Who Wagged the Dog?

“Wag the Dog” is a movie about an ideology of rhetoric and how it affects its audience. First, the ideology is to take advantage of the audience’s trust. Almost everyone relies on the government and has some level of trust with them. This is a trust, but not as powerful as the impact the media has on people. This is the medium that is powerful enough to convince a large population of people of whatever they want them to believe. The rhetoric comes in play when two people, Conrad and Stanley, use their rhetorical skills with the power they are given, and use the medium of national media to orchestrate their own war. The audience, which is the general public, is going along with the whole thing, because the two things they trust and rely on, the government and the media, are working together with some powerful people to generate a series of events which are completely fictional.
The title of the movie is very interesting. It’s taken from the joke: Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog." This is the first sequence shown in the movie. There are many ways to interpret the title. First, the dog is public opinion, and the tail represents the media. Second, the dog is the media, and the tail is political campaigns, and thirdly the dog is the people, and the tail is the government. When considering the personal relations in the movie, the dog is the president and the tail represents his PR assistants, who immediately assume the authority for the damage control. Plus the expression "the tail wagging the dog" refers to any case where something of greater significance is driven by something lesser. The last sequence, when Stanley is taken away by the agents, I knew he was going to be killed, because he was the “something lesser” and Conrad was the “something greater”. I believe Conrad knew from the beginning that this was going to be the demise of Stanley, and he was the one wagging the entire time.