‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’ Episode 8 Recap: Coming Clean

I’ve quoted it once before, and I’ll quote it again: “We train our young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes, because it’s obscene.” It’s rare for a line of movie dialogue to so neatly summarize one of the core contradictions of American life as this final utterance by Apocalypse Now‘s Colonel Kurtz does: the contrast between our gleeful propensity for violence at home and abroad and our puritanical loathing of sexuality in all its forms.

I kept thinking about this line throughout this week’s episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story, titled “Stand By Your Man” after the Tammy Wynette song Hillary Clinton referenced during one of her husband’s many sex and sex-abuse scandals. It isn’t the strikes he authorizes on alleged al Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afghanistan that tarnishes his image, despite however many people he sent to their deaths during those strikes. It’s the concurrent matter of his sexual relationship with an intern that shakes his presidency and his marriage. I ask again, what’s really obscene here?

Compared to previous episodes, ACS Impeachment‘s most sympathetic figure, Monica Lewinsky, takes a back seat this week. She pops up primarily to sever her relationship with lawyer Bill Ginsburg—a figure so loathed by the puritanical independent counsel Ken Starr that he flatly refuses to make a deal with Monica so long as Ginsburg is involved—and testify truthfully as to her relationship with President Bill Clinton, up to and including handing over the telltale blue dress stained with his DNA, the slam-dunk evidence that finally forces him to tell the truth, to his wife and to the world.

The rest of the episode focuses squarely on the Clintons. It’s partly a tick-tock of how Bill’s testimony before a grand jury went down, and partly a kitchen-sink drama about how revealing the truth about his relationship with Monica affected his marriage to Hillary. It asks us to have sympathy for the devil, as it were—to understand that even as he ordered the deaths of people halfway across the world, Bill Clinton was still just a man in hot water with his wife; and that even though her own political career would eventually eclipse her role as Bill’s wife, Hillary Clinton was still just a woman realizing she’d been defending a man who lied to her at every turn.

It’s tightrope-walk stuff, is what it is. And it’s anchored by the performances of Clive Owen and Edie Falco in the starring roles, more so than in any episode before it. I’ve come to really love Owen’s performance as Bill Clinton: Beneath that prosthetic nose, there’s something Shakesperean about the roiling conflict between his high ideals, his cold political calculations, and his all-too-human drives and desires.

Falco’s Hillary is a bit harder to swallow. And through no fault of her own! It’s not on Edie Falco that she’s confronted a husband’s deceit and infidelity more forcefully in a previous series, The motherfucking Sopranos, than she does here. She certainly does yeoman’s work in conveying Hillary’s shock and outrage when Clinton comes clean to her in the light of dawn, while she’s fresh out of bed and still in her nightgown, achingly vulnerable. But it is hard to shake the impression that we’re watching Carmela Soprano play-act as First Lady, rather than watching the First Lady in and of herself. In a sense, Falco is a victim of her own talent.

Be that as it may, the episode opens with what is essentially a flashback to 1992, when Bill was a candidate in the Democratic primary for president. It was then that Gennifer Flowers—shown here in legit news footage, rather than recreated by an actor—came forward with her claim that she and Bill had a twelve-year affair. It was then that Hillary, pressured into a 60 Minutes interview by George Stephanopoulos and the rest of Bill’s team, stated in front of the American people that she wasn’t some Tammy Wynette “Stand By Your Man” type, words that have arguably haunted her till this day.

It’s through this lens that we watch the rest of the episode unfold: Monica finally making an immunity deal with Starr in exchange for testimony and hard evidence, Bill’s DNA test to match his blood sample with the dried semen on Monica’s blue dress, the delicate dance his legal team performed to alert Hillary that there was more to the Lewinsky allegations than Bill had lead her to believe, Bill coming clean to Hillary about his transgressions, his infamous grand jury testimony and subsequent address to the American people regarding his “inappropriate” and “wrong” relationship with Monica, the miserable ensuing trip to Martha’s Vineyard during which Hillary could barely speak to him. Throughout it all, actors like Dan Bakkedahl as Starr, Darren Goldstein as his lieutenant Jackie Bennett, and Alan Starzinski as sex creep and future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh lurk like smug little demons, seizing every opportunity to bring the hated moderate Democrats down.

If you’re to the right of the Clintons politically, I assume you have no sympathy for these people. If you’re to their left, as I am personally, I’m guessing your sympathies ran dry a long time ago—when Hillary lost a layup election against a game-show fascist at the latest. But again, it comes down to the question of whether you can frame a guilty man—whether the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” accurately labeled as such by Hillary, has a point.

In his address to the American people, Clinton ultimately argues that this is a private matter, between his daughter, his wife, “and our God.” Is he correct in stating that these are the people to whom he owes answers, rather than a prosecutorial office initially conceived of to investigate what Hillary calls a failed land deal? Does his lawyerly bullshit—“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” that sort of shit—neutralize the allegations against him? Was his attempt to kill Osama bin Laden a “wag the dog” situation, or a legit attempt to defend the nation? Is that a distinction without a difference, in terms of the president’s virtually unfettered ability to call down death upon his enemies? Can you sympathize with the devil? About the best thing I can say regarding this episode of Impeachment, and the entire series in general, is that it asks these questions without providing any easy answers.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Impeachment Episode 8 on FX