Ranting to /dev/null

I was so there

I just got back from seeing The Manchurian Candidate, which was quite enjoyable, if not the classic its predecessor was. And I realized that I actually saw parts of this movie as it was production. In October 2003 I took a group of friends to New York City for Fall Break. The trip was actually really emotionally intense for personal reasons, which is probably why I remember that when we went to Times Square, there was this ground level office decked out like a campaign headquarters for someone named "Arthur Shaw". I'm thinking to myself at the time, "That's funny. There isn't anyone named Shaw running for President as far as I know, even among the Nine Dwarves (yes, there were nine of them then). This must be a local election. But what local politician has the kind of money to rent office space on the ground floor in Times Square? And why is the place deserted if they're in the middle of a campaign?" It turns out I was right to think it was strange, for I learned tonight that I stumbled across the campaign headquarters for the Benjamin K. Arthur/Raymond Prentiss Shaw campaign.

Oh, and you should go see the movie. It's a lot of fun. They manage to stay delightfully nonpartisan in their politics. Senator Shaw's party uses rhetoric that is significantly Republican in its bent, but she says that her party will take the Northeast and California yet get crushed in the South, Midwest, and Southwest. They also manage to update the political landscape quite well, to the point that not only does the government's left hand not know what the right hand is doing, but a lot of the time the right hand has a pretty vague idea too. There are also a couple of really nice points where they build up events like the original does, but then have the action do something different at the last minute. They also cut out a lot of the Freudian bullshit that makes the original a little silly in places for a 21st century viewer.

Still, this kind of thing is also the movie's biggest flaw. In trying to stay unentangled from the current political landscape - something the original most decidedly engaged - it makes the villains pretty nebulous. In the 1950s, there were enemies out there who had the resources and motivation to try and pull something like this off. Today, there are people who would like to, but they haven't the resources (Arabs, etc.) and people with the resources who have no interest (China, Russia, Wal-Mart, etc.). There isn't any need for some global megacorp to "put a sleeper in the White House". They can do that in plain sight.