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Wag the Dog and the Digital. Thanouli, Eleftheria. "Wag the Dog and the Digital." Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 49–76. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781628929171.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 00:31 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. 2 Wag the Dog and the Digital One of the key moments in Wag the Dog is the shooting of the war footage that signals the beginning of the Albanian crisis. Motss and his team decide to leak a news video to the media in order to visually establish the outbreak of the war. After working long hours on the pre-production of this video, the main protagonists arrive in a Hollywood studio and make sure that every minute detail of the shooting is carried out in the most efficient,as well as confidential, manner. In a six-minute-sequence Barry Levinson captures the intricate process of image fabrication and highlights the complex interactions between fiction and reality vis-à-vis the digital technology. A closer look into this scene will be most revealing. The diegetic transition from Motss’ mansion to the studio is made with a shot of a limousine driving through the streets of LA accompanied by a radio news report on the soundtrack. It is followed by an extradiegetic shot of Levinson and his crew (Figures 1.9–1.10), which I previously discussed as an example of how the film narration regularly breaks the diegesis to problematize the relation between the fictional level and the external reality. In this case, the break is all too subtle though, as it is possible for the viewer to miss the presence of the real filmmaker; the shot lasts only nine seconds and it is followed by the entrance of the fictional filmmaker, Stanley Motss, who rushes into the studio to set up the shooting. In an ostentatiously long take, the camera fluidly follows him around as he walks in front of a blue screen talking to his assistants and giving instruc- tions to the girl who will play the refugee in the war scene. The young actress, played by Kirsten Dunst, was carefully cast for her ‘Albanian’ looks and appears dressed in a traditional costume, trying anxiously to understand the purpose of the shooting. Brean and Ames make sure that she will not put this project on her résumé and move on to deal with what appears to become a major issue; the selection of the pet that the girl will hold in her arms as she runs away from a bombed-out Albanian village. The production assistants have brought in several 9781441189363_txt_print.indd 49 03/06/2013 13:28 50 Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age breeds of dogs, cats and kittens but Motss finds it hard to choose. Eventually, they decide to insert the animal digitally during post-production and hand the actress a bag of potato chips in order to ascertain her arm position. When she looks at it in wonder, Motss explains that they are going to ‘punch a kitten in later’ so that they can have a wider set of options. The film then takes us to the control booth where we see Motss sitting next to the director in front of multiple monitors showing the girl against the bare sweep of the back wall. We hear ‘action’ and we see her run forward towards the camera. This simple and unremarkable movement suddenly becomes meaningful as the director pastes in the background the image of a burning village. A library of stock images and sounds offers the creative team a wide range of choices to render the video as realistic as possible. Motss asks the director to add flames, a burning bridge, screaming sounds and sirens. All of a sudden he realizes that the kitten he had envisioned for that scene is a calico kitten. The director promptly finds one among the stock images but Ames, who is on the phone with the President, objects to this choice. She insists that the President wants a white kitten and he is not willing to negotiate it. Much to his distress, Motss succumbs to his orders and asks the director to use a white kitten. A close up shot on the latter’s fingers as he presses the buttons of the console is followed by a close view of the monitor showing the chips being morphed into a white kitten (Figures 2.1–2.2). Now the key ingredients of the video are all in place and the team will be able to leak it to the press over the next few hours. The emphasis of this entire scene on the kitten that the Albanian girl will take to her rescue, starting with Motss’ initial indecisiveness and culminating with the lengthy dispute in the control room, serves two narrative premises. First, it contributes to the satiric portrait of presidential power that the entire film constructs, which will be further analysed in Chapter 4. Second, it gives the Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 9781441189363_txt_print.indd 50 03/06/2013 13:28 Wag the Dog and the Digital 51 film the opportunity to address the key issue of digital technology and its reper- cussions on the recording of reality, which is going to be my focus here. More specifically, I would like to discuss the relation of film and reality at the filmo- graphic level,1 i.e. at the level that concerns the film as a material object, which, depending on its qualities, acquires varying relations with the afilmic reality. In order to understand the dual film/reality at a modal level, I would like to engage with a number of theoretical positions about the passage from analogue to digital cinema and highlight the main concerns regarding the relation of film and reality in the digital era. The overview of the main concepts and arguments in this current debate will help me analyse in more depth the aforementioned scene as well as other key moments of Wag the Dog. The goal is to formulate the position that this film takes on a number of controversial points, such as the status of the image in contemporary media, the correspondence of film and reality, the conventions of digital realism and, finally, the regimes of truth in a media saturated environment. What is cinema? Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. Bazin, What is Cinema?2 In What is Cinema?, Bazin set out to explore the essence of the cinematic medium, maintaining a firm belief in its ability to reproduce physical reality in a mechanical manner. The ties of cinema with the external world were destined to become stronger, he deemed, as each new technical innovation could satisfy the cinema’s inherent tendency towards greater realism. The question ‘what is cinema?’ that haunted Bazin is, in fact, one of the key problems that penetrate, explicitly or not, every thread of film theory since the inception of the medium. Particularly during periods of transition, the volatile nature of essentialist definitions of the cinema is more openly exposed, as technological advance- ments incite significant changes in the cinematic practice. Throughout film history, every major technological breakthrough would be called a ‘revolution’ and would alarm theorists about the new directions opening ahead for cinema. The first revolution was undoubtedly the advent of sound in the late 1920s, a development met equally with elegies as well as celebrations. It would suffice to mention the emblematic opposition between Arnheim and Eisenstein, on the 9781441189363_txt_print.indd 51 03/06/2013 13:28 52 Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age one hand, and Kracauer and Bazin on the other; the former lamented the loss of expressive power in the cinematic image due to the intervention of sounds, while the latter cheered the talkies’ ability to come a step closer to the experience of the real world.3 As it turned out, both sides exaggerated the impact of sound on the morphology of the film; current and more systematic research into the formal qualities of the transitional period gradually revealed the significant continuities between silent and talking moving images.4 A similar historical and theoretical challenge arises with the coming of digital technology. The passage from analogue to digital cinema poses key ontological and aesthetic concerns that beg us to reconsider the answer to Bazin’s persistent question: what is cinema in the digital age and, by extension, what is its relation to reality?5 The answers vary and, as in the case of sound, they can be distinguished into those that regard digital cinema as a revolution that brings something entirely new and those that underline the persisting continuities between the different technological phases.6 My purpose here is to investigate both sides and to trace the new conceptual stakes for the cinematic medium in the age of digitality and media convergence, when the boundaries among the different media blurred more than ever. The advantage of this contemporary transitional period is the incentive to revise and rethink some of the issues we believed to have been settled. As William Uricchio reminds us, But perhaps most importantly, such moments [of change] challenge the ‘taken for grantedness’ that under normal circumstances tends to blind us to the possibilities inherent in a particular medium and the processes by which social practice gradually privileges one vision of the medium over the others.7 The new technological developments at this historical juncture oblige us to study the cinematic medium objectively once again in search of new functions and applications that had been previously overlooked.
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