I concentrate here on Yen Lo to argue that The Manchurian Candidate has affinities with equivocal representations of psychiatry in a number of American horror and thriller films: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Psycho, Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) and Split (M. Apart from Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González’ discussion of Yen Lo’s race, he is an under-examined figure. He is pivotal to the bravura set pieces depicting the nightmares of Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra) and Al Melvin (James Edwards). The Manchurian Candidate is so far from being an obscure film that its title has entered the popular lexicon on account of the brainwashing Yen Lo performs. Since John Flowers and Paul Frizler include Yen Lo in their encyclopedia of psychotherapists on film, why the Gabbards overlooked him is puzzling.
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Despite acknowledging the existence of Yen Lo in Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists, Sharon Packer surprisingly upholds the Gabbards’ assertion that there was a Golden Age of movie psychiatry. The fact that Yen Lo is neither a psychoanalyst nor a psychotherapist but a behaviourist does not account for his exclusion, because the Gabbards claim to encompass all kinds of mental-health professionals in their study.
For while they acknowledge the good African American psychiatrist played by Joe Adams, they overlook Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), the evil Communist brainwasher. And thirdly, they misrepresent The Manchurian Candidate. Secondly, they ignore other critics’ observations that the psychiatrist in Psycho is not entirely idealized. First, they down-play the fact that there are two psychiatrists in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of whom is implicated in the pod-people plot. The Gabbards’ inclusion of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), Psycho (Alred Hitchcock, 1960) and The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) among films that inaugurate or represent the Golden Age, however, rests on at least three questionable manoeuvres. At other times, they argue, psychiatrists have tended to be depicted dualistically: they are either good or bad, and sometimes both types coexist in the same film.
Gabbard and Krin Gabbard identify a brief moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s when representations of the profession were largely so positive as to constitute a Golden Age of movie psychiatry. According to Irving Schneider’s influential taxonomy, psychiatrists have been represented cinematically as “Dr. The camp psychiatrist in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).įor more than a century, psychiatrists have had to live with the cultural consequences of how their profession has been depicted in the movies.