I can't believe that the debate over Hillary's crying moment is so often boiling down to whether it was staged or genuine. That is so oversimplified. In this mediated age that distinction is outdated. Obviously it still applies in particular cases, but they aren't very interesting cases. This case is very interesting.
Hillary's moment was both real and performed. We aren't talking about plain old acting -- we are talking about method acting. That essentially means that you don't act like an old-fashioned stage actor, you take real emotions and live in the moment, like Marlon Brando or Robert DeNiro, and then massage real emotion into the shape you want things to take. Bill is master of the art, but Hillary is apparently learning.
No doubt people who think it has to be either staged or real have never spontaneously choked up -- and then proceeded to use teary emotion to some implicit purpose as the situation unfolds.
Yeah, right.
I hope the women who voted for her were not that shallow.
The sympathy that many - myself included - felt for her during the debate and at her moist-eyed roundtable was completely valid.
But what, in our actual experience of this hyper-prominent woman over thirty-five years of public life, reinforces Jamie Lee Curtis' characterization of her as a "big, open, warm, loving, [mother, who can] lead us out of this bleak despair, into the light of hope and peace"?
This is what I mean by "universalization."
Either Hillary's responses revealed the "mother's heart" that has been kept impossibly carefully concealed for thirty-five years, or this marks a transformation in her personality, or it was a manipulative sham.
I am not at all convinced that it was a sham, but if it was, enough said.
If it was a revelation... well, I do not believe for a minute that it was a revelation, after thirty-five years filled with a vast array of completely reasonable and compelling reasons to publicly shed a tear.
If, however, it was neither, then we are witnessing - after thirty-five completely public years - an epic transformation of a public personality, in the middle of a campaign for the Presidency.
The instability of such a transformation would concern most of us, except for the fact that the transformation is toward that universally appealing "mother's heart."
The fact that she is the most prominent woman politician in our country should not blind us to the possibility that she may not in fact BE the woman that we want her to be... the kind of woman whom we would most value as the leader of our nation.
Let's read that again: "big, open, warm, loving, [mother, who can] lead us out of this bleak despair, into the light of hope and peace"?
Hillary?
Really?
A year or so ago there was a debate in the media about the wife of a Supreme Court nominee bursting into tears during her husband's Senate confirmation hearing.
In my opinion she was crying because she felt she was entitled to take the throne as President and she had just lost Iowa (which was a big surprise) and then her 20 point lead in New Hampshire had dwindled down to where Obama had the lead. She was just an over ambitious person crying because what had been promised to her by the media and her consultants wasn't panning out. BOO, f&*$ing HOO!!