The most surprising part of FX’s hotly anticipated anthology American Crime Story: Impeachment is not the story, as the retelling of the scandal that took down Bill Clinton tells no new detail that hasn’t been burned into the country’s consciousness for more than two decades. The real revelation comes from Monica Lewinsky herself — namely just how the fictionalization, on which she serves as a producer, reflects her own interpretation of events.
For half her lifetime, Boomer women have called themselves feminists while calling Monica a slut in the same sentence. After years of trying (and failing) to fade into obscurity and settle into a life of normalcy, Lewinsky finally found a fitting third act not just as a prominent anti-bullying advocate but, at last, as the author of her own story.
Lewinsky never sought the spotlight. Per her own admission, she spent most of her adulthood unable to support herself financially.
“Ten years on, I still could not get a job,” Lewinsky confessed to the Hollywood Reporter.
Even after leaving the country to earn her master’s, Lewinsky had to embrace her past to sustain herself. When she heard ACS creator Ryan Murphy planned on turning her life into the third season of the true-crime drama, she signed on to co-produce only after his repeated pleas for her participation. Although we’ve seen Lewinsky talk about the Clinton saga, we haven’t experienced it through her eyes — until now.
We can safely assume that actress Beanie Feldstein’s Monica is Lewinsky’s Monica, or at least her perception of herself. That’s the true revelation of the show thus far. Although Lewinsky has openly lamented her struggles with her weight, the real Monica of the 90s (and even now) was never really a pound over “zaftig.”
In all actuality, she was quite a looker who would have been considered a catch in today’s post-Kardashian era embrace of curvier bodies. Feldstein just has a larger body type. That isn’t a dig at Feldstein, herself a doe-eyed beauty, at all. Visually, she just doesn’t share Lewinsky’s, for lack of a better term, leaner physicality.
But the giveaway of Lewinsky’s innermost judgment — and the crucial aspect of how she internalized years of abuse from the media — is Feldstein’s deliberate acting choices. At 28, the extremely youthful Feldstein is still six years older than Lewinsky was at the start of the affair, so it’s a little surprise that she plays Lewinsky with a noticeably girlish and soft soprano.
Unlike the caricature dreamed up by her cruelest critics, Lewinsky doesn’t have her fictionalized character lift her blazer to flash her infamous thong or declare to the leader of the free world that she has a crush on him as a calculated and sensual act of seduction. Rather, they’re the passionate impulses of a girl falling in the type of lust she thinks is love until it’s too late.
This works.
But in this laudable attempt to contextualize properly just how out of her league she was in this affair with a man as practiced and manipulative as the president, this on-screen Lewinsky seems less charming and more childish across the series. The Pentagon wouldn’t have kept Lewinsky around if she were as careless and unprofessional in her nonromantic affairs as her friend Linda Tripp would later portray her. Yet, the series refuses to grant airtime to Monica’s many virtues, such as her lack of pretension and gift for gab.
Again, it’s worth reiterating that Feldstein, a Golden Globe-nominated actress who’s set to reprise the legendary Fanny Brice in Broadway’s revival of Funny Girl, is not making poor acting choices. No, she is following the real-life Lewinsky’s direction to a tee.
Knowing Lewinsky’s involvement in the production makes the comparably sympathetic portrayals of her contemporary adversaries all the more impressive. For all that the commentariat has ridiculed Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp in a fat suit, Lewinsky’s Linda Tripp has a legitimate ax to grind. Sure, Tripp’s complaints about the informality of the Clinton administration — Hillary uses the West Wing bathroom like the rest of the peasants: news at 11! — read more as personal grievances than principled disputes.
But her interest in Lewinsky’s relationship is revealed to have a stridently feminist purpose. Tripp interprets her transfer to the Pentagon after the death of the boss she felt such fealty toward, the tragic Vince Foster, while Clinton victim Kathleen Willey remains in the White House as a sign that Clinton’s sexual preferences decide his personnel choices. This is an analysis we all now know is correct.
At the time, Clinton was seen as a cad. Now we can all acknowledge that even tacitly incentivizing promotions in exchange for sexual favors is systemic sexual harassment. Even if Tripp’s reason for rage was purely self-motivated, Lewinsky shows us that Tripp understood what others refused to at the time.
Impeachment makes other choices far more thoughtful than half the country would, even today. The show intentionally limits the presence of Hillary Clinton and reportedly erases daughter Chelsea Clinton from the screen altogether. Lord knows how Lewinsky found it in her heart to show such grace toward the woman who called her a “narcissistic looney tune,” let alone vote for her in 2016.
But it’s clear from her own portrayal of herself that she’s a humble woman to a fault. (Even Ann Coulter gets a fair shake with the portrayal of the fittingly comely and leggy Cobie Smulders of How I Met Your Mother fame!)
This brings us to the Boomers. On ABC’s The View, now reverted back to its usual uselessness with the departure of Meghan McCain, the table took turns on Wednesday debating just how trashy or whatever Lewinsky is for daring to own her story.
“I don’t regret any joke I ever did,” Joy Behar said of Lewinsky, who she maintains was not a victim of Clinton’s. “Because in the moment, it was funny and it was relevant — my intention is never to hurt anybody’s feelings, so I’m coming from a pure place with it.”
Sunny Hostin denied the notion that Lewinsky was “canceled,” asserting that becoming the global punchline of a joke was simply one of the “consequences” of “having an affair with the married president of the United States.”
“Now she is a producer of movies based on this affair — her life. I think her net worth is in the millions of dollars, she is part of the 1%,” said the woman reportedly worth $3 million about the woman who literally could not get a job until she publicly owned (again) the worst mistake of her life.
When Sara Haines, the sole voice of reason at the desk, pointed out that, yes, Lewinsky was far more of a victim than Hillary, who willingly backed her cheating husband multiple times, Hostin charged Lewinsky with “making her career” capitalizing on her mistakes. Behar asserted that the only victims of the most powerful man on the planet using his employee for quickies next to the Oval Office were Hillary Clinton and the rest of the country. At least on the latter half, she had a point.
For too long, Boomer feminists like Behar and the movement’s evil stepmother, Gloria Steinem, made clear their principles were conditional. So long as the likes of Clinton protected their holy grail, abortion, all other abuses of women could be occasionally overlooked.
In their minds, Lewinsky was not a human being worthy of dignity from her boss, the media, or fellow women — but she was an obstacle. In turn, Lewinsky internalized that bullying with an overcorrection, a reactionary impression of herself. It was not the vicious vixen the press manufactured but as someone more corpulent and childish, rather than just a tad too curvy and charming around a practiced predator such as Clinton.
Impeachment may not present the carbon copy of the Monica we remember, but it’s the story she deserves to own, once and for all.
