Small confession: I realized that I really don’t know fuck-all about Watergate outside of it being the biggest political scandal of the ‘70s and the reason for why nearly any major scandal is now referred to as a “-gate.” Despite paying attention in all my history classes, mostly all I know is that it involves three major dudes—President Nixon, Woodward, Bernstein—and something about a burglary, cover-ups, and an unknown informant. Most anything you read or watch about Watergate, including 1976’s All the President’s Men, detail it as such a nail-biting investigation and uncovering, a daring journalistic endeavor. It has become the yardstick for measuring the wrongdoings of those in power, but in retrospect, the entire debacle feels fairly… conservative (no pun intended). This is partially due to the circus act that has become American politics since Watergate–we’ve now lived through the Iran-Contra affair, Benghazi, and Russia election meddling. But it’s also because reality could never live up to Andrew Fleming’s iconic 1999 revisionist history of the event, Dick.

So who was Deep Throat? If you guessed it was an alias made up by two high schoolers during a prank call, to your surprise (and mine), you’d be wrong. Turns out Deep Throat was some FBI guy who coughed up all the information about Nixon and Watergate to The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Up until 2005, this informant’s name was kept under wraps, but in the late ‘90s Fleming and writer Sheryl Longin dared to explore the not-entirely-unlikely possibility: what if it was Nixon’s two ditzy, dewy-eyed 15-year-old dog walkers?

Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams) sneak out of their Watergate apartment complex to mail a letter to heartthrob-long-forgotten Bobby Sherman when they inadvertently expose Nixon administration officials breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The following day, the girls take a school field trip to the White House where they see a familiar face from the night before, G. Gordon Liddy. Fearing that the girls are far more canny than they are, Liddy shuffles them into the West Wing where they wind-up running into President Richard Nixon himself, played by Dan Hedaya, and his dog, Checkers. Subsequently, the girls are appointed official White House dog walkers and eventually, Nixon’s “secret youth advisors.”

While working for Nixon–Dick, as they like to call him–Betsy and Arlene find themselves all over the White House in the wrong place at the right time. They are unsuspectingly gathering incriminating evidence on the Nixon administration in true Looney Tunes style; secret donor lists found stuck to shoes like toilet paper, opening the doors on plumbers knee-deep in shredded documents and stuffing briefcases full of money, and recording love songs over tapes of the President spouting prejudices, confessing his crimes, and worst of all–being mean to Checkers! The biggest mistake the Nixon administration makes–aside from the entirety of the Watergate scandal–is to undermine Betsy and Arlene. The girls are not geniuses by a stretch and while they may be a little too trusting, they’ve got moxie to boot and are nothing if not virtuous. All this leads to the girls’ prank call to Woodward Bernstein where they eventually reveal all of the President’s secrets and, well, the rest is literally history.

Sure, the actual goings-on were a bit different than in the film, but even then, the most absurd bits aren’t entirely too far off from fact. We discovered years after the film's release that Deep Throat wasn’t in fact our two style icons; however, even at the time, people knew that the pseudonym was actually dubbed from that same skeezy 1972 porno Betsy’s brother is caught seeing in the movie. Revisiting Dick, especially after events from the 2000s on, I think it actually exposes American politics for the farce it can be. Since its release, we’ve watched more real-life government buffoonery on TV news than what I think most writers could even dream of conjuring up pre-2000. But Dick’s satire is smart and the events, along with the fashion, remain a perfectly exaggerated depiction of the ‘70s.

Fleming and Longin tap into that absurdity of American politics and point a finger at the foolish politicians themselves, never making the girls the butt of the dick jokes, but rather the Dick himself–Nixon. The bad guys are almost always clearly the bad guys (I mean, even the President’s little henchmen were aptly given the acronym CREEP in real life), but sometimes we make things more complex than they need to be. These girls aren’t obtuse; in fact, they’re the only people in the movie who see things as straightforward as they really are. Arlene is right. Like, why can’t we just ask the President to stop the war? It could really be that simple. The girls’ escapades feel so cartoonish and comical because we can see all of the corruption in the light of day just like they do; it’s practically on display. It shouldn’t have to take a pair of geniuses, advanced journalistic skills, or even an extensive investigation to expose what was one of the most poorly operated criminal affairs in American history. It should be as simple as following the moral compass of two well-intentioned girls, in all their plaid and polyester glory. Bottom line: if he kicks his dog, if he’s prejudiced, and if he has a potty mouth–he’s a dick!

You Suck, Dick!