Chapter Nine - The 90's: Truth, Justice, and Special Effects
Chapter Nine
With modern computer and video technologies, it is now possible to electronically composite reporters on virtual sets, even virtual locations. The war may be raging around them, but the reporter is actually safe in a studio.
The traditional static graphics behind the newsreaders can be replaced with movie-like opening credit sequences. Smart bombs can carry nose cameras. No casualties are displayed. No enemy is seen. The war has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the good guys always win. It is easy to doubt the messages from the media because news seems so "produced".
As technology has improved, the gathering and analysis of news has become less detailed and meaningful. Reports in our era are truncated to headlines offset by sound bites, and no story on television is much longer than 74 seconds. The near absence of analysis prevents questioning those headlines or challenging the sound bites. The quantity of the same headlines on countless channels is overwhelming, and the quality is numbing.
By the time the 1992 presidential campaign was underway, independent filmmakers were responding to the widespread acceptance of media truths by documenting the ways in which stories were being disseminated by the candidates themselves.
In documentaries like The War Room and Feed, filmmakers pulled the curtain back and revealed a ragged wizard made out of spin doctors, satellite feeds and savvy politicians, all contributing to a circus of information over which no one had any real control. Out of this, a new and refreshing cynicism was born.
In Wag The Dog, Brean is relying on a disinterested public. He knows that if he can just entertain them, he can distract them from the actual events. He knows they will never explore the realities because they rely on a press hell-bent on ratings and compromised by its entertainment values.
Perhaps one of the reasons Wag The Dog might have more validity than the live television coverage of the Gulf War or the Monica Lewinsky story is that we, the audience, know we are watching a story. We know that this is not meant to be real, but that it is about reality. The filmmakers have taken time to slow down the speeding information that flies at us from our televisions and shape it into something more meaningful.
With modern computer and video technologies, it is now possible to electronically composite reporters on virtual sets, even virtual locations. The war may be raging around them, but the reporter is actually safe in a studio.
The traditional static graphics behind the newsreaders can be replaced with movie-like opening credit sequences. Smart bombs can carry nose cameras. No casualties are displayed. No enemy is seen. The war has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the good guys always win. It is easy to doubt the messages from the media because news seems so "produced".
As technology has improved, the gathering and analysis of news has become less detailed and meaningful. Reports in our era are truncated to headlines offset by sound bites, and no story on television is much longer than 74 seconds. The near absence of analysis prevents questioning those headlines or challenging the sound bites. The quantity of the same headlines on countless channels is overwhelming, and the quality is numbing.
By the time the 1992 presidential campaign was underway, independent filmmakers were responding to the widespread acceptance of media truths by documenting the ways in which stories were being disseminated by the candidates themselves.
In documentaries like The War Room and Feed, filmmakers pulled the curtain back and revealed a ragged wizard made out of spin doctors, satellite feeds and savvy politicians, all contributing to a circus of information over which no one had any real control. Out of this, a new and refreshing cynicism was born.
In Wag The Dog, Brean is relying on a disinterested public. He knows that if he can just entertain them, he can distract them from the actual events. He knows they will never explore the realities because they rely on a press hell-bent on ratings and compromised by its entertainment values.
Perhaps one of the reasons Wag The Dog might have more validity than the live television coverage of the Gulf War or the Monica Lewinsky story is that we, the audience, know we are watching a story. We know that this is not meant to be real, but that it is about reality. The filmmakers have taken time to slow down the speeding information that flies at us from our televisions and shape it into something more meaningful.
posted by Xavier Casto | 00:01
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