House Of Cards: The Real Game is Being Played With The Audience

By Martin Hollis

Literature had it lucky. Good old Willie Shakespeare knocked out many a soliloquy in his time, not through choice, but necessity. Standing in the bare rooms of The Globe, it was a must for actors to explain in detail to the audience the location, color, and décor of the room, which had now become Denmark, Verona, wherever.

Given 500 years, it’s no surprise then that Nabokov, Danielewski, and even JJ Abrams in his authorial capacity, have all manipulated and played with the concept of the fourth wall, obfuscating, elaborating, or messing with readers’ expectations. Even Alan Moore’s Watchmen played with the fourth wall, using framing, captions, and font among others in order to play with the form.

Sadly, it’s in other mediums that this has never really been utilized. Breaks to the audience have been used in film to either explain in oh-so-specific-detail what is exactly going on (I submit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as exhibit A as a great film that doesn’t do anything new or shiny) or as a method of allowing the audience to explicitly know the inner workings of the characters’ machinations (Woody Allen telling us his neurosis, Amelie letting us know how whimsical she is, or even John Cusack’s Rob in High Fidelity whining to us about lists). Basically, we’re still at the level of Shakespeare, staying with our characters. Perhaps the closest we’ve seen to the Pale Fire level of playfulness in the art of this is in Fight Club or Funny Games.

But lo, TV is getting it right. Perhaps it’s the intimate nature of the medium—it’s in your home; Johnny Carson, Jimmy Kimmel, et al have chatted at length with us; we’re used our news being told to us and us only. Perhaps it’s the fact that it, being on a smaller scale than big budget Hollywood, is willing to take more and more risks in order to tell its stories. I’m reminded of Ben Stiller’s suggestion to Tom Cruise that during a climactic fight in MI:2, he turn to the camera and announce that “this mission just got a whole lot more impossibler.” Perhaps it’s the fact that we’ve learned along with it—thanks, Kermit, for teaching me my alphabet; thanks, Teletubbies, for teaching me. . . something. Whatever it is, TV is certainly flying the flag for meta-commentary on TV.

Ten years (!) ago, Arrested Development‘s omnipresent narrator, the affable Ron Howard, began to tell us the story of the Bluth family, ostensibly allowing us to keep up with the multiple narrative strands of the story which, in a rather complex manner, overlapped and flip-flopped in a very un-sit com way. AD took this idea and destroyed it, allowing the audience to bring in not just its knowledge of the characters, but of the actors as well. There’s Henry Winkler, jumping the shark; Tony Hale doing the Mr. Roboto dance; Ron Howard referencing the “Opie Awards.” Arrested Development has constantly, even in its fourth season, used the Netflix interface magnificently to play with the audience’s interaction with the fiction, meta-fiction, and form of the TV show.

And it’s not just AD that Netflix is flexing its meta-muscle with. Current sensation House of Cards has just unloaded the second season of Frank Underwood’s rise to power. While incredibly Shakespeare-ian in its approach (mirroring the original BBC series, so I’m told) with Frank’s inner machinations being explicitly explained to the camera, it also serves three other purposes, which I’d like to finish by highlighting in order to demonstrate its peerless commitment to direct address (at least until the Bluths return.)

The first is education. Just as The Count (ah-ah-ah) and many others have helped us to learn, Frank is our conduit into the seedy world of SuperPACs, Quoras, and other jargon, in which he and everyone around him is intimately versed. On a surface level, House of Cards‘ fourth wall breaking allows an audience to enter the world, just as Shakespeare’s chorus set the scene for the time and place. But it goes deeper.

The narrative entertainment value in Frank’s ability to turn to us is magnificent. Seeing something as small as a withering look to the camera after another politician has tossed out an otherwise flippant piece of PR speak is magnificent. It’s almost as is Frank is complicit with us: “Yep, this line of dialogue is stinky. Hold on. I’ll sort it out.” We are part of Frank’s game, we are with him and on his level, and if we weren’t there, it would feel incredibly distant and serious. Indeed, the first episode of season 2 withholds any address to the camera until the last few minutes, Mr. Underwood eventually turning to the camera and asking, “Did you think I’d forgotten about you?” before the camera pans down to his new cufflinks, which have his initials monogrammed on them (I’ll wait till you get there . . . yep, it’s pretty good.) Frank, you absolute japester.

Finally, the show is pushing into the same territory that Arrested Development has, letting us begin to think not just about the characters, but the actors themselves. At the end of season 2, Frank and his wife Claire’s relationship has been much more thoroughly explored. Always the linchpin of the show, their relationship is the one area that has remained fairly inscrutable, allowing the audience to make up their own minds themselves: Do they love each other? How much? Do they ever touch? Kiss? Make love? Much has been made about Spacey’s own sexuality in the tabloids, and, like Frank, he has always refused to comment on this, rising above such irrelevant news. It’s therefore the ultimate “cufflinks moment” that happens at the end of episode 11, as Frank and Claire’s relationship seems to comment explicitly on the rumors about Spacey’s own sexuality. It’s magnificent, both irrelevant to the main story itself and also integral to the characters’ relationship, and it’s played so incidental.

Remarkably, after having brought the audience so close throughout the rest of the show, House of Cards might have just set a new standard in playing with its audience.