In Alex Gibney's documentary "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot
Spitzer," which is now available on Netflix's "instant queue," the
ex-governor of New York at times refers to himself as the protagonist of
a modern Greek tragedy, which caused me to puzzle over which tragic
hero of classical antiquity would be his most fitting role model. While
Gibney's investigative approach leaves little doubt that Spitzer's
downfall was deliberately choreographed by powerful men whom he had
crossed, his refusal of that narrative and insistence on his own
responsibility argues eloquently for the title, Eliot Rex.
Aristotle famously defined tragedy as being an imitation of an action
of importance, containing incidents arousing pity and fear. The tragic
protagonist is typically responsible for his own downfall through the
infamous "tragic flaw," an oft-debated translation of the Greek
hamartia, which can also mean merely a mistake. Aristotle's example of
hamartia was from Sophocles' Oedipus, and it is in this character that
we see how exact the analogy is, and what great literature can tell us
about the fall of great men.
Oedipus's hamartia was hubris, which we also attribute to Spitzer.
But like that of Oedipus, and unlike the way we use the term when we
accuse him of simple arrogance, Mr. Spitzer's hubris involved being
blind to how his own behavior and desires were implicated in the very
fervor with which he sought to uphold the law.
Like Oedipus, who rose to power and declared he would stop at nothing
to discover the murderer of Laius, the former king, Spitzer rose to
power declaring he would steamroll over anyone standing in the way of
his quest to clean up corruption. Oedipus drove his investigation to the
exemplary instance of tragic irony, when his own fanatic efforts led to
the public revelation that he was the guilty one he had been searching
for all along. Spitzer's tragedy is likewise ironic, as even the
software that federal agents used to discover the payments he made for
sex was developed to aid his own earlier investigations into corruption
and prostitution. And whereas Oedipus tore out his own eyes as a
punishment for his blindness, Spitzer's self-punishment was to abdicate
power to his lieutenant governor, a man whose own real blindness proved
an all too adequate metaphor for the descent of New York's government
into ever deeper pity and fear.
If we follow the lessons that tragedy, literary and real, has to
offer, we might learn something like this: that the greatest danger for
"great" men—for men, in other words, like Spitzer, Ted Haggard (a
conservative Evangelist preacher revealed to have frequented a male
prostitute), and countless others like them—is to believe they embody
the law they seek to enforce. In identifying too closely with the law
they forget that the law's power always comes from elsewhere, and is not
of their own making. Their total, fanatic dedication to that law seems
to divide these great men into a part that prosecutes and punishes and
another part that yearns to violate it, thus earning punishment at their
own strict hands for the crime of merely being human.
