Late Clinton-Era Films & My Faith in Democracy

During my formative years, the words “Bill Clinton” were either the punchline to a saucy joke or an expression of lament regarding the deconstruction of Regan-Era surface morality. Upon his election, I knew probably only three hard facts about the guy: he was a Democrat, he was from Arkansas, and he played the saxophone[1]. But I was in for a political awakening and, even though I was only 13 years old, I was apparently ready for the media tidal wave that was about to wash over us all. When the Lewinsky story broke on January 17, 1998, it was gleeful validation for the “right-wing conspirators” and payday for anyone running a news station. It was also a dream for anyone in the business of satire and comedy.
On New Year’s Eve of that year, our family visited some friends, as was tradition. In about 1996, the ban on The Simpsons had been lifted on my brother and I and we had a good two years of smart-ass humor and cultural references tucked under our belts. We knew that it was going to be a tough audience—the friends’ kids were quite sheltered—but we had no idea just how tough it was going to be. When one of us pulled out a Lewinsky joke, which should have been a sure bet, we got blank looks. “Who’s Monica Lewinsky?” My brother and I were shocked. Shocked! What was wrong with these kids? What did they talk about in social studies at school? And why weren’t they watching Saturday Night Live? It took a while to get over our dismay—I’m not sure my brother has yet—because humor in the form of political commentary was such an intrinsic part of our adolescent experience. Linda Tripp was the Lewinsky friend who leaked their taped conversations to Kenneth Star, but more importantly, she was John Goodman in a wig.
It wasn’t until later in life that I realized how much political humor was shaping my views on democracy[2] and not just in the form of late-night sketch comedy featuring cross-dressing sitcom stars. During those years of scandal-saturated media, there were three films that grabbed my attention and, despite seven-and-a-half-years in Dubya-fueled wariness (or, perhaps, because of it), they still haven’t quite let go. They were (arguably) all satires, and their winking take at the way things work, for good and bad, didn’t so much kill my idealism as rearrange it.

We’ll work backwards, chronologically-speaking, and begin with Dick, a semi-forgotten satire labeled as teen comedy. For the uninitiated—and sadly there are too many—it’s a what-if tale in which Deep Throat, the formerly unknown person whose inside information helped Woodward and Bernstein link Nixon to Watergate, is revealed to be two teenage girls. Two very naïve teenage girls who, by being in the right place at the right time, become the president’s dogwalkers (and Secret Youth Advisors). But when he turns out not to be the kind, “dreamy” president they thought he was, they screw him over. Dan Hedaya plays a hilariously skittish version of Nixon and Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams are comedy gold. Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Dave Foley, and Ryan Reynolds show up too. This is the film I’ve probably seen the most times by choice (in other words, there are movies I’ve seen more times, but every time I’ve seen Dick it’s because I put the DVD in the player.) What has made the film so addictive to me, aside from a lot of great lines[3], is how it portrays scandal in the office of the presidency. The film offers the point that presidents usually don’t get away with anything because, well, they’re too damn busy to get away with anything.
It goes beyond that, though. In the film, the highest offices in the land are plagued by corrupt individuals, but it’s a plague that’s ameliorated by the people’s eventual access to the truth[4]. A burning desire for the truth, however, has to be set up in the first place, as do people willing to make sacrifices to find it. Asking questions, probing deeper, staying informed—those are the actions that make democracy, or at least its forms of justice, work. Checks and balances are built into the three branches, but it’s the people’s checks on their leaders that should have the greatest effect. I realize that, at the time, it was a national loss of innocence, the singular most resonating example of the public losing faith in its leaders. But I wasn’t even a fetus yet. I was 14, though, when I saw the movie for the first time, just one year younger than the characters, and it was easy to imagine that, though I was not yet of voting age, I could still have a hand in democracy if I was willing to put forth the effort.[5]

Looking back on it, I’m still surprised that, at 13, I was so excited to see Primary Colors. (Probably because it had been on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and I was just starting my subscription…which is still going today.) It came out in February so the timing (seemingly) couldn’t have been more perfect, but it kind of faltered at the box office. I guess people didn’t want to see an expose on their current president while he was still in office[6] and still fairly popular.[7] But I did.
I can’t remember if I saw it in the theater or not—if I did, way to go, Mom and Dad!—but I know that I’ve watched it about once a year since it came out. Based on the book by Anonymous/Jow Klein, the names-have-barely-been-changed account of the Clinton-for-president campaign is a riveting look inside the hype machine. There’s sex, a gun, and a certifiably crazy lesbian is the film’s whacked moral compass, but the real intrigue lies at the heart of the Stanton’s strategic, ruthless grab for power. They’re not unsympathetic characters; the charming personas on which they’ve based their campaign are, indeed, real aspects of their personalities. It makes their political “achievements”—such as discovering and leaking another candidate’s sordid but probably irrelevant past—feel like battles lost, the energetic contender opting for the moral low-ground.
I wasn’t so foolish as to think that image wasn’t top priority at any campaign headquarters, but it was the first time I saw it deconstructed so well. The Stantons—and the dream team of idealists working for them—are fragile and human. But the candidate-version of the Stantons is just human enough to be relatable. Working in a post-Watergate world, they know that the public is wary and untrusting, so their façade has to be crack-less. The demands of selling the sizzle are far more soul-crushing, it seemed, than the straightforward demands of selling the steak. The pressure from the public—channeled through its relationship to the candidates through the media—is based on the hope that the candidate (and his/her spouse) is able to be who they (subtextually) promised s/he could be. The importance of likability suggested a higher bar set for the highest office: don’t screw things up and, for God’s sake, smile.
Primary Colors highlights a number of scandals, both behind the scenes of the campaign and at press conferences, but expert spin is able to turn each scandal into a moment of charm or televised grace. Scandal, in the world of Primary Colors—and, I began to see, in the real world—was not a threat but a challenge. Spin the scandal correctly—as Jack and Susan do with the help of Libby Holden (Oscar nominee Kathy Bates[8])—and you’re not only a fighter, but you’re far more interesting. And when the public takes an interest in the person, it usually gets informed, by extension, about the country’s politics-at-large. Between Colors and Lewinsky, it would have been far too easy to become jaded with the office of the president or democracy in general, especially in its modern form. But I found the whole thing…exciting. And oddly hopeful. It wasn’t that I craved scandal—although it can certainly spice up a slow news day—but it brought new elements into the public’s and the government’s checks and balances game. Every aspect of your life is now on trial, we said. Defend yourself and do so eloquently. We will listen and we will judge. And while we’re listening, we may accidentally take an interest in the issues. Like I said, my idealism wasn’t crushed, just rearranged. And if Wag the Dog, which came out about three months before Primary Colors, wasn’t going to make me lose faith in the system, really, what was?

Wag the Dog sits on a shelf of limited space. That shelf is where I place films that have actually altered the course of my life. When I saw Wag the Dog[9] for the first time in 1998, I started planning my adulthood. Not only did it help me figure out just what the hell a producer does, but it made me feel that, perhaps, the world really is a stage, far more than we realize.
I actually don’t mean that in an everything-is-fake-we’re-all-being-duped-terrorism-is-a-hoax way. I mean it in the sense that we’re being told a million stories a day and we’re a captive but discerning audience. In the Mamet-written/Levinson-directed flick, a Hollywood producer is recruited to “create a war” to distract the media from an alleged sex scandal between the president and a Firefly girl (the movie’s version of girl scouts, I guess, so the victim must have been dramatically underage.) One scene in particular has always stood out to me: it’s a late-night brainstorming session for a bunch of various representatives from the field of “influence.” Dennis Leary (whose character is called the Fad King) discusses shades of green for the armbands that will show support for the troops, Dustin Hoffman looks through headshots to find a refugee, and Willie Nelson tries to rhyme Albania. And it all works.
The joke is supposed to be that the American public is ill-informed and has a short memory and by holding up something shiny over there, we’ll look until you tell us to stop[10]. And it is funny because a) it’s not wrong and b) you have to laugh to keep from crying.
But good Lord did I want to be in that room when I grew up[11]. Those creative powwows led directly to widespread cultural movements and if I was going to grow up to be a “creative type”—as teachers predicted—I wanted to contribute to nothing less than directing the general culture of America, like a backroom Oprah with a marketing degree. I realize now that I just wanted to be a writer/producer. At the time, though, having the rapt attention of the majority of the nation’s citizens, and constructing something that would engage them, seemed like a really fun job and I can trace my path toward writing, toward film school, toward a deep interest in social politics[12], back to watching Wag the Dog. It wasn’t the sole influence in any of those decisions but it definitely played a role.
Despite bearing a plot that would seem to jade any viewer toward the modern American political process, Wag the Dog felt like a warning in the same way that 1984 and Brave New World did. This is what could happen, although the “future” in Wag the Dog was far more immediate than the futures in either of those tomes. (I know this wasn’t the intention, but it’s the way I took it and I don’t see Mamet or Levinson would have a problem with that…although I think they would argue that that immediate future is now about six years in the past.) Wag the Dog isn’t so much a condemnation of a complacent public—after all, no one would really have any reason to question the fake war[13]--but of a system that rewards flash over substance. Thanks to the faux war and the president’s faux-heroism during it, he’s handily re-elected come election time, the film’s ticking clock. No actual issues are discussed. In fact, we never see the president (except from behind when he delivers a televised speech) and we only see his opponent via television. Coincidence? Wag the Dog was a reminder that leaders—and people in general—as we experience them through the media are sometimes no less produced than a Hollywood movie.
About two months later, Bill Clinton would blow that film’s premise to smithereens. A mushroom cloud off the coast of Jersey wouldn’t have made anyone less interested in Monica Lewinksy (probably.) A good ol’ fashioned sex scandal is grab-the-popcorn entertainment. It did all serve to highlight, though, Wag the Dog’s ideas about how the American public truly experiences its president: though newspaper headlines, Leno monologues, and talking heads on cable. And the more scandal, the more Leno gets joking[14], the more the heads get talking, and the larger and bolder the headlines. And the more we all start to pay attention again.

What these films bred in me is an appreciation for scandal. I don’t excuse it by any means, but I’ve come to see the way it brings the voters—and non-voters—into the fold. It’s certainly arguable whether the focus in is the right place. Indeed, I’ve heard more misinformed rants about Bush than I can count from individuals who, I know, get just enough surface politics from something like The Daily Show Moment of Zen to form what they consider a real opinion. All leaders are worth scrutinizing, though, especially when they’re running the most powerful nation in the world and I highly value our freedom to do so. To continue to be a part of the national conversation—as well as the one at the water cooler—we have to stay skeptical, we have to question what we see, we have to keep seeking the truth. Even when scandal isn’t afoot—can you remember such a time?—we’re becoming increasingly programmed to dissect the information we receive, to absorb but not necessarily trust.
That’s what I got from these three films, which all emerged amid an environment of presidential scandal, and it’s why I believe that democracy now works better than ever. Despite the presence of so many readily available mind-numbing timesuckers, I’d argue that there are more people educating themselves about the world, about politics, than ever before. Blessed are the truthseekers, for they shall keep the conversation going. Blessed are the cynics, for they shall preserve my faith in the system.

[1] Thanks to the opening credits for Animaniacs.
[2] My uncle once said, completely seriously, that Jon Stewart should be shot for treason. So clearly it doesn’t shape everyone’s views.
[3] “We have a very important school report on turquoise jewelry due in two days, and we can't find any books on it, and the President's having us followed. It's too much pressure!”
[4] I realize that the same could be said about the French Revolution, but just roll with me here.
[5] I wasn’t.
[6] Good luck, W.
[7] Oh wait, nevermind.
[8] She’s spectacular here, but I want to take a moment to name Travolta as the unsung hero of the 90s. He was the star of several of the decade’s best and most iconic films: Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, Phenomenon, Face/Off, Michael, and A Civil Action. The guy deserves more props.
[9] Second Kirsten Dunst film. If you’re counting.
[10] Or look at something even shinier. Like a celebrity meltdown.
[11]CUT TO: Me getting a minor in advertising. See what I mean about altering the course of my life?
[12] And toward reading Malcolm Gladwell books.
[13] Though Chuck Klosterman argues, if we found out it was all fake, would we really do anything about it?
[14] Granted, debatable use of word “joking.”