by Drew Martin
My wife and I are now cruising through House of Cards on Netflix. Wow, it’s well done; great everything. And I thought I was not going to like it. While it is primarily about the politics of Washington there is so much more at play.
There are some fun media details, such as on-screen balloon texts between the main character, a congressman played by Kevin Spacey, and a reporter played by Kate Mara. Mara’s Zoe Barnes is a millennial blogger at the fictitious Washington Herald, but her ambitions are not always welcome. At one point an older, female colleague calls her Twitter Twat out of frustration.
What keeps the show feeling really fresh, however, are not new-media snaps but good-old-fashioned soliloquies by Spacey, which pulls the viewer into his two-faced world. The most shocking is during the church service for a teenage girl who died after she lost control of her car while texting that the Peachoid water tower, which she was driving by in her town, looks like a vagina. Spacey attends the service to work his politics and while giving a heart-wrenching speech about losing his father as a teenager, he makes a break to tell us he did not really care much for the man.
There are some fun media details, such as on-screen balloon texts between the main character, a congressman played by Kevin Spacey, and a reporter played by Kate Mara. Mara’s Zoe Barnes is a millennial blogger at the fictitious Washington Herald, but her ambitions are not always welcome. At one point an older, female colleague calls her Twitter Twat out of frustration.
What keeps the show feeling really fresh, however, are not new-media snaps but good-old-fashioned soliloquies by Spacey, which pulls the viewer into his two-faced world. The most shocking is during the church service for a teenage girl who died after she lost control of her car while texting that the Peachoid water tower, which she was driving by in her town, looks like a vagina. Spacey attends the service to work his politics and while giving a heart-wrenching speech about losing his father as a teenager, he makes a break to tell us he did not really care much for the man.