‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’ Episode 6 Recap: The Right to Remain Silent

This week’s episode of ACS Impeachment chronicles the worst day in Monica Lewinsky’s life. By the time it’s over, it’s clear that, for the foreseeable future, every day will be the worst day in Monica Lewinsky’s life. Swallowed up by the mechanisms of the law and the right-wing campaign to take down President Clinton—who we know is about to go on record effectively calling her a liar, until the evidence mounts to the point where he can do so no longer—she’s got nothing but bad days to look forward to.

But none of them will be quite like this, a day spent in legal and emotional limbo, lived in the strange non-spaces of a hotel room and the mall to which the hotel is attached. Meeting Linda Tripp for lunch, Monica walks right into a sting, iÏn which Linda knowingly served as the bait. Monica is whisked away by agents from Ken Starr’s Office of the Independent Council, led by the circumspect Mike Emmick and the bulllying Jackie Bennett. Repeatedly discouraged from calling a lawyer—she eventually settles on calling her mom, Marcia Lewis (Mira Sorvino), who comes running to her aid—Monica is stranded with these men.

In between rounds of grilling, threatening, and attempting to recruit her, they watch TV. They go eat lunch. They go shopping. They even let Monica leave on her own, twice. Why? Because they can’t legally prevent her from doing so, however much Bennett rants and raves.

But Monica, ever the good girl, returns for further abuse. It’s simply impossible to imagine this young woman, whose entire life has been a story of making herself vulnerable to men in positions of power over her, would actually make a run for it.

Even as Monica awaits her fate, the president’s enemy Ann Coulter and her minions gather to celebrate his impending downfall by listening to the entire collection of tapes Linda recorded of her and Monica’s conversation. The celebration is short-lived, however, because as it turns out the tapes are tedious beyond belief. And as her chief elf George Conway points out, the quid pro quo for which they were looking—a job from Clinton pal Vernon Jordan, in exchange for false testimony—is nowhere to be found.

And where’s Linda during all this? Well, she’s at the mall, she might as well shop, right? And that’s how Monica bumps into her, the woman who’s destroyed her life. The two walk away without a word. But later that night, when Paula Jones’s attorneys show up to Linda’s house for further intel on Monica’s relationship with Clinton, she’s already making excuses for her behavior, saying she’d have done the same thing if it were her daughter, saying Monica’s ungrateful because she was raised to be entitled, unfavorably comparing Clinton’s behavior to that of world-class assholes Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Reagan, she says, always wore a full suit in the Oval Office; Bush personally wrote to the families of every fallen soldier; “Bill Clinton became president and he got the most vulnerable girl he saw in the hallway to suck his dick.” Linda may be no one’s idea of a guardian of propriety given her own unbelievably sleazy behavior with the tape recordings, but she has at least half a point there.

One of the episode’s most compelling elements is the interplay between Colin Hanks’s Mike Emmick and Darren Goldstein’s Jackie Bennett. Without planning to do so in advance, these characters essentially lock themselves into a good cop/bad cop dynamic. No, neither of them is particularly sympathetic, and as always “good cop” is a term of art rather than an accurate description of the cop in question. But Emmick is not half the true believer in the cause that Bennett is, and therefore he’s much gentler on the Lewinskys than his counterpart. Bennett, by contrast, is a real fire-breather, who curses and threatens and shouts in an attempt to bully Monica into doing whatever Emmick fails to more gently persuade-slash-compel her to do. Hanks and Goldstein are talented actors, and it’s a dark pleasure to watch the men they play revert to such familiar types. It’s as if they know no other way to be.

But the real star of the show here, of course, is Beanie Feldstein as Monica. Tasked with portraying a young woman who’s watching her world fall apart in real time, Feldstein rises, or perhaps sinks is the right word, to the occasion. She cries, she panics, she paces, she zones out, she looks for enemy agents behind every mall kiosk. One moment she’s desperate to contact Clinton or Jordan or White House secretary Betty Currie in order to warn them what’s about to befall them; the next, she’s openly contemplating suicide, completely flummoxing the phalanx of men there to detain and interrogate her.

Many of Monica’s concerns are hard to listen to, because they ring so true as something a young woman in her position would be concerned about. “My grandma’s going to be so disappointed in me,” she tells Emmick in a Crate & Barrel. In what looks like a TGI Friday’s, she continues: “I’ll never have kids. No one’s ever gonna marry me.” In this, at least, her prediction has been borne out. All her life plans, tossed out the window because a man in power abused his authority and a woman who was supposed to be her friend sold her out to feed her own delusions of grandeur. In the end, she’s left sobbing in her shower, as her mother crumples to the floor outside the bathroom, brought low by the sounds of her daughter’s pain. It’s brutal stuff.

The hero of the episode, the one person to bring a note of uplift into the proceedings, is Monica’s family attorney William H. Ginsburg. Played by Fred Melamed, whose wonderful performance as the unctuous Sy Abelman in A Serious Man has become the stuff of memes, Ginsburg promises Monica’s father, his original client, that he’ll take care of the matter. Then he gets on the phone with Monica and her captors and proceeds to do exactly that, carpet-bombing Emmick with f-bombs and advising Monica and her mother to simply get up and leave, since despite all their blather, these guys have no right to detain her at all.

Emmick’s aggrieved response to Ginsburg’s fury is “I do not see the need to use profanity!”; it reminds me a lot of Col. Kurtz’s complaint at the end of Apocalypse Now that “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.”

And that’s the irony of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in a nutshell. It isn’t Whitewater that almost wounds his presidency. It isn’t the more serious accusations of harassment and assault he faces, except insofar as a network of right-wing operatives connects them all together with Monica’s situation. It certainly isn’t egregious policies like the 1994 crime bill or his 1996 welfare reform. It’s getting his dick sucked by an intern—a fact about which he’s going to lie through his teeth, and over which his enemies celebrate. What’s really obscene here?

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 6 on FX