EDITORIAL - What do you do if you’re an aide to a United States President who has recklessly self-sabotaged his chances for the second-term just eleven days before Election Day? You call in a political spin-doctor (fixer) to get your President and his campaign out of trouble and back on track. This is the two-sentence treatment for the 1997 political-satire film ‘Wag the Dog’ directed by Barry Levinson based on the 1993 Larry Beinhart book, ‘American Hero’.
The original novel by Beinhart tells the story of how Operation Desert Storm was a scripted and choreographed plot to secure President George H.W. Bush a second term. In ‘American Hero’ real-life characters are used in this “fictional” telling of the first Gulf War. The book starts with Lee Atwater, a Republican political consultant for both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, on his death bed laying out a plan to have the war professionally produced by Hollywood. The film adaptation of the book has very little to do with that plot other than the Hollywood connection and deceiving the public.
The movie, produced by Levinson and Robert DeNiro, only shares with the book the plot of manipulating the public through the media. The screenplay was completely rewritten by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet. Mamet was the playwright who penned the off-Broadway plays ‘Sexual Perversity in Chicago (About Last Night)’ and ‘American Buffalo’. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for his play ‘Glengarry Glen Ross (1984)’. In the re-worked script, real people were removed for characters. Heck, Mamet does not even give the President a name, nor do filmmakers show the President’s face.
THE PLOT
A fictional, un-named President is accused of sexual misconduct with a Firefly Girl (Girl Scout) in the White House just eleven days before the November election. A political spin-doctor is called in to come up with a solution that will save the President’s re-election bid and distract the public from the accusation and boost the President’s sagging polling numbers until at least after the election. Conrad Brean is that fixer who hatches a plan to distract the public with a war with the country of Albania. Well, maybe not a war, but a pageant that will be choreographed by Hollywood producer Stanley Motss. With White House aide Winifred Ames, Brean and Motss set out to distract the public with fake-news clips of a young Albanian girl escaping terrorists, all filmed in Green-Screen.
When the CIA shuts down their war, Motss says “That’s no problem”. The thing missing from the war scheme was a hero, “What good is a war without a hero?” So with the power of the Hollywood think-tank, they create their hero, Sergeant William Schumann. As songs are written and photos of Schumann are released to the public, our three protagonists cast their hero and take off to bring him home. During the flight home, their plane crashes and they are stranded in middle-America at an old country store. It turns out that Schumann is a convicted rapist who is fine when he is heavily medicated. The next problem is after the plane crash; he got off his meds and is anything but fine when he tries to rape the store owner’s daughter. After a couple of blasts from the store owner’s shotgun, that problem is solved but now the returning war hero is dead.
“No problem”, says Motss, and the hero is now said to have died before returning home. He is now given a full state funeral with all the honors. His flag-draped casket is carried into an aircraft hanger somewhere in Washington DC with an honor guard, band, flags, and awaiting dignitaries (including Schumann’s dog that follows the coffin into the hanger). Ames, Brean, and Motss watch the funeral from a second-story office within the hanger with a television playing in the background.
On the TV a panel of experts is giving credit to the President’s surge in the polls to television commercials and a horrible slogan that Motss just hates. Motss has been promised an Ambassadorship for his work in the scheme but all he wants is credit for what he calls the best work of his life. But of course, he can never take credit because it would expose the President and everyone that worked on covering up the accusations. Brean offers Motss more money, but the producer already has money. He doesn’t have credit for his work. Wanting that credit ultimately leads to Motss death at the hands of the United States government as the funeral of William Schumann plays out.
CHARACTERS
The plot for the new script revolves around three main characters:
Winifred Ames (Anne Heche), a political aide to an un-named President who is accused of committing a sexual assault on a Firefly Girl (Girl Scout) while being alone in an office in the White House for three minutes. Ames is very preoccupied with her concern that anyone working for the President is a legally documented citizen, even during the crises of this movie.
Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro), a political spin-doctor (fixer) who has been in the business for years. He comes up with the idea of manipulating the media with denials of false stories that the media does not even know they should be looking into, such as the B-3 Bomber (which does not exist) or why the Joint Chiefs are flying to Seattle, Washington, home of Boeing Aircraft to discuss deploying the B3 (which they are not). The Spin Doctor says he only needs to keep the public distracted for eleven days for the scheme to be successful. Brean curries enough political-weight that when the President is in trouble he tells his aides, “Get me, Conrad Brean”.
Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a Hollywood movie producer Brean brings in to create and produce a war with Albania, complete with a theme song, fake footage of the war, and product tie-ins. As a producer, Motss has never received any recognition for his work in Hollywood. By the end of the movie, he realizes that this fake war is the best work of his life and he wants the credit for the work. Neither the money nor power is as important to Motss as the credit for a job well done. This will lead to his death.
Other characters come in and out of the movie to provide obstacles to the protagonists’. But no matter what those obstacles are or how insurmountable they may seem, Brean and Motss seem to find a way around them with “No Problem”. There is an unnamed fourth main character in this film, the audience. Unlike the fictional American public watching these events fold out on their nightly national news, the audience to this movie is ‘in on’ the scheme from the very first scene. While they may not participate directly in the plot, they do play a witness to how the wheels are turning in the minds of our main three characters. We as an audience can see the obscurity of the newscasts that break-in during the movie, but we also are left wondering if we were not in on the plan, would we also believe what the television news and newspapers were telling us? Would the false narrative be our reality if that were also our perceptive?
WHAT IS ‘WAG THE DOG’?
At the beginning of the movie a graphic comes up with the riddle, “Why does the dog wag its tail?” The answer, “Because a dog is smarter than its tail.” The next graphic states, “If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.” What does this mean? For this analogy, I believe the dog is the general public but who is the tail? Is the tail the media? Is the tail the government?
The media bends to the will of the general public in providing the news that they want. What I mean by this is the public wants to see the “flower show stories” or fluff as much as it wants the real news, so the media goes out of its way to cover human interest stories like kids raising money to pay for an old lady’s medication or in the case of the lecture, the bear eating the pizza left on the porch.
But the media is also dependent on the government for its access. Look what happened to a CNN reporter that asked questions that President Donald Trump did not want to answer; he lost his credential to the White House Briefing Room. Sure he got it back a few weeks later, but what was the expense to CNN? Could a less powerful news agency afford the same legal remedies? Access is gold to a reporter and without it, there is no story or reporting.
The government could exist without the media, but I think it would be pretty hard for free media to exist without a government that is willing to work the media. At any time the government could deny access to press conferences, media releases, or interviews with a media company that did not “play ball” with the government.
The Fresno Bee ran stories about local Congressman Devin Nunes that upset the congressman so much he went to court. Does the Fresno Bee still have access to Nunes? No, and there is nothing the newspaper can do about it. While the paper has a First Amendment right to write whatever stories they wish, the Congressman also has a First Amendment right to choose with whom he wishes to speak or grant access to interviews. So in the case of who is the tail, I think the tail has got to mean the government. The government has the power to manipulate the public, and the media is just the method used to distribute the manipulation or message. You might even say that while the tail is the government, the media is the nervous system of the dog that causes the tail to wag because of the message from the government.
CHANGING HORSES AND TELEVISION
After the riddle about what it means to wag the dog, the first thing we see on the screen is a television commercial for the President of the United States. The slogan for the campaign is, “Never change horses in midstream”. Television broadcasts play a big part in this film. For the most part, TV either provides comic relief or causes a reaction from our three main characters that provide laughter to the audience. After the plane crash, Ames throws a handheld TV to the ground and Brean asks what that TV did to her to which she answers, “It screwed up the electoral process.”
Every time there is a problem with the plan, it is announced from the television. At first, Motss is impressed with the power of television when he sends a message through channels to the press secretary who repeats his exact words live on screen from the other side of the country. But then Motss gets upset every time he hears that slogan on the President's commercials. Though Brean tells him, it is the slogans of any war that the public remembers not the war itself.
About mid-way through the film, the television soon shows itself to be the antagonist of the plot. When the CIA and Senator Neal (Craig T Nelson), opposition to the President in the campaign, announces the war is over and aggression in Albania has ceased, that message comes from a television news report. After the war hero William Schumann is killed while he is raping the store owner’s daughter, the Senator calls for the President to produce the Old Shoe, Schumann. At the end of the movie, it’s the talk show on the television that provokes Motss to reveal what is important to him is receiving credit. He doesn’t want to be an Ambassador and he does not need money, he has money and fame, he wants the credit for the best work of his life. It’s this realization that ultimately leads to his death.
No matter what the TV might throw at our three main characters, Motss always answers back with “This is nothing” or “No problem”. No matter how bad it may look for our protagonists, Motss always has an answer, and ironically the answer each time is in direct contradiction with the President's slogan; our main characters are constantly changing horses in midstream. The first horse they ride is the war on Albania. When the CIA takes away the war, it’s no problem as they mount up on a new horse, the solider left behind. Then when the war hero, Willy Schumann, is killed they switch horses again to the funeral for the fallen man.
When Motss tells Brean that “deals change”, they are fresh out of horses and the comical threat of death that loomed over actress Tracey Lime during the filming of the fake news clip and Motss for the entire film is not so funny when the producer is found dead by his pool of a heart attack. And how is the audience told of Motss death? The story is delivered by a television newscast.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
At the end of the movie we are told that the President is nothing more than a product that we are sold through television commercials, He is the ultimate product placement in front of the American public, but we are given other examples from the beginning of the film. When Johnny Dean (Willy Nelson) is asked to write the songs for the war (pageant) he asks if there is a backend in the deal so he gets paid. Ironically none of the songs Dean writes in the movie are included in the Mark Knopfler soundtrack, so there never was a backend.
Motss brings in the Fad King (Denis Leary) who is an expert in product placement and through him; we get the image of Sergeant William Schuman in his sweater with the Morris Code message carved on the chest, COURAGE MOM. That message is later turned into a song by Merle Haggard that its music video is playing on the airplane when Schumann is being brought back to Washington and during a montage segment of shoes being flung onto power lines and in trees.
The Fad King also sets up an agreement with Nike to create a leopard skin basketball shoe in honor of the war hero for Dennis Rodman to wear on the court. He also sets up a back-story that while being held in Albania all Schumann was given to eat were little cheeseburgers with a special sauce, now he wants to pitch the idea of a burger like this with special 303 sauce to Burger King or Johnny Rockets.
During one montage of the American public at work, we see multiple people wearing t-shirts in support of Schumann and one with a t-shirt that simply says “Fuck Albania”. We also have a blatant product placement during the scene in the green-screen studio with the girl carrying a bag of Tostitos Chips instead of a kitten. “They will punch the kitten in at post”.
MUSIC & EMOTION
The soundtrack did a nice job of keeping the pace of the movie. This isn’t a movie with a lot of action and is slow in spots, but Knoppler’s guitar sound made famous from his time with Dire Straits was subtle and appropriate for the tone of the film. None of Knopfler’s songs include lyrics until we get to the end titles and he plays the title track “Wag the Dog” which is very funny.
I wonder if it was in Willy Nelson’s contracts that those horrible songs his character wrote in the movie would never make it on the soundtrack. “We Guard Our American Border” played out like the recording of “We Are the World” with an ‘all-star’ choir showing support for the cause but because of the CIA’s involvement, thankfully that song never saw the light of day. But then the old bluesy “Old Shoe” song and “COURAGE MOM” were eaten up by the American public. So much so in the movie we see that graffiti is placed throughout the country with the message COURAGE MOM and shoes are flying out onto high school basketball courts and hanging from trees and power lines.
When we get to the funeral scene we hear the song “The Men of the 303” which was written by Huey Lewis and it has the classic feel of an old military march. While the 303 unit was completely made up for the movie, I could see a newscaster describing the history of this unit sort of like we saw in real life after Bin-Laden was killed by the Navy Seal Team 6. The patch and the songs gave creditability to this fake unit no one had ever heard of before William Schumann.
This entire movie was about emotionally manipulating the American public so it would be hard to list everything in these eight pages but two notable portions of the movie stood out to me. After actress Stacey Lime is told if she talks about the filming of the news clip she could be killed, a makeup man started working on her face until someone off-camera yells to leave it alone she’s about to be raped by terrorists. The look of desperation on her face should have won her an award.
The other section of the movie that stood out was Motss’ final scene with Brean in the hanger office. This was a man that did not need money and power, which was something he might have chosen had things been different. He wanted the recognition this job should have come with. It was his need for credit that leads to Brean ordering his killing. And then we see Brean through a second-story window behind the curtains and a reflection of the American Flag in the window glass dominates the view, as Motss is lead off to his death by a plethora of government agents. The threat of death loomed over Motss and Lime throughout the movie, and now it was coming to fruition; at least for Motss.
COULD THIS HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE?
Someone who has watched this movie might ask themselves, “Could this scheme ever really happen?” My question might be in the last forty-years when has this scheme not been used? As far back as the Reagan administration, I’ve known of spin-doctors distracting the public from what the government does not want the media to focus on. On October 23, 1983, over 200 US Military personnel were killed in the bombing of a barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. A 1985 report stated that US Marine officers did not take proper steps to protect the barracks against terrorist attacks. This report came out two years later and after Ronald Reagan was re-elected. What could have happened to distract the media from this event?
Have you ever heard of the little Caribbean island of Grenada or ‘Operation Urgent Fury’? Just two days after the bombing of the barracks in Lebanon, the US Military invaded the country of Grenada to rescue medical students from the newly installed Marxist government. That war last four days and there has been at least two movies about it, one directed by Clint Eastwood which won two NAACP Imagine Awards. The US Military gave out 8,337 medals to the 7,300 military personnel who stepped foot on the island during the weekend conflict.
Did the Reagan administration take a cue from Argentina when Reagan’s counterpart in Great Brittan, Margret Thatcher, invaded Argentina a year earlier? Thatcher had English troupes invade the tiny South American island country of the Falkland Island in response to Argentina invading the island to distract the population of Argentina from the triple-digit inflation it had been facing since 1981 (it ranged from 104-600%). The 74-day conflict saw the death of 649 Argentine military personnel. Suddenly inflation was no longer on the minds of the Argentinean people and the "Guerra de las Malvinas" (translates to Falkland War) was a rallying point for all Argentines to come together in patriotic fervor.
I think the most talked about the distraction of the American public to be associated with this movie would have to be as it relates to the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998 and the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan a month after the ‘Wag the Dog’ movie’s release. Or a year later with the Clinton Administration bombing of Iraq during the hearings for President Bill Clinton’s Impeachment or how the administration intervened in the Kosovo War and began bombing against Yugoslavia. You could say that “Wag the Dog” was like “The China Syndrome”, but it was not a stretch of the imagination to think that at some point Clinton was going to cheat and get caught, again.
What actually might be scary to think of was the theory behind “Wag the Dog” and “American Hero” used to orchestrate the manipulation of the American public after the attack on New York on 9/11? Were political spin-doctors used to push the United States into an all-out “War against Terrorism” on two different fronts? Did we go to war against Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction or was it pay-back for a failed assignation attempt by the Sadam Husain against George W Bush’s father GB1?
The American public was told by the George W. Bush administration that we needed to act so we didn’t find the “smoking gun” as a mushroom cloud over our own country, yet after we cleared out the Iraqi troops, we found no weapons of mass destruction just like the United Nation monitors told us before the war started. Was the American public deliberately lied to?
I think it is clear that yes, the fictional events of this movie not only could happen but probably have been happening for quite some time. I think the real question we should ask ourselves is what events in our country’s history were real and which ones were manufactured? Did we land on the moon, or like we see in the movie Capricorn One, was that fake? Did Elvis die on the toilet at Graceland or did President Richard Nixon make him a secret undercover Federal Agent used to save America from Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers and Mafia crime families during the 1970s? Were all the yellow ribbons tied around trees during the Iran Hostage Crises just a distraction for the fact that there was no hostage situation in Iran?
GREEN-LIT TODAY?
I do not think this movie could be made today. At least not exactly as the movie was made in 1997. Today the general public is not as concerned with sex-scandals as they once were. Twenty-three years ago just the accusation of an extramarital affair would end a politician’s career, look at Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. Just weeks after photos were released of him and “another woman”, his Presidential primary bid was over, despite the fact he was the front-runner.
But in 1992 President Bill Clinton was able to withstand the scrutiny over an extra-marital affair to become President, though he did have a lot of help from Ross Parot being a third party spoiler for then-President George H.W. Bush. And look at how the public feels today with the evangelical right saying they give President Donald Trump a pass on his past extramarital affairs, even with a porn-star.
Another reason I believe this movie would not be made today is the accusation that was waged against the film’s President. It is one thing to have an affair with a legal adult, in the movie the President is accused of sexually assaulting a minor. Not only a minor by a Fire-Fly Girl (Girl Scout). In the days of “Me Too” there is not a studio in the world that is going to touch this project. The public will forgive many things but child abuse is not one of them. As the Dustin Hoffman character said in the first act of this film, “He’s fucked”.
Now the movie that I believe could be made would be the original story of how the first Gulf War was manufactured by Hollywood to ensure the re-election of the first Bush administration. The author of the book liked the idea of television shows producing docudramas with real footage of a real event with actors and real-life participants telling the story; fiction interacting with real life. So Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel, ‘American Hero’, combines real life with fiction. This story is about the retention of power more than the cover-up of misdeeds. The only problem might be in whether or not the studio would need to get these real-life people to sign off on the use of their character
MEDIA LITERACY
After watching this movie, how can the American public believe anything the media tells us? With the use of Green-Screen, we can replicate anywhere in the world and possibly outside of this world, in the case of the question about the moon landing. The character of Brean causes one to doubt the beliefs we hold as true as whether or not the Iran Hostage situation was a real event.
Today we use media literacy to question new media such as Internet news sources, but this film shows the traditional media being manipulated by the spin-doctors with a fake war in Albania. It is easy to look at Internet sources such as Info-Wars and Alex Jones and call bullshit because of how bias their message is, but a lot more difficult when the fake news is coming from a news source that has been trusted for years.
As I stated above, I believe the television acts as the antagonist to our three main characters because this is where they encounter the barriers to reaching their goal of the re-election of this pedophile President. We can laugh when we see the fake-news Brean wants to be put out to the public because we as the audience are in on the planning, but when TV cuts down their plans it is not as humorous. Maybe it’s not so humorous to us because we are not a part of the other side of the story? Is the President’s political opponent, Senator Neal (Craig T. Nelson), using the media just the same as Brean? Does Neal have his own spin-doctors working against the President? There are a few lines in the dialog where Brean is being warned about Senator Neal, but he does not want to listen.
We as a public chose to believe the reality with which we are presented. Maybe we are all just asleep and life is but a dream, how would we know? Three times in the movie Brean is confronted with issues that blow up his plan and instead of fighting it, he accepts it for truth because “He saw it on TV”. If it is on TV it must be true? I think I agree with Ames's assessment after the plane crash when she grabs the portable TV and throws in on the ground, to which Brean asks, “What did TV ever do to you?”, and her answer is, “It screwed up the electoral process.”
DID I LIKE THE FILM?
I knew I was going to like the movie from the first scene when Ames tells Brean the President said, “Get me Conrad Brean” and the look on DeNiro’s face in reaction says “No shit!”. This reminded me of Donald Trump announcing, “Get me Roger Stone” when he was putting together his run for the White House back in 2015. Some have called this movie a dark satire on the state of politics in this country, but I didn’t find it dark. Dark would have required a larger body count than just one Hollywood producer that could not keep his mouth shut. Watching news of Trump’s life to date, I would surmise that there is some power in the use of ‘None-Disclosure Agreements’.
I have had a huge man-crush on the works of this screenwriter. David Mamet wrote one of my favorite, quotable movies of all time, ‘About Last Night’. Funny how the star of that movie, Jim Belushi, turned out to be from the ‘terrorist state’ of Albania. The dialog in both of these is fast-paced and hilarious. Whether its Rob Lowe and Jim Belushi in ‘About Last Night’ or Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman in ‘Wag the Dog’, each set of actors played off each other with fantastic scripts.
The two characters played by DiNiro and Hoffman also reminded me of two other characters they would play around ten years later in ‘Meet the Fockers’. Both actors seem to be playing the same characters in both movies. You just know that some time in Jack’s life before the Focker’s married into the circle of trust, that he had ordered someone to be killed by faking something ‘natural’ like a heart attack. We need to check in on that movie franchise to see if everyone is still breathing.
Woody Haralson as the war hero who turned out to be a nun-rapist reminded me of a dark cross between Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Rainman’ character and Woody’s portrayal of Larry Flint in the ‘People vs. Larry Flint’. The voice was defiantly the same voice he used playing Larry Flint, or at least after Flint was shot and crippled, but the mannerisms and dialog in ‘Wag the Dog’ were a spot-on ‘Rainman’. “Today’s my day in the yard”, “I got to get back because today we’re having pork -”, “and it’s definitely Wednesday because we do laundry on Wednesday”.
The plot to the film's story is laid out in three acts. The first act, The War, makes up the majority of the film, over one hour. Each sequential act takes less time to tell. The second act, The Rescue, only takes thirty minutes to tell and the final third act, The Funeral, is told in about fifteen minutes. I found irony in how Motss knew at the beginning that this story had to be told in three acts, but Brean said there would be only one act. When the “fit hits the shan” and the CIA shuts down the war, Motss announces, “We now have an act two”.
This movie ranks up there with ‘Network’ and ‘A Face in the Crowd’ as far as drawing the curtain back on what happens behind the scene with media. This time we get a look at how politics and media intersect and how one can manipulate the other without even a second thought. The movie should have been over when the CIA told Senator Neal about the plot, but instead, he used the media to announce the end of hostilities with Albania. Why didn’t he just expose the plot? Maybe because no one in Washington wants to reveal to the public how the sausage is made.
I wonder if this movie has any influence on the making of the ABC Television show ‘Scandal’. Are Conrad Brean and Olivia Pope alike? I think there are aspects of the Brean character in Pope but also I thing the Brean character is spread out over several characters in the ABC show. Olivia never really had to threaten to kill someone or send them to their death if they crossed her. But there were characters on the show that would do her bidding, even though it seems that the Pope character disdained the killing of anyone.
Speaking of killing, there are those threats throughout the movie from Brean. First to the actress, Stacey Lime, who is playing the young Albanian girl running from the terrorist who has killed her family with the little white kitten? Brean tells her before she films her green-screen news clip if she puts this gig on her resume, “they” will come to her house and kill her. Motss is warned multiple times about keeping his mouth shut, but in the end, he cannot do it and Brean gives the signal to the agents to take him out. That is where we learn that Brean is more than just a fixer.
Where is Waldo? Did you know that Barry Levinson, like Alfred Hitchcock, likes to appear in his movies? Well, this one is no different and if you look very closely in the green-screen scene, Barry is playing a director in the background. He also played a doctor in ‘Rainman’, Dave Garraway in ‘Quiz Show’, and a casting director in ‘Bugsy’. What I did not know before researching this paper is he also played in three Mel Brooks' movies, ‘History of the World Part 1’, ‘High Anxiety’, and ‘Silent Movie’.
CONCLUSION
Again what do you do if you’re an aide to a United States President that recklessly self-sabotages his chances for a second-term just eleven days before Election Day? What if a month before Election Day it was revealed that your billionaire President, who has refused to release his tax returns because he is “under audit”, is revealed to have drastically underpaid his federal income tax for years in ways that may be at least borderline criminal? What if he is found to have kept vital information from the public about a deadly pandemic that has killed over 200,000 people in less than six months? What if he blew up a Presidential debate and refused to denounce white supremacists?
How would you distract the public from a man that will not stay out of the public eye and will not stop self-sabotaging his own campaign? How about giving the President and his family the same virus affecting the world forcing him into isolation away from the public? Maybe by giving the President the virus, or faking it, a spin doctor might try to get the President to come back from isolation with a different attitude towards the virus and show some sort of humility towards the public and show empathy towards other people.
Now, what do you do if your president is Donald Trump who refuses to follow the plan, uses his illness to stage ‘off script’ dramatic scenes like ‘greeting his supporters’ at the hospital and taking off his mask before saluting his military detail for a full two minutes when he returns to the White House, telling the public the virus is nothing, not to be afraid of it, and denies he is contagious? If I were that White House aide, I’d send my resume to the Biden/Harris campaign and hope they were hiring.