If you have loyally stayed with us to this point, you know the drill. Ashley Parker and David Carr put the old gimlet eye on “House of Cards” with an emphasis on the optics and verisimilitude of the show’s media and political angles. And if you are just arriving, you can catch up with recaps of episodes one, two,three, four, five, six,seven or eight. Lots of spoilers, so proceed with caution.
Episode 9
Synopsis: Revolt is in the air: Frank Underwood’s carefully crafted bill to prop up Peter Russo’s candidacy comes undone and it’s an inside job. The alliance of convenience between Frank and Zoe Barnes becomes an intimate battle for power.
Carr: This is the episode where the marble rolls off the table for Frank, and part of me really enjoyed watching the comeuppance. The Washington D.C. of “House of Cards” has been a place where women only gain power and salience by their adjacency to men. There is scene after scene in which male politicians come into the shot and there is a phalanx of women traveling in their wake, heels clicking as they follow The Man down the hall. It’s not as if you don’t see that every day in the Congress, but this is also a time in government when the Democratic leader of the House is a woman and the Secretary of State was, until recently, female and arguably one of the leading candidates to be the next president if things go her way. Yet in “House of Cards,” all the women pivot around Frank, or Peter, or the president.
All that bystanding is starting to get under the skin of those women and they strike back. Frank’s wife, Claire, who has watched her own plans fade just to bolster her husband’s, stabs him in the back from a very close distance. And Zoe Barnes begins to exercise all the leverage she has to put Frank on notice that she does not belong to him, that there is a mutuality of interests that must be attained. She is also beginning to sense that Frank is capable of anything, not just playing politics, and begins to regard him with heightened suspicion.
Parker: The Claire Underwood betrayal feels like a real act of defiance, with Ms. Underwood knowingly beating her husband at his own game of manipulative double-dealing. In their partnership, he has not been a very worthy partner, and she plans to let him know as much in the place that hurts the most — on the House floor, with the whip count, with a devastating vote.
The Zoe Barnes pushback to Frank, however, struck me as a bit more convoluted. After all, as Frank himself points out, she was the one who elevated their relationship from transactional to sexual. When Janine Skorsky, her world-weary older colleague, tells Zoe that as a young reporter herself, she slept her way “to the middle” and finally “hit a wall” where no one would take her seriously, Zoe seems to heed the warning. Her decision to try to break things off with Frank seems to come down to yet another calculation — that it’s bad for business. And then, when Frank turns off the spigot of leaks, Zoe begrudgingly and angrily backs down.
On the issue of not being taken seriously, Janine has a point. In the instances I know of where a female reporter has somehow gotten involved with a source — or if there were widespread rumors, fair or unfair, to that effect — the reporter’s credibility and reputation instantly plummeted, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen when their male colleagues do the exact same thing. Though for Zoe Barnes, she may already have gone too far down that road for it to matter much.
Carr: “This is what professional feels like,” Frank explains when he cuts Zoe out of inside information. But he has, in fact, lost his professional moorings. Even if he wants to be in the favor-trading business with all kinds of things up for barter, his limping male pride creates an Achilles Heel. It is O.K. for him to go home and smoke ciggies with Claire and talk about Zoe, but when Zoe shows a hint of having a life beyond simply being an instrument of his will, he loses it.
In order for Frank and Zoe to carry on, the subtext must be rendered visible. Once that happens, the game is up. “I can play the whore,” Zoe tells Frank. Of course, to articulate that fact is to own it, and it can’t feel very good to know what business she is in, even if she is now setting the price and the terms.
I love that you point to the floor of the House as the scene of his abasement. As the whip, he is only as good as his counting fingers and when he comes up short, his fundamental value is in question.
Parker: The whip scene is an interesting one, if only because the show, as usual, gets part of it so right and part of it so wrong. Frank, trying to whip his members into voting the way he wants, urges them, “Vote your district, vote your conscience, don’t surprise me” — a line right out of the playbook of the actual whip, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. (In fact, in a recent CNN interview, Mr. McCarthy reveals that he gave the show that line, when Kevin Spacey was doing research about Congress).
But then, in the final whip scene, the show gets it so wrong, offering up a tableau of Frank watching the vote on C-SPAN from his office. There, he sips champagne with the president’s chief of staff, and mingles with other friends and colleagues — as if he were at a cocktail party, not a crucial floor vote on a tough-to-pass bill. On such a critical vote the whip would never, ever be watching from afar on C-SPAN; he’d be right there on the floor with his members, making sure they were voting the way they’d promised and ready to engage in any last minute cajoling and arm-twisting.
I e-mailed Mr. McCarthy’s office just to be sure that leaving the House floor and watching a vote wind down on television was very un-whip like. The response was swift and decisive: “That is a big no-no,” an aide responded.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/house-of-cards-no-9-alliances-crumbling-on-all-sides/?partner=rss&emc=rss