“When it comes to creating a drug policy that makes crack and heroin cheaper than asthma and AIDS medicine—yes, I’m an amateur.”

More applause.

“But there’s nothing wrong,” he continues, “with being an amateur. The people that started the Underground Railroad were amateurs. Martin Luther King was an amateur. Have you ever been to Amateur Night at the Apollo? Some of the best talent in the world was there!”

“But you wouldn’t know nothing about that,” Gilliam continues. “Why? Because when it comes to judging talent and potential, you, my friend, are an amateur!”

It’s a victorious performance—one that emphasizes the role that empathy, real empathy, must play in elections. “How can you help the poor if you’ve never been poor?” Gilliam asks. “How can you stop crime if you don’t know no criminals? How can you make drug policy if you never smoke the chronic?”

The crowd erupts, again, into cheers. And, with that, the fantasy of the political outsider is perfectly articulated (as Gilliam’s opponent sweats, profusely, into a handkerchief). If a presidential campaign is a job interview, then many of the hiring managers have decided that a lack of experience is preferable to a long career in public service. And that might have to do with a mistrust of bureaucracy, but it has even more to do with the political value of simple empathy. Career politicians, the idea goes, don’t understand what it means to suffer and want and need. They don’t, in every sense, get it.

Not so Mays Gilliam. “I’m a real American!” the presidential candidate says, in conclusion. “I’ve been high! I’ve been robbed! I’ve been broke! My credit is horrible! They won’t even take my cash!”

The crowd goes wild. And the career politician keeps on sweating.

It’s entirely fitting that Wag the Dog take for granted its audience’s cynicism; most Americans are, after all, extremely cynical about politics and elections. Not in a #rigged kind of way, necessarily, but in a softer, more diffuse, more miasmic way: Many of us just figure that political institutions are constantly trying to fool us. Campaigns are a Hollywood production, with wardrobe and makeup and cue cards. They involve lines and edits and revisions. They cast characters. They take direction. They take place, for the most part, on screens.

Many of the movies we’ve watched so far in Political Theater get at that basic idea through pushing against it: Head of State’s Mays Gilliam is a regular guy who refuses to play his advisers’ Hollywood-inspired game. So, to an extent, is The Candidate’s Bill McKay. And so, in a way, is The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet, who thwarts expectations about presidential geniality by being that most time-honored of things: True to Himself.

It’s a common trope in films and shows about politics: the one person, standing up to the Hollywood-produced machinery of Washington. The individual, fighting for authenticity in a political culture that wants nothing more than to be fake. What Wag the Dog suggests, though, is something both gentler and infinitely more cynical: Here, there is no one to push back. Here, there is no one to stand up for authenticity or truth or the empowerment of the individual. Here, it’s all a production; we citizens double as audiences. And the thing of it is that, in the movie’s dark vision, there is no difference between the two.

If you have any thoughts about the film you’d like to add, please drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a reader:

Glad you brought up this movie. It’s ahead of its time in underlining our tendency to believe what we see on TV, Facebook, Twitter, and from political “surrogates” and pundits. I have to confess: As a Class A cynic (hey, four years at a New England prep school in the ‘60s will do that to ya), I watch Wag the Dog about once a year just because it makes me laugh to see a team of “whatever it takes” political operatives go so all in on Robert deNiro’s command. Great supporting cast, too. Yikes.

The Beer Question, after all, is the wrong question to ask. Do we really want a leader who is on our level—or is it better, actually, to have a leader who is demonstrably above us? My money’s on the latter. And so is The West Wing’s. You can read “Game On” as a lot of things—smarmy, strawmanny, overly convinced of a single debate’s ability to sway the electorate’s affections—but it also makes a pretty good argument for choosing leaders according to their skills and their knowledge, rather than their charm. Political stagecraft, as Matt noted of The Candidate, offers a mix of benefits and drawbacks; I think one of its most significant failings is the way it has of emphasizing charisma—not interpersonal charisma, but telegenic charisma—over things that are less readily translatable to the screen. It prioritizes the best performance over the best person.

“Game On” aired in 2002, before the founding of Facebook and Twitter; it is not about social media. But in another sense, I couldn’t help thinking as I watched the episode, it is entirely about social media. It is about the performative, personality-driven demands the public makes of its politicians. It is about the way we ritualize the lowering of our politicians so they will meet us within our own averageness. Under the current regime, candidates must be photographed and filmed and Instagrammed as they gnaw on pork products at the Iowa State Fair. They must share their Spotify playlists, and the mixes must be full of selections that are whimsical but also relatable. They must constantly be performing—not just as public servants, but as actors in the great dramedy of American democracy.

“Game On” is in the end, I think, about all of that. It is about how, in the interplay between “person” and “persona,” the American campaign apparatus is biased in favor of the persona. It is essentially a 43-minute long condemnation of the role that beer plays in the American political system—and, at the same time, a reminder that we are all under its influence.

The problem of political success was put in a nutshell for me by the extras we gathered at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California, to film McKay’s final speech. The director had me explain to them that McKay’s phrases (e.g. “forward into the future”) were meaningless, because he thought the extras had to be told when to laugh or clap. But when Robert Redford delivered the speech, the crowd—even though it knew it was watching an act—was stirred. The speech evoked not only spontaneous applause, but tears. Redford had the grace to be frightened by the response he drew that day.

The point of the film is the power of popular response: how little it has to do with reality or ability. It’s also about how easy it is for a politician to forget that he’s not usually saying anything at all.

Sorry, Senator Quayle, you thought we were telling you how-to, when we were trying to say: watch out. You missed the irony. Unless, in a way we never could have foreseen, you are the irony.

In Designated Survivor, Tom Kirkman begins the story close to where Bill McKay winds up at the close of The Candidate: newly appointed to the highest office in the land, wondering, with mounting panic, “What do we do now?” He wonders almost immediately whether he should step down, but he presses ahead, moment to moment, playing the role of president precisely because he recognizes the nation’s deep need for a figurehead in a moment of crisis. In several scenes, he psychs himself up to perform as a character who’s tougher and smarter and more confident than he really is, believing that the artifice is both necessary and part of the point.

Midway through The Candidate, McKay goes to a hospital for a photo opp with some new mothers, all of whom are black or brown. When his campaign staff reviews the footage with him while they’re trying to cut an ad, we see the mothers talking over him as he doles out platitudes. Over the course of the film, he gets better at commanding attention; as Larner put it in the Times, “his star outshines his soul and events sweep him, blind and lost, to victory.” McKay has the temerity to be shocked by the effectiveness of his superficial appeal, but seems to lack the decency to put that appeal to any use. It never occurs to him to strive to understand what those new mothers might need, and to use his apparent political gifts to get it for them.

What rings truest in The Candidate today isn’t the now-banal insight that pure stagecraft might make for effective politics, but that a vacuous self-styled idealist would exploit that fact all the way to office, with no intention of ever having to govern, believing all the way that his idealism is intact.

All of that supports J.S.’s theory! It suggests a movie that is deeply concerned with political alchemy: how a person, with all his quirks, gets transformed into a shiny, glimmering candidate. But I agree with J.S.: It doesn’t seem to me that, if that transformation was the concern here, the film fully made its case, by its end.

You could read “What do we do now?” as meaning, essentially, “What do we do now that the performing is over, and we have to get real?” But that discounts the dynamics of the permanent campaign, which were already very much in play by the ’70s. You could also read it as an acknowledgement of the overall vacuity of the campaign: Empty rhetoric colliding, finally, with a job that needs doing.

Whichever it is, though, at this point it’s hard to get too incensed about the notion that campaigns double as spectacles; that doubling, after all, is also how politicians reach their constituents in the age of mass media. The connection between “spectacle” and “democracy” is a really interesting one, and one that movies, both before and after The Candidate, have explored to great effect; I didn’t read The Candidate, though, as fully embracing it. J.S. mentioned Wag the Dog; the story of Bill McKay strikes me, for the most part, as a case of the dog doing the wagging. It’s describing what happens during a campaign; I’m not sure, though, how much it’s actually criticizing.

Have thoughts to add, to this discussion thread or others? Write us at hello@theatlantic.com.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive, certainly. But either way they make The Candidate revealing. It could simply be, after all—this is the argument for movies having changed—that I missed the satire because I’ve simply become desensitized to cinematic subtlety. The ’90s, and that decade’s unprecedentedly violent collisions of politics and entertainment, had their way with us all; maybe, in the wake of Wag the Dog and Primary Colors and even (the absurdist, glorious) Canadian Bacon, I simply expect my satire to be stridently un-subtle. Maybe it’s simply the case that nuanced satire no longer scans, to my Starr Report-addled brain, as “satire” at all.  

The other possibility—and, again, the two aren’t necessarily at odds with each other—is that Americans’ perception of politics, in the wake of waters Gate and White, has simply become more cynical in the years since 1972. I pretty much take it for granted, today, that to be a retail politician will require—implicitly—some degree of selling out; I take it for granted, too, that politics and spectacle are, at this point, pretty much inextricable from each other. And in an age that finds conspiracy theories swirling, exhaust-like, around pretty much any major-party national candidate who puts herself forward for candidacy—in an age whose current “political satire” so often culminates in unpunished murder—McKay’s soft-sellout scans to me as … not much of a sellout at all.

Could the difference simply be that people of previous generations, in the post-1968 and pre-Watergate years, simply expected more—and, in another way, less—of their politicians? Very possibly. Here, after all, is the New York Times’s review of the movie, written by Vincent Canby and published in June of 1972:

There is something perverse and puritanical in the way many liberal Americans regard the political system. If a candidate wants to win, he must be suspect. Ambition in itself is bad. Like athlete’s foot, it’s not a sin, but it is unseemly. We put great store by the kind of modesty that insures defeat and that, only then, is revealed to be a form of arrogance. The best man should lose, or he isn’t the best man. This is the Catch-22 of American politics.

We all know that men who run for public office hoping only to improve the tone of the campaign, to raise the real issues, usually fail—and look terrible on television, which may be even worse. We suspect that only winning counts, yet we also fondly believe—since we’ve seen it demonstrated often enough—that the system is so corrupt that no good man can win without either being hopelessly corrupted or turned into a bewildered cipher.

First of all: Like athlete’s foot, it’s not a sin, but it is unseemly. From one writer to another: RESPECT. What a great line.

Second of all, though, it’s noteworthy that these tensions are simultaneously ones that we still discuss today … and, also, that seem distinctly antiquated. My sense is that the American public, writ large, has largely given up even on the notion of modesty in politicians. And that we have also given up, largely, on the notion of idealism—particularly now, as the public anticipates the post-Obama years. A lot of us now simply assume, I think, that an election is a pragmatic choice between two not-terribly-appealing options. And that corruption is simply part of the game—a part, indeed, that we, the public, are complicit in. In the age of social media, after all, we are all part of the partisanship that we are so fond of bemoaning. Candidates are what they are because that’s what we, directly and indirectly, ask them to be.

The Candidate anticipates all that. It emphasizes cameras and flashbulbs and TV screens; it explores the performativity of politics. And that’s what makes it feel—satire or not—worthy of watching today. One reader, who first voted in 1980, explained that the movie is “Timeless, still relevant. Redford’s line after his victory—‘What do we do now?’—sums up the political process as well today as in 1969.”

Another, who first voted in 1960, said that it “shows the candidate as we don’t see him/her in all the media and what campaigning itself can do to the one running for office.”

Another (first vote 1978): “About a guy who doesn’t want to run, and does anyway...resonates today.”

Another (1972): “Still relevant, subtle, entertaining, skewers hypocrisy of both parties.”

Another (also 1972): “Asks the most important question in the 2016 race (regardless of the ultimate winner)—‘What happens now?’”

Another (1968): “Showcases the absurdity of the political process.”

It definitely does. My main question is: How does it do that showcasing? And what can we learn from comparing the 1972 notion of political satire to the 2016 version? I’ll keep thinking and, meanwhile, I’d love your thoughts; send them, please, to hello@theatlantic.com.