Who
was the "deep throat" who informed Washington Post reporters
the secrets about Watergate? Who caused the 18½ gap in Nixon’s
tapes? Since nobody in Washington is likely to divulge the
answers any time soon, the puzzles are fair game for Hollywood.
This is the context for the low-brow farcical film Dick,
directed by Andrew Fleming, in which the answers to both questions
are two fifteen-year-old airheads with Valley Girl accents
attending Hamilton High School in the Beltway. After accidentally
running into G. Gordon Liddy (played by Larry Shearer) in
a stairwell during the Watergate break-in, Betsy Jobs (played
by Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene Lorenzo (played by Michelle Williams)
go with their class on a White House tour, are spotted by
presidential aides, and are escorted into the inner sanctum
of the White House in order to debrief them on what they might
know about the break-in. Checkers, from an office across the
way, bolts from President Richard Nixon and runs toward them,
driven by an animal’s keen sense of good and evil, and the
wagging dog is then followed by President Richard Nixon (played
by Dan Hedaya). Fearing that they may know too much, the most
powerful man in the world tries to buy them off by assigning
them as "official White dog walkers" and later as "secret
youth advisers." One day, while in the White House to assume
their new duties as unpaid interns, they ask Nixon to end
the war in Vietnam, and shortly thereafter he does! They also
bake some of their special Hello Dolly cookies for Nixon,
who in turn offers them to Leonid Brezhnev, whereupon the
Cold Warriors break into song, and soon the girls learn that
the Soviet Union and the United States have signed a major
peace accord! (Betsy’s Vietnam-protesting brother, unaware
that they would put them into the cookies, stashed marijuana
leaves into the jar of ingredients.) Next, Arlene falls in
love with Nixon and imagines that she will marry Nixon after
he divorces Pat. However, they eventually find out about Nixon’s
attempt to cover up the Watergate burglary, see the shredding
of documents, and hear and record over the foul language and
anti-Jewish remarks of the hitherto secret tapes. Betsy is
Jewish, so the two are so angered by Nixon that they decide
to inform Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Will
Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch), and the information that they
supply brings down the Nixon presidency. Although the dialog
and plot may be teenagerish, all actors chosen to play White
House and Washington Post roles have such a cartoon resemblance
to the real persons—and to those who play them in All
the President’s Men (1976)—that mature filmviewers
will bellylaugh the first time they parade onto the screen.
We can also see that Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp have
themselves been cartoonized by Arlene and Betsy, whose innocence
saved them from talking about or even having sex with the
president. The one important insight of the film is that Nixon
did not fall because of his tricks in a Washington where machiavellism
is par for the course, but rather that Nixon lost popularity
outside the Beltway because of something that Arlene and Betsy
(as female Forrest Gumps) as well as Checkers grasped reasonably
quickly—that Nixon lacked simple human decency. The Saturday
Night Live imbecility of all the adults in the film is an
indictment not just of those trapped by the Nixon presidency
but of the absurdity of almost all American politics ever
since. Future generations will now be absolutely certain that
"deep throat" was Arlene and Betsy, Cliff Notes notwithstanding.
The tagline of the film, released approximately twenty-five
years to the day when Nixon resigned, well summarizes Dick:
"He was tricky. They were better." And as Nixon helicopters
away from the White House after his resignation, Arlene and
Betsy have the last say—a banner that they hold up, which
says, "YOU SUCK, DICK." MH
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