Wag The Dog

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul"


Wag the Dog is a 1997 black comedy film starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, co-starring Anne Heche, Denis Leary and William H. Macy about a Washington spin doctor who, merely days before a presidential election, distracts the electorate from a sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood film producer to construct a fake war with Albania. 

The scheme enlists the aid of a country music singer, who creates several theme songs for the war; a "fad king"; and a costume designer, who helps create a fictional special forces unit to fight the war's supposed battles.

The title of the film comes from an idiomatic English-language expression "the tail wagging the dog", which is commented at the beginning of the film by a caption that reads:

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

An ironic twist was the release of the film just prior to President Clinton's sex scandal and the subsequent bombing of terrorists strongholds in Africa.

When an unnamed president of the United States is caught in a closed room making advances on an underage "Firefly Girl" (the fictional equivalent of a Girl Scout) less than two weeks before re-election, Conrad Brean (DeNiro), a top notch spin-doctor, is brought in to try to take the public attention away from the scandal.

He decides to construct a fake war with Albania, hoping the media will concentrate on this instead. In order to come up with his 'war', he contacts a Hollywood producer named Stanley Motss (Hoffman), who brings in a series of specialists who help construct a theme song, build up interest, and fake some footage of an orphan in Albania.

In the end, with the election done and the president re-elected, everything seems fine – until the producer finds out from the news outlets that the media are crediting the president's win to his tired "Don't change horses in mid stream" campaign slogan, rather than Motss's elaborate plans. 

Motss announces that he will call the media to "set them straight," despite Brean's warning him that he is "toying with his life." When Motss refuses to back down, Brean has him killed and makes it look as if he had a heart-attack while tanning next to his pool. [Wikipedia]