The 1999 comedy Dick is, in my opinion, very close to a perfect film. A fictionalized and beautifully dumb retelling of the Watergate scandal, Dick stars Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst as Betsy and Arlene, 15-year-old best friends who destroy Richard Nixon’s presidency. The idea of the movie is basically: what if “Deep Throat”—the mysterious informant who provided the Washington Post with information on Nixon’s involvement with the Watergate break-in—was actually just a pair of teens making a prank call? Its release amidst the absurdism of the Monica Lewinsky scandal delighted critics, although some reviews from the New York Times and other outlets featured lines that did not really age well, like Slate’s observation that: “Post-Monica Lewinsky, it isn’t odd to think of wide-eyed airheads wandering the White House.”
Financially, however, it was not a success, grossing only about $6.3 million at the box office. How wrong we were then. Dick was directed by Andrew Fleming (also known for The Craft) and co-written by Fleming and Sheryl Longin, and it follows Betsy and Arlene through a series of unlikely events: while sneaking out to mail a fan letter to teen idol Bobby Sherman outside the Watergate complex, they unknowingly alert police to the break-in at the DNC offices. Then, on a class trip to the White House, the girls recognize G. Gordon Liddy from the night of the break-in, and he’s like, “Oh shit,” but when a staffer brings them in for questioning, they are mostly just excited to meet the president—and are particularly interested in Nixon’s dog Checkers.
A historical satire based in the White House felt like an appropriate thing to revisit, given our current political landscape.
Because the girls clearly don’t care to think too hard about this, Nixon opts for flattery, retaining Betsy and Arlene as his official dog walkers and “secret youth advisors,” where they help inspire the end of the Vietnam War and bring about the Nixon-Brezhnev Accord with a tin of pot cookies. Eventually, they turn on the president after hearing tapes of him kicking his dog and yelling about Jews, and subsequently, the paranoid administration turns on them. Prior to her cruel disillusionment, Arlene had fallen in love with Nixon and erected a shrine to him in her bedroom, replacing Bobby Sherman. The 18-and-a-half minute gap in Nixon’s tapes, we learn, was in fact a deleted recording of Arlene confessing her love and singing “I Honestly Love You” by Olivia Newton John.
After rewatching it for the first time, I was relieved and delighted to find that Dick holds up. It’s fast-paced and breathless and does not take itself seriously at all. A historical satire based in the White House felt like an appropriate thing to revisit, given our current political landscape, and there is something oddly comforting about a constitutional crisis being reframed, from the comfortable vantage point of history, as a joke—although it does serve as a grim reminder that the actual goings-on of our present-day West Wing are more ridiculous than anything a screenwriter could have dreamed up in the ‘90s.
When I discovered that our own Megan Reynolds has not seen this classic film, I gasped, and immediately set out to rectify the situation. Here’s our conversation.
Ellie: I remember first watching this with my dad when it came out, and because I had no idea what Watergate was (I was 10), I didn’t really get any of the jokes. I still laughed, though, because the lead actresses were so good (and Will Ferrell’s pouty, egomaniacal Bob Woodward is among his best performances, if very rude to the press), and also because my dad—one of the many Boomers who loved this movie—paused it every five minutes to explain. The thing is, you don’t really have to know any historical details to laugh at a romantic dream sequence in which a 15-year-old fantasizes about being twirled around on the beach by Richard Nixon. Although to be 100 percent honest, Megan and I did peruse the Watergate Wikipedia page for a brief pre-film refresher.I think Dick evades the “two dumb blondes” trope, which is the only spot where this movie logically could have felt dated. The protagonists are two dumb blondes, but they’re also only 15, an age at which everyone is dumb—and because of this, their vividly melodramatic and self-serious personalities feel real in the best way. Their devotion to each other, and to running around screaming and waving their arms, is the emotional centerpiece of the film. What do you think? Did you like it?