Beaten down by withering media criticisms, sexism, a bruising custody battle, and a burgeoning tabloid scandal, prosecutor Marcia Clark collapses in tears, with only her colleague Christopher Darden to console her. Episode six, cheekily titled Marcia, Marcia, Marcia, is a painful affair for Clark. After last week’s race-focused installment, the series pivoted to one of the other major themes of the case: gender.
In a moment Clark and Darden share in their Downtown LA office, Clark says that she’s not used to being a public figure, that the flashy Dream Team members on the other side of the case are well prepared for the attention they receive. It’s true that Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, and F Lee Bailey were accustomed to high-profile work, but none of them had to endure the sort of abuse heaped on Marcia Clark. From the daily taunts over her outfits, which are referred to as “frump incarnate” early in the episode, to the aforementioned tabloid issue, wherein the National Enquirer printed a nude beach photo of her taken by an ex-husband: it’s an extraordinary amount of stress to inflict on one person, especially when that person is prosecuting the “trial of the century”.
Cochran’s own domestic violence issue is alluded to in this episode, but it was hardly as publicized as Clark’s hairstyle. Her attempt to placate the tutting public, scored with Seal’s Kiss from a Rose, only exacerbates the problem. Clark strides into court – head held high, the strains of the love theme from Batman Forever still dancing around her brain – only to receive the incredulous stares of the courtroom full of men. After a brave attempt to keep it together, she begins weeping. In a rare show of understanding, judge Ito calls the court into recess, granting Clark a necessary reprieve. For a woman who constantly had to be stronger than her male counterparts, she more than earned the chance to feel and express her sadness.
It’s clear the custody hearings are taking a toll on Clark. Her ex-husband sees the Simpson trial as an opening to wrest their children from her. She leaves home early and returns late, meaning the kids spend much of their day with a babysitter. The paradox here is that in order to afford babysitters and food and clothes for her children, she has to hustle at work.
In the 90s, the US was grappling with how to reconcile ambition and motherhood, a concern typified by Candice Bergen’s sitcom Murphy Brown, in which the title character, a news anchor, becomes a single mother. That plotline became an election year issue in 1992 when then vice-president Dan Quayle criticized the show for what he claimed was the glamorizing of a socially unacceptable arrangement. Quayle and President George HW Bush lost the election in 1992 to Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, stood up proudly as a working woman who was more than equal to her husband. In the moment, that felt like a victory for progressive values, but the treatment of Hillary – from Whitewater to healthcare reform and criticisms of her appearance – has been laced with sexism from the moment Bill was inaugurated.
Working mothers are still treated by many Americans with skepticism and disdain. The system doesn’t support professional women having children, as this excellent documentary on the website Broadly points out. The US still does not guarantee women the right to paid maternity leave, which discourages the kind of ambition and hard work that defined Clark. We see in this episode that her private life increasingly becomes a talking point for pundits. Her ex-husband even goes on television to criticize her parenting, claiming she abandoned her children for work, even as she pleads with Ito to forgo a late-night session in order to tend to her responsibilities as a parent.
The responses of the men in Clark’s orbit alternate between patronizing and callous. Gil Garcetti suggests she get a media consultant, then chooses a lunch break as the moment to show her the nude photograph in the Enquirer. Cochran dismisses her issues out of hand. Only Darden shows much in the way of empathy. In one of the standout scenes of the episode, Darden and Clark share an intimate moment over tequila. They dance to the Isley Brothers’ That Lady, hinting at a connection that may or may not have been romantic in nature, but was certainly significant for both of them. The Simpson trial laid bare so many lingering wounds in the American psyche, and a single mother and a black man had to walk into that maelstrom every day and face things most of us would much rather ignore.
