SubjectivistEpistemology

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WWZmT_k1uxg

Synopsis: "This darkly comic film depicts the creation of fake news (in this case a bogus war) by the White House in order to distract voters from a sex scandal involving the US President. Robert De Niro plays the spin doctor whose master plan it is, and Dustin Hoffman is the Hollywood producer brought in to create the war footage." https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/e7dbbfc8-12dc-5aa3-9840-4941d9ac9305/wag-the-dog 
Point: "Levinson’s film https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120885/ depicts a mega-manipulation of political events by a spin doctor (the tail), who hires a Hollywood producer to create a fake war to divert the US public (the dog) from a sex scandal involving the president, two weeks before an election.

In a remarkable coincidence, the film was released less than a month before the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton%E2%80%93Lewinsky_scandal broke in January 1998. Then, in August that year, just days after the president admitted to 'inappropriate intimate contact' in front of a grand jury and made a televised apology to the nation, his administration launched missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan – effectively shifting the media focus with a barrage of dramatic footage beamed nightly into US living rooms.

Pure coincidence or a deliberate strategy to draw attention away from the bad behaviour of a sitting president? The similarities between Wag the Dog and real life did not go unnoticed" (Quinn, E., 2024).
Point: "At the ontological level, the search for inherent qualities in these two types of images is not without obstacles. The remarkable creativity of the digital tools in the making of the fake war footage appears to confirm the fears about the loss of reality in digital images. Yet, the retorts are not insignificant either. Remember how Brean questioned the veracity of some historical analogue  photos, acknowledging the possibility of manipulation even in analogue media. Despite the film’s extensive display of the digital means of image construction, the creative possibilities available to those working with analogue technology should not be underestimated. Granted, matte shots and superimpositions are easily detectable, but the inventive potential of staging, framing and editing a scene has been ingeniously explored from the very beginning of filmmaking, for example in Lumières’ first films. In his article ‘Louis Lumière – the cinema’s first virtualist’, Elsaesser summarizes the evidence of deliberation and planning behind Lumière’s single shot, single-scene films made with a static camera to illustrate how Douchet and Bazin’s belief in cinema’s capturing and respecting reality had been misconstrued all along. Similarly, Nanook of the North (1922), another emblematic documentary admired by the lovers of reality, has been painstakingly analysed to show how Flaherty’s camera intertwined fantasy and myth to portray the life of Nanook. In fact, a number of key documentary theorists, such as Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, have extensively argued for the problematic relation of non-fiction films to the outer world without taking into consideration any digital representations at all. Thus, the advent of digital possibilities does not seem to establish a new ontological regime altogether; rather, it sets the agenda for an ontological inquiry that probes us to reconsider the history of analogue media by freeing us from the hallucination of their indexical relation to reality. " (Thanouli, E., 2013, pp.60-61).

Bibliography: Quinn, E. (2024, Tue 8 Oct 2024). 'Wag the Dog: a pitch-black political comedy that’s never looked more relevant'. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/oct/09/wag-the-dog-where-to-watch-streaming-abc-iview-robert-de-niro-dustin-hoffman 
Thanouli, E. (2013). 'Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age'. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781628929171 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339292767_Wag_the_Dog_A_Study_on_Film_and_Reality_in_the_Digital_Age