How Chappaquiddick rewrites the Great Man Tragedy

John Curran's new film is a revealing interrogation of Ted Kennedy

Jason Clarke.
(Image credit: Claire Folger/Entertainment Studios)

Stories about Ted Kennedy, a.k.a. "The Lion of the Senate," tend to focus on the man's achievements and his suffering. Typical of the way he's usually described is his New York Times obituary, which calls him "a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate." If you know about Chappaquiddick, you recognize that the word "tragedy" is drooping under the heavy work being asked of it: "tragedy" conflates things that happened to Ted Kennedy, including the untimely deaths of his brothers, with the untimely death of Mary Jo Kopechne (an aide to his brother Robert) that Teddy directly caused.

This is what we tend to do for Great Men: rescript their lives so that their awful actions coexist with their misfortunes. And then admire them for surviving these suitably euphemized "tragedies."

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.