----- DO NOT READ if you don’t want to know what happens ------
Finished watching season 2
yesterday. The finale was the best episode of the season after the stunningly surprising
season opener, but lest this sentence fools you, let me assure you that
neither I nor the husband liked season 2.
How come, you may ask, given the
awesome actors and the established greatness of season 1? They lost me, at
least, at hello. When Frank (FU as he is
known by his cufflinks) shoves Zoe under the train, barely disguised in clothes
that seem borrowed from the set of the original “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,”
his character, I would suggest to you, meine Damen, jumps the shark. It
simply makes no sense within the carefully crafted realism of the first season
to have a wanna-be president commit murder by his own hand. That’s what he has lackeys
for. From that point on most of the
season spun into caricature, with all the characters, central as well as peripheral,
acting beyond reason and beyond pre-established conventions.
"House of Cards" was a show where suspension of disbelief
needed to be calibrated carefully, so as not to lose tethering to reality. It
was not, manifestly, “Scandal,” with its deliberately campy, daytime drama take
on the White House. No, “House of Cards”, from its muted palette opening shots,
advertised itself as a better framed reality. That mandate, if you ask me, was
shattered in the very first episode of season 2, not to be regained.
If Frank showed little sympathetic
humanity in Season One, all traces of it were leached out of him in this
season. But the biggest change was in the depiction of Claire. Season One
positioned her as complex and ambivalent, a woman whose armor-like stunning
outfits sometimes gave a glimpse of the vulnerability beneath. Season Two
Claire was never vulnerable, not even when she confessed to rape and abortion –
a confession that was all cold political calculation. Even her wardrobe
suffered, and most of her clothes this season were dull and forgettable. In her
stead it was Jackie Sharp’s character that played her old role, a
personification of the uneasy relationship women often have with naked ambition. Jackie
even wore the same dresses as Claire did in Season One, underscoring the changing
of the guard.
Claire, on the other hand, became a
caricaturistic Lady Macbeth. When, in the last episode, she cried over the
breakdown of her bill, the woman she enlisted to help with it, and the loss of
her earlier self the tears looked forced, fake, fleeting. There was one nice touch, though – as she
hauled her suitcase up the stairs we saw the red soles of her Louboutins – a reminder
of the blood she stepped in, like the imaginary blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. Closing
that arc, during the swearing in, Claire covered her blood stained hands with
gloves (in a look reminiscent of Michelle Obama's latest inauguration outfit, where she wore oxblood gloves).
The most unnecessary story in this
season was that of Rachel, the former hooker, and Doug Stamper, Frank’s chief
of staff. Why did we need so much viewing time spent on a trite and tired pulpy
motif? We should have gotten more of Jackie and Remy whose relationship
encapsulated the dangers of ambition and power much more potently (and by
hotter actors).
Ultimately, the question that needs
to be asked is this: What was the second season of “House of Cards” all about and how
did it reflect present day American reality? The husband suggested that
insomuch as television, at its best or worst, is a wish fulfillment, a mirror
held up to the present, then “House of Cards” tells us that we have lost all
faith in government. A man who was never elected to be either Vice President OR
President moves from becoming, over a short period of time, one and then the
other. His climb to the highest position in 'the free world' is littered with dead bodies, literal, not figurative. Is
this how we see the presidency? Was this show, the husband asked, written by a
Republican? J
What do you think ladies? Please
weigh in.
p.s. Radiohead's "House of Cards":
