Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is most famous for the scene in which Robert De Niro’s rapidly disintegrating title character, Travis Bickle, looks at his reflection in the mirror and asks “Are you talkin’ to me?”, but this isn’t the only pane of glass into which Bickle gazes. During his disintegration, he also watches television. He stares at the tube, gun in hand, as young couples slow dance on American Bandstand. He slowly tips the TV set over with his foot while watching another young couple address their star-crossed affair on a soap opera, until the TV falls and explodes. He knows he has reacted inappropriately to these displays of romance, but he’s powerless to stop the poisonous feelings they engender in his mind.
“Damn,” he whispers to himself as he cradles his head in his hands, one of them still clutching a gun. “God damn.”
I thought about these scenes a lot during this episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story (“The President Kissed Me”), because of a similarly staged scene involving its central character, Linda Tripp. (More on her centrality later.) On Inauguration Day, 1997, she’s at home, while her young friend Monica Lewinsky is dressed to the nines in a stunning red gown, attending the Inaugural Ball. Her teenage daughter gives her shit and mocks her job. Her dinner is some joyless diet concoction, nuked in the microwave. And there on the television are two people she casually loathes, Bill and Hillary Clinton, celebrating their second historic victory. As they dance to Nat “King” Cole’s posthumous duet with his daughter Natalie, the 1990s remix of “Unforgettable,” they beam lovingly into each other’s eyes.
Linda knows this is a sham, knows Bill is having an affair, knows that he habitually can’t keep his hands or other parts to himself. She knows things that can bring the whole Clintonian edifice down. Yet there she is, alone, eating a TV dinner, dodging the insults of her own children, while the world moves on without her. Director Michael Uppendahl, working from a script by showrunner Sarah Burgess, cuts from closeups on Linda to closeups on Bill on the screen, arranging them so it almost looks as if Clinton is staring right into her eyes, teasing her, taunting her. In this moment, you can feel the years of roiling resentment that have built up inside Linda threaten to burst free, as we know they will eventually do, destroying the life of her friend and nearly destroying a president. But for now, like Bickle, all she can do is sit and stare at a world that holds better things than what she’s been given by it.
Damn, you can all but hear her think. God damn.
I reviewed last night’s episode of ACS Impeachment for Decider.
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