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.In Mr.Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Jimmy Stewart s title charac-ter embodies the triumph of simple, straightforward Capra-esque political andmoral values over entrenched political cynicism.But there is no such victory inWag the Dog.It belongs in the same cynical category as Orson Welles s CitizenKane (1941; remember Charles Foster Kane saying, I ll provide the war ), Sid-ney Lumet s Power (1986) starring Richard Gere as a corrupt political spinmaster,and Michael Ritchie s The Candidate (1972) in which naïve Bill McKay s (RobertRedford) political campaign is ruthlessly orchestrated by a professional politicalspinmaster (Peter Boyle).What all of these films say is that politics in the sev-enties of The Candidate and the eighties of Power is more and more being runby political professionals and controlled by the press and electronic media.Theultimate extension of their quite realistic theme culminates in the postmodern-ist satire of Wag the Dog.What Wag the Dog says, taking this theme of politicalmanipulation to an even more cynical level, is that the professionals are no longereven political and the press is merely a duped vehicle for a much more cynicalgame of spin the candidate. Ï%Politics and Spin 69In Wag the Dog the terrible absurdist truth of the power of media spin comesout after the plane carrying Brean, Motss, Winifred, and Schumann (WoodyHarrelson), the psycho convicted of raping a nun who they are all trying to spininto a war hero, crashes.They all survive the crash, as does a single functioningTV set, which Winifred, in frustration, throws her shoe at:Brean: Leave it alone.What did television ever do to you?Winifred: It destroyed the electoral process.In a film that so rigorously denies the possibility of truth in deference to thepower of spin, small kernels of dark truth (like Winifred s frustrated answer)sometimes surface in the film s sea of cynicism.At the very beginning of Wag the Dog, when Winifred first tells Brean aboutthe president having sex with the Fire Fly girl just off the Oval Office, the con-cept of truth is rejected out of hand:Brean: Who s got the story?Winifred: Don t you want to know if it s true?Brean: What difference does it make if it s true.It s a story and if it breaks they regoing to run it.Truth has no place in the nineties political equation: TRUTH = TV/SPIN.Theonly number that truly crunches is the effect of the spin factor on TV ratings.One SCUD stud plus one smart bomb down one chimney equals the truth ofthe Gulf War.Like everything else in the nineties, truth, has been taken over bythe power of spin.But the cynicism of Wag the Dog makes the political operatives of The Can-didate and Power look like naïve Pollyannas.Wag the Dog s political cynicism isaligned with two much more sinister films about the evil potential for spin, Cap-ricorn One (1978) and The Parallax View (1974).In these two earlier films, truthbecomes exactly the kind of pageant that Brean describes to Motss in Wag theDog.In Capricorn One corrupt Space Agency executives fake a moon landing byshooting it as a studio TV show.In The Parallax View, journalist Joe Frady (War-ren Beatty) becomes the fall guy in an elaborate political assassination conspiracy.What both of these films share with Wag the Dog, however, is one essential truth:a TV image can be used to convince anyone to believe anything.One of the most compelling scenes in Wag the Dog could be a scene out ofMichelangelo Antonioni s Blow-Up (1966) or Francis Ford Coppola s The Con-versation (1974) or Brian De Palma s Blow Out (1981) or Richard Rush s TheStunt Man (1980).What all of these films have in common are extended scenesin which technology attempts to simulate reality8 as a means of learning orunderstanding some truth, constructing some reality out of a series of imagesor sounds.Blow-Up, The Conversation, and Blow Out are all essentially the samemovie, and in their pivotal techno-simulation scenes, their protagonists all try toreconstruct the commission of a crime out of fragmentary images and sounds.In Ï%70 The Films of the NinetiesThe Stunt Man, an all-powerful film director cuts and recuts a scene in which astunt man supposedly dies resulting in so many different versions that no one hasany idea what really happened.The compelling techno-simulation scene in Wag the Dog involves the makingof a phony news bite that depicts a young Albanian girl running through herburning, bombed village carrying her kitten.The whole scene is created by thedigital overlay of visual and audio effects.First, the special effects technicianshave the actress playing the Albanian girl run toward the camera in front of ablue screen.She is given a bag of Tostitos corn chips to carry as she runs so that,when they add the white kitten later, her arms will be in the right carrying posi-tion.Then, the blue screen image is taken into the digital editing room and thevillage, a bridge for her to run across, and the kitten are added digitally to theimage. Give me some flames, Motss orders the digital editor. Now the soundof screaming, and the Anne Frank sirens. The creation of this news bite is the making of a movie within the movie, ametamovie.Wag the Dog becomes a movie about making movies, only in thiscase the movie that is being made is not to entertain the American people butto politically and historically deceive them, to cynically spin their sympathy (thekitten, puhleeze!) toward believing in this nonexistent Albanian war.Winifred,the president s aide, takes one look at this finished news bite that Brean andMotss have created and rejoices: We can leak that to the press and they candownload it. Immediately upon finishing and leaking their masterpiece to the press, Breanand Winifred are detained and interrogated by CIA Agent Young (WilliamMacy), who, using CIA satellites and on-the-ground sources as proof, insists that there is no war! Nonplussed, Brean answers, Of course there s a war.We rewatching it on television. The appearance of war, the TV image, is everything,and the truth is nothing compared to the power of media spin.Brean even citesunimpeachable authorities (though not exactly) to support his version of truth: As Plato once said, It don t matter how the fuck you get there, just so you getthere. In Wag the Dog s second act, which focuses completely on the techno-magicand delivery of spin, Motss consistently uses movie imagery to describe the pro-cess of creating this pageant of spin [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.In Mr.Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Jimmy Stewart s title charac-ter embodies the triumph of simple, straightforward Capra-esque political andmoral values over entrenched political cynicism.But there is no such victory inWag the Dog.It belongs in the same cynical category as Orson Welles s CitizenKane (1941; remember Charles Foster Kane saying, I ll provide the war ), Sid-ney Lumet s Power (1986) starring Richard Gere as a corrupt political spinmaster,and Michael Ritchie s The Candidate (1972) in which naïve Bill McKay s (RobertRedford) political campaign is ruthlessly orchestrated by a professional politicalspinmaster (Peter Boyle).What all of these films say is that politics in the sev-enties of The Candidate and the eighties of Power is more and more being runby political professionals and controlled by the press and electronic media.Theultimate extension of their quite realistic theme culminates in the postmodern-ist satire of Wag the Dog.What Wag the Dog says, taking this theme of politicalmanipulation to an even more cynical level, is that the professionals are no longereven political and the press is merely a duped vehicle for a much more cynicalgame of spin the candidate. Ï%Politics and Spin 69In Wag the Dog the terrible absurdist truth of the power of media spin comesout after the plane carrying Brean, Motss, Winifred, and Schumann (WoodyHarrelson), the psycho convicted of raping a nun who they are all trying to spininto a war hero, crashes.They all survive the crash, as does a single functioningTV set, which Winifred, in frustration, throws her shoe at:Brean: Leave it alone.What did television ever do to you?Winifred: It destroyed the electoral process.In a film that so rigorously denies the possibility of truth in deference to thepower of spin, small kernels of dark truth (like Winifred s frustrated answer)sometimes surface in the film s sea of cynicism.At the very beginning of Wag the Dog, when Winifred first tells Brean aboutthe president having sex with the Fire Fly girl just off the Oval Office, the con-cept of truth is rejected out of hand:Brean: Who s got the story?Winifred: Don t you want to know if it s true?Brean: What difference does it make if it s true.It s a story and if it breaks they regoing to run it.Truth has no place in the nineties political equation: TRUTH = TV/SPIN.Theonly number that truly crunches is the effect of the spin factor on TV ratings.One SCUD stud plus one smart bomb down one chimney equals the truth ofthe Gulf War.Like everything else in the nineties, truth, has been taken over bythe power of spin.But the cynicism of Wag the Dog makes the political operatives of The Can-didate and Power look like naïve Pollyannas.Wag the Dog s political cynicism isaligned with two much more sinister films about the evil potential for spin, Cap-ricorn One (1978) and The Parallax View (1974).In these two earlier films, truthbecomes exactly the kind of pageant that Brean describes to Motss in Wag theDog.In Capricorn One corrupt Space Agency executives fake a moon landing byshooting it as a studio TV show.In The Parallax View, journalist Joe Frady (War-ren Beatty) becomes the fall guy in an elaborate political assassination conspiracy.What both of these films share with Wag the Dog, however, is one essential truth:a TV image can be used to convince anyone to believe anything.One of the most compelling scenes in Wag the Dog could be a scene out ofMichelangelo Antonioni s Blow-Up (1966) or Francis Ford Coppola s The Con-versation (1974) or Brian De Palma s Blow Out (1981) or Richard Rush s TheStunt Man (1980).What all of these films have in common are extended scenesin which technology attempts to simulate reality8 as a means of learning orunderstanding some truth, constructing some reality out of a series of imagesor sounds.Blow-Up, The Conversation, and Blow Out are all essentially the samemovie, and in their pivotal techno-simulation scenes, their protagonists all try toreconstruct the commission of a crime out of fragmentary images and sounds.In Ï%70 The Films of the NinetiesThe Stunt Man, an all-powerful film director cuts and recuts a scene in which astunt man supposedly dies resulting in so many different versions that no one hasany idea what really happened.The compelling techno-simulation scene in Wag the Dog involves the makingof a phony news bite that depicts a young Albanian girl running through herburning, bombed village carrying her kitten.The whole scene is created by thedigital overlay of visual and audio effects.First, the special effects technicianshave the actress playing the Albanian girl run toward the camera in front of ablue screen.She is given a bag of Tostitos corn chips to carry as she runs so that,when they add the white kitten later, her arms will be in the right carrying posi-tion.Then, the blue screen image is taken into the digital editing room and thevillage, a bridge for her to run across, and the kitten are added digitally to theimage. Give me some flames, Motss orders the digital editor. Now the soundof screaming, and the Anne Frank sirens. The creation of this news bite is the making of a movie within the movie, ametamovie.Wag the Dog becomes a movie about making movies, only in thiscase the movie that is being made is not to entertain the American people butto politically and historically deceive them, to cynically spin their sympathy (thekitten, puhleeze!) toward believing in this nonexistent Albanian war.Winifred,the president s aide, takes one look at this finished news bite that Brean andMotss have created and rejoices: We can leak that to the press and they candownload it. Immediately upon finishing and leaking their masterpiece to the press, Breanand Winifred are detained and interrogated by CIA Agent Young (WilliamMacy), who, using CIA satellites and on-the-ground sources as proof, insists that there is no war! Nonplussed, Brean answers, Of course there s a war.We rewatching it on television. The appearance of war, the TV image, is everything,and the truth is nothing compared to the power of media spin.Brean even citesunimpeachable authorities (though not exactly) to support his version of truth: As Plato once said, It don t matter how the fuck you get there, just so you getthere. In Wag the Dog s second act, which focuses completely on the techno-magicand delivery of spin, Motss consistently uses movie imagery to describe the pro-cess of creating this pageant of spin [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]