Although we still hear her whining about the election results behind the scenes, Hillary Clinton has mostly stayed out of the public limelight since her big loss. However, according to Atlantic magazine writer Megan Garber, there is a whole other Hillary Clinton who could become a "voice of advocacy" as well as a leader of "political resistance" to the Donald Trump presidency. This alternate Hillary is the Saturday Night Live parody version of Hillary Clinton. I kid you not.
The funniest thing about the idea of a fictional parody Hillary leading the opposition to Donald Trump on SNL is that Garber is absolutely serious about this. Here she is making the case of the SNL parody Hillary leading the opposition to Trump much as the West Wing's Jed Bartlet served as the fictional counter to President George W. Bush:
During the episode of Saturday Night Live that aired just after the November presidential election, Kate McKinnon, dressed as Hillary Clinton and clad in celebratory/funereal white, sat at a grand piano and performed a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It was a double-edged dirge: The song was on the one hand a tribute to Cohen, who had died the same week, but it was also a tribute to Clinton herself, and to her saddened supporters—many of whom counted SNL’s audience and creators among their members. The song was also, however, a requiem for someone else: the particular version of Clinton that McKinnon has been playing regularly on Saturday Night Live since 2015, the swaggering, simpering, behind-the-scenes caricature. The version that managed to cartoonify and humanize the actual Clinton, both at the same time—and the version that, now, would not go on to be president, or really, it would seem, to be much of anything worth satirizing.
That Clinton, it turns out, needn’t have said farewell so soon. Since the election, while the actual Hillary Clinton has been extremely selective about the public appearances she has made, the SNL version has been resurrected on the show, in the service of both comedy and advocacy. There Kate-Clinton was, a couple of weeks ago, framed as a kind of political Yeti, gleefully evading determined “Hil Hunters” in the woods of Chappaqua. And there she was again, during this Saturday’s SNL, showing up at the door of an elector, Love Actually-style, and begging that elector not to vote for Donald Trump.
Garber continues to demonstrate that for her, parody trumps (pun intended) reality:
What’s most remarkable about the sketch, though, is what it hints at the continued resurrection of McKinnon’s Clinton character, even as someone not named Clinton prepares to assume the presidency. In SNL’s boombox-stalker version, Clinton isn’t just a caricature; she is also a political advocate. She’s making an argument, and a plea. One of the cue cards Clinton reveals in the sketch offers 16 reasons why the electoral college should vote against Donald Trump. One of them: “He won’t acknowledge Aleppo but he tweets about Saturday Night Live.” Another: “He wants to leave NATO.” Another: “He doesn’t know how the government works.”
Clinton’s final argument is this: “If Donald Trump becomes president… he will kill us all.”
It’s an open question, right now, what the political future of the actual Hillary Clinton will hold. Will she, in the manner of Al Gore, devise alternate strategies for keeping the issues she most cares about in the public consciousness? Will she serve as a party elder? Will she run again? Will she give it all up for a life of Chappaqua-hiking? Whatever the fate of the real Clinton is, though, with “Hillary Actually,” Saturday Night Live might have settled on the future of its fictional version: as a voice of advocacy, and of political resistance. As a hovering specter of what might have been. As a candidate who has become, in the aftermath of her loss, a conscience—and, quite possibly, a Cassandra. In SNL’s estimation, at any rate, Hil, actually, is all around.
One of the readers in the comments section did a good job of pointing out harsh reality to Garber:
If you were only watching SNL, you'd think Clinton was still engaged post-election - in reality, she's barely done anything...a few public appearances, never really fighting for issues that are supposedly under threat by Donald Trump, never doing much besides pointing the finger elsewhere.
Exit question: As the real Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, will parody Hillary also take the SNL alternate reality oath of office administered by fictitious Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland?
