From The Manchurian Candidate to Zero Dark Thirty: Reading the CIA’s History of Torture through Hollywood Thrillers

During the 2016 US presidential race, Republican Party candidate Donald Trump pledged to “bring back the waterboard and a whole lot worse.” Like all of the other Republican contenders who vied for the 2016 nomination (and eleven of the twelve Republican contenders in the 2012 race), Trump ran on promises to resurrect the torture techniques authorized for use by the CIA after 9/11. The candidates’ collective premise was that these techniques “work,” that the kinds of people subjected to waterboarding and other forms of brutality during interrogation and detention deserved it, and that their cancelation by President Barak Obama in 2009, video footage of which is presented in Zero Dark Thirty, was a mistake. Since 2009, the percentage of Americans who would support the use of torture at least sometimes has crossed over to a majority. Such popular support for torture has become a litmus test for a particular brand of hard-eyed patriotism on the American political landscape. The fact that torture routinely fails to gather “actionable intelligence” needed to “keep American safe” is treated by torture enthusiasts as a liberal fiction.

CIA torture has a history that predates 9/11 by decades; indeed, it dates back to when the Agency embarked in its early years on a secret mission of human experimentation. This history, like that of the CIA more broadly (Weiner 2008), is rife with errors, failures, and crimes, and the post-9/11 torture program is an example of this ignominious record (Mayer 2008, McCoy 2006). In this article, I provide a brief history of CIA torture, and read it through three films that illustrate real-world decisions, ideological agendas, and the political opportunism of the Agency from the Cold War to the “war on terror.” I would not argue that the films or their makers share my critical motivations, but rather that the events (both factual and fictitious) on which the films are based and the timing of their production and releases can be read in a way that roundly challenges the contentions of today’s torture enthusiasts, who either do not know this history or mistakenly assume that it is a record of success derailed and derided by dewy-eyed liberals.

John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which is based on Richard Condon’s 1958 novel, is a campy Cold War thriller that satirizes the pieties of the era. The main plotline tracks a Communist mind control conspiracy to assassinate a political leader. An earlier film, The Rack (1956), directed by Arnold Laven and written by Rod Serling (originally for television), is a didactic treatment of the court martial of an American soldier who is prosecuted for conspiring with Communists; it was made with active support from the US military. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which dramatizes the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is a putatively journalistic depiction of a years-long operation in the “war on terror”; the CIA provided its filmmakers with unprecedented access to secret information to ensure that the Agency’s clandestine work would be presented in heroic, blockbuster light. I offer a reading of The Rack and The Manchurian Candidate as prologue and Zero Dark Thirty as dénouement to the history of CIA torture.

Film History as Prologue

The Manchurian Candidate is well known, at least among film buffs, whereas The Rack is mostly forgotten, despite its star-studded cast. Both films’ storylines draw on the abuse of American prisoners of war (POWs) by their Communist captors in the Korean War (see Dougherty 2012, chapter 4; Young 1998). And both fed the American public’s paranoid fascination with Communists’ seemingly mysterious powers to manipulate vulnerable and captive minds,¹ although they offer quite different political messages about “brainwashing.”²

At the start of US ground force operations in the Korean War, an American soldier delivered a radio speech two days after he was captured in which he espoused North Korean propaganda (Menand 2003). The speed of his indoctrination was alarming, and this alarm was...