Frames per Second: When 'House of Cards' played out at Raisina Hill

The midnight change of power at the CBI this week has opened a Pandora's box of speculations

With the sixth and final season of Netflix’s wildly popular original series House of Cards slated to be released on November 2, I have been meaning to watch all the previous five. I have wanted to write about the series for some time but have not been able to do so. But, earlier this week, events on Raisina Hill — not Capitol Hill — prompted me to return to the series that I had binged on early last year, when Season 5 was released. I am referring to the midnight rejig of brass at the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday, and the series of incidents that have followed.

As CBI Director Alok Verma and his deputy Rakesh Asthana were sent on leave and stripped of their powers, amid mutual charges of corruption, and with a high-volume verbal duel ensuing between the government and the Opposition, a friend said to me: “Looks like we have our own House of Cards now.” It was meant as a joke, of course. Who doesn’t like a bit of speculation on matters of power? However, the way in which the rejig occurred has opened a Pandora’s box. The Opposition has claimed that Verma was starting to investigate the Rafale deal; the government has denied all charges.

Yet, one is left wondering: What was the need for the rejig to happen at midnight? Could it not wait until next morning? The answers may elude us forever, which is why fiction, such as House of Cards, is somewhat more satisfying. However, before I write anything else, I must confess that it has not been easy watching Kevin Spacey playing Frank Underwood, the power-hungry Washington politician who will go to any length to become US President. While his performance is compelling, how can one forget the multiple allegations of sexual assault against him? How can one not be guilty of drawing pleasure from the art of such a man?

Similar questions are raised by writer Claire Dederer in her essay ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ (Paris Review, November 20, 2017). “They did or said something awful, and made something great,” she writes “…we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or... we don’t.” The case that she looks at most closely in her essay is of Woody Allen — accused of sexual assault on his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow — and arguably his most famous film, Annie Hall (1977).

Dederer writes of watching the film in 2017 (not for the first time), and being fully charmed by it, despite being aware of the allegations against Allen. She describes her own moral dilemma at enjoying the movie, and then the debates she had with several people — especially men — about its aesthetic quality of Allen’s other acclaimed film, Manhattan (1979). After a long and complicated essay, referencing many other works and experiences, she does not arrive at any conclusions, but quotes Martha Gellhorn (who is rather unfairly more famous as Ernest Hemmingway’s girlfriend): “A man must be a very great genius for being such a loathsome human being.” Not really a very satisfactory answer.

The experience of watching House of Cards with knowledge of Spacey’s deplorable and criminal conduct was very different from what I remembered. Earlier, he was mesmerising, as he knocked his knuckles on wood, manipulated everyone, murdered Peter Russo (Corey Stoll) and Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), and betrayed his friends, gobbled down pork ribs and conducted threesomes with his wife, Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) and security staff Edward Meechum (Nathan Darrow) as testimony to his enormous appetite and ambition. His Machiavellian machinations, interpolated with break-the-fourth-wall addresses to the audience (taken straight out of William Shakespeare’s Richard III), were seductive, addictive, making one stay up all night.

Yet, as I watched him in action this time, plotting and planning, scheming and killing, strutting about and cowering, I could not but help feeling rather bored with how the narrative progressed. As one nears the end of Season 5, and his past sins catch up with him, Frank is forced to abdicate, making Claire the new US President, one wonders if the tortuous road to the pinnacle of power was for nothing. What does Frank get as President anyhow? His tenure, before and after re-election, is short and troubled, constantly under threat from a new crisis or the possibility of the discovery of his past crimes.

During the campaign to get re-elected, he is fatally wounded and goes into coma. All the power he has accumulated, trudging knee-deep, shoulder-deep, neck-deep, through mud and blood, climbing to the pinnacle of a mountain of bodies, slips away from his fingers, and as his past catches up with him, he is forced to abdicate. Claire, already Vice-President, succeeds him, and he is banished out of the White House to a hotel. If the trailer of Season 6 is anything to go by, Frank is dead and gone, and Claire is entrenched as President. After the allegations of sexual misconduct emerged, Netflix sacked Spacy from the show; he lost several other projects as well.

The pursuit of power at any cost is not a new narrative. The man who will not take “no” for an answer has been at centre of such narratives for too long. Yet now, with #metoo sweeping through Hollywood and Bollywood, the universes of literature and journalism, the arts and politics, this character and this narrative is starting to look a little tired, boring, a tad out of fashion. Something has shifted. A new world order might be on its way, where we shall no more be seduced by a masculine pursuit of power. So, it seems unlikely that I shall return to House of Cards, to re-watch it. The new season is a different matter though. “My turn,” said Claire Underwood, breaking the fourth at the end of Season 5. Maybe it’s time for us to take a good look at the contours of female ambition.