Francis Urquhart Doesn’t Want To Be Your Friend
House Of Cards was a British television show in the nineties, starring Ian Richardson as a totalitarian Tory. House Of Cards will this year be an American television show, on Netflix, starring Kevin Spacey as his old self, hopefully. House Of Cards is also a pretty good Radiohead song.
The British version was toddied up in that way the redcoats do, w/ not much visible budget but lots of inside-cricket stuff about Parliamentary procedure and palace intrigue, all spoken w/ British accents. Surnames like Makepeace, Landless and Collingridge litter the landscape like undrunk daiquiris. The show is knowing and fourth-wally; Richardson’s character, Francis Urquhart, turns to you at regular intervals and comments on what just happened or is about to happen. Above eighty percent of these comments are snarky to a Michael Musto extent, as though you’d taken the doddering old queen along with you to a crummy fancy-dress event and had him speak only in Pop-Up Video turns, his halloweenhead powerwashed into a patrician’s haughty glare.
Sometimes he, Francis Urquhart, only furls an eyebrow at the camera’s low angle before bustling into a meeting, and you know shit is about to get buck. It’s marvelous motion-sicky fun.
House Of Cards is set in a post-Thatcher pre-end-of-history UK where John Major, hungover librarian, presumably never existed and Tony Blair is just a gleam in Michael Sheen’s eye. It was the age of Howell Henry Chaldecott & Lury, which shaped and documented the zeitgeist with zingy minimalism, newfound racial accuracy and hints at integrated marketing. Gary Oldman was still a few years away from making Nil By Mouth and forever enabling the cult of Ray Winstone, but British street life was still no picnic. After years of being privatized to within an inch of its IRL, it’s pretty unlikely the country would have taken so easily to another Thatcher. But House of Cards makes one the PM anyway. Its three seasons are essentially three acts of Shakespeare on the getting and keeping of power.
Francis Urquhart is a monster. He hits for the Scarlett O’ Hara cycle in rising from chief Whip to the top spot, all while self-effacing and demurring and deflecting at chop-socky speed. His catchphrase “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” was subsequently used in the House of Commons. He has a wife who is able to answer yes to those questions Newt Gingrich asked his second wife from time to time. She finds him successive blondes to fuck, indoctrinate, and discard. FU arranges overdoses, stores marital failure in a drawer, kills with his bare hands. He is the perfect leader, duh.
There is so far nothing on the internet about how closely the American version will hew, other than that the Francis Urquhart character is played by Kevin Spacey. He has played John Williamson, Keyser Soze and Richard III. Even post-grace, he can still fascinate. David Fincher is also creatively attached; not sure if it’s in a truncated Scorsese on Boardwalk Empire way or if it will be more Milchian, or if Trent Reznor has begun streaming the whole run of The West Wing on Videobb.
Ideally the Netflix series will retain the parliamentary specificity. This fucking works. Spacey should aspire to and acquire the speakership of the House, not the presidency itself, because the speakership is the nearest equivalent to a British PM. An American president, or even a candidate, wouldn’t get his hands as dirty as Urquhart does—only because he’s so heavily sponsored, not because he wouldn’t like totally do it.
Season two of House Of Cards coronates a liberal king who begins to get under Urquhart’s skin, ordering just the soup at dinner and going around talking about the poors and “helping” them. If the remake is properly on it, the American president could be positioned as that kind of nemesis and thus realize a perfect Norquistian vision of government: Congress as the true driving force and the presidency as ceremonial timesuck only.
