Guardian Australia's deputy political editor watches the TV series House of Cards, and compares it to what she witnessed in years of political reporting
By Katharine Murphy, The Guardian (UK)
Thursday 4 July 2013
People conform to Underwood’s will. They might struggle with the yoke at the beginning, but ultimately they move as pawns on his chessboard. He has everyone’s measure, and their weaknesses are his strength. This of course is another great myth of politics – the uncluttered power of the strong-man, the kingmaker who trades only in pin-point treachery and possesses the perfect strategy and the means of executing it without mess or digressions. It is, of course, a fantasy – as all of the boilovers of political history can readily attest.
It really is too much – and if you weren’t completely addicted and hadn’t entirely sucumbed to the experience and begged for more, you’d actually laugh.
The most compelling political dramas usually subsist on a pernicious but enduring myth: that perfection is possible in politics. It’s the underlying condition behind those wise-cracking, walk-and-talk progressive brainiacs of The West Wing; the brilliant subversiveness of Malcolm Tucker, who can spin himself free of any tight spot; the studious imperfections of the woman driven as a kind of compulsion to deploy consensus politics for the greater national good - Denmark’s Brigitte Nyborg.
In House of Cards it is Underwood’s evil which is the burnished, high gloss perfection at the centre of the piece. His brand of ruthlessness is as perfect, uncluttered and elegant as Robin Wright’s couture wardrobe on the show. The Shakespearean asides to camera allow Underwood the luxury of perfect communication, allowing his intentions to be clear to the audience at all times – a quality that the sludgy political communicators of the real world, with their dog-eared talking points dreamed up by a kid in a room at 4am, can only envy.
People conform to Underwood’s will. They might struggle with the yoke at the beginning, but ultimately they move as pawns on his chessboard. He has everyone’s measure, and their weaknesses are his strength. This of course is another great myth of politics – the uncluttered power of the strong-man, the kingmaker who trades only in pin-point treachery and possesses the perfect strategy and the means of executing it without mess or digressions. It is, of course, a fantasy – as all of the boilovers of political history can readily attest.
So what is politics in reality, away from the gloss of cable TV drama? Mostly punishing incremental work. One inch forward, a great slide backwards. It’s good intentions felled by events. It’s good days and bad days. There are more stuff-ups than conspiracies. There is treachery, but it’s mainly suburban and small rather than grandly operatic. There are strong men who control weak men (yes, mainly men, although not exclusively). People fall in and out with each other, compromise themselves, fail to live up to their best aspirations, lose nerve and will. But then of course there are those great moments: courage, heart, bravery, truth. Acts of genuine reform, and acts of progress. The moments that make hope not ridiculous.
The thing that House of Cards absolutely nails, however, is the dangerous malaise of the present. Institutions are being hollowed out, making them ripe for gaming. Democratic politics around the world is corroding in the face of an entrenched culture of deal-making and voracious demands by third party interests.
The mainstream media is exhausted, distracted and marginalised by its ongoing existential commercial struggle. There are players on the stage of politics who once might have been checked by more robust managerial systems, stronger accountability, or the simple faith in enduring values – but those checks and balances are weaker than they used to be. That’s the real chill of the Zoe Barnes character: the brutal transaction she makes with power, her willingness to be a stenographer in return for being a player. There’s no purpose to her activism, or at least none that I’ve yet detected. Truth? Well that’s something you create, not something you record.
If you want the truth that House of Cards conveys to the viewer, it is this: more rubbish rises to the surface in this weightless world. The cacophony can conceal truth, not reveal it. Frank Underwood, compelling creature that he is, exists only in our dreams.
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