Life

Scarlett Johansson Channels Ivanka Trump In SNL Spoof Ad

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By Phoebe Maltz Bovy March 12, 2017

On Saturday Night Live, Scarlett Johansson — one of the Jewish speakers at the Women’s March — starred as Ivanka Trump in a spoof ad for a perfume called “Complicit.”

The most interesting aspect of the video isn’t, I don’t think, the spoof “Ivanka,” but the portrait of how other women react to her, or to what she represents. The sketch has a woman narrator, and traces (via facial expression) how three women at the swank party where the ad is set react to her presence. A mix of envy and awe switches over to skepticism, then ridicule, as the narrator continues her smooth-voiced argument that Ivanka is “the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.”

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at bovy@forward.com. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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