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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
5 0 July 2016
CULTURE
S
eason 4 of 'House of Cards' came out
on Netflix earlier this year and was
gobbled up in a matter of weeks by
its fans. The opening sequence will
be familiar to them, a series of shim-
mering images of Washington DC, first in
morning light and ending with the channels of
motor traffic pulsing through the darkness of
the city, like arteries through a body. The tech-
nique is called time-lapse, where a long period
of time is replayed in a few seconds, creating
effects such as clouds scudding across the sky
as if borne on a speedy stream of water.
Beneath the clouds and inside the portentous
buildings across whose facades the shadows
eat away at the sunlight, the dirty business of
politics takes place. The city of impassive clas-
sical architecture is sinister, devoid of real life,
like an enormous timepiece that obeys its own
rhythms with no regard for the humans trapped
inside.
In a show that front-and-centres its solilo-
quies and its parallels with 'Othello', 'Julius
Caesar' and 'Macbeth', the title sequence also
evokes Shakespearean tragedy. The cosmic
scale dwarfs the vain efforts of the mere mor-
tals who strut the stage and whose merely
human perception of things means they cannot
escape what fate has in store for them. Chief
among the mortals, puffed up with pride about
their ability to control the future, are the char-
ismatically likeable villain-hero, Frank
Underwood, and his icily remote wife and run-
ning mate, Claire.
Who actually likes Claire Underwood? While
a man wielding power seems to be fully a man,
a woman with power is often judged
unfeminine, tough and unlikeable. The Under-
woods clearly conform to this paradigm. But
'House of Cards' dealt itself a challenging hand
to play in the last season by making Claire the
main character in naked pursuit of political
power.
A nuanced and prominent female is a rare
thing on screen, but, as in the real world, the
price a woman pays is in the currency of likea-
bility. The screenwriters seem to be aware of
the problem. In Season 4, Claire's estranged
and difficult mother slowly dies in front of her
eyes, but the payoff is not so much sympathy
for her as much as astonishment at how she
(Claire) seems not to suffer.
In May this year, the actress who plays Claire,
Robin Wright, revealed in an interview that she
was forced to insist that she and the leading
man, Kevin Spacey, receive equal pay for their
work. She told an interviewer, “I was looking at
statistics and Claire Underwood’s character
was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of
time. So I capitalised on that moment. I was
like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go
public.’ ... And they did”.
The Hollywood rumour mill pegs their pay at
somewhere between $500,000 and $1m dollars
each per episode. So perhaps after all there are
people who like Claire Underwood, if we take
being ‘more popular’ as meaning the same
thing. (Though, for example, Darth Vader is
arguably more popular than Luke Skywalker,
but not more likeable.)
At any rate, this is clearly good news because
Wright is breaking the kind of glass ceiling that
stymies women in politics, women like Claire
Underwood. Wright’s argument for equal pay
displays the sure touch of a poll-sensitive poli-
tician. It also displays a politician’s knack for
simultaneously controlling her own narrative
and cornering her opponent – she threatened
to go public with the studio’s unwillingness to
pay her equally, and then went public with it
anyway when they had coughed up. They won’t
try that again.
The parallel between acting and politicking
is notable too, and not only because public life
is a kind of stage play. It is also notable because
of the way that women politicians are obliged
to act in public life. The norm is that a political
leader is a man, and so a woman who occupies
this position is perceived to be playing a man’s
role. No matter how good a woman is at being
a politician (Thatcher, Merkel, Albright, Harney,
Indira Gandhi), she is nearly always judged to
be performing the role, whereas men are simply
being themselves.
An effect of this is the tendency to focus on
female politicians as actors, performers, and
on what they look like (their facial expressions,
clothing and hair). Their appearances are scru-
tinised as usually failed efforts to pass as
Claire as Hillary
The Democratic candidate
can learn that it is difficult for a
woman to be likeable in a tragedy
by Cormac Deane
House of Cards features,
the charismatically
likeable villain-hero,
Frank Underwood, and
his icily remote wife and
running mate, Claire
July 2016 5 1
something else or to conceal some real aspect
of themselves. In short, the merciless attention
devoted to the appearance of female politicians
is due to the fact that they are not considered
to be authentic – not authentically women, and
not authentically politicians either.
All of this is expressed in terms of likeability.
When a male politician is unlikeable, it is con-
nected to other, attractive qualities; for
example, many Irish people do not like Donald
Trump, Nigel Farage or Vladimir Putin, but they
probably would credit these men as being
strong-willed, independent and impervious to
criticism. But when a woman is unlikeable, it is
because she is perceived to be mannish, cold
and hard.
The person most consistently hounded by
the problem of unlikeability is Hillary Clinton,
who does not compel the charisma and warmth
dividends of the three men who have stood
alongside her in different ways down the
years: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and most
recently, Bernie Sanders. More than ever, the
Democrats have put a lot of effort into control-
ling her appearance in the current electoral
cycle. So for the last two years at least, she
has consistently worn a tunic-plus-trousers
combination that varies only slightly in its
colour, and this has taken some of the atten-
tion off her appearance. In other words, her
clothes have become as invisible as a male
politician’s standard dark suit.
It is difficult not to draw parallels between
the Underwoods and the Clintons, the supreme
real-life power-couple. Few people have walked
the corridors of power longer than Hillary Clin-
ton, as she now reaches for the presidency.
Indeed, Obama’s June endorsement of her bid
included the ever so slightly faint compliment
“I don’t think there’s ever been someone so
qualified to hold this office”.
Clinton epitomises the Washington big-gov-
ernment operator so despised across the
American political spectrum. Claire Under
-
wood’s CV is not nearly as impressive, but she
has also chalked up many years inside Wash-
ington power circles. And they both have
histories of elided maiden names and of work-
ing in jobs created for them by their husbands,
not to mention politically-conscious haircuts
and makeovers.
'House of Cards' is undoubtedly to be admired
for the relative prominence and visibility of its
lead female, but the fact that it plays as a trag-
edy gives us little room for optimism that Claire
Underwood will thrive, or even survive, when
the show makes it so apparent that what Shake-
speare calls ‘the affairs of men’ are subject to
impersonal fate.
In lively contrast to this is 'Veep', now in its
fifth season, which centres on the comical
highs and lows of the cut-throat career politi-
cian Selina Meyer, who is trapped in the role of
Vice President, never quite able to break
through to the top job. Veep episodes are a fast-
paced 28 minutes, stuffed with motor-mouthed
barbs and repartee, totally unlike the self-con-
scious gravitas of 'House of Cards'.
And in Selina Meyer we have another ana-
logue for Hillary Clinton and Claire Underwood.
Her clothing and make-up are of such central
importance that they are practically the sole
concern of another major character, Gary. She
is inauthentic, selfish, vain and fully obsessed
with her political career, even at her mother’s
deathbed. What makes 'Veep' so much fresher
is that these characteristics are what what
make Selina Meyer so likeable.
How does this happen? At least in part
because 'Veep' is a satire, while 'House of
Cards' is a tragedy.
Satire thrives on outrage, in this case outrage
that politics is so corrupt and politicians so
craven. But this satirical outrage has its roots
in a sense that things ought to be, should be,
maybe even will be better someday down the
line. Selina’s never-ending disappointments do
not make us despair, because somebody like
her is exactly the wrong kind of person to hold
political office. 'Veep' makes an implicit prom-
ise that things will come out right in the end,
but not for Selina.
As a tragedy, 'House of Cards' more or less
guarantees that the Underwoods will go down
in flames, and Claire’s achievements with them.
No matter how good
a woman is at being
a politician, she is
nearly always judged
to be performing the
role, whereas men
are simply being
themselves
