Obsessed With the ‘Man Behind the Curtain’

In “Wag the Dog,” director Barry Levinson’s satire on the unholy alliance between politicians and image-makers, a presidential spin doctor arranges for an unctuous Hollywood producer to stage a war for the press to help the president out of a jam. The press, of course, doesn’t know the war is a production confected for its benefit. It blithely takes the images provided and sends them on to us. It’s a pretty good scheme. After all, the Gulf War wasn’t much more than a video game sandwiched between briefing sessions conducted by generals from central casting. The only trouble is that the producer can’t quite smother his pride at the stunt he has pulled off. “I want the credit!” he bawls.

Where the film goes wrong is in thinking that denying him credit is essential to preserving the scheme when we know that, in this day and age, revealing the manipulations is more likely to prompt wondrous respect for the accomplishment, maybe even raise the president’s approval ratings. That’s because, after long relying on a suspension of disbelief to enjoy so many of the fruits of our culture, we now find ourselves in an entirely different state of mind. We seem to get more enjoyment from a confirmation of disbelief--an understanding that whatever we see is not real but has been created for us.

Not so long ago, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speech, it was just assumed the words were his. Only insiders knew that Judge Samuel I. Rosenman or playwright Robert Sherwood had helped craft these speeches, and neither of them was about to demand credit. More, I doubt if anyone much cared that the president had a little help. Today, we not only know that the president and presidential aspirants don’t write their own speeches, we sometimes know which speech writers contributed which passages to an address.

That’s because, like the producer in “Wag the Dog,” everyone is demanding credit. Peggy Noonan, who wrote some of President Ronald Reagan’s and President George Bush’s more memorable lines (“Read my lips: No new taxes,” was hers), is now a celebrity for having been a presidential ghostwriter, and novelist Mark Helprin was so brazen about having authored some of Bob Dole’s more felicitous lines in the ’96 election campaign that you almost thought Helprin was running for office and Dole was just his flunky. In short, the whole idea isn’t to convey that a politician has penned his words but to affirm he couldn’t have.

Nor does it stop at speeches. By now we are all sick of the whole idea of spin doctoring--the process by which political advisors descend on the media to tell them how they should be interpreting an event. But the raison d’etre of spin doctoring should be its subtlety. If you reveal how baldly you are trying to spin the response to an event, you become just another partisan, hectoring the press for your candidate. The beauty of good spin doctoring is you let the allegedly disinterested media take your lines and make the case for you.

Or at least that would seem the logical approach. But in the age of the confirmation of disbelief, spin doctors, like Clinton advisor James Carville, seem only too happy to tell the press not only what to think but also to tell them that, in doing so, the spin doctors are spin doctoring. Indeed, Carville’s old partner, Paul E. Begala, who has been serving as the president’s point man in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, was the subject of a recent newspaper article about, of all things, how Begala is serving as the point man in the Lewinsky affair. And that is hardly the worst of it. Dick Morris, President Bill Clinton’s old strategist, wrote a book discussing his Machiavellian schemes for returning Clinton to the White House, as cynical a political exercise as one can imagine, but one that caused nary a flutter of reaction.

Why, after living in ignorance about people like these for so long, is the public suddenly showing interest? The answer may lie in a national undertow of cynicism that first began to exert its pull with Watergate and has grown in force with each new revelation of chicanery. After Watergate, we know that politicians scheme. After Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Reagan, we know they have teams of speech writers patching together their addresses. We know that behind every decision, every policy, every press-conference answer, there is a web of strategizing to predict the effect and tailor the action accordingly. We know that nothing is really authentic, that it is all calculation.

Cynicism isn’t ordinarily a heartening emotion, yet this cynicism, this confirmation of disbelief, is as satisfying in its own way as the suspension of disbelief was. The difference is the difference between the power of not succumbing and the power of succumbing. Deconstructing the statecraft of politics, or anything else for that matter, gives us the reassurance that no one is putting anything over on us. It makes us feel savvy. The world may be full of inauthenticity, but knowing it puts us in the loop, which provides some form of cold comfort. Whatever we are, we’re not dupes.

Even though it is prevalent now in Washington, the confirmation of disbelief, like so much else in the culture, may owe a great deal to the capital of the suspension of disbelief: Hollywood. Not so long ago, Hollywood directors, like political advisors, were invisible hands who orchestrated the action without calling attention to the fact they were orchestrating it. Just as no one knew presidential speech writers, no one knew directors, unless it was Frank Capra, John Ford or, possibly, Howard Hawks. Frankly, the public didn’t seem to care who made the movies. Until the ‘70s, the only director whose name was a household word was Alfred Hitchcock, and that’s because Hitchcock was selling audiences his manipulation of them rather than, as most directors were, a constructed reality the audience was invited to enter.

But Hitchcock was a singular exception until Steven Spielberg arrived and helped set the whole confirmation of disbelief business in motion. Like so many others in his generation, Spielberg grew up in the 1950s going to the movies and, or so it was assumed by numerous profilers and biographers, falling under their spell--that is, suspending his disbelief. In short order he began making films of his own, at first, small student affairs, then bigger productions featuring neighborhood kids and then, while still in high school, an even bigger production with professional actors and sophisticated special effects.

As the saga goes, the movie lover thus became a lover of movie-making. By the time he made “Jaws,” in 1975, Spielberg had transformed his almost tactile pleasure of filmmaking into popular art and immediately became the foremost of a group of directors, including George Lucas and Brian DePalma, whose movies were essentially paeans to their own moviegoing childhoods.

But what was easy to overlook is that the majority of Spielberg’s films were not predicated on that old suspension of disbelief, the operative principle of the old movies he celebrated. His films were predicated on the confirmation of disbelief, that celebrated the filmmaker rather than the film. Spielberg’s great discovery is that a skillful director could deflect attention to himself and thus supersede even the stars on the screen. That seems to be why he was so bewitched by the mechanics of special effects and why even now, when we watch “Jurassic Park” or “The Lost World,” we marvel not at the dinosaurs themselves (a suspension of disbelief) but at the effects that made them possible (a confirmation of disbelief). The first makes us think of the movie, the second of Spielberg.

It is no knock on Spielberg’s considerable gifts to regard his motive not as a love of the movies or of movie making as much as a love of celebrity. Nor is it a criticism to see his movies as a means to that end. In fact, it makes Spielberg something of a forerunner of a cultural shift. Spielberg recognized there were rewards in being acknowledged as the one who made the magic, and where he led, Noonan, Morris, Ed Rollins and a whole army of others have followed. If they couldn’t be the ones on the screen, they could be the ones behind it, pulling the strings and then telling everyone about it. It was as if the Wizard of Oz had yanked down his own curtain to get himself a magazine profile.

It is understandable in our culture of celebrity why the string-pullers want to reveal themselves. What they get for doing so are all the benefits the people on the screen get: fame, wealth, sex. It is also understandable why the media enjoys lavishing attention on them. These folks open up a whole new area of celebrity at a time when the media need new celebrities to fill the insatiable demand. It’s a bonus that the people who put the strategy in the president’s campaign or the images on the movie screen make great stories, often better stories than those of the stars they direct.

But their gains have also been our loss. The suspension of disbelief was about willed innocence. We jettisoned our cynicism and indulged our naivete because we were rewarded for doing so by the experience we got, whether it was the experience of believing in a president’s vision or of believing in the fantasies on screen. We knew we risked seeming foolish, but we allowed ourselves to be open and idealistic nonetheless. It was really a matter of trust. To ignore the machinery behind something was to trust the thing itself.

Now we know all about the machinery and can assert our superiority to it, but we have lost our innocence and our sense of trust. One might even say that, in this postmodern world where everything is fabricated, we have come to know too much for our own good--too much to enjoy the kind of illusions one may need to survive. Everyone wants the credit, but we pay the bill.