Does everyone remember the movie Wag the Dog? In case you don’t, the movie came out in ’97, and the plot revolved around efforts to pull attention off sexual advances made by the president to a young girl, a girl scout, just weeks before the election. In the film, a spin doctor and political elites hire a top Hollywood producer to script a distraction to help the president win back voters’ trust, shifting the focus away from what was really going on with the politician running the county.
Now, why Hollywood? Hollywood, in partnership with mainstream media, can feed a false narrative that is believable to the majority of the population. People are captured by mainstream media, the six o’clock news that reports all current local and world events with believable video clips and voiceover narratives. Basically, it comes down to the power of the elites to say, “Hey, look over here to the right,” when you should really be looking to the left and behind the scenes. Wag the Dog was about the power to manipulate the population through Hollywood and then use the media to reach and capture the attention of the people.
In Wag the Dog, a political group works behind the scenes with a spin doctor and an egocentric big-time Hollywood producer to brainstorm a narrative powerful enough to get the attention of the voting public. They have to reach them on an emotional level, so after tossing out a few ideas, they come up with the idea of a war. This is where the big Hollywood producer comes in, because they need to script the appearance of a war in big Hollywood fashion. They create a theme, a song, some visuals, and a slogan, all with Hollywood special effects. To pick the country the president is suddenly going to go to war with, they toss around a few and land on Albania. They rent a warehouse to use as a movie set. They create fantastic visuals, hire crisis actors, and add special effects, from screaming to the bombing of a village. In the background, a woman is running with a bag of chips, but the Hollywood producer tells the young female actor that the bag of chips she’s holding while ducking from bombs is just for the arm position, and later, they’ll replace it with a kitten or a baby using special effects.
The final clip is on the six o’clock news. Meanwhile, the crisis actor wants to put this latest gig on her resume, but the producers behind the show tell her not to, because if she does, people will come to her house and kill her. Basically, she has to hide. They also hire crisis actors to update the US daily on the state of the fake war in an effort to get the attention off the sex scandal involving the president. The images of horrors and atrocities involving innocent villagers are touching, reaching the hearts and minds of the people of the world, who will forever remember the image of the screaming woman running, terrified, clutching her baby while her village is being bombed behind her by terrorists this political group needs the people to hate. Of course, this is the same woman the producers have told to hide or be hunted down. I thought one of the greatest lines in the movie was “This is politics at its finest.”
After coming up with the distraction, a war, the big Hollywood producer asks the spin doctors and the group of political handlers, why Albania? He needs a reason to tie it together and make it part of the story, to make it believable. Again, they toss out ideas. The big Hollywood producer knows how to pull the story together to create much-needed drama, fear, and hype that will touch the heartstrings and captivate the minds of the people, so their story is that the enemy, Albania, is targeting the US because of its way of life, its love of freedom, and they hate the US people for that. One of the storylines they put out to the news is that Albanian terrorists have placed a suitcase bomb in Canada in order to infiltrate the US.
The movie includes different strategies used by the spin doctors, one of which is the aforementioned video segment of a young Albanian girl running from terrorists in her village. This video segment looks like a news report but instead has been created by a PR firm, advertising agency, and government agency. Yet it’s presented as an actual news report, with a running theme to drive fear, fear, and more fear. But one of the three-letter agencies that isn’t part of this theater figures out what the political group is doing with this fake war and, after pulling over the spin doctors, basically announces that the war has ended. But because people will again be looking at the president, in comes a second fake story about a secret American unit trapped behind enemy lines and a hero who has been left behind. When a photograph emerges of this soldier hero, they have to make him human in a way that easily captivates the hearts, minds, and emotions of the American people, so the producers relay the idea of a morse code on his shirt that spells out, “Courage, Mom.”
That is enough to get to the people and start a movement. Newspapers and mainstream media news outlets build off each other and publish news identical to what all the other news stations are streaming. Add in a plane crash, a dead war hero, and a funeral broadcast over all the national news, and the public ends up mourning a hero who doesn’t exist. Election day comes and goes, and the scandalous president defeats his rival and is re-elected. Now the media is all about the new election. Everyone who’s part of the spin doctor’s team and all the politicians celebrate their victory behind the scenes. But then the Hollywood producer with his big ego wants to take credit for the president’s successful re-election. He’s warned by the political elites and the spin doctor not to do it, but he doesn’t listen, so the spin doctor and political elites give orders to the secret service to stop him, whatever it takes.
The next morning, the news reports that the big-time Hollywood producer has been found dead at home from an apparent heart attack.
If you haven’t watched Wag the Dog, watch it. It’s a great movie.
And remember what “wag the dog” means, to deliberately overshadow an important event and get the public’s eyes off of it by drawing their attention to something else.
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