The Halliburton Candidate

I like to listen to NPR in the shower. No, not because it makes me feel dirty and in need of a shower--well, okay, sometimes it does--but mainly because of the incredible candor that their left-leaning guests often show. Today’s interview with Manchurian Candidate director Jonathan Demme was a special treat.

That link will take you to the audio clip of the interview, but to save you the trouble I've transcribed the thrust of it below, followed by a little logical analysis.

Michele Norris: Much as the 1962 original version plays on the fears of its time, the new version attempts to do the same. The communist villains from the original have been replaced by a politically ambitious global corporation, the dark force behind nefarious mind-altering technology….
Now that I’ve seen the film, and as I watch the trailer, which is in heavy rotation,… it seems that there was a conscious decision not to market the film as a political movie but more of a sci-fi thriller
Demme: Because the film is set against a political backdrop, specifically a presidential election, because absurdly coincidentally, Paramount got the movie made just as an election year comes up—
Norris: COINCIDENTALLY? That was a coincidence?…
Demme: As far as I’m concerned it’s a terrific coincidence…
Norris: Did you make a conscious effort to keep your politics out of the movie or was this a chance for you as a filmmaker to send a message.
[Here, Demme claims, at length, that though the film “inhabits a political world,” it’s not “about” politics. He then immediately says the following:]
Demme: I liked very much the idea, when I read the script, of a piece that brought this whole world of corporations that profit from war into the thriller terrain because just the very notion that there are corporations that get, you know, OBSCENLY rich off of WAR, is just, there’s something, uhnnn, unpleasant about that in the extreme and its extraordinary to me that we haven’t focused as a culture yet on: ‘Is this okay?’…
Norris: It would seem that this is, in listening to you, very much a message movie…. I was just wondering, as a filmmaker, if you were trying to encourage people to think more about that… corporate profiteering.
Demme: One of the things that [screenwriter] Richard Condin was concerned about when he wrote the Manchurian Candidate was a brainwashed population. Maybe we’re--I feel like I’m brainwashed. I pick up the paper, I hear something on the radio about Halliburton, and I go: ‘Oh, tsk tsk tsk, my God isn’t that awful’ but I’m not doing anything about it—Yes I am, I made a movie…. Yes, so I do hope the movie is thought provoking in that regard….

So, kids, the theme of this movie is that we need to stop Halliburton. Only, in real life, the thing is, Halliburton is not suspected of abducting Gulf War veterans and pumping them full of mind-altering chemicals so that they can take over the nation, and thence, the world. But if it’s not doing that, we are left to wonder, why do Hollywood (exemplified by Demme and Condin) and the media (exemplified by Norris and NPR) hate it so very, very much.

Do they think the services it provides are inherently evil, or do they think that those services are only evil when they are commissioned by the U.S. government? Or is it only when the U.S. government commissions those services to help out the recently emancipated people of a formerly totalitarian country? I know that Hollywood and much of the media hate Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton, but that can’t be it, because here they are focused, in Norris’ phrase, on corporate war “profiteers” more generally.

So really, no matter who is doing the work in question, it’s evil and must be stopped. But wait, surely they don’t think it’s inherently evil to help Iraq in its effort to become a free and prosperous nation? No, they only think it’s evil to PROFIT from the provision of that help. So if tens of thousands of people could be mobilized to do millions of man-hours of labor and supply billions of dollars worth of materials and equipment for free, then, THEN, they wouldn’t have a problem with it.

In other words, if we only had a communist utopia, we’d all love each other, hold hands, and sing that charming Coca-Cola song from the 1970s (except that Coke’s probably an evil corporation too. I’ll have to check on that. For that matter, I wonder if the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is an evil corporation? Should NPR really be associating with it? Shouldn’t they reestablish themselves as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) to avoid catching any of those corporate cooties?)

The problem, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is that communism didn’t perform as well as its advocates promised. When people don’t get justly compensated for their own labor, it tends to undermine their work ethic a tad. If nobody could have profited from rebuilding Japan, or Germany, or France, those nations would have languished in poverty and anarchy far longer than they did. So, too, with Iraq today. So to heed the message that Norris, Demme, and their fellow travelers suggest is to consign Iraq to indefinite squalor. They just haven’t thought through their anti-capitalist manifesto well enough to realize that.

To summarize, this remake of The Manchurian Candidate could more accurately have been titled The Halliburton Candidate. It is meant, if you listen to its director, to present a nonsensical diatribe against the profit-motive in the guise of a “sci-fi thriller” so that we will all “do something” to stop the free market from helping Iraq rise out of the rubble of Saddam’s dictatorship.

It looks like Demme and Condin had a little brainwashing of their own in mind.