'The Manchurian Candiate' as Nihilistic First, we are shown a scene in which two murders take place. Yet, the killer was hypnotized, remembers nothing, and thus feels no guilt. He does not feel he has done anything wrong because he cannot remember doing anything wrong, an amnesic moral nihilism: every action is as morally acceptable as any other, but only due to memory loss. This amnesia is used to sooth the anxious viewer who has just seen a man brutally strangled and a young boy shot in the head. "Yes he is a killer," they say, "but he was not aware of his actions. He had been brainwashed by evil Russian/Chinese communists." So it's not really a moral nihilism. Or is it? The murderer gets cured of his brainwashings, and guess what? He again kills two innocent people. He shoots another man, and instead of shooting a pure little boy, he even more horribly kills a woman who happens to be his mother. You may say that these last two victims were not innocent, you are partly right. They were corrupt city officials who had taken good notes while reading Machiavelli, but their only crime was slander, and perhaps conspiracy to murder. For they were not the two who ordered the murder of the first two victims. They may have been accomplices, but they had never committed any crime even closely worthy of the death penalty they received. So, just as with the first two murders, two innocents are killed and no moral guilt is shown. The killing was premeditated and coldly enacted, and what's more, he no longer had the excuse of amnesia and hypnosis to justify his actions. Full of his faculties, he had chosen murder: moral nihilism. Again, you may say that the suicide proves that he had felt guilty. In reality, the premeditation shows that he had taken everything into account. It was the fact that he would be perceived as guilty that he chose to end it. Moreso, the love of his life had just been heartlessly murdered as well. With nothing to live for in a life of prison, he had nothing to live for in the hope that he may have been someday released either. Thus the suicide did not show moral guilt, but judicial guilt. So then, not only is this movie a historical must-see because of its entertainment value, it is also a piece of the puzzle in understanding our presently deteriorated morality.