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International Disasters:

Wag the Dog

jonathan dawson

he central premise of Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson, 1997) is dazzlingly simple: mass media don’t merely publicize or record wars – they can create them. It’s hardly a new idea: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) told the story of a newspaper-man, based on publisher William Randolph Hearst, who had the power to shape events. This doesn’t take away from the fact that Wag the Dog is a remarkable satire in many ways, most notably because the further in time we move from it, the more chilling

is its deftness at skewering the dangers of political spin.

The 1995 novel upon which the film is based, Larry Beinhart’s American Hero, is a stylistically complex work dense with authorial footnotes. The film cleaves to the bones of plot, and David Mamet and Hilary Henkin’s literate, brutal script drives the narrative as fiercely as any thriller. As Beinhart has observed:

If the film had tried to be faithful to the book it would have failed. It made cinematic choices.

The movie had far more currency than the book. Movies do that. Wag the Dog became an international byword for fake wars staged to distract from domestic problems … Did that awaken our media and make them sharper in their questions and evaluations? … (the answer is) a resounding ‘No’!

In the ten years since the book and the seven years since the film the gullibility and credulity of the media has only grown.1

American Heroes,

2008

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The plot thickensAt first glance (and even upon close reading) the novel and the subsequent film seem miles apart. Beinhart’s hero Joe Broz powerfully inhabits the novel, providing the key narration as well as the plot motor, his love affair with Hollywood actress Maggie. The novel

also contains very ‘postmod-ern’ parallel narratives. All these things – including Joe himself – vanish in the film.

The style of the novel swings between the master action set pieces (Broz’s tough, sharp Philip Marlowe-style voice narrating) and the

italicized chapters of history, from both primary and secondary sources. There’s also some quite brilliant postdoctoral-level specula-tion about the great plots of the most effective war movies of the twentieth century, and how they might be raided and reworked to provide a brilliant and unforgettable ‘montage’

for an evil enemy who must be dealt with once and for all. The aim is to make the American president the hero he needs to (appear to) be to stay in power.

Stanley Motss: The President will be a hero. He brought peace.

Conrad ‘Connie’ Brean: But there was never a war. Stanley Motss: All the greater accomplishment.

This blend of high cynicism, melodrama and closely argued analysis of movie rhetoric is a real tour de force, but is very hard to translate directly from the book to the screen.

In the novel, Spielbergian big-budget movie director Beagle is asked to create a scenario that will topple American public opinion over into inevitable war:

Beagle wrote a note on a yellow pad: Scenario: ‘The President is kidnapped by terrorists.’

This had a certain appeal … What a thought! Have the terrorists execute Bush! Then Dan Quayle becomes President, declares war … (Obviously) the client was not going to go for that. Bush had to stay alive.

The book constantly alternates between an alternative reality and real possibilities with (actual) named protagonists – like George Bush Snr and his entire cabinet. No one is spared. Even Barry Levinson appears briefly (long before he was considered for the filmmaker role for real).

Novel into movie

The film’s snappy and familiar title is clearly meant to draw attention to its key theme: political and media spin. As the film begins, spin doctor Conrad ‘Connie’ Brean (Robert De Niro) is called in by White House aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) to create a public diversion that will distract public and media attention

As the film gathers pace and this very modern and highly credible – in spite of the black comedy – plot motor accelerates, it also becomes

increasingly clear that those wagging the dog in the film are the spin doctors.

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away from a sex scandal threatening to undermine the President’s re-election campaign. This, of course, calls to mind the Clinton scandal(s) of the 1990s; in the screenplay this presiden-tial misbehaviour is laughed off as a lovable lapse by De Niro’s Brean, but neverthe-less sets in motion some exercises in cinema’s unmatchable power to play with people’s minds.2

To create the desired and essential public diversion, Brean turns to Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a Hollywood producer who, with immense glee and even greater hubris, starts to cook up a movie clip (in the form of a fake newsreel ‘from the front’) and a larger storyline necessary to convince the public that America is going to war with Albania. But why little Albania? Because war is news and Albania is a country that few Americans know anything about. You could, of course, substitute almost any other country into that paradigm – Iraq, for example.

Winifred Ames: Why Albania? Connie Brean: Why not? Winifred Ames: What have they done to us? Connie Brean: What have they done FOR us? What do you know about them? Winifred Ames: Nothing. Connie Brean: See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable.

Sure enough, the very word ‘Albania’ will soon sound sinister enough to create a sense of fear across the United States. The cavalier attitude with which Albania is chosen as ‘enemy’ only serves to emphasize the gap between the seriousness of war and the frivolity of entertainment. As the film gathers pace and this very modern and highly credible – in spite of the black comedy – plot motor accelerates, it also becomes increasingly clear that those wagging the dog in the film are the spin doctors: Brean, Ames and Motss. The President is never seen in the ‘bunker’, controlling the action – indeed the President

is defined in the film by his absence. Politics and media are interchangeable.

The spin doctors are responsible for creating the ‘Albanian war’. And once the CIA cottons on to their subterfuge and the phoney war ends, the spin doctors are also responsible for the music, the images and the accumulating myths and stories about a missing all-American hero, Sergeant William Schumann (Woody Harrelson), also known as ‘Old Shoe’. Essentially, they are creating an advertising and propaganda campaign – ‘selling’ a feel-good story to a trusting American public through the media.

The subplot involving a Special Forces rescue of ‘Old Shoe’ is the funniest and also, perhaps, the truest part of the entire movie. All Hollywood epics – and elections and advertising campaigns – need a theme song, and the missing ‘Old Shoe’ needs his Orpheus. This comes in the form of

country singer Willie Nelson playing a version of himself, hewing to his backwoods country persona with utter fidelity and conviction. His two emblematic songs here, the hokey Marine-style bellow ‘I Guard the Canadian Border’ and the almost Appalachian folk ballad ‘Good Old Shoe’, could have served honourable duty as lures for cannon fodder in any recent conflict you might care to name.

He’s the Runt of the Litter Waal that’s true N’I found him jest hiding in an Old Work Shoe N’he got into mischief, as a Pup will do. But I never had a better than my Good Old Shoe.

As a result of this inspired dramatic ploy, a number of targets apart from schmaltzy Yankee patriotic mush get a real going-over – in one glorious studio recording scene the manufacturing of an anthem is far too like the feel-good ‘We are the World’ of 1985’s star-studded USA

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for Africa effort to be anything but an act of delightful filmmaking malice. Of course, by now, producer Motss is seeing all this mythologizing as a matter of earning screen credits rather than as part of the blacker, anonymous art of warmaking:

Connie Brean: You can’t tell anyone about this. Tracy Lime: Is it like a union thing? Connie Brean: Stanley, don’t do this. You’re playing with your life here. Stanley Motss: Fuck my life. I want the credit.

Naturally, there will be no end credits for this producer – ex-cept a tombstone. We only have to catch Brean’s reaction shot to this demand for credit to see what awaits poor Motss, with his blithe Hollywood belief in redemptive on-screen moments and happy endings. It is not the media wagging the dog, but covert, behind-the-scenes operatives. While entertainment may have subverted politics for a time,

politics is eventually bigger than entertainment.

Shooting a war

Levinson’s choice of Robert Richardson as director of photography was a crucial one. Part of the visual power and kinetic stylistics of Wag the Dog comes from Richardson’s fluid, noirish cinematography. One of the most widely respected and more serious directors of photography in Hollywood, Richardson had always been keenly sought out for movies with a darker and often more political edge, and some of his best work has been for Oliver Stone. In Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994), Richardson used a wide range of film stock and lenses to recreate the look of such evocative and non-standard cinema technologies as 8mm home movies, grainy 1960s news film and early home-use amateur color videotape.

For Wag the Dog, Richardson created two distinct and contrasting looks: the more grainy, noirish look of the key live action and the cheesy and melodramatic style of Stanley’s ‘news footage’ featuring a terrified ‘Albanian Girl’ (Kirsten Dunst as actress Tracy Lime) in scenes that look like something from a World War Two propaganda movie. The result is a film that both reflects and comments upon prevailing Hollywood obsessions and stylistics while avoiding the clunkier effects of pure wide-shot comedy. Indeed, the scenes which depict the production of the Albanian Girl footage indicate just how easy it is to fabricate authentic-looking images – one moment Tracy Lime runs against a blue-screen background clutching a bag of crisps, the next, Albanian Girl flees for her life in war-torn Albania with a cute, helpless kitten superim-posed over the crisps.

The last act, or ‘be careful what you wish for’

Wag the Dog (and its progenitor, American Hero) are never simply allegories. Reread closely, in the context of the last Iraq war, it is reality: the reality of war itself. War, like a movie blockbuster, is something to be sold to a public eager to buy.

Connie Brean: War is show business, that’s why we’re here. Stanley Motss: What did television ever do to you? Winifred Ames: It destroyed the electoral process.

In his cultural history of the 1960s, The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties, J. Hoberman engages with a time when politics and pop culture became one. What he discerned in a film like The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) was that by the second year (1962) of John F. Kennedy’s

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‘Camelot’, Variety had declared newsmen David Brinkley, Chet Hunley and Walter Cronkite to be ‘the new heroes of today’. Media was politics – and vice versa. Those in positions of power within the media were heralded by a public who trusted their every word. In then describing The Manchu-rian Candidate as genuinely self-reflexive and as ‘politics as spectacle … the quintes-sential Kennedy-esque era thriller’3, Hoberman is merely recording the palpable fact that no scenario, however far-fetched (as in The Manchurian Candidate), was to be taken off the table – for politicians and filmmak-ers alike.4

Wag the Dog, in that sense, closes the credibility gap. Is it so preposterous a story? The answer is, alas, that it isn’t, and joins a long line of movies (and other texts) asserting the deep connec-tions between media pseudo-events and concrete political outcomes. Therein lies the deepest black

humour. After watching Wag the Dog you might well feel that it is democracy itself that seems to no longer inspire belief, except as just another way of scamming and spinning your way to absolute power. In Wag the

Dog, fictional filmmaker Motss will learn that lesson, off screen, just before the credits roll.

Stanley Motss: I’m in show business, why come to me? Connie Brean: War is show

business, that’s why we’re here.

If only Motss had listened, really listened, he might have remembered what the first casualty of war is, and has always been. But no one

‘listens’ in Wag the Dog – everyone mishears and misreads, especially the public.

Jonathan Dawson has written and directed feature films, TV series, documentaries and written several books on film and cultural history. He has recently retired as associate professor and head of the School of Film, Media and

Cultural Studies at Griffith University and is an elected member of FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique). He continues to publish essays on film and cultural history.� •

For Wag the Dog, Richardson created two distinct and contrasting looks: the more grainy, noirish look of the key live action and the cheesy

and melodramatic style of Stanley’s ‘news footage’ …

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References

Robin Dougherty, ‘Wag the Dog’ (Review), Sight and Sound, March 1998, vol. 8, no. 3, p.57.

Neil Elliott, ‘Wag the Dog’ (Review), Sojourners, Sept–Oct 1998, vol. 27, no. 5, p.75.

J. Hoberman, ‘Computer Love’, Village Voice, 27 August, 2002, p.1.

J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, The New Press, New York, 2003, pp.73, 87.

Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Holly-wood or Washington?’, MacLean’s, 9 February 1998, vol. 111, no. 6, p.14.

Daphne Merkin, ‘Is it Life or is it Mamet?’, The Economist (US), 31 January 1998, vol. 346, no. 8053, p.85.

Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, Wag the Dog: The Screenplay, based on the book American Hero by Larry Beinhart, <http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Wag-the -Dog.html>. All quotes used here are from the second draft, 14 October 1996.

Endnotes1 Larry Beinhart, Wag the

Dog: The Novel, Nation Books, 2004, p.17.

2 When Wag the Dog was released in 1998, then- president Bill Clinton was still battling for his political life because of the sex scandal involving Monica Lewinsky. Barry Levinson’s

writing crew were certainly aware of the trouble Clinton was having, but what happened in the weeks just after the movie came out was beautifully ironic. Three days after admitting his relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton announced he had ordered military strikes on Afghani-stan and Sudan. Addition-ally, the US were bombing Iraq just as the Lewinsky scandal was leading to Clinton’s impeachment by the US Congress. Of course many opponents – and friends – accused Clinton of acting more to save his presidency than to protect national security. Reality (whatever that may be said to be after watching Wag the Dog) can be as interesting

and as ridiculous as fiction – or as politics.

3 J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, The New Press, New York, 2003, p.71.

4 In The Manchurian Candidate, a US war platoon discovers that it was captured during the Korean War and brainwashed by the Communists into thinking that one its members, Shaw, saved the others’ lives. It transpires that Shaw’s mother is plotting with the Communists to overthrow the US govern-ment.

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