When War Becomes a Script

As Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran push the Middle East towards an ever- widening conflagration, more than a few have noted that the timing coincided with renewed scrutiny over the Epstein files.

In this context, the razor-edged 1997 Hollywood satire ‘Wag the Dog’ - about a President’s advisers who fabricate a war with Albania to distract the public’s attention from a sexual scandal damaging to the administration - feels less fiction than documentary.

Nearly three decades later, this black comedy, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro, eerily seems to hold up a mirror to contemporary politics. Its premise of a foreign crisis eclipsing a domestic scandal feels uncannily familiar at the moment.

The brilliance of ‘Wag the Dog’ lies not merely in its satire but in its clinical understanding of modern political theatre. De Niro plays Conrad Brean, a monk-like spin doctor summoned to contain the scandal. His breathtakingly simple solution is to give the nation something ‘larger’ to worry about.

Enter Hoffman’s Stanley Motss, a flamboyant Hollywood producer who treats geopolitics like a studio production. A consummate artist, Motss’ fervent belief is that if a war is needed, it must be staged convincingly – replete with grainy footage, patriotic music and an emotional storyline involving an Albanian refugee clutching a kitten.

A striking line from the film - “of course there’s a war… I’m watching it on television” - captures the film’s central thesis that in the media age, wars do not merely ‘happen’ but are narrated and marketed.

The film, adapted from Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel ‘American Hero,’ was originally conceived as a satire on the political spectacle surrounding the first Gulf War. But fate endowed it with an even sharper edge. Only months after the film’s release, President Bill Clinton found himself engulfed in the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. When the United States launched missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, critics immediately invoked the film’s title as shorthand for diversionary war.

Such coincidences have ensured that ‘Wag the Dog’ has aged less like satire and more like a diagnostic manual for diversion. Its humour derives from the unsettling plausibility of its premise. Scarier is the fact that the de Niro and Hoffman characters, rather than rely on grand conspiracies, manufacture their ‘war’ through familiar institutions of public relations and television networks while cannily playing on the nation’s patriotic reflexes.

The film belongs to a distinguished tradition of political cinema that explores how power manufactures consent. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War masterpiece ‘Dr. Strangelove’ revealed the absurd logic that could lead the world to nuclear annihilation. Later works such as Warren Beatty’s biting ‘Bulworth’ (1998) and ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ (2007) explored the uneasy relationship between spectacle, ideology and foreign policy, leavened with dollops of smart black humour.

But ‘Wag the Dog’ remains unique in its focus on the fusion of politics and entertainment. In Levinson’s film, it is Washington that behaves like Hollywood and vice versa. Motss fusses over lighting and narrative arcs while producing footage of a fictional war zone, treating geopolitics as merely another blockbuster awaiting release.

The film itself nods toward earlier episodes of American military spectacle. At one point, the characters cite the 1983 invasion of Grenada as an example of how quickly patriotic fervour can be mobilised and how murky the motives behind foreign interventions sometimes appear.

Watching ‘Wag the Dog’ today, one is struck by its prescience in anticipating the mechanics of modern media ecosystems. In 1997, the internet was barely a political force and cable news still dominated the narrative cycle. Yet the film anticipated a world in which spectacle outruns scrutiny, where a compelling ‘story’ can eclipse inconvenient truths.

That is why its resonance amid today’s geopolitical turbulence is all the more striking.

The film’s final irony is also its most striking as it reveals the limits of manipulation itself. The Dustin Hoffman character, having successfully manufactured the war, grows intoxicated with his own creative genius and demands recognition. He is then quietly eliminated in an unsubtle reminder that in politics, the most effective stage managers are never allowed to take a bow.

Nearly thirty years on, ‘Wag the Dog’ still provokes uneasy laughter. Its troubling message is that when politics becomes performance, war risks becoming just another plot device. And in the age of perpetual spectacle, the question is no longer whether the dog wags its tail but whether the tail has begun to wag the dog.