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| Television America's Poetess of Neurotic Vanity In HBO's Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the vice president as a personality in search of a cult. Posted Friday, Apr 20, 2012, at 11:00 AM ET  Related in Slate: A conversation with Armando Iannucci. Armando Iannucci's Veep (HBO, Sundays at 10 p.m. ET)—ruefully amused and regularly amusing—stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the vice president of the United States. The farce busies itself with filibuster-reform failures and a clean-jobs-commission hassle. But where Iannucci's earlier comedic explorations of government (BBC's The Thick of It and its big-screen spinoff, In the Loop) directly concerned themselves with the substance of politics, Veep focuses on style, on mangled image-management and interpersonal bumbling. This is appropriate both to the nature of the No. 2 job—famously, a gig not worth a pitcher of warm piss—and to the facts of public service in 21st century America. As any random rerun of Seinfeld will remind you, Louis-Dreyfus is a veritable poetess of neurotic vanity. Here, when her character, Selina Meyer, gets word that the POTUS has suffered a heart attack, her face tickles you with its hopeless attempt to stifle a pulsing expression of giddiness beneath a mask of gravitas. Meyer is a pure incarnation of Beltway narcissism and fake-smiley realpolitik. Much of the time that we spend in her company ticks by at cocktail parties where she anxiously glad-hands, and at photo ops where she condescends to visit with, in the words of her director of communications, "the normals and the normalistas." She's a personality in search of a cult. Meyer surrounds herself with staffers engaged, perpetually, in a grandly silly verbal slap-fight of all ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Proof That When Obama Talks About "Silver Spoons," He's Not Digging at Romney Saletan: It Must Be Torture for an Intelligent Christian To Argue Against Homosexuality Don't Believe the Atlantic Cover Story: Facebook Isn't Making Us More Lonely | Advertisement   |
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