Beau Willimon (real name) is the writer of Netflix’s zowie success, “House of Cards.” There’s a touch of OCD about Willimon, at least as he’s described in the latest New York Times Sunday magazine.
“House of Cards” is the fantasy about Bush>Obama Washington in the way that “West Wing” was the feel-good Clinton era series: “‘West Wing’ arrived in 1999 as a televised fantasy of what we wished our government could be. ‘House of Cards’ arrived in 2013 as a nightmare of what we fear our government has become,” says the Times. Accordingly, the latest episodes of “House of Cards” continue and ramp up the brutalities of the first season.
“House of Cards” springs from Willimon’s days working for the Howard Dean campaign.
When you think about that campaign, you most likely remember one thing: The Dean Scream, which effectively ended Dean’s presidential aspirations. Talking about it now, Willimon says that the Scream — that momentary outburst of stump-speech enthusiasm that was played on a loop for weeks, recasting Dean as possibly unhinged and, even worse, unpresidential — is not what did the candidate in. It was the fateful days afterward, when the campaign failed to respond in an effectively aggressive way. “The thought in the campaign was, Let’s take the high road,” Willimon said. “It’s a way of saying, ‘My detractors have no power, because they have no ability to affect me.’ In reality, though, it ended up being about forfeiting power by not responding quickly enough.”
Describing it now, he uses this analogy: “I’m standing on a corner, and I’ve been waiting there for 15 minutes, and I’m trying to hail a cab. And just as I’m about to get in, someone rushes up and gets in. I have a lot of choices in that moment: I could open that door and yank that person out. I could bang on the window and flip them the bird but let them have the cab. I could say nothing and stew in my own anger. Or I could be super-Zen about it and let them go and figure, another cab will come.” Transactions of that nature fascinate Willimon — they are the heart of all great drama, he says. Continuing with his cab analogy: “Who has the power there? Do I have the power because I didn’t let this ruffle my feathers? Or does that person have the power because I let them walk all over me? When you put that on the political stage, there are real stakes to it. And there are people who make a living thinking about these sorts of transactions.”
The Dean Scream, then, functioned as a kind of protean moment that forever shaped Willimon’s political, and dramatic, outlook: What is the nature of political power? What is the nature of personal power? How do the two intersect? On that stage in Iowa, where Howard Dean’s presidential dream died, the philosophy of “House of Cards” was born.
Willimon paused in the retelling, intrigued all over again by the complexity of the situation. “That decision” — how to respond to a moment of public embarrassment and media distortion, how to counter, and outflank, the people who are trying to define, and defeat, you — “is the sort of thing Francis Underwood is thinking about all the time.” …NYT
Nabbing a cab is so New York, so D.C.; so urban, northeastern, urbane! The rawness in our politics today seems to come from the southern tier, from the South Carolina of Francis Underwood south and west right across to Arizona. Bowie knife vs. musket. But the real trouble we’ve made for ourselves comes not from weapon in hand but the weapons used in the constant battle for “image” and perception. For that we need control over speech and thought. From our lips to the media’s megaphone and then back at us.
Image and perception were distorted and used against Howard Dean; they influence us all the time; they’re available through every gadget we carry around with us. They include, of course, “House of Cards.”