The Tar Pit

Ante Scriptum: Post-WWII, America was quite possibly the coolest place on this ball called Earth, at least for a while. I am sure that historians will spend decades if not centuries debating how exactly it went from that point to being one of the shittiest places to live, under the doubtful assumption that the mere existence of most folks in that space counts as living. So under this sad circumstance I really, really, really can't stand these movies anymore, but someone recommended it to me, so I here I am reviewing it; and for a good reason, namely that it recursively depicts the enshittification process -- that is, as if the situations depicted therein, as well as the movie itself, as well as the context in which it was created, as if all of these provide a crystal clear explanation of how America went from A to B. That being said...

Wag the Dog¹ is a political dark comedy which, along with other films such as Idiocracy, Charlie Wilson's War, Dr. Strangelove, Burn After Reading², as well as masterpieces such as The Truman Show, Mulholland Drive and so on and so forth, illustrate what a self-mockery American life has become; with a particular focus on the public office, say, that of the president³.

Anyways, the whole premise is that president fucks a scout girl right before the elections, and somehow this goes public, so his campaign team, led by one Conrad Brean (De Niro), need to find a creative way to mitigate the situation. Nevermind the implications this would have had in a year such as 2025, when everyone and their dog keep screaming about Epstein. The whole angle is focused on how to distract the public, especially given that timing is everything and well, the president -- who, tellingly enough, has but a minor role in the whole movie -- needs to win "his" second term. So our good Brean comes up with the idea of calling up a film producer, Stanley Motss (Hoffman), to stage a fake war involving some Albanian terrorists who would supposedly want to nuke the motherland. Does this sound familiar to you? because this lines up with most presidencies in the last three decades or so⁴. Anyways, the whole thing is a Great Success (tm), and everything's "fine" in the end, depending on how you look at it.

I think that the value of the movie resides not in the fact that it reveals this kind of consensus-making mechanism -- by now it's probably obvious to everyone, to the "crying wolf" point where the so-called public is chronically distrustful of anything⁵ -- but in the minute details of how exactly this sort of propaganda is produced. The video post-processing, of the crackpot "the moon landings were faked" ilk, the "inspiring" musical "defend ourdemocracy" moments, the viralization of "old shoe"-throwing -- all these are absolutely superb, in the sense that they made me, at least judging by my understanding of TV productions, buy into the whole process entirely. You cannot simply look at the news with the same eyes after watching this.

I mean, let's look at covid for example. Six years after the whole thing started, don't fucking tell me that the isolation and the vaxxing policies were "for the public good". People around me are still afraid of exposing themselves and their children to the common cold, and while some may do so for good reason⁶, the vast majority are healthy except in their heads that have been brainwashed by the daily agitprop. Don't tell me that wasn't carefully planned by people who knew exactly how human psychology works and what traumas this kind of propaganda could instill. Call me a crackpot if you will, but also, remember when they told you to wear masks in public places, and then how the next day you didn't wear them anymore and somehow you lived just the same as you did before, probably because the war in Ukraine scared covid away or something.

The point isn't even that the propaganda machine works; it's that it works by quite easily spinning a few words the right way, and that whichever argument you'd bring in to counter it, e.g. that "millions of people could be fed by simply not firing the rockets", will be absorbed into the discourse. But above that, the more important moral of the film is that, well, just as the title says:

Why does a dog wag its tail?
Because a dog is smarter than its tail.
If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

and that this is the precise sad situation that we'll find ourselves in until the whole deal slowly and inevitably crumbles into pieces, with or without WWIII.

That aside: a really neat production; you can tell that the occasional security guard or the alien driver are placed there for a well-rounded reason, and you don't even need to watch it twice to catch on to the subtleties. The music is top-notch, the imagery is as nice as it could have been for 1997 and De Niro, Hoffman, Heche and Harrelson are simply great, much like a Caragiu, Rădulescu, Constantin and Călinescu during communist times. Except on a significantly bigger budget.

Filed under: food for the soul.
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