Wag the Dog (37 page)

What he understood, at last, when he awoke in the dark, was that football was his model, not baseball, not
movies. In one sense that should have been obvious because one of the standard adages in the drivel of popular wisdom is that
football is the sport most like war.
If you had asked Beagle, before this particular morning when an insufficiency of bile aroused him, he would have said:
“Football is the sport most like roller derby. It can also be compared to professional wrestling with more clothes. Golf is the sport most like war.”
But part of Beagle's genius was the ability to overcome his intelligence and arrogance and cater, shamelessly, to a lower common denominator. The lowest, if possible.
⁷⁹

If football was what America thought war was, then a Beagle-directed war was going to be the goddamn Super Bowl. Unlike baseball, which used anticipation instead of action in the game, football no longer even needed the game. The players didn't have to do anything. The fans did it all by themselves. Super Bowl was the most hyperbolic version of this effect: two weeks of hype, hysteria, wagering, turmoil, media blitz, and ado—without a single block, tackle, or penalty, without one ball thrown or kicked or carried.

The game itself—that final, end-of-the-season, ultimate, championship confrontation—was normally a dud. A blowout, decided early, barely worth watching for those few weirdos who watched for the sake of seeing what happened in the actual game segment of the event. Yet it was never a disappointment. No game was bad enough to diminish the hysteria of the subsequent Super Bowl.

That, Beagle now knew, was the pace and the shape of a war that America was going to love.

Heroes and villains. The hero was a given: George Herbert Walker Bush. He would have his costars. They would be . . . hold that for later.

The first thing Beagle did when he got to CinéMutt was run villain footage. Hitler, Joe Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Kaiser Wilhelm, Jack Palance, Erich Von Stroheim. There was just one word, one definition of “villain”—Hitler. Change the face, change the language, change the rant, but call the character Hitler.

But the really interesting thing was that in the end the importance placed on the character of the villain was illusory. Bush had done a Hitler bit with Noriega and it didn't play. Maggie Thatcher had done the Falklands
without
a bad guy and her splendid little war did splendidly.

What did she have? She had Pearl Harbor!

It wasn't the villain, it was the villainous act, which found its most perfect expression in the sneak attack. Which was also the centerpiece of America's mythology of itself: Mr. Nice Guy gets sucker-punched. Mr. Nice Guy gets up off the floor, squares up man to man with Mr. Sneak Attack. Mr. Nice Guy turns out to have been John Wayne, Clark Kent, a Superpower—Mr. Sneak Attack wishes he'd never been born.

What America needed—or Bush needed—or Beagle needed—was someone to invade America.

That was a problem. Big-time. Who was going to invade the U.S.? Mexico? Canada? Laughable. The remnants of the USSR? They'd use nukes, we'd use nukes, that would be the end of Hollywood as we know it. Japan? Would Japan be willing to invade us again? Could the economic thing be made to look like an invasion? No. The job didn't call for economic war. Too sophisticated for TV and, frankly, the images were nonexistent.

He went back to the Vietnam scenario. He did not yet understand why he felt
The Return
was wrong and he needed to do so before he could find his way to a war whose aesthetic would succeed. He started running Nam clips. It was clear in
less than a minute:
jungle.
That was a big one. Americans don't like jungle wars. Too wet. Too hot. Hot and wet was disease and sex. Americans liked fighting the Nazis. Americans liked Germanic warfare. Mechanized. Civilized. Clean and dry.

Yet, America had fought the Japs in the jungle. And that had been good. A lot of good films had come out of it. John Wayne had been mostly in the Pacific. There he was again, on Screen 8, in the only pro-Vietnam War movie ever made,
The Green Berets,
an old, fat John Wayne strutting around like it was still WWII.

And that was the final insight.

The real fundamental problem, the structural problem, was that Vietnam wasn't Vietnam. It was never intended to be its own thing. To go back to Vietnam was to miss the point. The point was to be what Vietnam was supposed to be in the first place—a remake—not for theaters, for television—of 1942-45:
World War II Two—The Video.

He heard the words underlined in his head. That was it. That was the essence.

He remembered an anthology film—
Going Hollywood: The War Years.
It said something pertinent. He searched it out and punched it up: “A war where there was no doubt about who started it or what we were fighting for or who were the good guys or who were the bad guys. In other words, it was a war that could've been written by Hollywood.” That was good, right on target, but still not the statement that he was looking for—there: “Gone were the movies of the thirties with their screwball rich people, their fast-talking heroines, their wisecracks about banks, government, unemployment. The war canceled all criticism. A new and total wholesomeness pervaded Hollywood's America. It was decided that the true character of the nation was just—nice. There were no demonstrations, no complaints, in nice America.” That's what it was really about. That's what the client wanted. The war was just a means to an end. World War II was the war that delivered the proper end. That was the America Bush wanted—where rich people were respected, banks were good guys, nobody criticized, even the darkies turned out to be nice, and women kept their goddamn mouths shut.

John Lincoln Beagle had chosen the film that America would make next:
WWII-2-V.

 

 

 

⁷⁷
Earlier versions—all but the final one, actually—do contain footnotes or other forms of reference. The first line is attributed to Professor Campbell Stuart in Sidney Rogerson,
Propaganda in the Next War
(Garland Library, 1938). This is a fascinating series, edited by Captain Liddell Hart, of predictions about World War II. Titles in the series included
Sea Power in the Next War, Air Power in . . ., Tanks in . . ., Gas in. . . .
The information in the chart, slightly altered, and the three statements following, came from Sam Keen,
Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, The Psychology of Enmity
(Harper & Row, 1986), a book about war, war images, and war propaganda, which seemed to Teddy to describe the way his family related, especially his relationship to his father and his father's to his mother. The next line, the quote from Mr. Lodge, and the last two lines, all come from Bruce Winton Knight,
How to Run a War
(Knopf, 1936; reprint, Arno Press and the
New York Times,
1972). The underlined passage is a paraphrase of Terence H. Quaker,
Opinion Control in Democracies
(St. Martin's Press, 1985).

⁷⁸
Jeanine Basinger, in
The World War II Combat Film,
points out that “Hollywood was, contrary to popular opinion, a frugal place. Plots and characters and events were saved like old pieces of string, and taken out of the drawer and re-used. . . . Useful things were—tough sergeants, raw recruits, old veterans, diary-keeping writers, colorful immigrant types; mail calls, Christmas celebrations, barroom brawls; wounded men crying out to be brought in, and, when rescued, dying anyway; brave men going up in planes to sacrifice themselves. . . .”

This was exactly what Beagle did. He took bits and pieces “saved like old pieces of string,” and we can notice their appearance in the final production. Teddy's brainstorm was to take the classic combat film—the same twelve or fourteen people: Pop, the guy from Brooklyn, the kid with a puppy, the guy who was gonna write novels someday, etc.—and make all the characters gay. In the Pacific War, a homophobic colonel takes all the gays—men and women—in his battalion and puts them on a tiny atoll. He knows that it will be attacked by an overwhelming force of Japanese. He tells them they must hold out at all costs. And so on.

⁷⁹
He was fond of a quote from H. L. Mencken, changing
they/their
to
we/ our:
“We have built our business on a foundation of morons,” and said as much in a interview in
Cinema
magazine. “Who do you think buys movie tickets? Who goes to see the same movie fourteen times—morons and aspiring film directors. Who watches TV? If it's not dumb enough that the morons love it, it will lose money and I haven't done my job. Catering to the morons is Job One! Somebody said that: Lee Iaccoca? Ford? Reagan? Before you go to make a film, spend a couple of days watching a lot of television. Get down with the morons. If you can make a movie that does that and is brilliant too, then you're a genius. You're John Huston, you're John Ford, you're Alfred Hitchcock.”

This is actually the last real interview Beagle ever gave. David Hartman saw to it that Beagle never again spoke for publication without a handler present and without previewing the questions.

I
N
1967
THE
CIA instituted a program in Vietnam called Phoenix. The name is a rough translation of
Phunng Hoang
, also a mythological bird. The program was run by William Colby, who later became head of the CIA.

One of the phrases that Teddy Brody pulled out of Sam Keen's
Faces of the Enemy
for his one page of adages on propaganda, but which did not make the final cut, was, “Notice, the undertone beneath the self-justification in all propaganda is the whining voice of the child: ‘He did it to me first—I only hit him back.' ” They did it first is the foundation of Phoenix. It happens to be true. They did do it first. The Viet Cong had an extensive and very effective terrorist program. It targeted everybody and anybody whose work supported the routine functions of government—mayors, tax collectors, police, postmen, teachers. Guerrilla warfare isn't nice, and opposing the power of the state is always difficult. Yet, however politically correct the VC may have been, it's fair to say that only motive separates what they did from the most ruthless forms of gangsterism. They established their underground rule in much the same way as the Mafia in Sicily or the drug gangs in Colombia.
⁸⁰
There are lots of good atrocity stories—good in the sense of “As a popular passion producer, experience indicates that there is nothing quite like the atrocity story”
⁸¹
—about VC terror. These include young boys and elders impaled on stakes where the rest of the village is sure to see them and pregnant women disemboweled, the fetus cut out and left on the ground as a public display.

The South Vietnamese government, the CIA, and the other American organizations had all made attempts to imitate these tactics before Phoenix. The CIA had various CT—counterterrorist—teams that consisted of Vietnamese, and sometimes Chinese, who are frequently referred to as mercenaries because they were not regular Army and they were paid. Some of these teams consisted of convicted murderers, rapists, and other criminals, recruited from Vietnamese prisons, real-life versions of
The Dirty Dozen.
The Special Operations Group (SOG), which ran Project Delta and Project 24, Navy Seals, hunter-killer teams, and most especially the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU),
⁸²
all engaged in counterterror operations.

What Phoenix did was centralize all the South Vietnamese intelligence services under American supervision and target what was called the VCI—Viet Cong Infrastructure—in a systematic way. The Americans and the South Vietnamese actually had a lot of information about who the VC and their sympathizers were. Phoenix put it all together. They put up wanted posters, they offered rewards. They set up interrogation centers. They sent in teams to arrest and to assassinate.

To the degree that Phoenix was known, it was instantly controversial.
⁸³
And it remains so. Vietnamese named to Phoenix as VC or VC sympathizers were not innocent until proven guilty. Assassinations did not wait upon due process. Suspects were detained without trial, on the basis of anonymous accusations. In prison they were often beaten and tortured. South Vietnamese district intelligence officers got rich through extortion—threatening to put people on the list unless they paid—and by letting real VC buy their way off the list.