74 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
ON TELEVISION
FOUL PLAY
“Impeachment: American Crime Story,” on FX.
BY DOREEN S T. FÉLIX
ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY WROTEN
rality is not the currency of art, however.
The show offers a surprising character
ization of Lewinsky, who was twentyone
when she interned in the White House
and later began a relationship with Clin
ton. Beanie Feldstein, who plays her, is
slavish to the detail of her fragile youth,
scrubbed as it was from the tabloid rec
ord. The character is a wreck, riskily piti
able, a Beverly Hills naïf frenzied by her
foolish love for the leader of the free
world. And yet “Impeachment,” which
has an intelligence informed by popcul
tural reckonings around consent, does
more than align her situation with pure
victimhood. Lewinsky herself has already
expanded the record; her 2014 essay in
Vanity Fair rewrote the scandal through
the prism of her experience, revealing
the complexity of the affair. Why retread
now? If there is a revelation in “Impeach
ment,” it is the conflicted portrait of the
forgotten operator in this legend of exile
and exploitation: the reviled bureaucrat
and whistle blower Linda Tripp, played
by Sarah Paulson.
The title of this “American Crime
Story” installment is a trick of nomencla
ture, because the series, steered by the
playwright Sarah Burgess, presents the
impeachment as Tripp’s nasty showpiece.
We meet her in the first episode, a mess
of gratuitous nonlinear storytelling. The
Clinton dynasty is in full swing, and Tripp,
a holdover administrator from the Bush
years who sees the West Wing as her
permanent domain, is unwanted. Worse,
she’s unnoticed. There’s a contrast be
tween how the White House is filmed—
dark, devoid of life—and the palpable
pleasure Tripp takes in being there. After
the suicide of her boss, Vince Foster, a
confidant of the Clintons’, she is reas
signed to the grayedout halls of the
Pentagon. She does not languish; rather,
she is heated by suspicions of conspir
acy, asking her new boss to give her an
office, as she is a target for knowing “too
much about Whitewater.” Thoughts of
revenge provide the only warmth in her
lonely days, which end with frozen din
ners consumed in front of the television.
Her aggrievement is generally that of the
conservative white woman at the end of
the century, sensing her creeping obsoles
cence. But it’s deeper than that; Tripp con
siders herself unappreciated as if by fate.
The casting of Paulson in the role has
been rightly controversial. “Impeach
ment” is basically a diorama, obsessed
with the camp possibilities of uncanny
reënactment. The Diet Cokes, the soiled
dress, the secret audiotapes, all totems of
the ugly age. Clive Owen has been given
a prosthetic nose to better approximate
the profile of Bill Clinton, and Anna
leigh Ashford, who plays Paula Jones, a
former Arkansas state employee who
sued Clinton for sexual harassment (they
eventually settled), has a fake nose, too,
which distracts from Ashford’s nuanced
and sympathetic performance. But Paul
son takes it to the next level, wearing a
padded suit to embody Tripp. It’s a con
temptible choice, increasing the distaste
Linda Tripp, the reviled bureaucrat and whistle-blower, is the core of the series. we naturally have for the character. Paul
M
uch has been made of the fact that
Monica Lewinsky is one of the
producers of “Impeachment: American
Crime Story,” the third installment in
Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy’s FX
anthology series. The show depicts the
events that led to Bill Clinton’s impeach
ment, and Lewinsky’s willingness to at
tach her name to the project—a name
that, amazingly, she has managed to re
claim in her second life, as an antibul
lying activist—wraps the chaotic mini
series in a clean air of legitimacy. Her
involvement is crucial to viewers, in the
#MeToo era, who want to feel virtuous
when consuming stories about women
who have been publicly pilloried. Mo
