Film Analysis: Wag The Dog

"Advertising is essentially truthful, except political advertising, which ... gets worse every year ... (It's) just the artful assembling of nominal facts into hideous, outrageous lies." - Bob Garfield, AdAge columnist

The ability of the media to deceive, particularly in the service of politics and politicians, reveals the worst of human nature. The 1997 film Wag The Dog is about how self-interest overrides the principles of truth and honesty. It raises questions about who really ‘owns’ the media; and demonstrates the influence the media can have on the public and how, when that influence is related to politics, the outcomes can have far reaching consequences. The related text I have chosen is a Leunig cartoon, which is a comment on the 2001 Howard Government refugee scandal. These texts show that the truth can be secondary to self-interested constructions of the truth, constructions that are designed to be manipulate or mislead the public.

Wag The Dog, directed by Barry Levinson, is a satirical film that explores the manipulation of the media’s

perspective and, by association, society’s perspective for political gain. The film’s title, Wag The Dog, suggests that a story can be influenced and controlled - suggesting the larger proportion of the dog’s body is controlled by its tail, comparable with a small number of politicians controlling the public’s perception. The film begins when the American president is accused of sexual misconduct two weeks before an election. To deflect the public’s attention, presidential advisor Conrad Brean, with the help of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss, creates a fake war in Albania. The diversion works, and the media and public are manipulated into believing the fabrication.

In an early scene, Brean puts his proposal to presidential adviser Winifred Ames:

Ames: Why Albania?
Brean: Why not?
Ames: What have they done to us?
Brean: What have they done FOR us? What do you know about them?
Ames: Nothing
Brean: See? They keep to themselves. Shifty. Untrustable.

This small sequence reveals the subtle manipulation of perception, showing how ignorance can be manipulated to create something more sinister. This shows two negative aspects of human nature- first, the tendency of the general public to insulate themselves from the wider world and second, politicians taking advantage of this to manipulate events for their own advantage. Another example of the worst of human nature is how the team who create the war fail to investigate the sexual misconduct claim. Whether the scandal was truthful or not is never questioned; the only discussion was about how to deflect the attention from it.

The film shows a definite link between the mechanisms of Hollywood and how politicians present themselves and their policies to the public. Stanley Motts has been hired to organise a fake war – a pageant - using the same tools as would be used in a Hollywood movie production. A scene with an actress playing a young Albanian girl shows subtle comedy when she is propped in front of a green screen holding a bag of chips, having been told that it would be photoshopped into a kitten later. The use of a Hollywood producer ensures that the public will be hooked into the story of the war the same way a film does. The film uses multiple screens in many scenes, with multiple perspectives to create meaning about one set of truths. The screen motif used highlights the importance of the media, as well as the link between politics and the film industry. Hollywood and politics are very similar in the delicate production and planning behind political ads and campaigns.

Another example of how politicians doctor the truth is the 2003 the Michael Leunig’s cartoon showing a politician (Sir Goodstrong Cardigan) speaking to the National Press Club about refugees, with the aim to sway the public’s perceptive.

The cartoonist has taken the idea of doctoring to an absurd extreme- repeating fear mongering words like ‘beware’, ‘terror’ and ‘evil’- when talking about Australian’s and himself, he uses words like ‘good’, ‘safe’ and ‘brave’.

The use of violent hand gestures, the childlike way he speaks and the repetition are Leunig’s way of commenting on the sly way politicians hammer home simplistic messages to the public- in the same way advertising does. The cartoon ends with ‘now I will take questions’ showing how ludicrous the speech is. This cartoon shows the worst aspect of human nature with an authority figure trying to change the public’s perspective for political

reasons.

Our ideas of truth have become very confused with the prevalence of ‘reality’ television, like Keeping Up With the Kardashian, - society is led to believe programs with the label of reality are the truth; even though these shows are constructed using the same conflicts and drama as a Hollywood film. This is even more prevalent in politics and the media, with these outlets skewing the public perspective. It seems like what politics rely on is most is be perceived as truthful rather what is actually the truth.
As Stanley Motss says: ‘Look at that! That is a complete f****ing fraud and it looks 100% real. This is the greatest work I’ve ever done in my life- because it’s so honest’

Another text that illustrates the way politicians have manipulated the truth for their own purposes is a radio interview with John Howard during the Children Overboard affair just a month prior to the November 2001 election. The Howard government circulated photos of a sinking boat, which depicts refugees “throwing” their children overboard. John Howard spoke on 2GB radio saying:

“There’s something to me, incompatible between someone who claims to be a refugee and somebody who would throw their own child into the sea. It offends the natural instinct of protection and delivering security and safety to your children”

However, the photos had been cropped so that the viewer wasn’t able to see another boat saving the children. Despite being informed that these photos were inaccurate, the Liberal Party decided to release them photos to the media, to incite fear of immigrants in order to gain support from the public for their asylum seeker policies. Much like the fake war in Wag The Dog, the government used this lie to make their party look like the best voting opinion, with the best policies. This particular scandal shows the worst of human nature, as the government both denied a safe home to, and defamed, the refugees for their own personal gain and to stay in power.

These texts all show politicians manipulating the truth to serve their own greed and need for power. Wag The Dog questions who ‘owns’ the media and reveals how easily the public’s perspective can be warped for politician’s advantaged. Leunig’s satirical cartoon shows a politician’s vicious attempts to sway public opinion to their own and, like the Howard scandal, disadvantage other people. All these texts show how self-interest overrides the truth, exhibiting the worst of human nature.