Wag the Dog Page 14

A BZX-7000 is located inside the room. It creates a constantly shifting randomized pattern of electronic and audio signals that interfere with any attempt at recording. As an additional failsafe, any recording would be degaussed by a powerful magnetic field that surrounds the one and only door. This is the single device that can be turned on and off by request since one of the things that people often use the Cube for is to listen to recordings. For that reason there is a variety of play-only equipment installed inside.

  Some of the technology is restricted and cannot be exported without a special license. But the existence of the room and how it functions is no secret. It is, rather, advertised by Universal Security as the ultimate in aural privacy. It rents for $2,000 an hour. That may seem high for a room that is small, hot, and inherently claustrophobic. But all the clients who use it inevitably express a sense of value received and they frequently return to use it again. Rolls-Royces and Lear jets, even high-priced sex, can only make people feel wealthy. The Cube can make people feel something more special and rare—important.

  The door to the Cube itself is thirty-six inches above the floor. Cube users are escorted into the gap by a guard who carries a stepladder. After the client has entered the gap and closed the door, the guard removes the ladder, takes it with him, and returns to his post in the outer room.

  It was a Saturday. The two men who sat in the Cube were dressed casually but very expensively. David Hartman had been outfitted by a shop in L.A. called DownEast that sold clothes that made the wearers look like they were New Englanders, the sort that had so much money they needn’t mention it, and, more importantly, that the last person in their family that had actually earned money had died long before the invention of motion pictures. John Lincoln Beagle was a film director. His style was far more bohemian: jeans, southwestern-style shirt, Navaho belt with a turquoise buckle, and desert boots, about $2,500 for the ensemble. But that included $800 for boots that were hand-sewn from a custom last, which was in no way an indulgence, since Beagle had sensitive feet and off-the-rack shoes, no matter how costly or carefully fit, always hurt. And the belt buckle was $960.

  Lee Atwater’s memo was in the inside pocket of David Hartman’s $1,800 Whittier & Winthrop jacket. He was trying to think of a way to avoid revealing it.

  The door of the Cube closed. “Wow, heavy-duty,” John Lincoln Beagle said. “I love it. I’d love to use it as a set. But what the fuck could you possibly have to tell me that needs this much secrecy. What are you, taking over Columbia? Taking over Sony?”

  David Hartman reached into his pocket. He took out Lee Atwater’s memo. He unfolded it. Smoothed it flat on the table.

  From the moment they left this room, Beagle would be watched and listened to by operatives of Universal Security. His home and his office would be wired. His friends and family would be monitored.

  Hartman slid the memo over to Beagle.

  It said:

  MEMO FROM: L.A.

  TO: J.B. III/YEO

  WAR has always been a valid political option, through all societies, through all time. We, who grew up in the South, know about revering our warriors and war heroes. Even those who have lost! So long as they fought valiantly and gallantly. You and I grew up on the legends of Lee and Jackson and Beauregard. My first president was Eisenhower, General Eisenhower. Kennedy was a war hero. George Bush was a war hero. George Washington was General Washington. Andrew Jackson was General Jackson. The two great names in British history are Nelson and Wellington. The heroes of France are Charlemagne, Napoleon, and de Gaulle.

  After Vietnam and in the shadow of atomic weapons, war ceased to be a political option. It was considered to be, and may have been in fact, political suicide to pursue a war option.

  Then Maggie Thatcher showed us the way.

  It is important to remember that Thatcher’s political career appeared to be virtually over. That she was at a low point in the polls. That most forecasters considered that she and the Conservative Party could not win reelection.

  Then she had her war in the Falklands. She rallied her country. She won. For her, war was not a liability—it was political salvation. She became a hero of her nation. She won reelection. She became the longest-serving British prime minister in modern history.

  Obviously, I am not the only one to take note of the event and the results. It changed all of our attitudes. Especially Mr. Reagan’s. He had his adventure in Libya; that rather tentative affair in Lebanon—quickly and correctly aborted; he had his invasion of Grenada.

  These military affairs did no harm in terms of domestic political standing.

  This proves absolutely that an American president can go to war and survive politically. It is an option. But is it an option worth employing?

  We have yet to duplicate anything approaching the Iron Lady’s success with her “splendid little war.” While Libya, Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama did no harm, they did precious little good.

  Why not?

  Because we have not fully embraced the fact that modern war is a media event There is a recognition of a media element in war, especially in the post—Vietnam War American military. It is de rigeur to say that we lost in Vietnam because of the media. If we ignore the possibility that this belief is so universal exactly because it also serves the function of completely removing responsibility from the people who would most logically bear responsibility for the loss, then the implication is obvious, clear, and logical: the new order of battle says we must win on television (and the lesser media) as well as on the battlefield. This is now an article of faith in the military.

  “You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said the American colonel.

  The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. “That may be so,” he replied, “but it is also irrelevant.” (H. G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War)

  The Vietnamese lost every battle. According to our military, the Americans and the ARVN even won the Tet offensive. Yet this battle is without question the battle in which the Communists won the war.

  The military has understood only half the idea. Yet the whole of the concept stares us in the face: it is not necessary to win the war on the battlefield as well as is in the media, it is only necessary to win in the media. It is possible to lose on the battlefield, win on television—and win. War is not partially a media event. It has become completely a media event.

  If the president is to go with the Thatcher option, to establish or reestablish popularity—to win reelection by going to war—he must recognize that it must be handled as a media event. Both he and Mr. Reagan have employed war. They were sensible in leaving the logistics and the fighting to the professional armed forces. Those armed forces did what they do with reasonable success. That is, they got there in good order, they executed with minimal embarrassment, they won the fighting, there were few casualties, and they kept the body bags off camera. Lebanon excepted, of course.

  But they did not leave the media war to the professionals. (This is particularly surprising in Mr. Reagan, who should have intuited better. It is possible to fault his intellect and his work habits, but his intuition, never!)

  What is war? To you? To me? To the American people?

  War is John Wayne. It’s Randolph Scott and Victory at Sea. It’s Rambo, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, it’s body bags on CBS. It’s Combat, The Rat Patrol, Patton. The face of war is not reality. It is television and motion pictures. Even for people who have been to war. Whatever their memories, they have been replaced by what they have seen subsequently on TV. Even if they were “disillusioned” by Vietnam, those illusions came from the movies. As Mr. Reagan proved, people much prefer a good, solid story to an elusive and complex truth.

  The war must be run by professionals.

  If victory or defeat will be attained on television, then the professionals are not the generals. Or even the politicians. The war should be directed by a film or television director. This may sound, on the face of it, like a frivolous i
dea. It’s not. It’s dead serious.

  The generals and the politicians—even the media-wise Mr. Reagan—have demonstrated that they can achieve victory on the battlefield without achieving victory where it counts: in the hearts and minds and votes of the American people. To repeat a method that we know is a failure, that is the frivolous idea.

  Who, then, is to run this war?

  David Hartman, head of RepCo, the most powerful agency in Hollywood today. If anyone can figure out how to package a war and who should direct it, Hartman can. If anyone has a sense of a deal and making it happen, it’s him. Remember that it was Mr. Reagan’s agent, Lew Wasserman, and MCA that supported and guided, even partially created, that president’s career. Hartman and RepCo are the Wasserman and MCA of the nineties.

  When all seems like it might be lost, and there are no other options, go to war. It is the classical response to insoluble domestic problems. It is the reverse of the hostage crisis that destroyed Carter so completely—another media event. Don’t leave the impact to chance. Find someone who has the gut instincts, the style, the sheer artistry, to create a war that America can love—on television.

  Then you will win.

  “Wow. Cool,” said John Lincoln Beagle. He was capable of writing great dialogue, but he didn’t speak it.

  Chapter

  EIGHTEEN

  BEAGLE HAD A box for the baseball game.

  He didn’t want to be in it. There were two reasons. The first was that he had yet to come close to solving the problem, which is how Beagle thought of movies, as problems. It was strange—when he first got a project, there was a great and happy excitement. The happy part disappeared instantly. It was followed by another process of trying to figure out how the raw materials could be handled, shaped, discarded, kept, whatever, in order to produce a successful film.

  Except for his very first student film, which seemed to spill out of him, he always went through an intensive research phase. He always knew that it was totally necessary—it was where all the real work was done. He sometimes suspected that it was a way of stalling, procrastinating, avoiding that irrevocable moment when the camera was there and loaded, the actors were there and ready, and a hundred-odd people looked to him to say “Action” while another hundred—or so it seemed—peered over his shoulder fearful of how their millions were being spent and he had to know what every damn body was supposed to do and that when he was done it would look right, sound right, cut right, and sell right.

  He thought of his mind as a sausage maker. A big open funnel at the top. Pour everything in. Turn the handle. Grind it up together. Something happened inside. Out came sausage. The image, of course, suggested something else. A giant mouth, grazing, nibbling, noshing, gorging, devouring, ingesting mass consumables, down the esophagus to a gross and wobbling belly which, because he’d got it wrong, produced nothing but shit—stinking, reeking, fly-catching, sausage-shaped shit.

  Someday it was going to happen to him.

  It scared him—dare he pun it; yes, but not in public—shitless. He loved his fear, adored his panic, hoped it would keep him shit-free, a pure and stinkless sausage maker. But he knew it wouldn’t. There was always failure. Spielberg had 1941. Coppola had Finian’s Rainbow. John Huston did Victory. John Ford did This Is Korea.

  He felt it—the certainty that he was failing—every time. Every single time. He wondered if the feeling of failure would feel different the time that he actually did fail.

  He understood that the first principle of all fine art is plagiarism and that the first principle of all commercial art is theft. No artist, craftsman, or thief works in a vacuum. Every artist is a jazz musician, running new riffs on old tunes because old tunes are icons, references, cultural understandings—they are the language of the people of his world. Since the moment he saw the memo, Beagle had been gorging on war films: documentaries, features, foreign films, short films, training and recruiting films, cartoons, raw footage, news film.

  The problem was, he wasn’t there yet. If he had to turn the handle, he knew that all that would come out the other end was shit, was failure, and he was scared. He had to keep gorging until somehow, some catalytic ingredient, an enzyme perhaps, entered the stewing mass inside him, finally, and started the process that made it come out as something that did not stink. Or maybe what he was waiting for was to be stuffed so full that the internal pressure forced the creative organ, whatever it was, to finally function and make something with form and shape and color and light and meaning.

  So his actual preference was to be back at his studio, watching images, organizing images, on his ten HDTV screens with their thirty possible source machines all interfaced with a virtual supercomputer capable of controlling all of it while converting every image that passed through it into digital form and keeping it that way in memory.

  The other reason was that Beagle had a massive indifference to baseball. He understood its place as fable and parable in the canons of American mythology and had even included baseball shtick in several of his films, but its lethargic pace and the arrhythmic structure of what little action it had left him baffled.

  His wife, Jacqueline Conroy,43and their son, one-year-and-eight-month-old Dylan Kennedy44Beagle were with him. It was Jacqueline’s idea. She felt Beagle had been neglecting his family—true—and that they should do a wholesome family thing so that Dylan might learn to recognize his father.

  Beagle called Hartman, who got the Disney reserved box for them. John and Jackie’s cook had packed them an “all-American repast”: sliced-turkey sandwiches with goat cheese, sun-dried tomato bits, and homemade mayonnaise on Sacramento sourdough white bread; munchies of fried pork rinds and beef jerky; potato salad with roasted garlic bits; sparkling water from Idaho; and four bottles of Coca-Cola bottled in St. Louis.45

  Dylan didn’t like baseball either. It wasn’t that he had an active distaste for the game in any particular way. The idea that there were people who did not exist to play with him but to play for him was as yet an incomprehensible abstraction. Worse, it apparently required sitting still while in a waking state.

  Beagle had hoped that Fernando Valenzuela would be pitching because he would have recognized the name. But Valenzuela had pitched himself out or gotten old or maybe injured, one of those things that make ball players disappear. The Dodgers were playing Cincinnati. Beagle was glad that Cincinnati still existed.

  He sat Dylan down beside him. He was aware of his wife watching the way he handled his son so that she could tell him the right way to handle his son. He truly didn’t understand whether maternal instincts were powerful and difficult things to live with or whether she was just a compulsive bitch and it didn’t matter a good goddamn if she had a child or was a virgin. He began to explain the game to his son. Dylan said something that his father heard as “aH wuss,” then reached out and grabbed a pen from his father’s pocket. It was a monogrammed platinum fountain pen, the one that’s advertised as both decadent and overpriced. It had been a gift from some studio chief. Beagle couldn’t remember the name, so he didn’t know if the guy had been fired yet. He just remembered that the guy was the kind of guy who checked up on his gifts. A terrible habit and very burdensome for the recipient. He tried to get the pen back.

  Beagle got the top. Dylan kept the rest.

  Dylan had a very masculine concept of objects. It appeared to be genetic. No one had to show him what a hammer was for or that many, many objects could be used for hammering. The first time he got a stick in his hand, he conceived of the sword. When he got a little older and could walk and got hold of a bigger stick, he thought of the spear. He was very cute walking around the yard holding his stick high overhead and flinging it at things. He had sword fights with the bushes. Flailing at them with a twig. The bushes frequently won, catching the stick and forcing their young opponent to overbalance. But he always got back up off his diaper, dragged his stick out of the tangle, and returned to the attack as valiant and beautiful as Errol Flynn had ever b
een. It made Papa Beagle proud.

  So he should not have been surprised, or taken it at all personally, when his son slashed at him with the pen. Got him, too. Not only did the nib almost break his skin—and Beagle was sensitive to physical assault even from very small people—the pen splashed ink across his shirt. It was made of one of the more expensive mystery fabrics, dyed with the soft yet vibrant southwestern desert colors that he had lately come to favor. It wasn’t the money. What did $480 matter to John Lincoln Beagle? It was what? The beauty of the object? Having to walk around all day with ink blots where style had so recently been? Having to shop to replace it? It was that Kids Have to Learn.

  The obvious thing to do was whack the kid. Not maliciously, but like the papa bear gives the baby bear a cuff now and again to remind him who’s the papa bear and who’s the baby bear.

  That was a bit from an animated feature that Beagle had been working on shortly after Dylan was born, an adaptation of Goldilocks as told from the ursine side. John Lincoln had been certain that being a parent would add the dimension to his talent that would enable him to do for the children of America what Walt Disney himself had done—while maintaining his touch for adult cinema, of course. He and Belinda Faith, the animator he’d been working with, had story-boarded out several sequences. In one of them Baby Bear had annoyed Papa Bear when he was having his after-porridge pipe and Papa had just knocked him across the room. Baby Bear went rolling across the kitchen and up the wall and out the window. It was quite humorous and Baby Bear didn’t mind at all.

  There were a lot of people around. Modern pedagogy, he knew, frowned on whacking kids in public. Even if that’s what one did in cartoons. Also, his wife was watching. She’d love to have that on him. And finally, and in truth, Beagle didn’t hit his son because he understood with that part of his mind that was firmly rooted in reality that his son was not a Toon and that hitting kids wasn’t nice.