Skip to main content

New top story from Time: Impeachment: American Crime Story Frames the Clinton Scandal as a Case of Women Sabotaging Women. Is That Really So Revolutionary?

https://ift.tt/3Dwzh65

The latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology American Crime Story is not exactly well timed. Impeachment, which revisits the investigation that threatened to end Bill Clinton’s presidency, was originally intended for release before the 2020 election. Instead, it premieres on Sept. 7—months after the twice-impeached Donald Trump left office, taking the immediacy of the title with him. The season is based on a nonfiction book whose author recently faced his own extremely public sex scandal. And it follows years’ worth of high-profile reconsiderations of the Clinton impeachment, from Monica Lewinsky’s reclamation of her good name in a 2014 Vanity Fair essay to A&E docuseries The Clinton Affair and a buzzy season of the podcast Slow Burn, both tied to the 20th anniversary of the story in 2018. There may always be an appetite for content around this salacious tale of sex, politics and media, but what is there to say about it that hasn’t been said before?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

That is the question with which Impeachment struggles as it reassembles all the familiar elements: the blue dress, the Drudge Report, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Head writer and executive producer Sarah Burgess, an award-winning playwright who is relatively new to TV, finds her answer in the women this scandal thrust into the spotlight—not just Monica, Hillary and Linda Tripp, but also Paula Jones, Ann Coulter and more obscure players including Jones adviser Susan Carpenter-McMillan and Tripp’s literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg. A handful of interesting performances and effective episodes in the second half of the season aside, the effect is to reduce the President and his inquisitor, Ken Starr, to minor roles. If there’s a point to this exercise, it gets lost amid so many histrionic reenactments of scenes we’ve seen replayed on the news and parodied in late-night comedy for more than two decades.

Of course, for Murphy-verse diehards, stunt-cast actors hamming it up in broad roles are part of the appeal. And in that regard, Impeachment gleefully delivers. Our heroine, in a choice that might have seemed subversive before Lewinsky’s reemergence but now just feels obvious, is the lovelorn, early-20s Monica, given sympathetic voice by the preternaturally effervescent Beanie Feldstein. Murphy regular Sarah Paulson takes on the guise of Monica’s treacherous coworker and confidant, Linda. While she isn’t exactly bad in the role, this is not a transformation on the level of her gloriously angry Marcia Clark in The People v. O.J. Simpson. Tripp remains the same delusional, cartoonish character she has always been.

Paulson isn’t the only cast member rendered fully unrecognizable by makeup, prosthetics and/or wigs. Clive Owen’s transformation into Bill Clinton must have taken hours, although it still doesn’t leave him looking much like the former POTUS. (Perhaps because she barely appears until the seventh episode, the production doesn’t appear to have expended much energy on sculpting the egregiously miscast Edie Falco into a believable facsimile of Hillary.) Owen does, at least, break from the standard, overly broad “Bubba” impression. His Bill isn’t a fratty hedonist so much as a man too psychologically compartmentalized to face his own misdeeds. There’s a regretful mutedness to the performance, too, as though we were watching the Clinton of 2021 retrace steps he took as a younger, more energetic and libidinous man.

Impeachment: American Crime Story -- Pictured: Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp. CR. Kurt Iswarienko/FX
Kurt Iswarienko/FXSarah Paulson as Linda Tripp in ‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’

Although the cast of characters is enormous, encompassing everyone from Clinton’s advisers to members of Starr’s team to the swarm of beltway reporters and pundits buzzing around the developing story, it’s the relationship between Monica and Linda that gives the season its shape. After opening with a thriller-esque flash-forward to the stranger-than-fiction sting operation in which Linda and a band of FBI agents ambush Monica at the Pentagon City Mall food court, the show traces the women’s time together at the Department of Defense. A pair of White House exiles, one nursing a secret love affair and the other a secret grudge, they bond over their impatience to leave the Pentagon’s boring, gray cubicles for another stint in the West Wing. When Linda realizes that Monica’s encounters with the President could give her the leverage to become the genuine Washington player she’s so desperate to become, the friendship becomes a seduction.

As Bill pulls away from Monica and Linda’s deceptions escalate to the point of taping the girlfriends’ marathon phone calls—and also, confusingly, as the show skips around among dates in the mid-to-late ‘90s—peripheral stories begin to unfold. There’s palace intrigue in the Oval, with aides scrambling to protect a President who seems only dimly aware of what he’s done, and cognitive dissonance at Starr HQ, where investigators’ conservative sympathies wrestle with a need to maintain the appearance of nonpartisanship. We watch Paula (a camped-up, makeup-caked Annaleigh Ashford) get unwittingly dragged into her husband’s (Taran Killam) and self-proclaimed “conservative feminist” Susan’s (the great Judith Light, splitting the difference between Phyllis Schlafly and Laura Dern in Marriage Story) vendetta against the Clintons.

The strongest side plot, by far, follows the media circus surrounding the Starr investigation. In one corner there’s Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff (Danny A. Jacobs) doing his shoe-leather thing—vetting sources, refusing access to illegally recorded audio and still having to beg his skittish editors to just publish the Monica story already. In the other, more sinister but also more colorful corner are Coulter (Cobie Smulders), Matt Drudge (Billy Eichner) and their circle of oddball right-wing upstarts, who want to engineer the President’s downfall and get rich and famous snarking about it, too.

If any aspect of the Clinton impeachment merits closer examination in 2021, it is surely the role it played in creating a flamboyantly partisan far-right media sphere, with echoes reverberating from Fox News to Breitbart to OANN. (Curiously, Showtime’s 2019 Roger Ailes docudrama The Loudest Voice skipped over this fertile period.) A vignette that finds the self-mythologizing Drudge managing the CBS studio’s gift shop by day—yes, he’s that guy spouting hot takes on Edward R. Murrow to apathetic customers—and diving into its dumpster at night in search of scoops brings some much-needed fun to a season that spends too long on inert recreations of Linda and Monica’s phone calls. It helps that Eichner and Smulders are so good. Her performance merits particular notice, considering that she stepped in on short notice to replace Betty Gilpin; she nails the character’s icy glare, her deadpan baritone, her surprisingly jockish body language.

Burgess paints Coulter as a sort of arrogant, nihilistic Peter Pan to a gaggle of awkward, conservative Lost Boys. (“Nice hat,” she quips upon meeting Drudge. “Is it serious?”) Though I wish we saw more of this cohort, that framing works. Elsewhere, we see other women quietly cranking the levers of power. The relationship between Paula and Susan mirrors that of Monica and Linda; in both cases, a commanding older woman pretends to nurture a lonely, naive, wronged young woman while actually using her pain to selfish ends. At the same time, Linda’s doing dirty work for Lucianne (Margo Martindale in tough-broad mode, always a treat), the agent she’s desperate to impress. Women wield influence in the White House as well. Bill’s personal secretary Betty Currie (Rae Dawn Chong) gradually shifts from compassionate Monica enabler to stern gatekeeper. When the prospect of settling Paula’s lawsuit comes up, Bill nixes the idea for fear of crossing Hillary.

Impeachment: American Crime Story -- Pictured: Clive Owen as Bill Clinton. CR. Kurt Iswarienko/FX
Kurt Iswarienko/FXClive Owen as Bill Clinton in ‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’

All history written after the official record is set must be revisionist, redundant or some combination of the two, and revisionist history loves to restore agency to oppressed groups whose contributions went unheralded in the original accounting. It’s usually a noble project. But in this case, it’s hard to see what is gained by putting some of the most powerful men in the world on the sidelines. It lets Clinton, Starr and the patriarchy at large off the hook.

The depictions of the women, for their part, rarely challenge the tabloid caricatures of 1998. When Susan calls Paula “dumb as a rock,” there’s nothing in the script to contradict that impression. Impeachment seems to delight in mocking Linda, whose passion for microwave cuisine comes off as almost sexual. The real women behind these characters may well deserve such scrutiny. But it’s a weird political stance for an anthology that, in past seasons, connected the murder of Gianni Versace to a culture of homophobia and teased out all the ways in which race, class, gender and the cult of celebrity intersected with the O.J. Simpson trial. And by reproducing old stereotypes, a story presumably meant to be revisionist slips into redundancy.

The only character Impeachment really seems interested in humanizing is Monica, which isn’t so surprising given that Lewinsky, now 48 and an anti-bullying advocate, is one of its executive producers. Casting the bubbly, adorable Feldstein opposite the prosthetically monstrosified Paulson and Owen is like casting a guileless little bunny as the final girl in a creature feature. On screen as in reality, Lewinsky is a relatable protagonist—a moony, insecure post-adolescent whose devastatingly charismatic, terminally unavailable paramour just so happens to be the leader of the free world. What the show doesn’t seem to get is how successful Monica Lewinsky has already been, over the past seven years, in shifting the narrative around Monica Lewinsky from slut-shaming to sympathy.

More unfortunate still is the way this emphasis repeats the mistakes of the ’90s media, by portraying the impeachment circus as a melodrama fit for the National Enquirer rather than as, for instance, a vast right-wing conspiracy to torpedo a Democratic presidency—one that laid the groundwork for our country’s current partisan nightmare. No one could blame Lewinsky for viewing her own ordeal as the most salient topic for Impeachment to tackle. The rest of the American Crime Story team should have known better.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Residents Overwhelmingly Support Slow Streets

Residents Overwhelmingly Support Slow Streets By Eillie Anzilotti After over a year of Slow Streets providing safe, low-volume corridors for people to walk, bike, play and travel during the pandemic, we’re excited to share our first comprehensive evaluation of the program . The key takeaway? San Franciscans are overwhelmingly in support of Slow Streets. Slow Streets are designed to limit through traffic on certain residential streets and allow them to be used as a shared roadway for people traveling by foot and by bicycle. Since introducing Slow Streets in April 2020 in response to the Mayor’s Emergency Health Order, SFMTA has designated around 30 corridors covering 47 miles of roadway as Slow Streets. The program has evolved from a critical component of San Francisco’s pandemic response and recovery to a potential new avenue to further the city and SFMTA’s goals around climate action and sustainable transportation. As the Slow Streets program has grown, we wanted to make sure we...

Transit Lanes Keep Muni Moving on Mission Street in SoMa

Transit Lanes Keep Muni Moving on Mission Street in SoMa By Erin McMillan The full-time transit lanes on Mission Street downtown installed as a temporary emergency measure during the pandemic will be made permanent. The first of the city’s Temporary Emergency Transit Lanes to get permanent authorization, they were unanimously approved by the SFMTA Board of Directors at their June 15, 2021 meeting. This shows how a quick-build project can be installed, evaluated, and refined in a relatively short amount of time.   Thousands of daily riders have already felt the impact of the full-time transit lanes since they were first temporarily installed last summer. Now, riders of the 14 Mission, 14R Mission Rapid, and many SamTrans and Golden Gate Transit customers will continue to benefit from the transit time savings we have seen with the implementation of these lanes. Mission Street in SoMa has been a major transit corridor for years, serving regional commuter...

FOX NEWS: What is TikTok's 'Check Your Privilege' challenge?

What is TikTok's 'Check Your Privilege' challenge? Activists are calling for awareness and change following the death of George Floyd. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3crYd00

New Sculptures Light up Van Ness Avenue

New Sculptures Light up Van Ness Avenue By Luis “Loui” Apolonio Light sculpture at Van Ness Avenue and O'Farrell Street Spectators gathered both online and in person to watch new lighting sculptures on Van Ness turned on for the first time on March 31, 2022. The whimsical and brightly colored sculptures located on the new Van Ness BRT boarding platform between Geary and O’Farrell are made of steel with LED lights inside on a timer set to illuminate at night.  The lighting event was kicked off with SFMTA Director Jeff Tumlin and MTAB Chair Gwyneth Borden serving as emcees. Mary Chou, Director of Public Arts and Collections at the San Francisco Arts Commission, spoke about the art installation itself, as well as the process for selecting the artist who would be awarded the project. In addition, Maddy Ruvolo, a member of the SFMTA’s Accessible Services team and a recently appointed member of President Biden’s U.S. Access Board, shared the importance of having accessibility as a ...

New top story from Time: TWICE Delivers Uplifting Performance of ‘DEPEND ON YOU’ at TIME100 Talks

https://ift.tt/3a8KgF0 TWICE delivered a special performance at the TIME100 Talks Friday. For the first time, the South Korean group performed the track “DEPEND ON YOU” from its latest album, Eyes Wide Open . As the coronavirus pandemic continues, members Jihyo, Nayeon, Momo, Sana, Mina, Dahyun, Chaeyoung and Tzuyu offered fans a message of solidarity and gratitude (vocalist Jeongyeon is on hiatus due to health reasons). “ Currently, we are sad to say that we are also aware that all of us are suffering in this situation,” Sana said. “We appreciate all people who are doing their best to return us to our normal lives and to bring back brighter days,” Nayeon continued. “TWICE will diligently keep on carrying out our duty to bring positive energy into the world,” Mina said. In line with these words, the group sang “DEPEND ON YOU”—a breezy, mellow track about steady hands that offer strength and support in the midst of darkness. “DEPEND ON YOU” first appeared on Eyes ...

New Muni Service Changes Start Saturday, August 19

New Muni Service Changes Start Saturday, August 19 By Clive Tsuma 28R 19th Avenue will run on weekdays between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. starting Monday, August 21.  Back to School  With SFUSD students returning to school August 16, many families who rely on Muni to get to school will see service increase after school as part of the new schedule. Because Muni vehicles often become crowded during morning peak hours and sometimes pass up stops when there is not enough room for more riders, families are encouraged to plan their trips ahead of time and hop on Muni early to make sure students get to school on time.  With every public school in the San Francisco Unified School District being served by at least one Muni route , students can expect extra Muni service on the first day of the school this fall and continue providing service throughout the school year. While the Muni service changes won’t be implemented until August 19, school tripper service will be offered starting Au...

New T Third Connecting Chinatown to Sunnydale Starts Saturday

New T Third Connecting Chinatown to Sunnydale Starts Saturday By Christopher Ward New Muni Metro map. This Saturday the T Third starts its long-awaited new route connecting Chinatown-Rose Pak Station from 4th & King in Central Subway, Mondays through Fridays, 6 a.m. to midnight every 10 minutes and Saturdays and Sundays, 8 a.m. to midnight every 12 minutes.   The K Ingleside will now travel between Balboa Park and Embarcadero Station. Customers using Embarcadero & Folsom, Embarcadero & Brannan and 2nd and King platforms should transfer to the N Judah at Powell Station or 4th & King. Watch the new Muni Metro service  map animations . The following bus service changes also start this Saturday: The T Third Bus will now run along 3rd and 4th Streets in SoMa and on Stockton Street north of Market Street to align with the new T Third rail line and will no longer travel on the Embarcadero and Market Street.   The 6 Haight/Parnassus  will now...

New top story from Time: A Photographer’s Journey Through the Dangerous New Age of Conspiracies in America

https://ift.tt/354JVAF In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart ,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company. In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final de...

Swami Ramdev LIVE: Yoga asanas to treat cough, cold, other ENT-related issues https://ift.tt/2Flexoe

The total number of global coronavirus cases has surpassed 22 million, including more than 777,000 fatalities. More than 14,783,000 patients are reported to have recovered. Follow this breaking news blog for live updates on coronavirus pandemic as it continues to pose a challenge for health workers and scientists who are in a race against time to produce a vaccine/medicine. 

New top story from Time: New York Prosecutor Convenes Grand Jury in Criminal Investigation of Donald Trump

https://ift.tt/3wuXF3R (NEW YORK) — New York prosecutors have convened a special grand jury to consider evidence in a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business dealings, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The development signals that the Manhattan district attorney’s office was moving toward seeking charges as a result of its two-year investigation, which included a lengthy legal battle to obtain Trump’s tax records. The person familiar with the matter was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity. The news was first reported by The Washington Post . Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into a variety of matters such as hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf, property valuations and employee compensation. The Democratic prosecutor has been using an investigative grand jury through the course of his probe to issue sub...