If much of SNL’s treatment of Trump-world women has amounted to progressive fan-fiction—they must be trapped; why else would they be there?—“Complicit” provides a much more realistic take. The title of the sketch (which doesn’t much matter in the live-aired TV version of the show, but matters a lot when the sketch is shared on YouTube and NBC’s site and Twitter and other social platforms) acknowledges what news reports long have: that Ivanka Trump is part of her father’s administration, directly if unofficially. The decisions the White House has made about women’s health care and immigrant families? Trump the daughter, as a seemingly trusted advisor to her father, has been part of them.

It’s an argument SNL makes, cannily, via the less political side of Ivanka’s public image: her status as a fashion icon, as a brand, as a person known both for her looks and for her Look. As the ad’s sultry voice-over explains of the Trump daughter, “She’s beautiful … she’s powerful … she’s … complicit.”

And then:

She’s a woman who knows what she wants, and knows what she’s doing. Complicit. She doesn’t crave the spotlight, but we see her. Oh, how we see her. Complicit. A feminist. An advocate. A champion for women. But, like … how? She’s loyal … devoted … but probably should’ve bounced after the whole Access Hollywood bus thing. Oh, well. Also, I’ll bet when she watches Titanic, she thinks she’s Rose. Sorry, girl, you’re Billy Zane. Complicit: The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this … but won’t. Also available in a cologne for Jared.

None of this is subtle. But it also does away with SNL’s older portrayals of Ivanka being oblivious to, or powerless against, her father’s treatment of women. The sketch’s commercial frame spoofs the candle-lit conventions of many perfume—pardon me, fragrance—ads; it most directly spoofs Dior’s (featuring a golden gown-clad Charlize Theron informing viewers that “the future is gold”) and Lancôme’s “La via est belle” spot (this one starring Julia Roberts, its running refrain “I wish I could be... / perfectly free...”). Perfume ads have long played on themes of freedom-via-fragrance; here are those themes upended by way of that most modern of acknowledgements: “It’s Complicated.” SNL’s Ivanka is not simply trapped, in the way many women of the past could be trapped; she is, rather, bound to her father—and to her husband, her father’s other trusted advisor—in an extremely complicated way. She’s complicit.

Last week, my colleague David Sims pointed out how fragile SNL’s satire—and the relevance of that satire, during a time that finds many Americans craving both laughter and sense-making—can be. The show has had a rocky time covering a chaotic political moment, its jokes biting one week and fairly toothless the next. Last week’s show was a particular dud, Sims noted, because its political “satire” did what the show does when it seems not to know what else to do: It portrayed the extremely powerful, and extremely savvy, members of the Trump administration as low of energy and even lower of IQ. It took refuge in simplicity. Here, with a sketch whose very title suggests the complicated state of the White House and the world, is one more example of SNL being at its best when it wrestles with complexity. Johannson’s parody was deserving of the word “satire”—and a subtle reminder that, when it comes to the policies of the president of the United States, we are all, in our way, complicit.

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