Anne Heche contemplates being the meat in a Legend Sandwich…

Conflation Nation.

“Of course there’s a war – I saw it on TV.”
–Robert De Niro, WAG THE DOG.

War is only real if you let them get away with it. As George Carlin used to say, “Why do the troops keep turning up?” But even if the troops didn’t turn up for active duty, WAG THE DOG is an example of what the government can do with a little false-flag media.

WAG THE DOG is only a movie. It’s ostensibly a “satire” but as Roger Ebert insightfully observes, “It is getting harder for satire to stay ahead of reality.”

The U.S. President in a sex scandal. What can the American government do to atone for it? Not apologize to the public, or make amends, or even try to make the president a better man – but manufacture a fake war to take the focus off him, just two weeks before an election.

He’s termed a government spin doctor in the junkets, but Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) is what mobsters would call a “cleaner.” (And isn’t the government just a legalized form of thug life?) He makes problems go away. He and the White House PR aide (Anne Heche) manufacture the “war” with Albania (“because no one knows where it is or what’s happening there”) with the help of a Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman, channeling Robert Evans).

Aided by Denis Leary (facilitator) and Willie Nelson (composing a theme song for the conflict); bringing home a fake war vet, who happens to be PTSD to the gills (Woody Harrelson), and tailed by William H. Macy (CIA).

I’m biting my tongue here on the real life parallels of American government. WAG THE DOG is an allegory of this Orwellian society sometimes called America, where government manufactures crises in order to solve them and pretend efficiency. Like the bailout crisis of 2008; like the debt ceiling crisis of 2011. Who caused them? Not us. Who “solved” them? Not us. But the taxes and fortunes of the oblivious American people were raided by the American government as excuse for the quelling of those crises.

So the uncomfortable dichotomy in WAG THE DOG is its biting humor (for the audacity of the liars in this story) tempered with outrage (for the audacity of the liars in real life that this story bases itself on).

Movie brings together acting legends De Niro and Hoffman, cheekily playing off each other like a devil against an atheist; De Niro’s diabolical twinkle in his eye says, ‘Do right by me or you will burn in a lake of fire’ and Hoffman’s cute obliviousness doesn’t truly believe a lake of fire exists unless he produces the movie about it.

Flooding the media with war images produced by Motss, Brean can safely proclaim to his CIA questioners who doubt the veracity of the war, “Of course there’s a war – I saw it on TV!”

And our minds again wander to the terrifying reality of Orwell’s America: how the Bush admin flooded the media with “news conferences” that they engineered themselves as propaganda to showcase their murderous policies like Shock and Awe, and nonsensical programs like No Child Left Behind; to check off their ever-moving benchmarks in the fake War On Terror; to “prove” their transparency (ironically, by being duplicitous!). It’s not just the felons in the Bush administration; every government finagles the media, but the Bush Klan were so hamhanded and arrogant that they blew it for everyone. Now we know it is common practice to hire PR companies like Burson-Marsteller to “re-brand” activities, entities, corporations, even policies, to repackage lies and malfeasance.

“… the administration’s ambitions to manage the news knew no bounds…”
–Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, writing about Condi Rice’s attempt to keep bin Laden videos out of the media.

In WAG THE DOG, as in real life, they plant “reporters” in press conferences to ask questions that they answer with their spin; they disallow legitimate investigative reporters into their midst for fear of diluting the message; they preclude unfavorable coverage by threatening the news networks with lack of access (i.e. either report the lies or report nothing at all; any “news” is better than no news)…

Released in 1997 (when Clinton was prosecuting his own underhanded wars with little or no media coverage), whether this movie is satire or fact, it is undeniably prophetic, because in 2011, this is exactly how “war” is being prosecuted in America – via the media. Yes, there are ground troops and people dying in Iraq and Afghanistan (what Dubya liked to call “over there”) but it’s less than 1% of the American population who are involved or who know people involved in this political skirmish that has no reason and no goal. America is not “at war” – there are no bombers droning overhead, no blackouts, no rationing, and the only ruined streets and bridges are those that the local governments choose to ignore, choosing to funnel that taxpayer money into their own pockets. For America, war is an entertainment diversion; it only exists on TV.

(On the day I was writing this article, political commentator Lawrence O’Donnell made an observation about how the majority of America doesn’t even realize it is at war: “…a nation where it is impossible to in any way experience a country at war, a nation where not a single deprivation has been suffered because the country has been at war for a decade; a nation where no one has to wait in line for bread or fuel or anything else in short supply because of war…” Full disclosure: it was in a different context, but it corroborates everything I stated above.)

If you plop a person anywhere in America with no access to media, they could live out their life oblivious to America supposedly involved in “two wars” and innumerable illegal skirmishes ‘pon de side. If you did not turn on the news, would you ever know about drone attacks in Libya, or Yemen, or Pakistan? It’s just a frivolous game that politicians think it’s their job to play. Assholes. As Keith Olbermann used to say, “George W. Bush is having a war in Iraq – for the sake of having a war in Iraq.”

As Brean and his associates escalate the “war,” they escalate the lies to unimaginably audacious proportions, the aide constantly wondering if the lies will “take” with the public. Of course they do. When TV talks, people listen.

How many citizens of the indoctrinated United States of America will come away from WAG THE DOG knowing that it was a riotous satire once upon a short time ago, but has turned into a depiction of unethical real life political engineering? Only much tamer.

END

A few nights ago I accidentally watched HANNIBAL on cable. Surfing with the alien, my remote became my god, channeling for high-grade sewage, while I helplessly stood by and made bagels. (Cream cheese, m’dear?) Settling unnervingly on the couch with kippers and chardonnay, I found I had lost my towel. And the movie only made matters worse… Julianne Moore played Jodie Foster, while Anthony Hopkins played a psycho butler. And what’s with the lambs? (My brain hurts…)

The Violence Of The Hams.

I have seen THE EXORCIST, I have seen THE OMEN, I have seen THE SIXTH SENSE, I have seen the face of Death in Bergman’s SEVENTH SEAL – yet I was still unprepared for the bone-chilling horror I experienced in HANNIBAL, watching Julianne Moore’s acting.

Julianne Moore Advisory:

• If the role doesn’t call for you to get your tits out, turn it down.
• Pick an accent and stick with it.
• Get a tan.
• Get a day job.
• Get a hairstyle.
• Stop ruining what could otherwise be reasonably solid movies, by appearing in them.
• Don’t wear those pants.
• Take an acting lesson.
• Use makeup that makes you look less like a bloodless zombie.
• When your father said, “You’ll never make it as an actor”, he was right.
• Apologize to everyone who saw HANNIBAL.
• Call Jodie Foster and offer to wash her car for a year.
• Learn to live with no talent.

Brain Food

Ridley Scott, the brilliant director who helmed ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER and GLADIATOR, fell asleep during production and let a monkey take over.

Ray Liotta phoned it in. Maybe it was the fact that Lecter was ultimately going to slice open the top of his skull to eat his brain, which prompted Hair & Makeup to neglect giving him a decent hairstyle for this movie. Look up “pointy-headed freak” in the dictionary and there’s a picture of Ray in a production still from HANNIBAL.

Scott Glenn – where are you?

Thomas Harris, author of Hannibal, the followup to his Silence Of The Lambs, perpetrated the same sin that Michael Crichton committed in his Jurassic epoch – wrote the same book with a bigger bank account. Oh, he also put in some crazy unbalanced shit because…. well, because people were expecting him to put in some crazy unbalanced shit. Like the book, from which the movie-makers drew about 50% of their storyline, the film is… predictably gruesome. Evisceration? Coming right up. Biting people’s faces off? – you betcha! Blood spurting from severed arteries as if from a fire hose? Oooo!, sign me up for that!  Whereas director Jonathan Demme’s taut psycho-thriller, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), took us on a seat-gripping psychological foray into the masterfully manipulative mind of Hannibal Lecter, we’ve ended up in FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE HANNIBAL YEARS – a slasher film for the faux-cerebral; Jason quoting Shakespeare.

Jodie – I don’t blame you for not reconsidering, honey! Seeing this revamped version of her character, we realize that gone is the complex fledgling FBI agent we empathized with in SILENCE,to be replaced by a domineering, emasculating cyborg – Clarice Starling has morphed into RIPLEY! (No small blame aimed at this particular director!) – which accounts for Moore’s pants, at least. (Lest we forget, it was Ridley Scott who also embarrassed us with G.I. JANE, 1997.) Granted, the passage of a decade would see changes wrought in any character, but Starling’s “character” is missing in action in this movie, replaced by a stock sheaf of clichés and woman-empowering rhetoric. The film-makers have gone and done what the visionless HIGHLANDER money-grabbers did: compromised everything that came before, by everything that comes after. They even re-wrote the film ending in a vain attempt to draw Jodie out, but she made a correct decision in staying away, as the re-worked film ending is even stupider than the book’s ending.

The Saviors of HANNIBAL: the eponymous anti-hero himself, the droll, dread Anthony Hopkins (Violent Ham No.1) and that delectable chameleon of cinematic cheesedom, Gary Oldman (Violent Ham No.2), playing Mason Verger, a disfigured previous victim of Hannibal’s. Even with substandard directorial cohesion, weak dialog and Julianne Moore, some actors just can’t be stultified; any words in the mouth of the artisan Oldman turn to sweet, sweet, insane love-juice, whilst Hopkins savors each syllable like his now-infamous Chianti, deploying weight and depth by merely inflecting his voice, as other actors need to achieve these same standards of craft by screaming, shooting or taking off their clothes; as some insecure directors need to achieve this same level of impact by spending $40 million on computer-generated effects which waste everyone’s time and are irrelevant to the storyline, George.

pulling punches

The film completely ignored Mason Verger’s penchant for drinking the tears of children that he taunted into weeping. Even Eric Cartman went further than Ridley Scott, licking the tears of misery from Scott Tenorman’s face after he tricked him into eating his parents in a chili con-carnival.

In the book, Lecter and Starling sit down to a luxurious supping on detective Krendler’s brain, not simply one piece fed to Krendler. Though that was the best scene in the movie by far, it wasn’t nearly enough to make me vomit more than once.

Rather than regarding Hannibal Lecter as the psychopathic murdering swine that society would be apt to regard him as, were he to really exist, the movie LEANS on the viewing audience to regard him as the ‘hero’ (‘anti-hero’ is merely a euphemism to assuage your consciences).

At film’s end (again, in a wayward departure from the book), Lecter cuts off his OWN hand rather than Starling’s, to escape the “arm” of the law (couldn’t… resist). So we are shown that, though Hannibal is a calculating, psychopathic, pan-sexual, cannibalistic butcher, he still has a heart of gold when it comes to his unrequited lady love – well, ain’t that precious?

After all the hype surrounding the “long-awaited” sequel – who was waiting? I, and many other sensible people like me, were hoping that there wouldn’t be a sullying of the somberness of SILENCE with a stenchified sequel – the throaty-voiced hype, as always, far outweighed the quality of the belated, bloated product.

In a more concise interpretation of the above discourse: Eat me!

END