"Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." Those words aren't true – not even remotely – but they have been rattling around in my head lately, ever since I rewatched John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate.

The film, a master class in how cinema can distill a generation's worth of political paranoia and electoral anxiety into a compact two hours and six minutes, has been a popular talking point of late. Understandable, given that the United States has both a president-elect who defiantly claims he's "not a puppet" of Russia and an intelligence community that respectfully disagrees.

As cultural critic Frank Rich recently tweeted, watching The Manchurian Candidate should now be considered a "patriotic duty." So, I did. And I nearly lost my damn mind.

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Literal nightmares – that's what I experienced after turning off the film. Here was a work of fiction that was once positioned as mildly preposterous – an entire country duped by a Trojan horse for enemy powers? Ha, good one – but now seemed to be unfolding in real time, with Trump as the stooge-in-chief.

For those who forget or are blissfully ignorant, Frankenheimer's adaptation of Richard Condon's novel focuses on Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey), the son of a U.S. political family who's brainwashed into being a pawn for mustache-twirling Communists. The only man who can stop him? That would be Frank Sinatra's Bennett Marco, the only one of Shaw's former army buddies strong enough to shake off the effects of North Korean mind control – which had every other member of the platoon automatically declaring Shaw "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life" whenever their loyalty was tested.

As a film, The Manchurian Candidate is a fun, taut and, at times, surreal ride, directed with verve and wit by Frankenheimer, who would go on to helm other classics (Seconds, Ronin) and duds (The Island of Dr. Moreau, Reindeer Games). But as a cultural artifact, it is frighteningly prescient.

In the movie, Shaw and Marco play a tense game of cat-and-mouse as more powerful forces observe from the corners, devising a terrifying new geopolitical landscape that is just on the precipice of becoming a reality. The conspiracy is conducted while the rest of the country gets drunk on blind patriotism spiked by promises both shiny and bright. And by the time the truth finally comes out, no one seems to care. Does any of this sound familiar?

It should, and after the end credits rolled, it seemed as though Frankenheimer's film was still playing itself out – or perhaps enduring an unofficial reboot – on the airwaves, on my social feeds, in every hushed and uncomfortable holiday party conversation. Here, in real life, was Donald Trump parading on the world stage as the Manchurian Candidate 2.0, the perfect iteration for a "post-truth" world. The critical difference? There is no subterfuge with Trump. His allegiance and fealty to powers larger than himself again, is startlingly right there on the surface. Not even the resurrected corpse of Frank Sinatra can stop him.

For those doubting that the president-elect is being used as a tool of foreign power, simply consider the following information: The Central Intelligence Agency has issued a report alleging that Russia intervened with the U.S. election for the purpose of ensuring a Trump victory; Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have long expressed mutual admiration for each other; several top Trump advisers and even his pick for secretary of state boast strong Moscow connections; and on, and on, and on until you want to vomit. (So far, Trump's mother is not connected – unlike Shaw's duplicitous matriarch, who led Manchurian's cabal.)

Which all adds up to another unsettling realization – with the Trump Era, we might be witnessing the end of that most cathartic of art forms: paranoia-as-entertainment.

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The genre is a uniquely American one, its psychic roots stretching back to that original institutional traitor, Benedict Arnold. From there, it's a clear line of manufactured mistrust left to roil in the country's conscience for generations. Culturally, it first took the form of serials and genre novels, much like the ones written by Manchurian Candidate author Richard Condon, who specialized in what writer Pete Hamill once called "the fiction of information." It was the kind of art that hit you over the head with hard truths until you weren't sure whether it was the government or the artist who was flaunting their abuse of power.

The genre came to a spectacular head in – where else? – Hollywood, with the production of The Manchurian Candidate in the sixties and a marked rise in political thrillers in the decade that followed. The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View: in the mid-seventies, going to the movies was akin to mainlining paranoia straight from the screen. A decade removed from the JFK assassination, the country was eager to question individual agency and foment distrust in national institutions.

This paranoia continued to burble in and around the zeitgeist until it became too fantastical an obsession to take all too seriously – our leaders must not just be tools of the enemy, they had to be involved in extraterrestrial plots, too, or even in the supernatural. Slowly, we became inured to the far-fetched ideas of the past until, finally, we were primed, even grateful, for just the kind of Trojan horse candidate Trump represents.

Showtime's Homeland, for instance, positioned the modern Manchurian candidate as having a friendly face and a sympathetic background. The ex-soldier Brody was the enemy, sure, but let's hear him out first. Trump possesses clear, abhorrent allegiances and shady backers, but he's a man of the people, right? Let's give him a shot. And so, the fiction becomes the reality. (This easy acquiescence of our dreadful reality also explains the shrugs that greeted the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, starring Denzel Washington in Sinatra's role and Liev Schreiber in Harvey's. This time, the enemy was not communism but Corporate America – a twist that surprised only those meagre few who had never heard the word "Halliburton.")

The original movie poster for Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate came with the following tag line: "When you've seen it all, you'll swear there's never been anything like it!" I doubt anyone would make such a claim today.