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‘SNL’ kindly reminds viewers that Ivanka is not going to save us

Perfume commercial parody ‘Complicit’ deconstructs the first daughter’s savvy self-promotion.

CREDIT: YouTube/NBC
CREDIT: YouTube/NBC

Shortly after the 2016 election, Michelle Obama granted an interview to Oprah Winfrey. It was her last one-on-one interview as first lady. The questions were softies, the answers none too revealing. (Probably saving the juiciest tidbits for her half of that $60 million book deal.) As became her modus operandi during the campaign, Obama would not deign to refer to the then-President-elect by name. But when asked if she believed that her husband’s administration achieved its intended aim — if he did, in fact, infuse the nation with hope — Obama invoked the incoming administration.

“Yes, I do, because we feel the difference now,” she said. “Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like.”

No one in the Trump administration has been the object of as much hope as golden daughter Ivanka. Conservative women who felt uneasy about the GOP nominee’s proclivity for pussy-grabbing pointed to Ivanka as a motivating factor behind their votes. Even before the election, progressives appeared to harbor fantasies about Ivanka as a closet liberal, someone too rational and intelligent to possibly be on board with her father’s more—to use a technical term—batshit political views. “No one who wears a shift dress so well could really be okay with such blatant racism!,” people seemed to think, which, sure. Racists always dress very poorly.

Ivanka, a working woman who converted to Judaism, has enough of the signifiers of the very groups her father’s team disenfranchises and/or terrifies to seem like a comforting presence. This is plenty convenient for Ivanka, whose brand benefits from the kind of faux-feminism that looks nice on Instagram but is non-threatening and inactive enough to be utterly meaningless. But the buzziest sketch from this weekend’s Saturday Night Live reminded viewers that Ivanka is not a corrective to President Trump. She’s complicit.

In the perfume commercial parody, host Scarlett Johansson played Ivanka. She sauntered through a swanky party in a shimmering gold dress while, in voiceover, Cecily Strong purred, “She’s a woman who knows what she wants, and knows what she’s doing.” What’s the fragrance for a woman who has everything but does nothing with it except improve her own PR? “Complicit.”

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At one point, Scarlett-as-Ivanka applied lipstick in a mirror; her reflection was Alec-Baldwin-as-Donald, puckering his lips back at her. (An especially skeevy visual, considering the real Donald’s history of leering at his daughter.) As Ivanka poses aimlessly and the other women of SNL look on in confusion, Strong says, “A feminist. An advocate. A champion for women. But like, how?” Sure, loyalty is great (everybody wants to be in Gryffindor), but “she probably should’ve bounced after that whole Access Hollywood bus thing.”

The tagline: “Complicit: The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.” And don’t worry, gentlemen: It comes in a cologne, for Jared. The sketch was so popular — and inspired so much interest and attendant curiosity — that lookups for “complicit” spiked on Merriam-Webster’s website.

Though SNL is not the first to call out the Ivanka myth for the fiction it is, the mainstream media narrative around Ivanka—as not just having personal sway with her dad, but political muscle as well—has picked up considerable traction in the past few weeks. Anonymously-sourced stories have been making the rounds hinting that Ivanka is a moderating force in her father’s anything-but-moderate administration. Of course there’s nothing official going on; wouldn’t want to break those nepotism laws. But the messaging is that Ivanka, as my colleague Natasha Geiling reported, is on hand “ to pull her notoriously extreme father towards the center on traditionally liberal issues like women’s rights, family leave, and the environment.”

Such is the kind of absurdity that can spring forth when people are looking for hope in a hopeless place which, in this case, is the White House. For those who believe the President is a dangerous individual — willfully ignorant, reckless with the lives of the very citizens he swore to protect and defend, awfully cozy with Russia — the hunger for someone, literally anyone, to be a voice of reason in the Oval is extraordinary. It probably goes without saying that Americans who feel this way are not waiting for Vice President Mike Pence to swoop in and stand up for women’s equality, for Jeff Sessions to champion civil rights, or for Steve Bannon to suggest some helpful edits to that Holocaust Remembrance Day statement.

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SNL’s sketch cuts through the pristine, ballet-pink packaging that Ivanka markets — and progressives’ overly generous interpretation of everything Ivanka says and does — and states an unvarnished, unavoidable truth: Ivanka is not here for your resistance. She’s not in public service. She’s in Ivanka service.