House of Cards: Art presents a scary vision of life

Terror: That is the new state of affairs nationally and internationally.  It is represented well in our hearts as we watch, fascinated and drawn in by Frances (Frank) Underwood played by Kevin Spacey, and his wife, Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright.  When the techniques of building to a cliffhanger that were developed to help us sustain our interest in the next episode across a week are employed in a streaming series where the next episode is immediately cued up, the series, especially this one, becomes addictive, and the reluctant wife, but also the reluctant son and I and sometimes all three of us have watched more than we intended on more than one occasion.  We have just finished the fourth season and must now wait several months before the next season is released. 

Will we still be enthralled?   One thing that letting the next episode play does is to help us disregard just how sick and empty we can feel after watching a particular episode.  With the cliffhanger, we become aware of our hunger rather than the pervasive feeling that we have while watching of not been nurtured during the hour and, kind of like when eating cotton candy, we beg for more despite or maybe partially because of the emptiness we feel.  Will we want to return to this state next spring?  Or will we have thought better of it by then?  That may depend, in part, on the political outcomes that occur between now and then.

The emptiness is not just in our stomachs, it is on the set.  Where The West Wing, also a serial about the White House and National/International Politics, is constantly crowded and filled with people essential to the plot and inessential – and in the documentaries, actual denizens of the White House insist that there are many more people running the West Wing than could be depicted in the show because it would have confused people to try to track even more than was already being depicted.  But the personal and professional space of Congressman and then President Underwood is stark – and the absence of people is, I think, an intentional depiction of the internal world of the kind of person that he is – a psychopath, or by its more modern name, a person who has an antisocial personality.

The paradox of the psychopath, and both Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright nicely portray different versions of the style, is that while they are coldly manipulative and their internal worlds are as bleak as the sets of House of Cards, they evoke in us, the people they interact with, a sense of attachment and we feel warmly to them (Autism, particularly Asperger's syndrome, as depicted in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, raises a parallel set of questions).  Frank is charming in public appearances, and his asides to the audience are endearing – we are given access to his inner thinking and we admire the cunning and guile that he betrays.  He knows more about what is going on in the insides of the people he is interacting with than they (or we) do, and we are let into his inner sanctum of knowledge about the way people function.

Claire, as the show moves forward, polls higher than Frank and she is enlisted on the campaign trail because people like her.  Seeing Frank through her eyes leads people to like him because they like her.  She is likeable – though to those of us who have a closer view, we see that she is actually quite cold and has a very functional view of life and people – I find myself trusting her even less than Frank as the series progresses. 

We like them, though, not just in spite of themselves, but because of our ability to empathize with them.  Frank is a hard luck kid.  His Dad was mean and downtrodden, couldn’t keep a job or make something of himself and Frank has made a LOT of himself.  He has struggled up from nothing.  Claire was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but her mother is cold and while it appears that her father indulged her, it is not clear that anyone ever loved her.  I think that, were these people instead of characters, it might be even clearer that we empathize with them in a way that they can’t empathize with themselves.  They are angry about what happened.  Frank at one point is upset about a picture linking his Dad with the KKK because he was proud of the picture.  His father had gone to the KKK member to try to secure a loan to get on his feet, one of the few times he showed some gumption.  When that is all that you father has done to be proud of you have led a pretty bleak life, and we feel that bleakness.  But I’m not sure they do.  I think they feel angry that they have been treated this way, and entitled to much more, but they likely believe they can’t feel upset about how they have been treated because that feeling state is one in which they feel vulnerable, and they can never, ever allow themselves to be vulnerable.

I think that the dramatic device of using the aside allows us to use our more sophisticated psychologies to understand and appreciate their more primitive ones (you have to wait until the very end of the fourth season for Claire's joining in the aside piece - we view her through the eyes of her paramour before that).  Were we actually living in the world of the Underwoods, I think they would be communicating with us much more viscerally - I think they are actually functioning in much the mode that terrorists do (see a post on 9/11 to understand what I am referring to here).

In addition to getting a chance to "look under the hood" as it were through the asides and just as spectators, we admire their grit and determination.  We also feel, on some level, that they may be savages, but they are our savages.   More than once, the reluctant son and I have wondered about how Frank would have dealt with some intractable situation.  Especially when there is a bully around, it would be nice to have someone who is even more cold hearted and ruthless than the meanest bully you can bring to the party, and when we identify with the bully, we feel protected.  We are in the position of power, we are making others feel uncomfortable.  We are acting, not reacting.  We are doing not being done to.  The very things that help the bully feel comfortable help us - as their henchmen - feel comfortable and protected.

So, we are fascinated by this pair – this couple who feel it is them against the world and who manipulate and cajole and work the system and the good will of others to achieve – what?  Frank keeps referring to the goal of their work as the possession of this house – the White House.  But to what purpose?  It seems to give them very little pleasure to occupy it.  They might as well be playing one of Frank’s first person shooter games as leading a nation filled with living breathing people.  Even State Dinners – moments that might be seen as places to feel special and important are filled with angst and intrigue as they work in a non-stop political game of one-upmanship.  They must always be the top dog.

Of course, this is an election season, and it is tempting to wonder if Bill and Hillary’s marriage, one that certainly must have strange and intricate rules, mirrors this strange marriage.  What is Hillary’s true motive for running?  What is the magnetic pull of that house for them?  Are they – if not exclusively but in some ways pervasively as drawn to power for its own sake as Frank and Claire?  Is there some way in which there is not just a wish to do good, but a wish to aggrandize oneself that is at the heart of all political striving?  I was struck when a revolutionary in Nicaragua, Dora Maria Tellez, was not more disappointed in Daniel Ortega who went from being a freedom fighter for democracy, and the first democratically elected president - and the first leader to voluntarily give up power - to becoming a despot.  Her position was that there is something about power that is very hard to give up – that people like George Washington who chose not to be crowned are the exception, not the rule.

And there are certainly overtones of Donald Trump in Frank.  Could it be that, in addition to the attention that he craves, there is something about having power over others that is driving him towards the presidency?  Is his effort to have us fear others really an attempt to redirect the fear that we have of his drive towards power and perhaps despotism in another direction – to imagine that the threat is from someone – anyone – but the real threatening person, himself?

Power, here, is being presented as a drug.  Something that promises to make the person who feels deeply and powerfully (but neither completely consciously nor in an integrated and processed fashion) damaged to feel the opposite of that – to feel whole and, instead of downtrodden, to feel on top of things.  The drug is also revealed to be insidious.  Though it promises a new state, the state of power, it actually just keeps adding layers of mistrust and emptiness built on more layers of mistrust and emptiness because the power is illusory - it is not built on the genuine trust of others, but on having something on them or over them and of being vulnerable oneself because of the means that have been used to acquire that.

At the conclusion of the fourth season, the cliff hanger is a big one.  We are left with the promise that, to protect the house of cards from being exposed – to misdirect the people from seeing that all that is constructed is anchored in lies, deceit and murder – the Underwoods will introduce chaos – they will unleash fear.  And they will use this – they will massage and sculpt it because it is their medium - and they will, they promise, create a masterpiece of mayhem out of it.  We, the American people in this strange parallel universe, we know, will be drawn into it.  What will befall us?  How far can this be pushed?  What horrific ends will they achieve?  Stay tuned – don’t turn away - watch the brutality unfold.

One of the nice things about House of Cards is that we can, in fact, turn away.  We know that it is fiction.  The political landscape this year is not fiction, even though it feels, often, more like a reality TV show – which means something completely unreal (who could live with integrity in a house with a random group of people, be videotaped from morning to night, and be subjected to weird parameters?  How is this real?).  At this writing the Democratic National Convention has just concluded and the party – under the direction of Hillary Clinton and her campaign – has painted a picture that is in stark contrast to the picture painted at the Republican convention last week.  Both pictures are consistent with the campaigns to this point, but they may be coming into focus more clearly.  The two candidates are polling about dead even at this point, so to this point, these two very different visions have a similar hold on us.  What are they?

The one vision is that of the individual who can solve problems.  The person who is simply smarter and knows what is going on versus all of the dummies in the room (except for those who think like him) and who can cut through all the hand wringing and questioning and act forthrightly and directly.  Let’s just cut to the chase is this model.  From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is a powerful model – one that we identify with.  “If I were king…” things would be better.  They would be done my way.  I know what is going on better than those around me.  I can bring people around to my position and, if I can’t, I can overrule or override those who disagree with me.

The second vision is much more conditional.  The world is not one in which there are easy answers.  It is complicated and we must listen to the minority voices because they contain wisdom.  Ultimately we must act, but our actions will always involve compromise and conditions and will never be based on certain knowledge and they will never accomplish a goal completely – there will always be flaws.  And actually those flaws are part of what makes the world a beautiful place.

Now I have a strong opinion about which of these views makes sense (OK, it is the latter), though I am less certain that either candidate truly believes this (the Bernie chanters who would be heard were drowned out by cries of USA or Hillary whenever they tried to voice their concerns in the hall – good for appearances on national TV but inconsistent with the message being preached on stage…).  But I believe that taking in more information is more efficient, actually, based on a model of psychoanalytically healthier mental functioning. 

I think the practice of free association leads us to hear from the cacophony that is our own minds the diversity of voices and opinions that we feel about any given situation.  This can be overwhelming and confusing – especially when we first start doing it.  It is much more comforting to have a sense of certainty about a course of action or about how a situation is configured than to feel our way into a position that takes more data into account.  Heck, a lot of psychoanalysts try to boil things down to a simple rubric – they see the Oedipal situation in almost everything, not as a way to open up various ways of thinking about any given situation, but as a way of closing it down, of having the right answer - this is simply the Oedipal situation - like every other Oedipal situation - rather than one of an infinite number of variations on a theme - in which it is the variations - the particular tones of this particular rendition that are of interest.

I believe the paradox of using free association, however, is that it leads to more efficient thinking.  We actually come up with models that more closely match the environment when we take into account primitive as well as sophisticated ways of thinking about it – concrete as well as abstract – fearful as well as hopeful – selfish as well as community based.  And as we exert less control over our thoughts – as we let them bubble up, we find a richness in the resulting steam that is an aggregate of flavors and spices.  There is something severe and therefore impressive about a more incisive approach – a black and white one.  But I think that our political system – as envisioned in the interpretation of the framers of the public narrative of the Democratic convention – actually nicely mirrors what we strive for in our best psychoanalytic interventions and the lived moments that result from having learned to function more fully as the result of the psychoanalytic process.  


To see a post about the final season of House of Cards, link here.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index of this blog, link here.

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