Is Hillary Clinton Carmela Soprano — or Walter White?
AS FIRST lady, Hillary Clinton was reviled as the wife who sold out her principles and stood by her man, just like the wives who surrendered to their husbands on the dramas that ushered in a new Golden Age of television as Bill Clinton’s tenure in office came to a close. Now, as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, she has become the main character in her own story. But however much the Clintons function as a model for the antihero age of television, the genre’s difficult men seem unlikely to predict the fate of this difficult, historymaking woman.
If, as Emily Nussbaum memorably wrote about the reputation of “The Sopranos,” “David Chase’s auteurist masterpiece cracked open the gangster genre like a rib cage, releasing the latent ambition of television,” Chase also had the advantage of launching his masterpiece at a moment when American audiences were uniquely prepared to receive it.
“The Sopranos” premiered a little more than three weeks after the House initiated impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, charging him with perjury and obstruction of justice. PBS and a number of cable channels broadcast the proceedings live, turning the messy explication of Clinton’s behaviour into an ongoing televised drama.
For years, voters had been grappling with how to resolve the moral strain between Clinton’s competence as a politician and his transgressions as a husband. Now, long before science-teacherturned-meth- cook Walter White ( Bryan Cranston) put on the black hat in “Breaking Bad” or Tony Soprano (James Gandolfi ni) strangled a former Mafia snitch on “The Sopranos,” the impeachment proceedings forced us to grapple with the choices that we’d made to believe in Clinton’s prodigious political gifts rather than to reject his outrageous lack of personal discipline.
And if Bill Clinton was our fi rst antihero, Hillary Clinton assumed the blurred outlines of another archetype that would congeal the latest Golden Age of Television: that of the wife whose moral clarity — if it ever existed — got blurred by her proximity to a mesmerising man.
The Clintons’ story is more complex than any marriage between any fictional antihero and his spouse; for one thing, it has been running longer. But she was an obvious reference point for the phenomenon. Carmela Soprano ( Edie Falco) and her friends even debated whether they should borrow from her response to her husband’s adultery, smiling in public so that in the end, they could do what she did when she “set up her own little thing.” And the tension between the antihero and the wife helps explain the hatred for Hillary Clinton that has persisted for decades, changing, chimera-like, to ensure its own survival.
The wife in anti-hero dramas produces such a strong reaction in part because it dramatises the ugly side of our own seduction.
Kamikaze move
Like the fictional women who fascinated and repulsed television viewers, Clinton set up a high bar for husband to clear, then validated him even when he marginalised her from policy-making, going back on the “two-for-the price- of- one” deal from the 1992 campaign, and cheated on her in astonishingly reckless ways. Her feminism made President Clinton’s transgressions seem more hypocritical, but the fact that she stuck with him encouraged voters to treat him as though he was still worth it anyway. It was, at least temporarily, a kamikaze move. Clinton saved her husband at a price of being damned in both directions; she was treated as though she didn’t have enough sex appeal to keep a man, or enough self-respect to leave him.
When faced with women who make the best of awful situations, whether in real politics or in fiction, we tell ourselves we’d call the police, or leave the creep, or at least not cover up and profit from their behaviour, as Skyler White (Anna Gunn) ended up doing on “Breaking Bad.” As Carmela initially argued about Clinton’s perseverance in the face of persistent adultery: “To be humiliated in public and walk around smiling all the time? That is so false.” But Carmela and Clinton both stayed, and we kept on watching, committed to the end to these bad, even horrifying marriages.
And even when the moral arc of an antihero drama bends toward the wife’s perspective, she rarely gets to win.
At the conclusion of “Breaking Bad,” Skyler ends up with the coordinates to two dead bodies, which she may be able to use to negotiate a plea deal after her husband’s death. In “The Sopranos,” Carmela will spend the rest of her life in that glum New Jersey diner, one of the many anterooms to hell scattered throughout the Garden State.
But just as she served as a forerunner for the Skylers and Sopranos of prestige television, after the debut of “The Sopranos” and her husband’s departure from office, Clinton did something new. She became the lead. First as a senator from New York, then as a presidential candidate, then as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, she earned the power she had tried to share as fi rst lady, and in wielding it became both more powerful, but also, to some voters, more hawkish and more compromised.
As Michelle Goldberg put it in a depressing dispatch about the chimerical animosity toward Clinton, “Back then, she was a self-righteous ideologue; now she’s a corrupt tool of the establishment. Back then, she was too rigid; now she’s too flexible.”
Now, we’re in what could be the fi nal episodes of Clinton’s own third act, the chances of a renewal hanging on how the votes land on Nov 8. As the antihero age has subsided, plenty of rich contemporary television has contemplated this moment, whether by playing with characters who are direct riffs on Clinton, or by imagining the dilemmas of other blondes who overcame their second-billing status to style themselves the architects of new eras in politics. Whatever you believe she’ll become, this time, at the very door of the White House, Hillary Clinton at last gets to be the one who knocks.