Why albania in wag the dog

All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Seizing the opportunity, Motss stages an elaborate military funeral for Schumann, claiming that he died from wounds sustained during his rescue.

While watching a political talk show, Motss gets frustrated that the media are crediting the president's upsurge in the polls to the bland campaign slogan of "Don't change horses in mid-stream" rather than to Motss's hard work. Motss states that he wants credit and will reveal his involvement, despite Brean's offer of an ambassadorship and the dire warning that he is "playing with his life". After Motss refuses to change his mind, Brean reluctantly orders his security staff to kill him.

A newscast reports that Motss has died of a heart attack at home, the president was successfully re-elected, and an Albanian terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for a recent bombing. This content is from Wikipedia. GradeSaver is providing this content as a courtesy until we can offer a professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors. We do not consider this content professional or citable. Please use your discretion when relying on it. The Question and Answer section for Wag the Dog is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

My grandfather used to tell stories. So it was the storyteller colliding with the universal storyteller, television, which would win at the end. I remember the television arriving in the house all gift-wrapped, and then years later visiting my grandfather, who was sitting alone with a television on in the background.

Given his own role as a virtual storyteller, Levinson appears to be in conflict when it comes to the impact of television on both real and reel lives. Similarly, he took a modest approach to film style, opting for more classical self-effacing devices and resisting the MTV aesthetics that were gaining prominence at the time.

I prefer to discover the technique only when you watch a film over and over again. In fact, this is a film praised for the exact opposite reasons; the realism of the dialogues, the emphasis on character rather than plot and the extolment of the quotidian. That week is populated with a number of small incidents and casual conversations, while key events, such as the imminent wedding of one of the characters, seem trivial compared to fights over roast beef and music records.

In Figure 1. There we witness a conversation between Shrevie and an old-age customer about colour TV and high fidelity sound systems and we notice how older generations look at technological advances with disregard.

There is even one secondary character called Methan who only speaks in quotes from The Sweet Smell of Success The fact that he memorized the entire movie and fails to utter words of his own is a harbinger of the threats of fiction over real life. Stylistically, Levinson tries to keep his technical choices to the background, not only because he resists the MTV aesthetics, but also because he is a novice in the filmmaking business.

Moreover, he avoids the classical analytical editing, which dictates the passage from an establishing shot to a closer view of the action, and he replaces it with a contrasting device: the passage from close-up shots of objects. Instead of giving us a character narration that would primarily convey the content of their discussion, Levinson builds a spectacle within the spectacle, doubly framing the characters through the glass partition and by adding the TV screen on the right as a competing narrative voice.

In a film that strove to keep any flourish off the screen, such a scene stands out as an intriguing exception fraught with significance that would reveal itself in his subsequent works. One of these is the aforementioned Avalon , which followed the box office and critical successes of Good Morning Vietnam and Rain Man In Avalon Levinson chronicles the life a Polish-Jewish family that came to America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

With Sam Krichinski Armin Mueller-Stahl as a leading character, the plot presents the story of his family from s onwards, while recurrent flashbacks take us back to earlier times. Even though Levinson maintains the subtlety of his stylistic interventions throughout the film, we cannot argue the same about the intrusion of TV in the lives of his characters and the devastating effects he attributes to the medium.

A large gift-wrapped TV set invades the living room Figure 1. Suddenly, the siren of a police car makes everyone leave their food and rush in panic towards the living room.

It is not a real siren, however, that alarmed the family but the sound of their favourite show, which is about to start. Levinson meaningfully underscores the interruption of the lively discussions around the dinner table by cutting from the view of the characters sitting on the floor and watching happily and, yet, silently their favourite show Figure 1. The gradual dominance of television in the lives of modern Americans is an element that persists through the end of the story.

Between the two, the young boy is clearly drawn to the latter. First, we watch little Michael and his cousins cheer the feats of the Rocket Man, as they watch King of the Rocket Men in a movie theatre. Later on, we see them imitate twice, once in the basement of their house and then in the new department store, one of the stunts they saw on the film. This stylistic choice complements the diegetic view of the event with a strong authorial commentary, which is meant to signal the mirroring of fiction on the reality of the diegesis.

The story revolves around a famous comedian called Tom Dobbs Robin Williams , who is unexpectedly convinced to leave his political talk show and run for president of the United States. After an unusual campaign grounded on blunt humour and the satire of the established political players, Dobbs seems to win the election. Yet, his victory is not real; it is due to a technical error in the computer systems of Delacroy, the company which carried out the voting process. An employee at Delacroy, Eleanor Green Laura Linney discovers the computer glitch but her bosses are unwilling to acknowledge the problem for financial reasons.

After a series of adventures and struggles with the company and her conscience, Eleanor discloses the truth to Tom and he chooses to report the fraud on live television. Thus, the electoral process is repeated and the presidential chair returns to its rightful owner.

Man of the Year ends on a happy note but not without casting a dire warning about the loss of reality in a media-saturated political world. Stylistically, Levinson flirts with the documentary conventions even more openly than he did in Wag the Dog. To the same end, a number of cameos from celebrities, such as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as the appearance of Barry Levinson as a TV director and James Carville [42] as a news correspondent Figure 1.

The narrating process is largely dependent upon the use of all types of screens computer, television, cell phones , which result in a highly fragmented and hypermediated [43] cinematic frame. For instance, the key sequence of the presidential debate, where Dobbs attacks his opponents and the entire political system in America, is communicated to the viewer from multiple screens that evoke multiple narrative agents.

For almost eight minutes, the filmic images fail to focus on one particular narrative level but keep alternating between non-diegetic images and random focalizations. In Figures 1. Finally, Levinson does not fail to put into words his personal concerns about the impact of television on the function of truth and credibility in the real world.

If everything seems credible then nothing seems credible. You know, TV puts everybody in those boxes, side-by-side. And next to him is this noted, honoured historian who knows all about the Holocaust. And now, there they sit, side-by-side, they look like equals!

Everything they say seems to be credible. And so, as it goes on, nothing seems credible any more! In , he made Poliwood , a film essay, where he could finally stand in front of the camera and talk openly and repeatedly about his fears about the loss of reality at the age of electronic media.

In Poliwood Levinson follows the Creative Coalition, a group of Hollywood celebrities, who want to get involved in politics in a non-partisan manner in order to raise a number of social issues. Levinson opens Poliwood with the image we saw earlier in Avalon Figure 1.

He, then, superimposes his face on the small TV screen of that era Figure 1. In Poliwood , Levinson gets the chance to revisit several of the themes he touched upon both in Wag the Dog and Man of the Year , namely the commercialization of politics, news as spectacle, politicians as Hollywood stars and the merchandization of the political life. The similarities of the real events with the fictional 42 are indeed striking.

The result of this new crossroad between the real and the fictional is that our hypothesis schemata become immediately updated; on the one hand, we assign culturally specific reference to the images in Poliwood Obama, George W. Bush, etc. This does not mean that we begin to think that either Stanley Motss or Tom Dobbs are real personalities, but that their correspondence to real personalities may be more direct than we initially expected.

For instance, the zooming shots and the abrupt cutting that we detected in selected scenes in Wag the Dog now become the dominant stylistic devices to a point of distraction in Poliwood. Above all, however, what connects this documentary to his fiction films is the prominence of the television screens in the unfolding reality.

Compare the shots in Figures 1. This type of framing of political reality in the documentary carries the exact same implications as it did in the fiction films, namely that the intervention of television, and electronic media in general, blur the lines between fact and fiction to such an extent that their distinction is no longer possible.

Every time we watch a film, whether in a dark theatre or on our laptop, the external reality does not cease to intervene in multifold ways. One of the first questions that we begin to sort out during the viewing process regards the commitments made on the part of the filmmaker or the production team; do they claim to present a fiction film or a documentary?

The institutional tagging tends to provide, without much equivocation, a solid framework of interpretation but it is not always sufficient in itself. When the screening begins, we continue to search for cues, either thematic or stylistic, that corroborate the official indexing.

In this chapter, it was invaluable for addressing the complicated distinction between fiction and 44 non-fiction at the level of the narration, which transmits data bearing direct or indirect connections to the real world. Above all, however, Wag the Dog strove to highlight the presence of television as a very powerful agent in political life in modern America, an agent capable of shaping reality in terms of its own. From Avalon to Wag the Dog , and then from Man of the Year to Poliwood , Levinson began to centre his attention on American politics, where he considered the blurring lines between fiction and reality as an alarming symptom for democracy in the United States.

Those blurring lines in fiction, reality and politics will continue to be discussed in the chapters that follow. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image , Vivian Sobchack New York : Routledge , However, he has tirelessly insisted on the persistence of the classical narration well after the s and well beyond the American borders.

Thanouli, Post-Classical Cinema. Back to Book Go to Page. Go Pages Front matter Dedication. Chapter 1. Wag the Dog and Narrative Analysis. Chapter 2. Wag the Dog and the Digital. Chapter 3. Wag the Dog and the Media. Chapter 4. Wag the Dog and Politics in Hollywood.

Back matter Conclusion : Wag the Dog and its Universe.