, his brother-in-law Stephen Smith and movie director John Frankenheimer have been shot. '?

Greil Marcus 2002. Extracted from The Manchurian Candidate by Greil Marcus, published on July 18 in the BFI Film Classics series, price? 8. 99.

Research essay sample on Bonnie And Clyde Presidential Nominee