Exigence In Wag The Dog

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Throughout the film Wag The Dog, Bitzer’s three concepts of exigence, audience, and constraints are all unmistakably used. The first concept of the three, exigence means imperfection marked by urgency. The first scene that is an example of exigence in the film would be the sex scandal that went on between the president and a girl in her teens, only 2 weeks before the Presidential Election. This is a wonderful example of exigence because the imperfection is that the president is being blamed for participating in sexual activity with an underage girl and the urgency is that this happened only 11 days before he is up for his reelection term. The political team including a famous producer in Hollywood named Stanley, and a spin-doctor named Conrad worked together and made the imperfection disappear. Conrad distracted the voting public from the sex scandal by hiring the famous producer from to put together a fake war with Albania. Constructing the fake war was intended to distract the public but ended up leading to even more problems and another scene involving exigence in the film. The scene was when the president decided to create an imitation war scene for the media. The issue arose when the actress that was hired to participate in the scene decided to put it down as an acting job on her resume. This was an issue because by putting the acting job on her resume, it would become public knowledge that this was a fake war scene and it would ruin the whole project. This would definitely put the president in a bad light and in turn make him be portrayed in an even worse way than he was to begin with. The second of the three concepts is audience. Audience has the most power out of the three concepts because the audience determines if the ... ... middle of paper ... ...festival going on in Albania and it is known to be an honor for the person who gets the first sheaf of wheat from the harvest. When the Albanian girl offered the gift it was displayed on news stations around the world. Another way that pathos was used in this film was when the war hero Old Shoe died unexpectedly and he then was given the highest honors in the military. Also a huge funeral production was made in his honor with the intent that it would be shown on the news. The public ate this up and enjoyed seeing the funeral because no one wants to see a war hero die. In general, death is a great way to stir up emotion in people because it reminds people of their fears. Death sparks the fear that you will never see that person again and also the fear of dying one day as well. Death is a known reality that everyone has to face but most people avoid talking about.

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