House of Bards

Unbridled evil can be intoxicating—just look at the television shows that captivate us. The unapologetic confessions of Walter White, Don Draper, and Frank Underwood force an addictive complicity that compels us to overlook all manner of sin: deceit, infidelity, murder. The vicarious thrill of simulated evil is disconcertingly enjoyable.

But that’s not a new phenomenon at all. Who can read about Plato’s Ring of Gyges without contemplating it on his finger? Iago’s scheming will always be more captivating than Othello’s rigid righteousness. Give me Madame Defarge over Sydney Carton any day.

We admire villains and anti-heroes because of and not in spite of their evil—a twisted brilliance that we can safely enjoy and admire behind the pages of novels and the screens of televisions.

There’s little secret to the success of House of Cards. Discounting the fact that it’s the remake of a British series of the same name that was itself adapted from a novel by Michael Dobbs, House of Cards casts its aura in the long shadow of Shakespeare.

It’s Kevin Spacey playing a modern Richard III, only with Democrats and Republicans instead of Lancasters and Yorks, with a steelier Lady Macbeth in Claire Underwood and a presidential Othello, no longer the moor of Venice but the unmoored tenant in the White House.

“I have no patience for useless things,” Frank Underwood stoically intones as he euthanizes a dying dog in the opening moment of House of Cards. “Simple plain Clarence, I do love thee so that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,” Richard likewise plots in his opening scene.

The personification of Washington’s sleazy underbelly, Underwood is captivating precisely because he preys on the deep anxiety and cynicism we have about people in general and politicians in particular. He’s nightmarishly Nixonian, yet somehow worse.

“He’s going to get away with it, isn’t he?” a journalist who knows too much asks his colleague.

“Yes. Yes he is,” she replies.

Unlike Nixon, Underwood doesn’t get caught. His comeuppance, the inevitable fate of his villainous predecessors Iago, Macbeth, and Edmund, has yet to come.

But we watch (and tacitly applaud) Underwood deceive, manipulate, and kill for a deeper reason too. Just as no one watches Richard III for its depiction of Plantagenet politics, few watch House of Cards for its vampiric rendition of Washington.

Instead, the enduring magnetism of that glorious sun of York, Richard, comes from the beautiful ugliness of his Machiavellian machinations. There are moments of corrupt brilliance that we are unused to being allowed to marvel at—stratagems executed with the elegance of an Euler proof, only directed toward ungodly ends. The allure of Sherlock Holmes’s deductions and Frank Underwood’s seductions is the same rush one gets watching Gary Kasparov dispatch his opponents with incredible insight and unflinching precision.

In pure Richardian fashion, Frank manipulates his opponents into self-destruction in an insatiable rise to the top. Underwood ices his opponents with the same deadly drive as Richard deals out to his brother Clarence and the Princes of the Tower. The intrepid journalist Zoe Barnes fulfills the same temporary usefulness to Underwood as Lady Anne does to Richard.

“Older men hurt you, and then discard you,” Underwood says early on, fully channeling Richard’s gloating over Anne: “I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.” Indeed, Zoe’s train came soon enough.