House of Cards: Season 1 (2013)

If the Netflix distribution model repackaged the television series as a quasi-cinematic event, then House of Cards is the Netflix event par excellence. Fresh from playing Richard III at the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey brings a Shakespearean grandeur and gravitas to disgruntled Whip Frank Underwood, who sets out for revenge when he’s overlooked by the Democrats for Secretary of State. Like the British series, it’s full of direct addresses to camera, moments of disclosure that are as titillating as Underwood is chilling, if only because they work more to contour everything that can’t be disclosed, everything that remains shrouded in ineradicable secrecy. Twenty years ago, that made it a series about the closet, and about being closeted – and it still is, in a way, if only because Spacey has so thoroughly resisted every effort made by the mainstream media to out him, or to force him to deliver up the peculiar secret of his singledom. But his position is more exceptional now than it would have been in the early 90s, with the result that the series often feels like a recloseting, a recourse to the darkest, dimmest recesses of Washington D.C., which emerge and recede with all the ephemerality of a live feed, just as Frank seems able to eradicate all traces of his passage across the city, seeking out its niches and glitches as if by smell. It’s interesting, then, that Frank is a Democrat, and that the series is so cloaked in Democrat affectation, since it’s usually Republicans that are supposed to be obsessed with policing and exposing secrecy, both within their own ranks and without. That’s not to say that it’s a Republican series either, but that its paranoid palette presupposes some secret suffusing Washington that even Democrats are in on, a secret that sustains the city even as it corrodes it from within, a secret so systemic that you have to throwback to a closet mentality to even come close to grasping it. And that’s the perfect backdrop to Frank’s paranoia, as well as the perfect way for David Fincher to make his television debut – his recent films have been obssessed with the dark opacities of a world that has supposedly moved beyond secrets, dismantling transparency with a surgical precision worthy of Frank himself. Over the last few years, there’s been a great deal of acclaim for film actors discovering or rediscovering their televisual selves, but House of Cards truly is Spacey’s masterpiece, or one of his masterpieces – it is at once his most personal and elusive project, and fuses his cinematic and theatrical ambitions into a single, staggering spectacle, making all his previous performances feel like mere dress rehearsals for this megalomaniacal moment.