Wag the Dog: a Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age

Thanouli, Eleftheria. "Conclusion: Wag the Dog and its Universe." Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 143–152. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781628929171.0006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 17:01 UTC. Copyright © Eleftheria Thanouli 2013. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Conclusion Wag the Dog and its Universe My study on film and reality using Wag the Dog as a pivotal case in the history of cinema is nearing its end. In these concluding pages I would like to revisit the terms and the concepts, the observations and the arguments that stemmed from the close analysis of the film and the surrounding reality in order to provide the reader with an overview as well as a blueprint of this complex relation. To that end, I would like to return to Souriau’s grand scheme to define the principles of filmology, which I presented in Chapter 1, and borrow his typology of the ‘seven levels of existence’ in the structure of the filmic universe. As I reframe my own findings into Souriau’s levels, I hope to shed light into the universe of Wag the Dog and its bearing on the state of cinema in the current age. The afilmic reality. The external reality that exists beyond the filmic text is impossible to contain within a single description, as the multitude of elements that comprise it is essentially infinite. As we try to understand the real world, however, we are bound to identify certain elements that stand out, such as specific events or personages, and then to organize them into a single narrative with specific causal, spatial and temporal characteristics. In my attempt to describe the afilmic reality of Wag the Dog, I was primarily guided by the temporal nature of certain facts, tracing events and issues in the real world that had appeared before the making of the film. Thus, I discussed the aesthetics of the Persian Gulf War, the 24-hour-live TV coverage of the missile attacks, the public relations campaign against the Iraqis and the reporting methods that pervaded in the coverage of that war. Moreover, I noted a number of developments in the communication strategy of the White House from the Nixon administration onwards, while I presented the case of Oliver North as emblematic of the mythology of the ‘war hero’ in the American political culture. After an admittedly selective look into the afilmic reality that preceded the film’s screening, I turned to the afilmic elements, the reviews and the media references, which surfaced shortly after the screening, noting a number 9781441189363_txt_print.indd 143 03/06/2013 13:28 144 Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age of ambivalent commentaries. However, the time during which people could ponder upon the film’s message on its own right was unexpectedly brief; the outbreak of a major afilmic event, the Lewinsky scandal, and the similarities of the real events with those depicted in the film’s diegesis caused the barriers between the real and the reel world to be definitively challenged. From then on Wag the Dog would enter the afilmic reality as a template, i.e. as an interpre- tative framework for evaluating or even prescribing political events. Yet, the transformation of a filmic element into an afilmic one is not unique to Wag the Dog. The entire tradition of high-concept filmmaking has migrated into the real world providing formulas, ideas and tips on how to handle real situations. To be precise, high-concept filmmaking generates exchanges between the filmic and the afilmic on two counts; on the one hand, high-concept films are designed to impact the lives of the spectators well beyond the movie theatre by encouraging them to adopt fads and fashions in their everyday life.1 On the other hand, high-concept filmmaking lends its strategies to news broadcasting leading the media professionals to treat afilmic elements as if they were filmic. Describing, ordering and, ultimately, selling reality as if it were fiction establishes a new regime of truth in contemporary global societies. The profilmic reality. The profilmic reality of Wag the Dog is fairly easy to describe since Levinson mostly relied on live-action footage. In other words, the profilmic reality contains all the actors and the settings that stood in front of the camera and were recorded by analogue means. It also contains Levinson and his crew, who made a brief appearance, as I we saw in Figures 1.9–1.10. The difference, however, between the profilmic presence of De Niro and Levinson is that the former was filmed in order to be later transformed into a diegetic element, while the latter would cling to his afilmic existence. A complication arises when we try to classify the status of the TV images that pervade throughout the film or even the surveillance images that appear on various occasions. In fact, the difficulty concerns the entire notion of mediation and its representation on the screen. My suggestion would be to acknowledge a doubly framed profilmic reality in the cases when a person or an object appears as a mediated level of reality. For instance, the news anchorman who appears on TV poses, in fact, twice in front of the camera lens; first as the actor and then as anchorman. Similarly, when we see De Niro pass through security checks, the film emulates the profilmic reality by showing us the actor as raw material recorded by the surveillance camera. The filmographic reality. At this level, we begin to address the actual film, i.e. the celluloid, on which the profilmic events were recorded. Souriau includes in 9781441189363_txt_print.indd 144 03/06/2013 13:28 Conclusion 145 this category the editing of the film, given that at his time the editing processes involved the cutting of the actual celluloid. Nowadays, we would need to acknowledge the collaboration of computer technology for the shaping of the filmographic reality, i.e. the final version of the film. In the case of Wag the Dog computers were certainly employed for the editing of the film, while various modalities such as electronic and digital images were all incorporated in the digital material before finally being printed back on celluloid. In other words, the filmographic reality of Wag the Dog, like most of the films today, includes not only its existence as an analogue medium, but also the digital version that was created during post-production and was employed for the release of the film on DVD or other media formats. The filmophanic reality. This is the type of reality that lights up on the screen during the projection of the film in the theatre. The parameters of this level can be distinguished into two subcategories. First, there is filmophanic reality in the widest sense, which is contingent upon the characteristics of projection. Second, there is screen reality,2 which contains the forms of the filmic image that a spectator witnesses during the screening. Among these forms we could include mise-en-scène cues, framing choices, camera placement and shot duration.3 Therefore, the filmophanic reality in Wag the Dog entails all those stylistic devices that we discussed in Chapter 1, such as high-angle framing, zooming shots, shaky camera movements and the prominence of objects in the mise-en-scène. Moreover, under this category we would include the presence of multiple modalities, varying from TV shots and surveillance images to digital inserts, such as the kitten in the hands of the Albanian girl. The different filmic textures of these images illustrate how digital technology can easily combine different image sources on a single filmographic material. The diegesis. At this level we enter the world of fiction where reality appears only as direct or indirect reference. The story world in Wag the Dog is concerned with politics and the media. As far as politics is concerned, the diegesis clings to a high sense of cultural verisimilitude, presenting the plot in a realistic and plausible fashion. Hyperbolic as the main premise about the Albanian war may be, the settings, the technology and the media activity resonate with contemporary developments in the political scene. When it comes to the media, Wag the Dog addresses head-on all the fine nuances of Souriau’s filmic universe, problematizing the distinction between its diverse levels. For instance, we repeatedly hear Brean question the ingredients of afilmic reality, 9781441189363_txt_print.indd 145 03/06/2013 13:28 146 Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age arguing that there is no way of knowing whether something really happened or not. Moreover, we see him and Motss fabricate reality as if it were a teaser or a pageant. In the world that these characters inhabit, the afilmic/filmic distinction no longer holds. In the same vein, the making and the broadcasting of the fake news video elaborates on the impact of the digital technology on profilmic, filmographic and filmophanic realities.4 During the shooting scene, analysed in depth in Chapter 2, we notice how the role of the profilmic elements changes at the age of the digital. They only needed an actress to pose for the camera in front of a blue screen, since all the other elements would be ‘punched in’ later during post-production.

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