Brigitte
Lacombe’s iconic New Yorker magazine image
of David Mamet writing his Oscar-nominated adapted screenplay for Wag the Dog in his cedar cabin on his
farmhouse in Cabot, Vermont, in 1997. He is using an Olympic SM portable
typewriter.
My
American friends appear to be deeply divided over who to vote for on Tuesday week.
Herman Price, no doubt, would have been keeping his fingers crossed that politics
stayed out of the equation when the faithful gathered in West Virginia for the
annual QWERTY Award fest this weekend - though there were some rednecks in the mix. I
can empathise. With just 240 hours left until E-Day, there remains a choice between
a candidate accused of making advances to young women, the unwelcome involvement
of a government intelligence agency, a potential whistleblower who was knocked
off and, in the background, a war - of sorts (and not all that distant from
Syria). Sound familiar?
'Truth, justice and other special effects'
Yep, last night we got out the DVD of Barry
Levinson’s 1997 black comedy Wag the Dog, adapted screenplay by David Mamet, and reminded ourselves that there’s really very little
new in the wacky world of United States Presidential election campaigns. The
movie’s 20th anniversary will be marked by the inauguration next
year of the 58th US president and commander-in-chief, two full decades after the candidates came straight from Mamet’s lurid imagination. The action in the
screenplay, eerily, starts 11 days out from a presidential election. OK, so Wag the Dog is heavily coated-on
cynicism, but how else can one view from this considerable distance the shambles
that is the showdown between Mr Trump and Madam Clinton?
Mamet’s screenplay was an original rewrite after an earlier
adaption by Hilary Henkin of Larry Beinhart's book American Hero, which came out in 1993 as a satirical conspiracy
theory novel. It hypothesised that Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait in early
1991 had been scripted and choreographed as a ploy to get George H.W. Bush re-elected
(taking a cue from Margaret Thatcher's similar war in the Falkland Islands).
Mamet has Washington spin doctor Conrad Brean (played by Robert De Niro) set out to distract the electorate from a presidential sex scandal. Brean hires a
Hollywood film producer (Stanley Motss, based squarely on Robert Evans and
played brilliantly by Dustin Hoffman, a role for which Hoffman won a best actor
Oscar nomination) to construct a fake war with Albania. Kirsten Dunst plays a young
actress playing a supposed Albanian civilian war victim, presumably the real-life
grand-daughter of the left-behind-in-Vienna Harry Lime (this is clever stuff from
Mamet). The CIA gets involved, first wanting to expose the phony war then abruptly
electing to end it. Wag the Dog, even
more eerily, was released a month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal
and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by
the Clinton administration.
In the great tradition of Dr Strangelove, Mamet’s wonderfully drawn characters include a seriously
deranged soldier (Sergeant William ‘The Old Shoe’ Schumann), played with much
conviction by Woody Harrelson. Anne Heche is equally impressive at Brean’s
assistant Winifred Ames.
At the time of Wag
the Dog’s release, Chicago Sun-Times
reviewer Roger Ebert said, “The movie is a satire that contains just enough
realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like Dr Strangelove, it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder.” The
wondering, I’m afraid, is over. Little did Ebert know that in 2016, Wag the Dog would become frighteningly less
satirical and take on a great deal more realistic ballast. It is no longer teasingly
plausible, but an actual commentary on the presidential election. Oh, how
clearly Mamet saw it coming!
With neither candidate fit for the office of President the movie could be more true than thought. All we can do is vote and as our money states "in God We Trust." Hillary is untrustworthy, and I doubt Donald. Never thought I'd see such a bad election. I blame a 2 party system and news liberals who refuse to cover any independent or alternative party.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to consider how the general consensus, every voting year, is that it's the worst year ever. Among those who do not blindly follow one party or another, at the very least. The beauty of our Federal Republic is that even with a terrible president, most of the actual power to govern, and thus impact the lives of residents and the world at large, resides in the Congress, and the State and local governments. The president is, of course, the figurehead of the United States, and nowadays wields far more power than perhaps the founding fathers had intended, but in 4 years the people will have another opportunity to elect someone else. There have been good presidents, there have been mediocre presidents, and there have been terrible presidents that let half the nation secede and did nothing about it (here's looking at you, Buchanan). But no matter what the world will go on, and we're only one nation among many.
ReplyDeleteI don't blame the media, they're just doing their job as dictated by the people who own the media companies. I don't blame the two-party system, we've had that for most of our history (Albeit with Federalists and Whigs at the beginning). I blame a public that votes with their emotions, rather than their minds.
As I drove through rural Ohio, seeing about 1000 Trump signs and 5 Clinton signs, I wondered whether political acrimony would infect the typewriter lovers' reunion. But it did not, thanks in part to a big jug in which we were supposed to deposit $5 for every mention of a candidates' name, and other amounts for other political buzzword. (I believe Bernie Sanders cost $4.99.)
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