Watching "Dave" in 2012

Last week I blogged about Clint Eastwood's appearance at the GOP convention. I said if a political convention is into film icons for its surprise guest speaker, the convention managers should go for someone like Harrison Ford, who played the president in "Air Force One," or Kevin Kline, who was the president in "Dave."

Both those characters were action figures, and heroes in the end, and I thought at least that GOP challenger in 2012 should wear a WWHFD? or a WWDD? bracelet.

I was fresh on "Air Force One." It was on last week, and Harrison Ford was in fact a stirring action figure and hero at the end, though I can't imagine Mitt Romney tethered to a rescue cable being reeled in by a C-130 as Air Force One crashes into the sea below.

But I had not seen "Dave" in a long time, so I watched it today. The plot was clever, and exciting, but forget the plot. It was the context that had me rewinding, watching again, and taking notes. "Dave" was made in 1993, but its context is a contrast between political posturing and everyday reality, a political "falsiness" (a cousin to Stephen Colbert's "truthiness") that is unnerving, watching it in 2012.

Falsiness describes the 2012 campaign phenomenon in which a candidate or a campaign ad not only doesn't bother with letting facts get in the way, the candidate or campaign, when challenged, says that facts aren't that important anyway. "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," Romney campaign pollster Neil Newhouse said last week.

If you want to watch how unnerving falsiness is, watch "Dave." The plot is clever to the extreme, but it's the falsiness that sets the plot up. Falsiness in 2012, like that voiced by Newhouse or Paul Ryan, is a culture necessary to the growing of plots, none of which will yield anything resembling everyday reality. In the movie, Dave becomes the hero when he gives his life (sort of) to stop falsiness in its tracks.

Other quotes and situations not only echo, they could have been in this morning's paper. It's so current that you wonder if today's politics are real, or only a movie.