‘Wag the Dog’ Movie Interest Spikes As The U.S. / Iranian Conflict Continues To Escalate In The Wake Of Trump’s Epstein Files Disaster

Photo: Getty Images, Everett Collection

The United States has gone to war with Iran. We haven’t declared war, mind you. In the words of Conrad Brean: “We’re not declaring war, we’re going to war. We haven’t declared war since the Second World War. We’re going to war.”

That line isn’t actually about Iran; it’s from the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, and Conrad Brean is a character played by Robert De Niro. In Barry Levinson’s political comedy, the unnamed first-term sitting president, mere weeks from Election Day, is hit with allegations of sexual misconduct with a teenage girl. Is it true? None of the characters seem to know or much care; the implication, though, is that it probably is, or might as well be. To create a distraction, Brean cooks up a phony military engagement with Albania, raising the specter of terrorism. So, a war grabs press attention from a sex scandal. Sound familiar yet?

It’s sounded familiar before, too. A month after the film’s late 1997 release, Monica Lewinsky scandal involving then-current president Bill Clinton broke – which, just like the incident in the film, involved sexual misconduct inside the White House – and several of the administration’s subsequent military actions throughout 1998 and 1999 drew comparisons to Levinson’s work. In 2004, then-president George W. Bush essentially ran for re-election on the folksy, vaguely desperate sentiment Wag the Dog’s president seems fond of, repeated ad nauseum in his ads: “Don’t change horses in mid-stream,” which seemed especially convincing IRL when the stream was an international conflict (started by the president, of course). Those parallels have resurfaced now that Donald Trump, who ran for president promising to end overseas conflicts of all kinds, has engaged in military strikes against Iran, at a time when his involvement in reams of files on the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case has remained in the news for months.

Photo: Everett Collection

In Wag the Dog, Bream goes so far as to hire a producer for his undeclared war with Albania. Enter Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a Hollywood figure who, he notes, has produced the Oscars but never won one himself, and bears resemblance in eyewear and tan skin and manner to legendary super-producer Robert Evans. Apparently, Hoffman had his eye on doing an Evans character for a while: According to a writer who worked on The Muppets Take Manhattan, a planned Hoffman cameo in that Jim Henson/Frank Oz production would have taken inspiration from Evans, but Hoffman backed out for fear of offending him (and with him, according to the writer, went several other big-name cameos, which is why the cast of that movie isn’t quite as impressive as the two previous Muppet films).

But maybe Hoffman knew he had something that would play to the Hollywood crowd and didn’t want to throw it away on a Muppet gag. After all, Evans was very much still alive when Wag the Dog came out (and reportedly jokingly took credit for “his” performance in it), and Hoffman became a late-breaking surprise Oscar candidate in early 1998, when he received a Best Actor nomination. It was his seventh such nomination in a 20-year period, and almost a decade after his victory for Rain Man, also directed by Levinson. Clearly Motss’ self-regarding slickness resonated with Hoffman’s peers.

Indeed, the character’s combination of big-picture bloviating, obsessive attention to detail (“punch in a calico kitten” he says while using a computer to composite a scene of a fake refugee fleeing for her life carrying an animal), and amoral obliviousness to what he might be aiding and abetting is funny – a superficially delightful comic conceit. I say “superficially” because Stanley Motss also underlines the movie’s essential break with reality – or rather, its one major failure of anticipation, despite how prescient it seems on paper. In Clinton’s and Trump’s military actions – in all such military actions – real people die.

Of course, part of the Wag the Dog illusion is that some people appear to die in the fake war, too, for inspirational purposes (and later, a real death is integrated into the proceedings, state funeral and all). But the idea that the government’s distraction war wouldn’t actually have a full-scale military component, that it would be judged too costly in terms of both money and real lives to actually “go to war” for those nefarious ulterior motives, now reads as almost overly respectful, rather than cynical. It also anticipates an entirely different strain of paranoid suspicion. It’s one involving crisis actors and faked moon landings and other nonsense that tends to excuse the simplest explanation of armed conflict: We go to war for stupid reasons and a lot of people get killed. In the increasingly less fringe-y fringes of contemporary political culture, sex scandals are subject to that same paranoid thinking for some conspiracy-minded observers, it can’t just be rich guys committing sexual assault on underage girls, so it has to be Satanic baby-eating rituals in the basement of a pizza parlor or whatever. The reality is far starker: Powerful men and sometimes women abuse people, including children, and get away with it.

Photo: Everett Collection

You can’t blame a 1997 movie for failing to predict the trajectory of political events and accompanying discourse over the following 20 years – especially one that does a pretty decent job with the broad strokes. But actually sitting down to watch Wag the Dog in 2026 does reveal a pretty different movie than the wise satire so frequently referred to. Towards the end of the movie, there are hints of encroaching reality – that the faked Albanian conflict might result in actual loss of life and manifest itself into a genuine war, or at least uptick in terrorism. There’s a sharp point to be made about how opportunistic American saber-rattling can quickly escalate into real violence, while its architects are largely insulated from harm (though that point, too, is undermined by the black-comic fate of Stanley Motss, who simply can’t abide being given so little public credit for his production value). Wag the Dog only makes that point after close to 90 minutes’ worth of prattling satire that becomes pretty repetitive after the first half hour. It’s initially clever, and then becomes an odd curiosity related to where the careers of its creators went subsequently.

Co-writer David Mamet, who heavily rewrote an adaptation of a 1993 novel for a screenplay credit that Levinson argued, unsuccessfully, should be his alone, famously made a hard-right turn in the 21st century; it’s hard to imagine him having any issue with any Trump version of wagging the dog now. This was something of a last hurrah for Hoffman; it’s his most recent Oscar nomination to date, and one of his last hit movies as a lead. (The big-budget disaster Sphere came out shortly after Wag the Dog and apart from his role in Meet the Fockers, he was mostly on to supporting parts from there.) Levinson continued to work with De Niro semi-regularly, including on another Hollywood satire, What Just Happened?, that arrived about a decade after Wag the Dog. And it was at a 20th anniversary screening of Wag the Dog where host John Oliver questioned Hoffman about his reaction to allegations of real-life sexual misconduct by the actor, resulting in a testy exchange. Not exactly a full-circle moment (not least because the behavior in question predates Hoffman’s work on the film). But still a discomfiting reminder of where even some prescient-seeming satire ultimately comes from: a place of self-amused power.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.