House of Cards: not about to start making sense any time soon

The UK series was a caustic satire but for the Netflix version’s gutless take on US politics disbelief must not be suspended so much as hung, drawn and quartered

By Jeb Lund, The Guardian (UK)
Friday 6 March 2015

Ultimately, the American House of Cards is gutless satire. It has always read like the creation of a kid in a 12th-grade government class who almost made it to the end of the semester and suddenly thought, “Hey, wait a minute, what if some of these guys are bad???”

Because some of my editors are British and don’t know what it’s like to fire guns into the wilderness and shoot a nation of pure liberty into being, they asked me to explain the new season of House of Cards. Does its version of America, like, make sense? While I’d never go broke telling them “just re-watch the UK version”, maybe that’s best. Because, Christ, is this show dumber than a bag of hammers.

Previous seasons of House of Cards were already extremely silly. Democratic House whip Francis Underwood wants vengeance for being passed over for secretary of state (uh …), rams an education bill through Congress in a trice (OK …), kills a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate to induce the vice-president to resign and run for governor (ahaha), then is tapped for the vice-presidency by the president who passed him over for secstate (lmao). The second season is so ass-backwards that it’s not even worth summarizing here.

Season three is somehow worse. President Underwood proposes a new program called America Works, which will “eliminate unemployment” by creating 10m jobs in infrastructure, defense and public-private partnerships with only a $500bn budgetary outlay. In exchange, he will destroy social security, Medicare, Medicaid and “entitlements”. Even before you remember that Underwood is supposedly a Democrat, every part of this is insane.

One, unemployment happens! It’s a naturally occurring economic condition. Sometimes people change jobs, and sometimes it’s cheaper to give unemployed people checks than fabricate jobs where we have to pay for training, materials, and buildings that meet OSHA guidelines.

Two, expanding defense spending is a poor make-work policy, because it creates a product with an end-user who doesn’t buy anything. You can buy bomb parts and pay someone to assemble them, but ultimately the Iraqi family who is provided with the bomb at high velocity doesn’t cut you a check. Make-work projects are better directed to stuff that can be resold in the economy or that lasts forever – like those over-engineered post offices practically every town in the south has courtesy of the WPA.

Three, killing Medicaid makes sense only if Underwood can somehow magically heal anyone with a disability that prevents them from working, then give them a job.

Four, killing Medicare only makes sense if all these jobs provide people with health insurance, which Underwood can somehow also mandate through magic.

Five, God help you if you can figure out what killing social security accomplishes. To use the same sum he does, do senior citizens all un-retire and start working at Walmart as greeters who earn $37,000 per year?

Lastly, $500bn might cover only some of America’s infrastructure needs – the only part of Underwood’s plan verging on reality. Yet ostensibly the House of Cards universe is vaguely like our own, where Republicans screamed “generational theft” over the $800bn 2009 Obama stimulus, which was about $2.1tn short of the CBO-projected production gap. Meanwhile, the current Republican Congress won’t fund a one-cent popcorn fart unless you cut a matching cent from food stamps.

Fair play to House of Cards: its Congress balks too. So Underwood raids the Fema budget to fund a trial run of America Works in Washington DC. He is somehow not immediately impeached.

Over in Real America, the Tea Party protested against Obama’s communist tyranny on tax day in 2009, despite the fact that they were paying taxes at rates the Bush administration budget had set, and despite the fact that Obama’s tax plan cut the next year’s rates for all but the highest earners. OK.

Somehow – help us, O Lord – the foreign policy is worse. Underwood and his wife Claire, who he has named UN ambassador via recess appointment (what?), are determined to put a UN peacekeeping force in the Jordan valley (why?). This despite the fact Israel despises the UN and that the US security council veto is the only thing that’s spared Israel that organization’s formal censure roughly 50 times.

Anyway, for their peacekeeping force, they must enlist the support of Russia’s President Notputin, because he will care for some reason.

But President Notputin has the hots for Claire Underwood. Notputin then assents, even after Claire throws him under the bus at the Moscow press conference announcing the accord, because she’s had an attack of conscience for no damn good reason after two seasons of imperturbable ruthlessness. Notputin then stages an attack on his own peacekeeping troops (seriously?), baits Underwood into sending a Seal team into a trap (OMG), which Underwood can only solve by meeting him in the Jordan valley, man-to-man (are you kidding me?). So there are the two presidents, chillin’ in a war zone, like some modern update of the Field of the Cloth of Gold – only they’re in the middle of a desert and wearing green camouflage (I want to die).

Every other part of the show is just as nonsensical, most of it reading like it was cribbed from a year’s worth of Politico articles. The Democratic frontrunner hammering Underwood is a populist woman solicitor general (Elizabeth Warren, you’re now also Donald Verrilli!). It would only be slightly sillier if the writers had picked the surgeon general.

Then there’s stuff out of left field: Underwood’s chief of staff flies to a foreign country to personally beat up a hacker in order to get an address so he can personally plot a murder. If you think any of this makes sense, email me your full name, birthdate, bank login information and social security number, otherwise your computer is going to blow up in five minutes.

Saying that you should just re-watch the UK House of Cards is an easy argument, but it’s almost impossible not to fall back on it, for two reasons.

The UK version ended after roughly 620 minutes. The American one is at roughly 1,950. If you might walk away disappointed by the ending, 10 hours is a lot less frustrating investment than 32 and counting.

The UK’s parliamentary system makes all these machinations both more logical and more satirically poignant. The UK’s Francis Urquhart never has to switch branches of government to attain power and then contend with the structural opposition of a Congress to exercise it; he only has to outmaneuver the handful of Tory boobs in line in front of him. Frank Underwood has to bizarrely help a sitting president before sabotaging him, then face a system of checks and balances that prevents him from acting on his ambitions. The recalcitrance of Congress perversely makes him a sympathetic character and undermines the message that he’s a cruel man seeking power as an end in itself. This was perhaps the most cutting aspect of Francis Urquhart’s ambition: that, once he realized it, he didn’t really have a Plan B, despite all the latitude in the world to exercise it. Power was the goal; then he had to wait out the clock to serve longer in office than Margaret Thatcher, just for the sake of doing so. Even Underwood’s America Works program reads like a satirically toothless version of Urquhart’s gambit in series two, To Play the King, in which he brings back national service. In it, you see a man who publicly champions English tradition while working to destroy any vestiges of power in England’s oldest governmental tradition, the monarchy – all to stop social leveling and racial comity. Meanwhile, his message to poor people is that government should provide them nothing except discipline and a rifle. If you hated the Tories, you could take away an extremely reductive but acidic satirical reading of them: go ahead and die, or join the army.

Ultimately, the American House of Cards is gutless satire. It has always read like the creation of a kid in a 12th-grade government class who almost made it to the end of the semester and suddenly thought, “Hey, wait a minute, what if some of these guys are bad???”

For all the evil of Underwood and his henchmen, surrounding characters are risibly sincere. The UK series didn’t even bother. It trusted that the audience shared its contempt and wouldn’t be titillated by one winking bad man, instead rounding out the cast with a parliament of whores and public school twats. The establishing shots all through series one, of the Houses of Parliament from across the Thames, foregrounded rats clambering over coils of rope at dockside. This was your heritage, O nation of Jack Tars: a government of vermin. The American version has never had a single image of such clarity.

Ian Richardson was playing Richard III in a rotting post-empire, and Kevin Spacey is another too-sympathetic TV misanthrope who breaks all the rules, including the fourth wall. Those rules don’t mean much in a world whose satirical stakes are at best muddled – especially when that world doesn’t functionally make a lick of damn sense.

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