House of Cards

Back in the days when this seemed a live and pertinent comparison, a university friend compared the West Wing with House of Cards (the former had begun in 1999, the latter ended in 1995). The contention was that the West Wing, with its depiction of a virtuous political class would be as unpalatable to a UK audience as the contemptuous elite of House of Cards would be to an American audience.

If that were true then it clearly isn’t true now, as the second season of the US House of Cards is released, all in one go and inappropriately enough, on Valentine’s Day. The exhuming of the original House of Cards also seems to provide counter-evidence to claim regularly made at present that the UK’s political class face an unprecedented crisis in public confidence. To make such a claim either ignores quite how bad things got in the first half of the nineties or, at least, fails to elucidate the distinction between that crisis and this one. (I attempt a distinction of my own below.)

This isn’t the first attempt to transplant British political cynicism to the US. Paul Abbott’s far more contemplative State of Play (2003) was adapted in 2009 and writer Beau Willimon nicks its inciting incident to replace the climatic scene of the original House of Cards in the second season of his remake. The title sequence and theme, too, seem to have that earlier remake in mind.

So whilst the original was often just a pot of latex away from an extended episode of Spitting Image, Willimon’s House of Cards can take itself quite seriously, which makes for quite an uncertain tone. Gone, for example, are the Billy Bunter MPs being told off for visiting knocking shops like the never-before-seen aftermath of a Benny Hill sketch. Fine. But, then, how are we supposed to respond when an FBI agent threatens to squish a guinea pig?

Whilst anyone can have fun with a central role like Urquhart/Underwood, it’s Robin Wright as Claire Underwood that transfigures the US show. Glacial and inscrutable, she frequently wrong foots the viewer. The best scene in the first season is where she leaves her lover’s apartment, having confounded an image he made of her and folded up one tile into a large origami swan. But Claire doesn’t only leave semioticians in a spin, she adds a complexity and mystery to the Underwood’s project and makes for far more compelling viewing, deepening the shallow Lady Macbeth-lite of the UK show. The unfolding and consequences of her rape are excellently handled in the second season and it is refreshing to have a female antihero with this much depth and nuance.

What the UK House of Cards exemplified most of all was not a contempt of the political class but a kind of self-contempt. It seemed to acknowledge that the representative class weren’t there simply to represent our interests but to represent us to ourselves. The clownish despatch of political enemies and the frequent shots of rats feeding upon shit (“the rat symbolises obviousness”) were smacks to the face: no one with a degree of incredulity could seriously buy Urquhart’s machinations, they had to be complicit in them. (House of Cards had much in common with The New Statesman in that respect.) Urquhart’s addresses frequently implicated the viewer.

Underwood’s soliloquies are less frequent and not so much fun; they seem to come from a show that the producers don’t want to make. As a device it disappoints most on the one occasion it might have soared. During season one the writers do a reversal of the Lear-like climatic scene in West Wing episode ‘Two Cathedrals’. Underwood, like Bartlett, addresses God and then, unlike, Bartlett turns down to the Devil. Both times Underwood looks direct into the camera - is it us? Does he struggle to tell whether we, his secret audience, are divine or satanic? No, “there is only us” he concludes. The effect is tantalisingly close but ultimately unrealised and I can’t quite but wonder whether this is down to Spacey’s performance. Dead-eyed, primordial, lethal, Underwood is not a creature that is easily anthropomorphised. Consequently, we can’t be complicit in the activities of a thing still in a state of nature.

Underwood is not Richard III but his antecedent, the Vice figure in the Medieval morality play whose chief effect was comical. Richard was far more than that: a scourge, a catharsis, he wipes out the entire corrupted political class and, inadvertently, purges England. Neither Urquhart nor, so far, Underwood performs such a role. But, worse, the US House of Cards lets the viewer off the hook, never once raising an adversary capable of matching the Underwoods. (Partly this is a problem of the US constitution: there is no head of state for Frank to best unlike the tragic King of the UK version.)

There lies the real problem with the show, which perhaps isn’t really its fault. If there is a difference, in the UK at least, between the present political crisis and the one in the nineties, it is that this time the electorate do not feel accountable for their politicians. That is, we attack them for failing to represent us in the first sense whilst failing to recognise that politicians represent us in the second sense too. We mould a political class in our own image. The US House of Cards never successful indites the audience for Congress’s misdeeds; it is an exercise in bad faith.

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