Watching Black and White--the "documentary-style interview" with Lewinsky--was a frustrating experience. The most important thing that Barbato and Bailey did was inject file footage and the infamous Linda Tripp phone-calls. These sequences explained how l'affaire Lewinsky unfolded with intense clarity. Newsreel footage of Whitewater (the Enron scandal makes Whitewater seem like an illegal Tupperware party) was effective in displaying just how little Monica Lewinsky had learned.

Barbato says, "She spent several years having other people with dubious intentions tell us who she was. " Monica Lewinsky also spent several months hitting on the President andgabbing about it to an older woman from the Republican camp--whose loyalty was so obvious that the mere replay of Tripp's phone-calls makes you wonder how Monica could be so 'naive' that she didn't know what she was doing. Lewinsky also exploited her notoriety: instead of being permanently embarrassed about the political scandal, she defected to the private sector and dedicated herself to designing lousy-looking hand-bags and appearing on The Tom Green Show. (Strangers called out her status as a Blow Job Queen: she giggled about it with Green while strolling along Canadian streets and on the roof of a shack diner with a lewd sounding name.)

Lewinsky didn't remain silent for her Barbara Walters moment in the kliegs. Even if she didn't know how incredibly stupid a move this was, surely her elders and family friends have been around long enough to watch Walters painfully trivialize self-aware famous people. Lewinsky was shot with the same Vaseline smeared lens that was usually reserved for actresses and old icons.

The setting for Black and White was savvy and played to its subject's personality. Monica moved freely: she used coy flirty body language throughout--talking through unbearable lock-jawed grins, checked her hair behind her ears, and gave a performance that would have her laughed out of James Lipton's living room.

The filmmakers were right in assessing that everyone who might watch this flick would be thinking, "What is she really like?" It's also true that most of those people came and left with the same feeling: "She really is like that."

Lewinsky seems to bear absolutely no responsibility for anything she has done--despite how disabused her role in the scandal was--it was Monica Lewinsky in that Oval Office hallway. It was her saving a dress with jizz on it. It was Monica Lewinsky who chatted on the phone with "the Leader of the Free World" fifty times (that we know of) and put a truly juvenile Valentine's note in the newspaper's classifieds section.

Do you really talk for hours about and leave a paper trail and flush the married man out if you really want to keep it hush?

Lewinsky had enough knowledge of politics to know she would be in serious trouble if her covert activities with Bill Clinton were revealed. Yet after being betrayed by Linda Tripp, an older woman with an agenda, who implored her to talk at length with total honesty and faked empathy, Lewinsky talked to another woman with the same personality: Barbara Walters! Lewinsky seemed sad that she was caught out, not with what she did.

"Secondly, you have this person who's been betrayed by virtually every important person in her life outside of her family." This is where Barbato is improbably naive. As a verite artist, he and Bailey knowingly expose the mechanics behind their subjects. They get to know them from ground up in the end. To say that Lewinsky has been stomped on by the whole world except her family is making an excuse for not having the total story. Maybe a Truth or Dare series of interviews with Lewinsky outside this love-fest college hall or inside her parent's home might have resulted in Barbato not saying such a thing.

In all likelihood, women who come from homes where they are loved, supported, guided and coached don't have affairs with married school teachers and work the commander in chief into such a lather that he looks the other way and unzips his pants. Maybe Clinton brought it up but she didn't say no. An accurate profile of this woman would no doubt reveal a rift in her childhood somewhere that left her adrift and unchecked.

Barbato continues to frost Lewinsky's image: "During the course of filming, welearned that this is a bright, strong-willed, funny, compassionate woman. And above all, strong."

(For the record, I'm definitely not Republican as it's practiced in our system today. Nor am I a Democrat as it's known to go down in Washington.)

Monica Lewinsky is not bright. Not only do her taped Tripp-ups reveal someone with cliched and fumbled command of English, but her humor is sophomoric and reflects her total self-absorption beyond any hope of gaining wisdom.

Strong willed she is. Lewinsky put herself out in the most idiotic way with Bill Clinton, she worked her relationship with him as if he were a typical guy asshole who might respond to that, "You know I'm the one, baby . . ." kind of force majure obsession. She revealed her anger and indignance in her old recorded calls and when faced by the few people who had the nuts to say something other than, "We're with you Monica!" from the darkened audience.

While Lewinsky was close and shot in proximity to the audience, it was less intimate than an MTV Unplugged show, where you often pick out particular fans who look great or expressive. Until getting up to ask a question, you really saw the group as a collective symbolic ear more than a gathering of other 'real normal people'. The only person that stood out was the black gentleman who said what was going through my mind in watching this. It was something to the effect of, "I came because I thought the format would allow something different to come out but this is really just a love fest."

I couldn't tell you what the "Queen of the Blow Job" question-author looked like, all I recall was the hissy disparaging tone that the majority of the crowd adopted. Also unavoidable was Lewinsky's inability to handle a situation where people didn't have a symbolic arm around her weighty shoulders.