Alright, SPOILERS FOLLOW. IF YA CAN'T HANDLE IT MOVE ON. Part three, now.
Peter
Russo dies. He doesn’t just die. Frank Underwood kills him. See, he lapsed back
into alcoholism and botched his chance at being Governor. With nothing left he
wants to atone for his crimes and come clean about all his illegal backdoor
politicking. That’d put Frank in an uncomfortable spot. So he picks up Russo
from a drunken stupor and drives him to a garage, leaves the car ignition on,
rolls down the windows and shuts the garage door. The U.S. House Majority Whip
Leader did that. When I expressed some mild reserve regarding the plausibility
of such an event to two avowed House of Cards fans, they looked at each other
and then to me.
“What
else was he gonna do?”
Anything.
Anything at all. Frank Underwood, the viewer is led to believe, is capable. A
man able to manipulate the subtle nuances and impulses of the human mind to his
advantage. He knows where every piece on the chessboard is, where they will
soon be and how they’ll get there. Five turns in advance. So he looks at this
man, a drunken wretch of a human being who’s only been talking about coming
clean while disastrously inebriated to absurd proportions and may very well
wake up the next morning and see the light and laugh off what he was saying the
night before, Underwood sees this man and believes the only solution to be
murder. And the moment’s not treated as a mistake made amidst a paranoid haze
of anxious uncertainty but a cold, deliberate decision. As if no other option
remained. I’m sorry but fuck that.
Aside
from the whole murder thing being all sorts of stupid, Frank got an emotionally
unstable alcoholic to go on a high profile, high stress election campaign that
would leave him more tempted than ever before but did not consider the possibility
that he may in fact relapse as 75% of alcoholics do within their first year of
recovery. A smart man would see that risk and not take it. If he did, he’d plan
a variety of backups to cushion the potential fallout. But Frank is surprised
as anyone else when it happens. As for the actual murder, really, what the
fuck, there were so many other possible solutions. Discredit the drunken
alcoholic as a crazy person in the press, threaten his family, bribe him with all
the money in the world, manipulate the events publicly so that he looks like
the one who masterminded it all, drug him and ship him off to Guam or
something. At least Guam would’ve been a fun sort of camp. It’s just crazy that
Frank murders Peter in order to avoid the possible legal ramifications should
Peter come forward and speak up but anticipates no apparent consequences for
fucking murder. Granted, the issue rears its head in the first episode of
season two when a reporter suspects him of the Russo murder. So he pushes the
reporter in front of a train. Then that thing is all null and void. Okay then.
It
is not as if television shows can’t explore the creative potential outside the
realm of possibility. Many of the great shows thrive off of the implausible,
often achieving their most powerful moments via batshit-when-you-think-about-it
means. But these moments all function within the boundaries the shows set for themselves
and never come at their own expense. House of Cards set the boundaries as a tell
all fictional tale of the true nature of Washington but then shits all over
them with murder. Twice. It took its carefully crafted verisimilitude and tore
it asunder. At the same time, it’s not like it’s some frivolous soap opera
where the stretching of reality does not matter either. Between the dialog and
all the interviews about commitment to reality and the episode being called
“Chapters,” as if there was a grand literary scheme to all this and the
narrative wasn’t just riding by the seat of its shit stained coat tails to an
ending.
Much
of my anger stems from the disservice the show did to Peter Russo in his final
moments. Part of it comes from the fact that everyone else thinks the show is
great and it’s not and everyone thinks that moment is great and harrowing and
it’s not and how I wished the show was great but it’s not. But most of my anger
comes from the realization of what about show is really about.
See,
the show was never about Russo. He was a narrative pawn, a character that
existed just to die and provide emotional watershed. It’s not about politics. It
just does not have enough to say about the subject. Hell, it’s not even about
Frank. It’s about his slow and often illogical ascent to power and all the
giddy kickass moment that accompany it. The entire dramatic thrust of the show,
what entertains the viewer and guides the narrative and provides catharsis, is
Frank winning. The other characters don’t complicate or challenge him in
anyway. They exist solely to be beaten and disposed of in the wake of his path.
It ends up being some high-class snuff film with flag pendants and cuff links
and C-Span. Ascent narratives are a delicate art and they botch it. Breaking
Bad, another one of the great shows, centered itself around the inherent thrills
of an ascent narrative as well. But that narrative worked in large part due to
its attention to the side characters. Their existence outside of the main
character’s was fully developed and entertaining in its own right. This gave
them the air of not obstacles but complications. So when the main character
inevitably hurt those side characters on his way up, it complicated our joy and
sympathy for the main character and the ascent itself, and at a certain point
for many viewers out right displaced the sympathy. House of Cards is too
careless with its side characters to ever pull of such a delicate balance of
thrill and empathy. But it does try and it does fail, reaching for these overly
dramatic moments that seem like needless and preposterous story beats intended
to inject stakes and emotional heft into the narrative but end up just
completely undercutting every emotional moment that proceeded them, like some
bogus shot of adrenaline bought off some shady dude in an alley that sends the user
into an even worse state, ultimately rendering them a lifeless corpse.
House
of Cards spends too much time trying to be great without doing any of the
groundwork that helped create a strong foundation the actual great shows used
to ascend into greatness. And so it ends up being a good show that thinks it’s
great. And a smart person who thinks they’re the smartest in the room will
always irritate more than a dumb one that knows he’s dumb.
People
buy into it because of the pedigree of it all. Smoke and mirrors. For me, it’s
like if everyone else in the world looked at wrestling and thought of it as a
deeply engaging narrative with a lot to say about the barbaric state of
violence in society, with out of nowhere plot twists that are really gratifying
and some nuanced, well balanced character work that meshes real well with the
visceral physicality of it all.
It's a shame because we deserve a show like this to be great. It just didn't happen. Oh well!
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