“It’s gonna be different now. They’ll never lie to us again.” It seems odd to start at the ending of “ Dick ,” the 1999 Watergate satire starring Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams and now celebrating its 25th anniversary.
But those final lines, spoken by Dunst’s Betsy to Williams’ Arlene, the teen girl duo whom the movie posits as the real political masterminds behind the Deep Throat informant that helped bring down Richard “Dick” Nixon, hit different when rewatching “Dick” in the current political climate. “It always got a knowing laugh,” said director Andrew Fleming, speaking to IndieWire during the same week of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life and President Joe Biden announcing he was not seeking reelection, instead endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. “We knew at the time that that was meant to be a joke,” said screenwriter Sheryl Longin, who co-wrote the script with Fleming.
“I’m sorry that we were right.” Fleming and Longin never set out to make a political satire. As Fleming said, “The [demographic] of people who are [interested in teenage girls and political thrillers] is nil.
” For this reason, the film was primarily pitched at Dunst and Williams’ contemporaries, who had just seen Dunst in the similarly toned “ Drop Dead Gorgeous “ weeks before, and religiously watched Williams as “Dawson’s Creek” bad girl Jen Lindley. The absurd satire was likely over that audie.