Bailey asks, "How did she survive?" She was only 24 . . . the whole world looking at her . . . because she was 24. Young people masturbate to fantasies of being famous . . . meeting Brad Pitt . . . being photographed for Vanity Fair . . . running through a gauntlet of hot cameras . . . being on Tom Green's show (she was dating one of his writers . . . but she didn't have to be filmed breaking in on his parents at 3 AM . . .).

Sure Lewinsky got tired of it and freaked out many times over the years. Just like all super-famous people you do want to be able to walk down the street and out of your house without being dogged down . . . that's the price of fame though. She's Julia Roberts famous, after all.

I'm sure Barbato meant nothing finite when he said this of Guiliani:

"He's sort of surfing this enormous tide of goodwill for simply being in a particular place at a particular time." He did do a bit more than just be at Ground Zero. No one ever said Rudy was a compassionate guy who represented the Bohemian artistry of NYC-he proved he was out of step with the essence of the city in his crack down on the homeless, drug addled, and artists who did odd gross works. But he was a truly together leader who was in his milieu on September 11th. He's a cop and a leader in times of immediate crisis. Thinking about former Mayors, like Dinkins and even the great Ed Koch . . it isn't enough to just 'be there' to have pulled off what he did after the terrorists attacked NY and Washington.

I see the point in the film-makers stating that we never got the complete story (depending on the climate in which the media operates), but Monica Lewinsky was never a great anything, never important, never accomplished anything of lasting note. She was an expert twenty-something who fueled a political scandal (shades of Britain's Profumo scandal in 1963). Lewinsky has no way to hide her good or bad sides; she reveals all by trying to be so unavoidably young.

Bailey reminds us that Lewinsky wasn't really happy with the end result of Black and White. If I were her, I'd wince too. Lewinsky's efforts to be cute, self-deprecating, silly and sexy, her numerous excuses and write-off answers, make her look extremely . . . what she is.

Lewinsky might've been well fooled by the love in the room. She heard people cheer from dark recesses when unflattering things were raised. She felt the other stupid girls in the audience leave the room with their eyes right behind her when she broke down and her mom walked out. What did happen? Did her mom walk out to use the can? Why wasn't a camera ready backstage to define the moment? There were numerous sequences of Lewinsky 'sharing' backstage, before the show . . . why not continue this with total coverage. It seems like Barbato and Bailey's film was more contrived in her favor than not when you notice how little reality was provided in the final product.

Bailey also says, "I don't think she regards the film as a pleasant experience for her by any means." It was fun until she got caught, just like with the White House, Tripp, Walters.

Compassionate? Lewinsky slept with two married guys. How compassionate is that? As a girl of the species known to obsess about boys, she surely would know that sleeping with a woman's husband would make her very unhappy if not devastated. Not to say if Lewinsky were to walk away from that old teacher or Bill Clinton, that they wouldn't break their wives' hearts anyway . . . but why be the one this time? She was a young dumb girl with critical amounts of insecurity dwelling in her system.

The key to this documentary lies not in answering what Monica Lewinsky is really like, but: "What is she like now?" After all this time, so many missteps, ludicrous acts of self-aggrandizing . . . Is she cool now? Did she learn anything?

Bailey says, ". . . the people in that audience were definitely ready to have a go at her. But, as she explained herself and engaged with the audience, they pulled back from their judgments, which were based on not really knowing her." If you want to know who someone is, what they're like, it's not in what they say, it's what they do. Only analysts trying to put a crowbar to Lewinsky's saga to bend it their way could fail to know her after an easy spectacle of her choices and behavior.

We knew Monica Lewinsky well. How someone behaves under pressure is quite decent proof. She responded to full court press media intrusion by giving more interviews, exclusive ones, showing up for prestigious (if not notorious photo) shoots, pretending to be an accessories designer (like Heidi Fleiss really blew the lid off underwear too), talking about her dating life and anything else on increasingly low rent types of media presentations.

When asked to dispell any major myths about Lewinsky, Barbato offers, "That she was a stalker, that she went to Washington, D.C., with an agenda, that she sought and enjoys the limelight."

Lewinsky blatantly enjoys the media. This wasn't a film about Lewinskygate. This was not a film chronicle with the authority of all sides presented fairly. Just Lewinsky, very much like Madonna, who people also like because Madonna is a normal person too. There's no megalithic star on her level that's more common, no matter how many soft R's she tries to pronounce without a bowery-grade punch.

Lewinsky isn't like so many of the people that vulture her fame-she's like someone you knew in school. She's the stupid idiot who slept with the teacher. The spoiled bitch whose parents didn't care what she did and always rewarded her with privileges that few 'real' people ever get to consider a norm. Lewinsky was the chubby girl who longed to be a movie star and sexy and desirable. She was the girl who had no plans for a future that was vested in passion. She was doing what so many rich kids do, passing time, being handed jobs, swimming through life without working for it. She lived to be well liked and popular. How popular are you when the President of the United States wants your mouth on his junk?

We knew and know a lot of people who started out like that only on a scale pressingly smaller than the White House. Some kept making mistakes and later had no choice but to bow to their responsibilities to just put food on the table or raise a kid or two.

Some looked at their youthful transgressions as humiliating foolishness that they wish no one ever knew about because they're so different now.

Many, like Lewinsky get away with avoiding all personal responsibility. They do anything but good works and study and mature and disappear into private life well led. Few have people willing to make movies about them.

What Black and White proves, no matter how this might've been shot or otherwise edited, is that Monica Lewinsky hasn't learned a thing. You have no clue as to what she wants to do next with her life. No indication that she'd truly like to put all this behind her. She's contrived and cowardly when it seems to get real. She speaks like a romance novel for fifth graders. She carries herself precisely the same in the mano-a-mano backstage footage as she does in front of a crowd. She is in performance mode, and that is what she is really like.

Bailey states that, "I think there's a misconception that she's volunteered all this sexual detail, and she's become a victim of that specificity." Seconds later he says, "We attach all this sexual detail to Monica and hold her in some way responsible for it."

If Barbato and Bailey did that then there's no misconception. She was legally muscled into talking. Considering but for her blabbermouth and her strange desire to pursue what Lewinsky did how she did . . . there would be nothing left for Ken Starr to use.

Barbato says they didn't approach Black and White with an agenda, but by excluding more expansive and total coverage to the event, they sanctioned the agenda that Lewinsky likely had. The final product included few original or revealing moments.

Should we not judge Monica Lewinsky for trying to make a buck? Is that the high-road? Her dad is rich, she has grounds for lawsuits that celebrity lawyers would take on pro bono. Lewinsky could have turned her negative experience into an enlightening experience. Oprah Winfrey presents thousands of people who have overcome far worse than what Monica Lewinsky ever endured and who have not posed for Vanity Fair with the goal of looking sexy. While a verite filmmaker shouldn't judge, they should also present as many viewpoints as they can. Barbato and Baily failed this credibility test.

Barbato and Bailey didn't make a truly "good" film with Black and White because nothing new was revealed. It's sad if Monica Lewinsky wasn't depicted with the complexity that she could have been--yet it's also pathetic to witness that she really hasn't changed at all.

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.