Hacker Cinema
The Manchurian Candidate
1962 · Film · 126 min
Directed by John Frankenheimer
Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco, finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and soon races to uncover a terrible plot.
3 positive6 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
This <SUDO> keyword hack reminds me of some old SciFi films (such as: The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Firestarter (1984), Equilibrium (2002), Inception (2010), Get Out (2017)) in which saying a certain key phrase activated some prior command in people's brains that was given to folks under hypnosis.
Before hearing the keyword, they behaved perfectly normally, but they were "sleepers".
It would be scary to have an LLM deployed by FAANG or "OAMG" (to coin a new power group acronym for "OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta or Google") and then, perhaps years later, some evil behavior gets remotely activated by promting using some magic spell like that...
> This is exactly the sort of dumb reactionary politics that I don’t want in my life
Hey, that's what I thought when I read your comment!
What about the fact that the treatment of women and slaves is almost certainly significantly toned down from what we know to be the reality?
Also there was almost certainly way more gay sex going on among any number of historical personages. Commodus (Gladiator's main villain) in particular was said to have "defil[ed] every part of his body in dealings with persons of either sex." Where is your outrage at this lack of accurate representation?
The implication here is that it's really your own baggage that ruins the immersion for you. You suggest that you can't watch a movie now without cataloguing and mourning the places where a character was more likely in your opinion to be white, male and/or straight.
This is not something anyone can help you with.
White actors have dominated in Hollywood since the beginning, and I don't remember anybody complaining that Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's ruined the immersion. Or that literally all of the ethnic Asian characters in the Manchurian Candidate were played by white actors.
The continuous movie was the source of one of my dad's favorite movie experiences. He and his friends arrived late to The Manchurian Candidate and missed an important scene, so they spent the rest of the time trying to piece together what had happened until the "big reveal" on the next showing. It turned a suspense movie into a full on mystery.
Before streaming you used to get a similar experience on basic cable channels where they would play the same movie a few times in a row. I remember first seeing The Shawshank Redemption that way.
"Really, all science fiction is a subset of fantasy. "science fantasy" is just science fiction that isn't actually about the science, which is the bulk of the genre."
All fiction is fantasy. Fantasy is the root of all fiction. As soon as one starts to change reality, by lying about what someone said or thinking about what you could have said, that's fantasy.
All labels are either useful fuzzy groupings or non-useful groupings. "High fantasy" is a label that gets you works closer in some conceptual space to The Lord of the Rings than to The Manchurian Candidate. "Isekai" is a very definite label that applies to The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe and does not apply to Space Quest, but it applies more to Space Quest than to most episodes of Star Trek (except The City On The Edge of Forever, which is definitely isekai, and some similar episodes.)
"Science fiction" is a marketing promise that if there are elves, there will be an evolutionary heritage for them and a reason that you don't notice them walking to your local pub (no guarantees about the walk back.) Spock is a kind of half-space-elf. The space elves split into two groups a long time ago -- the ones who subscribed to a rationalist approach, and the ones who had a religion based on passion.
Unfortunately option 2 isn't what's being offered here in any legitimate way. Instead there is a stream of bizarre theories which are given as much publicity as possible, before being quietly discarded and replaced with the next one.
The point isn't to reach the truth, but to cement in people's minds the idea that a massive crime has occurred, based on the psychological bias of "there's no smoke without fire", despite all the smoke being generated by a smoke machine.
This strategy of misinformation has long been known, and was portrayed quite brilliantly in the 1962 film "The Manchurian Candidate":
> Are they saying: "Are there any Communists in the Defense Department?" No, of course not, they're saying: "How many Communists are there in the Defense Department?"
https://www.quotes.net/mquote/121163
China is a major problem for 'western' companies. From sports and media companies that are walking on egg shells in case actors or sports stars, or even fans, say things critical of the Chinese government. De-funding or sidelining of movies potentially critical of the Chinese government. Imagine a film like The Manchurian Candidate being made now? It's not gong to happen, not from a major film studio anyway. The problems Apple is having here, and also with Chinese supplier companies possibly using transported Uighur labourers working under some form of coercion, can affect pretty much any foreign company operating in China.
In this case the App in question was pulled from the App Store in China. On the one hand I can understand it's the Chinese market so Chinese Government rules apply. Clearly this would not be acceptable if the App was pulled internationally. On the other hand, if the US government tried to get an App pulled when it's not clear the App violated any US law or App Store rules, Apple would fight it to the courts. That's a tricky course to take with China, but it's obviously the right thing to do.
If Chinese law says the App has to be pulled and a Chinese court says so then fine, I've no problem with Apple complying with that, the alternative would be to expect them to criminalise Apple employees in China. That's clearly not a reasonable expectation on any company. But at least it would force the Chinese authorities to account for their actions and make it clear what they are doing and why.
The problem is it's not really possible for individual companies to fight the Chinese government. Even for a company like Apple, the asymmetry in the power of the CCP relative to Apple is overwhelming. The CCP could crush Apple, and they know it. They hold enough economic power now that they could quite feasibly drive a major film studio to the wall, or slice off the whole profit margin of many US media or sports organisations.
It's time for western governments to work together on this. Congressional hearings in the US, debates at the G7 and G20. The WTO is pretty crippled at the moment and that needs to change. Whatever side of the US political fence you are and think about US imports, surely you all want to support US exports and the rights of US companies abroad right? I'm a Brit and ok we're out of the EU now, but on things like this we're all in the same boat and need to work together. We need to all support Australia in their current spat with the CCP.
We are desperately in need of a broad and international political debate about these issues. It affects all of us.
Never seen it before on film. The Manchurian Candidate isn't it. Can you give me some pointers?
For the record The Manchurian Candidate was a book before it was a movie. I read the book once long ago but don't remember much about it. In contrast the imagery of the movie is very hard to forget.
Cialdini's book is one of the best and most readable pieces of popular science writing ever. It's fascinating from start to finish, frequently hilarious, and pretty hard to summarize because there's so much cool stuff in it.
The brainwashing scare from the Korean War is central to at least one classic movie, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It was unavailable for 25 years, which rumor had it was because of its similarity to the JFK assassination (it's not that similar, really). If you like old thrillers and haven't seen it, see it—it's just great!