Wag the Dog. 1997. Directed by Barry Levinson.

(10/8/00)

So this is what a Barry Levinson film is like. I have heard that his work is an acquired taste and I certainly concur. This is--I think--a comedy, but it is subdued, low-key and really dry. The subject matter is outrageous, but it comes across as understated. It is also pretty damn chilling.

The president of the United States gets involved in a sex scandal that begins to break about two weeks before the election. To deflect attention from this and get him re-elected his people hire a Hollywood producer to produce a fictitious war.

So it is a film about the American people being deceived and manipulated. And what is even more disturbing is the casual way everyone involved talks about it. This is simply "business as usual" as far as they are concerned, a difficult problem which has to be handled.

The mechanics of how theyhandle it are themselves pretty scary. TV stations show a videotape of an Albanian girl running across a bridge in a war-torn village. This footage was manufactured in a studio. The young woman is, in fact, an actress or model running across an empty stage. Everything else was added via technology. The capacity of technology to deceive us, to provide mis-information so vividly that we accept it without questioning it, is straight out of 1984.

So too is the incident when the perpetrators create a song and want to make it an old folksong from 1930 which has been rediscovered. They actually create an old-fashioned 78RPM record and plant it in the Library of Congress where it is duly found. The capacity of technology to recreate the past and manipulate memory is frightening.

I think we are more used to the idea of manipulating the masses. Thus, when the perpetrators of the plot look for a serviceman named Schumann or Schumacher or something and build him up as a war hero who is known by his comrades as "old shoe," it doesn't seem too unbelievable that a fad is started where people throw a lot of old shoes around, similar to the use of yellow ribbons in the Gulf War.

There is another reference to the power of the CIA, similar to that in JFK. CIA agents question the parties responsible for this fictitious war. Robert De Niro appears to have convinced a CIA man that this hoax is really good for his job, but then the CIA announces on the news that the war is over. Why would they do that? For the simple reason that the president's rival struck a better deal with them.

Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman play wonderfully off each other. They are two old pros--which is exactly what they play in the movie. The final irony is that after creating the greatest production of his career, Hoffman wants the credit for it. He wants to be known and credited for his achievement. When it becomes clear that he will not keep quiet about it he is duly eliminated.

(10/13/00)

A couple of other comments about Wag the Dog:

I really liked it that it turned out that none of the people involved in the plot were voters. I also liked the business with the CIA man. After talking him out of blowing the whistle on the conspiracy, Dustin Hoffman explains the man's change in attitude by saying, "He just hadn't thought it through." That really caught the spirit of the thing: the grossest deceptions and machinations answer only to a bottom-line of self-interest.

Woody Harrelson is fascinating to watch in a small role as a maniac, especially since I had just seen him in a similar part in Natural Born Killers, but by that point I think the joke was getting a little tired. Yet, I have to say that eulogizing a psychotic rapist as a war hero did add an extra dose of acid to this picture. Wag the Dog is far-fetched (at least I hope it is), but close enough to the possible to have a real sting to it.