With Coincidences, `Wag the Dog' Takes on Life of Its Own

Secretary of Defense William Cohen was asked by reporters yesterday if the administration was trying to hand the country a "Wag the Dog" scenario. Cohen flat-out denied it, but the moment was unprecedented.

In the midst of justifying a military action, a member of the president's Cabinet was being asked if the government might not be stealing material from Hollywood.

In a case of life imitating art -- or of a coincidence of international dimensions -- President Clinton's order to bomb terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan has called to mind director Barry Levinson's political satire. In "Wag the Dog," the president announces an attack on Muslim terrorists as a way of diverting attention from a sex scandal.

In the film, the war is a fake, concocted on a sound stage with actors and computer graphics. The president is up for re- election, and the scandal has not yet broken.

In the film, the president is guilty of a single indiscretion with an underage girl. In real life, the president has admitted an "inappropriate relationship" with a young White House intern.

In the movie, the timing of the attack couldn't have been better, but yesterday's timing rivals it. Without the attack, the lead story on every news broadcast last night -- and every newspaper this morning -- would have been Monica Lewinsky's reappearance before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury. The military action came on the very day that Lewinsky was expected to dispute details of the president's grand jury testimony.

But there's no connection between a fictional film and the bloody realities of the past week, said the movie's executive producer, Claire Rudnick Polstein.

"It's hard for me to fathom any similarity to 'Wag the Dog,' " said Rudnick Polstein, vice president of production at New Line Cinema, the film's distributor. "I feel that what happened in Africa was incredibly tragic, and (yesterday's bombings) are a direct response to that and have nothing to do with Clinton's domestic issues. In the film, the spin was completely contrived; there's nothing phony about this."

When the Lewinsky story broke, she says, "there were definitely similarities to the movie. You kept seeing that picture of Monica in the receiving line wearing a beret, which looked like the picture of the girl in 'Wag the Dog.' " But this time, linking the film to current events "didn't occur to me until the press started calling."

In January, David Mamet, who co- wrote the "Wag the Dog" script with Hilary Henkin based on Larry Beinhart's 1993 novel "American Hero," told the New York Times: "My secret psychotic fantasy is that someone in the White House is saying, 'What we should do is go to war, but we can't even do it because of that movie.' "

Yesterday, Mamet instructed his assistant to tell reporters he had no comment on the turn of events. Robert De Niro, who has a starring role in the film and also is one of its producers, had no comment either. Levinson was on vacation and couldn't be reached. Likewise, Dustin Hoffman, the other starring actor.

At the time "Wag the Dog" was released, in January, the connection with Clinton was casual. There were only two points of similarity: The president in the film was a Democrat, and the sex scandal element called to mind Clinton's dalliance with Gennifer Flowers and his legal troubles with Paula Jones.

In January, the movie struck many viewers as a critique of the Persian Gulf War. The film pointedly satirized the way the news media were kept from the scene of the fighting in Iraq, while the military released footage that misled the public. As put by Brean, the political "spin" doctor played by De Niro, "A single bomb goes down a chimney -- that's all anybody knows about the Persian Gulf War."

The movie portrayed the public as obscenely delighted with the prospect of beating up on a less powerful enemy (in the movie, it's Albania). It showed a public complicit in its own deception, wallowing in a euphoria of patriotism and blood lust -- and in the sanitized images of warfare presented by the news networks.

It was only after the Lewinsky scandal broke two weeks after the movie was released that the perception of the film changed. What had been created as a response to media manipulation during the Bush administration now was perceived in light of a president with serious personal weaknesses.

War is show business, the film seemed to say. Certainly yesterday the TV images of Clinton were his best in months: Rushing back from vacation, saluting and then striding across the White House lawn and towering over the officer there to brief him. Three days ago, on the same lawn, he was headed out of town with his dog on a leash -- and no one was really sure which one of them would have to sleep in the doghouse.

"Wag the Dog" has made it impossible to watch such scenes except in a spirit of questioning and skepticism, which means that the movie is much more important than anyone could have figured in January. This is one satire that is doing its job.