Bill Clinton Remakes American Beauty
Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2000, at 6:04 PM ET
Like everyone else, Chatterbox was greatly amused by Bill Clinton's self-parodying home movie at the White House Correspondents' dinner. (Click here to watch it.) In case you haven't seen it, and don't feel like viewing it now, the movie shows Clinton wandering through an empty White House, taking phone messages for Chief of Staff John Podesta, washing his limo, mowing the lawn, chasing down Hillary's limo to give her a bag lunch, and hanging out, slacker-style, with a low-level twentysomething aide who teaches him how to use the Internet. The joke, which is very well executed, is that Clinton is a lame duck with nothing to do, and can't get no respect.
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StumbleUponBut you don't have to be a cinéaste to recognize the risqué similarities between Bill Clinton as presented in the spoof and Lester Burnham, the Kevin Spacey character in American Beauty. Like Lester, Clinton hangs around the house with nothing to do, attracting little notice from the careerist ice queen with whom he has a Potemkin marriage. (Chatterbox bets the first lady finds the joke that she's just like Carolyn Burnham, the Annette Bening character, something less than hilarious.) Like Lester, Clinton makes an adolescent (well, post-adolescent) his mentor. For Chatterbox, the tip-off that this is an American Beauty parody is the appearance at the end by Kevin Spacey, a Clinton friend who happened to be staying at the White House when the last scene was filmed. Clinton holds Spacey's Oscar and gives an imaginary acceptance speech to the mirror thanking the Academy. Spacey, in a dinner jacket, walks up and takes his Oscar back. Spacey, you'll recall, won his most recent Oscar for his performance in ... American Beauty.
Why wasn't the American Beauty joke made more explicit? Well, there are limits to what a president, even today, can yuk it up about. A good many people would likely have been offended by Clinton's comparing himself, even in jest, to a movie character who chain smokes dope and nearly seduces a teenage pompom girl. As TV producer Phil Rosenthal, who in addition to stage-managing the home movie is creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, said on CNN's Talkback Live, "It can't have too much of an edge. You want to be funny without being harsh or vulgar or crass in any way."
Can Chatterbox say for certain that this home movie was intended to portray Bill Clinton as Lester Burnham? No, he cannot. But he can point out that Clinton greatly admired American Beauty. We know this because of an interview Clinton gave film critic Roger Ebert that aired in February. Ebert invited Clinton to criticize American Beauty's negative characterization of bourgeois suburban culture. Instead, Clinton defended it:
It's like Fight Club. You know, there's got to be more to life than this. Okay, so you've got this nice little neat suburban lifestyle and that's comfortable. Now what. I must say, it was also a disturbing movie but I thought it was an amazing film.
If Chatterbox is right, Bill Clinton can definitively be characterized as America's first Bobo president. The coinage is from David Brooks' amusing new book, Bobos in Paradise, which argues pretty persuasively that bohemian culture and bourgeois culture are now indistinguishable from one another. (Hence, "Bobo.") Surely there is no more bourgeois an institution than the presidency. And yet, here's this pillar of the establishment articulating and pretty much endorsing a movie about suburban alienation! And--yes--even imagining himself, albeit humorously, as its protagonist! At this stage in human history, however, the fantasy must be kept sotto voce. That's why the home movie didn't show Clinton actually saying, "Ah rule!"
Photograph of Bill Clinton courtesy AFP Photo/The White House.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
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Reader Response from The Fray:
Dear Tim Noah
Write another article. The Clinton video piece is flooding The Fray with the same two posts, "He's a criminal, how dare he?" and, "Lighten up!" endlessly repeated.
Enough already.
--Rich
(To reply, click here.)
(5/5)
I understand why the media people always support Democrats. It gives them an endless supply of story material.
--Dave Davison
(To reply, click here.)
All you stock-buying, shiny-car-riding, phonies can do is ridicule the man for his private life which is none of your damn business. His Presidency has been a blessing for those of us below the $100,00-a-year income level. I am a disabled Vet who has seen the VA hospitals prosper under him, or at least recover from those Reagan-Bush years of cuts. You people should be glad this is all you have to bitch about. At least one in ten of your high school class won't see combat in a rice paddy, or run to Canada to evade the draft. And if they work for minimum wage (Industrial Slavery), it will be three times what it was when Reagan-Bush did nothing to raise it once.
--Bone Hammer
(To reply, click here.)
There's a good chance that Clinton sensed the futility of the suburban bourgeois lifestyle and correctly characterized it as limiting in both its nature and its accomplishments beyond the fact of child-rearing. He may have also uncomfortably "foreseen" what could be awaiting him after his tenure in office. Obviously, if his marriage hasn't exactly been ideal, then such a result might not be the most exciting of prospects even if his wife wins the Senate. I would guess it's rather difficult to top being President, after all. There aren't too many experiences that carry the fascination and components of that, or the burdens and human tests of endurance and tenacity, especially in his case over the last several years.
--pbr90
(To reply, click here.)
If everyone kept in mind the fact that our president is a human being, a family man, and an intelligent and talented person, we could stop looking for some magic answer-man, a Mr Fixit or an icon and we could enjoy his antics and his mistakes and rejoice in the fact that we have had the best eight years in the past 35--financially, socially and politically. Of course, the Republicans are going to have a field day as they have had with everything Mr Clinton has done (good, bad or indifferent). At least, it will take some of the focus off that poor little Cuban boy and his family.
--inna
(To reply, click here.)
The President, and I do use that term loosely, has once again degraded the office and put his lack of respect for the office and the American people in our face. I am all for a good joke or making fun of yourself but this is sad. It appears that since he cannot do anything that will leave a positive image he has decided to make himself the laughing stock for the whole world. Well if lasting fame is all he wants he has gotten it. Too bad he had to take the American people along with him.
--Ken F.
(To reply, click here.)
[Wishing you knew what a Potemkin marriage was? The Fray will tell you here.]
(5/2)
I started the Clinton mockumentary expecting to see something, anything (besides the Spacey appearance) that smacked of American Beauty. Nothing. Nada. Zip. (Save the aforementioned Spacey appearance.)
The adolescent mentor? Puhlease. It is a straight, and I mean very straight, ripoff of an e-trade (or one of the other on-line trading companies) commercial where the senior-citizen CEO gets lessons on on-line trading from an overly-caffeinated free spirit e-capitalist kid. There isn't one single element of the Internet lesson that hints at the relationship between Lester and the boy next door.
Arguably, and it's a real stretch, the hedge-clipping is meant to evoke Annette Bening trimming the roses, But wouldn't that sort of undo the supposed connection?
Regarding the whole suburban alienation thing, the movie is a very weak hook for a possibly interesting essay. Clinton isn't alienated. In fact, he seems throughout to be remarkably content, just a little bored. There is certainly not a trace of Lester's anger, unless you count the vending machine scene.
Risque similarities to American Beauty? I think not. Woefully attenuated argument by otherwise reliable columnist? I think so.
--Sean Roche
(To reply, click here.)
(5/3)