The satire "Wag the Dog," a cinematic artifact from the lost age of 1997, may occupy a unique place in film history. It is becoming our national portrait in the attic, worth a trip up the stairs every few years so that we may gaze upon its shifting surface and behold the latest, ghastly truths that have become visible there, reflecting our real political face.

It started out as a fairly puerile idea: The sparse, fuzzy green video of the Gulf War easily could have been faked using miniatures and special effects. What if Bush I had faked the war to boost a sagging presidency and his re-election chances? This was embroidered by David Mamet and Barry Levinson into a broad farce with the premise of a presidential sex scandal tossed in to motivate the media distraction of a fake war. Mere weeks after its release, the movie that had been intended as a parody of the Bush administration showed its astonishing predictive powers when the Clinton sex scandal broke, a virtual mirror image of the one concocted by the filmmakers. The astonishment stakes were raised when Clinton started lobbing missiles into Iraq to distract from the impeachment hearings.

Seen today, the movie's sex scandal trappings fall away and the rest of the film jumps out in high relief. Astonishment ascends to hair-raising wonder at a movie that seems fated to be a political ouija board:

- The plotters decide to declare a backwater country a haven for terrorists.

Also, the plotters decide, the designated nation has acquired nuclear capability. We are in imminent danger from their weapons of mass destruction. We must go to war immediately to defend ourselves.

- In one scene, chief White House spinmeister Robert DeNiro talks his way out of a tight spot with CIA agents who have discovered the plot and are not thrilled. They have intelligence that makes it clear the alleged threat being used as the basis for war is a fraud. DeNiro proclaims his fake war is part of the "new kind of war" that must be fought against terrorists. The CIA acquiesces to his logic.

- The necessary patriotic songs memorializing the forthcoming splendid little war are shown being scored and orchestrated. Mamet lays on the schmaltz with a trowel, but still can't match the real thing, to be heard on the nation's radios four years later.

- A random soldier is selected to be a prisoner of war. The concocted p.r. tale of the designated war hero's ordeal triggers the intended media frenzy, transfixing the nation and causing support for the war and the president to skyrocket.

- A farrago of official lies, catch phrases fall-back positions when things go wrong, and easy manipulations of the media and public opinion unspool with pinpoint predictive accuracy.

Needless to say, this film could not be made today. The theme of our besotted infatuation with string-pulling patriotism and all things martial -- though nothing in the movie approaches the reality of a president in a Navy flight suit landing on an aircraft carrier ordered to halt for the photo op -- is a form of satire that met its expiration date on Sept. 10, 2001. More to the point, what was biting, cynical political satire in 1997 is no longer cynical enough. The film's plotters don't kill anybody (other than one of their own overly talkative members). The fake war is literally fake. The motive in the movie was simply to sink a scandal and win an election, not secure world domination and initiate a right-wing dream project for a New American Century. It is about mere personal corruption, not the abduction of a nation and the destruction of another in the name of a mad ideology. Hence, "Wag the Dog" is now both scary and quaint simultaneously.

And, of course, the movie is no longer even a little bit funny.

Andrew Christie is a film editor in Los Angeles

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