Wag the Dog

What happens when you put together an all-star cast, a sex scandal, and Albania? A comedy that manages to hit hard with a bigger picture: that the media is a heck of a good way to distract people from the news.

A spin-doctor (Conrad Brean, played by Robert De Niro) is called in to clean up a mess when a teenage girl tells the press that the president had sex with her. The news came at the worst possible time for the president; the election is only days away, and the story looked poised to ruin his hopes of a reelection. Brean is convinced that, if they can only distract the media for a few days, they will be able to secure a reelection for the president. The ultimate distraction is, of course, a war, and because there is no enemy in the world (ahh, 1997...), they have to create a war from the ground up.

With the help of an enigmatic movie producer (Stanley Motss, played by Dustin Hoffman), they proceed to do just that. With a few sly maneuvers, they are able to convince the media that there is an impending crisis in Albania, and just like that the public and press are latched onto the story of war.

Wag the Dog was a well-made movie with a good amount of Hollywood twists thrown into the mix, but in essence it was just a movie about how strategic leaks and planned-out coyness by a press secretary can get people hooked onto a story that seems real. It was interesting because from the perspective of the Hollywood producers, creating the fake war was just like making a good movie- marketing, promotions, teasers, and heroes all played a big role in the way the fake war was displayed to the American public. In the midst of the war, the public conveniently forgot about the sex scandal that threatened the president because they were shown a situation where people's lives were at risk.

Compare that with how this most recent real war was sold: acronyms such as WMD, seldom heard before the run-up to the war, became known and feared. SCUD's, Saddam, and people living under a fascist regime all became prime actors in the show that got people to believe that there was need for another war in the middle east. The president could well have ordered troops into the region without selling the war through the media, but it would have gotten less support than it did in the first place, and it could have cost him the reelection.

It all seemed so shockingly easy in a world where a bag of Tostitos can become a kitten, where two different sex criminals can each become heroes, and patriotism can be fed through a cell phone to the ears of the media and public. The film is an obvious critique of the relationship between the media and politics in the real world, in a time when it is quickly becoming apparent how important the two are to each other.