The self-mythologizing of Hillary

History is written by the victors. That complicates things for Hillary Clinton, an accomplished lawyer, a formidable first lady, and a largely successful politician whose biography will nevertheless always be headlined by her dual failures to become president. It doesn't matter if you're with her or against her: the fact is, on Nov. 8, 2016, Clinton became, for perpetuity, the candidate who lost to Donald Trump.

Hillary, a four-part documentary about Clinton's life that arrives on Hulu on Friday, serves as something of the short-attention-span version of madam secretary's 500-page memoir What Happened, which is to say, it's an excavation of the external forces that led to her loss. Admittedly, Hillary is not for people with that short of an attention span, with a run time of four hours in total. Clinton, though, has persistently refused to go gentle into that good night of political has-beens, or perhaps more accurately, has persistently refused to relinquish the pen she's used to write her own rationalization of the events that culminated in those bleary early morning hours on Nov. 9. Hillary, as a result, is as much a product of Clinton's own myth-making as it is of journalism.

After all, here we are, a full election cycle later, and Clinton continues to dwell on 2016, volunteering her low opinion of Bernie Sanders to whomever will listen and launching a podcast. Hillary can feel, in many ways, like an extension of this search for relevance. "I thought, you know, now or never," Clinton said on the press tour for the documentary, as a means of addressing why this, why now. "I'm not running for anything. I might as well try to tell my story." Or, to be more exact, she found herself sitting on some 2,000 hours of campaign footage after the election, shot, one would assume, under the presumption it would be used in an eventual documentary about the first woman president. After losing, "Clinton and her longtime aide, Huma Abedin, met with Propagate Content, a production company with experience in nonfiction storytelling, about the possibility of shaping the material into a different kind of documentary," The Los Angeles Times reports. Under the stipulation that the director of the film be female, documentarian Nanette Burstein was eventually attached "to explore how Clinton had become one of the country's most admired and vilified people, and what that status says about gender and culture," The Hollywood Reporter writes.

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But more often than not, the central conceit of the documentary seems to boil down to "people who know Hillary like her," which is of course utterly meaningless information, a trivial fact that could fit on the back of a Snapple lid. Anyway, it isn't a legacy; no one in the distant future is going to put to stone Here lies Hillary Rodham Clinton. She had friends.

It doesn't help that Clinton's critics, of which there are many, are never given a voice in Hillary to articulate why they think she failed, or exactly why they opposed her. Instead, the film operates on the baseline assumption that Americans are a sexist mob who've been brainwashed by years of being told Clinton is "corrupt." Clinton, for example, flippantly dismisses Sanders as an ideological rival: "It's all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it," she says of his movement, rather than engage with why it might have appealed to a historically enthusiastic group of voters. Hillary additionally glosses over her many scandals, writing them off as smears. Sometimes this is justified — why give wacky conspiracy theories anymore airtime than absolutely necessary? — while other times they are used as proof that the world has unified against her. In fact, the only time Clinton gets testy with the filmmakers is during a push about her use of the dog-whistle "superpredators" to describe black children in 1996. "I was always trying to explain things that people didn't want to hear," she snaps.

Hillary is an echo chamber of Clinton's allies. With the exception of Abedin, who is conspicuously absent, sit-down interviewees include intimates like Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Barack Obama, and a parade of sympathetic friends who have a bad habit of veering toward sentimentalities to describe the former secretary of state. "Every time [Clinton] tried to break the script and be extemporaneous, she winds up being criticized, so she stops," one law school friend recalls mournfully. "You know, it's like a flower that keeps closing down until after awhile you appear packaged." A flower? At another point, Clinton is referred to as an "underdog" in the Democratic primary, despite her victory having been all but assumed since as far back as 2013. The New York Times' mostly even-handed Peter Baker serves as Clinton's harshest critic in the doc: she is "supremely confident in her own righteousness," he offers at one point, although the suggestion is not explored. And of course, there are the hours of chummy interviews with Clinton herself that allow her to steer her own story: "I'm the most investigated innocent person in America," she vents at one point, unchallenged.

It is undoubtedly true that sexism has taken a toll on Clinton's political aspirations. And yet, Hillary's appeals to feminism often feel rote rather than genuine. "I spent 25 days doing hair and makeup," Clinton reveals at one point, having tallied the lengthy sessions that started every day of her nearly two-year campaign. But the time-consuming preparation of her looks is a revelation she first described in What Happens; in Hillary, it's regurgitated like it belongs to a script. At another point, when questioned in candid footage by Abedin about her choice of footwear, Clinton scolds, "do you think anybody talked to Bernie Sanders about his goddamned shoes?" But even that logic is weak; for example, when waiting backstage at a debate with Sanders, the Vermont senator frets to Clinton about how he should wear his jacket buttons, eliciting from her a rude and sarcastic reply.

By the end of the documentary, even Clinton's surrogates seem to be grasping at straws for a larger takeaway. After 2016, "people decided to engage in the most Hillary Clinton way possible," claims longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala, which is followed by a confusing cut to footage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, subsequently, Rashida Tlaib, both of whom are avowed Sanders supporters and whose progressive victories have been interpreted as a kind of rebuff of the Democratic establishment Clinton represents. The film backs itself into a corner trying to have it both ways: to claim that Clinton was stifled by a country rigged against her, and also that she has a legacy so vast, she didn't even need to become the president to change the world.

Most damning, though, is Clinton's own close to the film: "I have no regrets," she tells the filmmakers, having apparently learned nothing from this opportunity to review her legacy. Hamilton, a favorite musical of Clinton's, which like her modern iteration grew out of the liberal self-aggrandizing of 2015 and 2016, asks us to consider who tells your story? And in this way, with admirable if wearying efficiency, Clinton continues to give us her answer: I do.

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