‘You might very well think that, I could not possibly comment.’Francis Urquhart, House of Cards (BBC, 1990)
This quotation1 from the British BBC TV series House of Cards is one of Conservative Chief Whip Francis Urquhart’s favourite replies to the young journalist Mattie Storin when she reaches a conclusion he has in fact led her to reach (‘you might very well think that’) without his taking responsibility for it (‘I could not possibly comment’). This enables him to deny information he has indirectly led her to infer. The use of the second-person pronoun (‘you’) combined with the epistemic modal (‘might’) attests to Urquhart’s disengagement from his own utterance, leaving it to Mattie to take responsibility for her own thoughts of which he has nothing to say, except that her reasoning might ‘very well’ be right. Aspiring to the most powerful political job in the UK (Prime Minister), Francis Urquhart (played by Ian Richardson) is ready to propagate false rumours or divulge true information about his party colleagues for his interlocutor to draw (true or false) implications that she can report in the press. Giving and gaining information thus becomes a game of pragmatic encoding and inference between the politician and the journalist.
In the American version of House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–) to which this volume is devoted, the protagonist aspiring to the presidency of the United States, Francis J. Underwood (called ‘Frank’ by everyone except his wife and played by the actor Kevin Spacey), uses the cue only twice with the journalist Zoe Barnes—he will end up killing her just as Urquhart kills Mattie when she understands his illegal and immoral dealings. If the 1990 four-episode BBC TV series stops here,2 the American version develops further (it counted three seasons at the time of writing; a fourth one was premiered on March 4, 2016).3 Yet the struggle for power is as ferocious in Congress as it is in the House of Commons. Their political leanings as Chief Whips aside (Urquhart is a Conservative and Underwood a Democrat), the main difference between the two protagonists lies in their social origins. If one is an English aristocrat who has renounced working on his father’s estate out of thirst for political power, the other is a rural boy from Gaffney, South Carolina, whose family had a hard time making both ends meet because of a depressed father: Frank’s desire to get to the highest post in the USA is a revenge on a poor childhood. Besides, it is animated by the certitude that America can give access to success to anyone inclined to provide themselves with the right means. As the second chapter will show, the protagonist’s language is underpinned by values informed by the American dream and predicated on ideological polarisation; hard work and strength of character are what drives a wedge between those willing to succeed and the others.
The Original Novel and the ‘Fictionalization’ of Politics
The BBC TV series took its title and inspiration from a novel written by Michael Dobbs in 1989. The world of British parliamentary politics depicted by the novelist could constitute a textbook case for pragmatics as what seems important is less what is said than what is not said, or rather what is said without being said. The exchanges during parliamentary ‘debates’, for instance, are not presented as exchanges of information but rather as exchanges of ‘forces’ in Austin’s sense,4 discourse performing a definite action by being endowed with a specific force through or beyond what is said. In the chamber of the House of Commons, politicians are more worried about the forceful impact of the Prime Minister’s utterances and his ability to rhetorically bring the opponents down than about the content of his proposals. The House becomes an arena for exchanges of verbal blows, falling short of its original democratic ideals as the narrator indicates:
In the verbal combat of the House of Commons bringing government and opposition members face-to-face, power is demonstrated through the rhetorical blows inflicted on the other. The House is less a place where ideas are debated and information exchanged than a locus where politicians struggle for recognition. Although this is fiction, the author could yet be trusted for rendering the feel of political life from the inside as he himself participated in party politics. Michael Dobbs5 has indeed exercised multiple political functions (at Margaret Thatcher’s side, then as Norman Tebbit’s Chief of Staff for the 1987 general election and finally as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party during John Major’s leadership). Thus endowed with first-hand knowledge, the writer cynically describes the workings of political performance, but his book also opens the door to the backstage of power politics the media and the public rarely have access to.6Prime Ministers are called twice a week when Parliament is sitting through the time honoured institution of Prime Minister’s Question Time. In principle it gives Members of Parliament the opportunity to seek information from the leader of Her Majesty’s Government; in practice it is an exercise in survival which owed more to the Roman arena of Nero and Claudius than to the ideals of the constitutionalists who developed the system.The questions from Opposition Members usually do not seek information, they seek to criticise and to inflict damage. The answers rarely seek to give information, but to retaliate. Prime Ministers always have the last word, and it is that which gives them the advantage in combat, like the gladiator allowed the final thrust.But Prime Ministers also know that they are expected to win, and it is the manner rather than the fact of their victory which will decide the level of vocal support and encouragement from the troops behind. (Dobbs, 1989: 77–8)
The 1990 House of Cards BBC series was very successful when it aired after the end of Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the appetite for backstage political intrigues seems to have sharpened as many telefilms and TV series across countries have made politics their central plot. Among the recent political TV series feature The West Wing (NBC, 1999–2006), Commander in Chief (ABC, 2005–2006), K Street (HBO, 2003), Jack & Bobby (WB, 2004–2005), Brothers & Sisters (ABC, 2006–2011), Boss (Starz, 2011–2012), Political Animals (ABC, 2012), Veep (HBO, 2012), and Scandal (ABC, 2012–) in the USA and, in Europe, the German Die Affäre Semmeling (ZDF, 2002) and Kanzleramt (ZDF, 2005) or still the British parody In the Thick of It (BBC, 2005–2012)—after the famous twentieth-century Yes Minister (BBC, 1980–1988). Not all the American series met as much success as Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Until 2011, with the release of the successful Boss series, they were all more or less in the same idealist vein as Sorkin’s creation, which established itself as an unbeatable model. Boss initiated a change by portraying a cynical anti-hero—in the wake of other non political series featuring ‘bad’ guys like The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), House, M.D. (Fox, 2004–2012) or Dexter (Showtime, 2006–2013).
For Boutet (2015), the reason for this change in perspective in the depiction of backstage politics must be sought in the context of production of the series. The West Wing aired at the end of Bill Clinton’s term and roughly all along George W. Bush’s mandates at a time when, according to the author, ‘Americans desperately needed to renew their trust in politicians’ (Boutet, 2015, my translation). Released during Obama’s second mandate, House of Cards features an ambitious politician who falls short of the positive image the African American candidate conveyed during his ascension to power. Disillusionment as regards the power of politics to turn the tide came with Obama’s second term, which might account for the series’s darker aspects. In the 15 years separating The West Wing from House of Cards, the representation of politics in series has progressively fallen into line with the popular perception of the political world as corrupted, power-hungry and self-interested.
The consequence of what Wodak (2011: 155) calls ‘the fictionalization of politics’ is a blurring of the demarcation between fiction and reality—Michael Dobbs and his book are a clear illustration of this blurred frontier. TV series (idealistically or cynically) describe politics as it supposedly is and (real) politicians refer to the series that they sometimes themselves watch. On her first official visit to France, for instance, the Danish Prime Minister handed President Hollande a copy of the Danish political series Borgen (DR1, 2010–2013) depicting the formalism-free political practices of the Scandinavian countries—François Hollande campaigned on a return to a ‘normal’ presidency in contrast to what he perceived as the ‘abnormality’ of Nicolas Sarkozy’s (see Daniel, 2014: 291). President Obama, a fan of House of Cards, impersonated Francis Underwood on April Fools’ Day 2015 as part of the West Wing Week YouTube series. He jokingly revealed the source of Francis’s habit of speaking at times directly to the camera in the series: ‘Hello, everybody. This is not Frank Underwood. This is Barack Obama. Happy April Fools’ Day. Frank learned it from me’ (Brennan, 2015). The personalities of politicians attract the interest of the media (and the public), treating them like celebrities, and politicians capitalize on this to increase their popularity (see Daniel, 2014; Mayaffre, 2012). In an age of disillusionment with politics, where distrust of politicians is at its highest, the fictional intrusion into what is not shown in the front stage seems to find a real appeal among the public. As Wodak (2011: 21) ventures, ‘th[e] growing disenchantment with politics, the exclusion from the backstage and the growing interest in celebrity politicians and their personalities, are probably some of the reasons explaining the rising popularity of fictional genres that depict the everyday lives of politicians and the intricacies of political decision-making.’
Indeed if The West Wing depicts politics as the citizens would probably like it to be, House of Cards stages politics as they more and more imagine it to be. In The West Wing, the smart and learned President Bartlet leads a country trying to make heroic and ethical choices for the common good of all Americans. Francis Underwood is the anti-hero ready to kill to secure power for himself. All his political decisions depend on how they will work for him (or against others) in the upcoming elections. Public opinion is usually prejudiced against ‘spin doctors’—that is, those in charge of handling the front stage of politics through the management of communication. Whereas The West Wing succeeds in having them appear in an unusual positive light (Richardson, 2006), House of Cards exposes them as experts in lies and deception. The more recent series portrays politics as centred on the manipulative moves of a Congressman serving his own personal interest to get to the top of the nation. Machiavellian politics embodied by Francis Underwood seems indeed more faithful to the multiple scandalous lies and corruption cases that the press man...