House of Cucks

It is done. It’s finally the very last season. After much drama and figuring out that Kevin Spacey is one of us, we have arrived to the conclusion of this tale, one last arc to the most notorious political thriller of this decade, the sixth season of House of Cards, the one where this shoddy construction will come tumbling down, where all the Xanatos gambits will— YO IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT WOMEN ARE STUNNING AND BRAVE, CAN YOU SPARE A MOMENT OF YOUR TIME TO DISCUSS HOW WE MUST RESPECT WHAMEN?

The final season was an entertaining enough watch, and it always kept me longing for what would happen in the next episode, up to and including the final episode. The things that made it strong are there; the direction, the music, the atmosphere, though they are a bit different. The things that made it weak are also there; but for the very first season, padded out to the detriment of its own pacing. What it is not is a work in its own right, or a fitting finale. The final chapter is final in only the most superficial sense of the word, as it leaves more threads hanging than a ravaged coat.

None of the characters you care about will have a fitting end to their stories, because none of them end. The sixth season is basically a cliffhanger, and you’re left to imagine what’s to happen, but not in any creative sense, where you can extrapolate meaningful conjectures from its themes, but like someone wrote a book then ripped off half its pages.

I am a dissenting voice in that I think it’s possible to have a House of Cards without Kevin Spacey. Though he was the best actor in the series, it wasn’t like there weren’t any other memorable characters in it, and the show could carry on even without him. The problem isn’t that he’s absent. It’s that we pretend he was supposed to be absent. Let’s not fool ourselves: House of Cards has always been about Frank Underwood’s struggle to rise to power, and every time he stepped up the ladder, how he would try to up the ante and go somewhere higher. There were other stories interwoven into this, but Frank has always been the focal point.

The sixth season dismisses all of that, dismisses even all the surrounding characters, and pretends it’s Claire who we’ve been really rooting for all this time. In doing so it becomes utterly incoherent, and its last scene is merely the crowning jewel. For example, the primary antagonists’ mere existence is impossible to explain; if they are such capable influencers, where have they been all this time?

As I watched it, I stopped seeing House of Cards as a work of art, but more as a statement. Of course, all good art makes some kind of statement, but the sixth season is classic neoliberal Hollywood in that the statement supersedes the art. Claire Underwood isn’t really Claire Underwood. When she raises the finger in the very first episode, at first glance she’s declaring her hatred for Frank. But its totality, I think what she’s actually flipping off is beyond the screen. She’s flipping off Kevin Spacey. She’s flipping off the orange man who took the presidency from ＨＥＲ rightful hands. She’s flipping off the overwhelmingly male audience who expects rigid, masculine-coded coherence from the Hollywood bourgeoisie’s elect postmodernist femininity. Fundamentally, House of Cards has become her podium to declare her grrl power.

It wasn’t Frank Underwood who was erased from the series, it was Kevin Spacey, so that he could make room for his superiors’ grrl power. I want you to step back and think about it for a second. House of Cards became what it is because of how amazing Spacey was as an actor; Robin Wright is good, but Spacey was the protagonist, and it fell on his shoulders to give it tone and character, and he managed to pull it off; it was his achievement, his effort, his stress. Robin—Claire—is merely occupying appropriating the fruits of his labour, and you’re supposed to believe this was the plan all along, that this is truly a good thing.

This season is the season of cucks.

It tries to juxtapose the old with the new. The old was corrupt, oppressive, dictatorship by a different name. The new, which is much the same—Claire does not shy away from playing as dirty as Frank did, even plotting assassinations—but is dressed up as diverse, inclusive, feminist, cucked. The old, which at least believed in something greater than itself; family, ideals, loyalty, something. The new thinks these are tools of the patriarch, to be discarded for our reality of narcissistic solipsism, of egoistic hedonism, of having your cake and eating it too, because you’re a princess and you deserve it all.

What did we really learn about Claire this season? That she was a teenage slut, like the rest of them. That she hypergamously attached herself to the strongest man he could find, even though her heart’s true desire was the high school Chad with a big dick, all so she could leach off his accomplishments and arrive to the highest office of the land. That all the mutual respect, even the hints of love between the Underwoods in the past seasons were all a play, a façade; we didn’t look at them right, for we were blinded by Spacey’s toxic masculinity, his rapey gaze.

That it’s perfectly fine for a child to never even know the sound of her father’s voice, because it doesn’t bode well for her mother’s empowerment—if he is even her father. That, in the case of the Shepherds, there is no value in biological bonds whatsoever, in passing down your genetic legacy, that it’s okay for a needy, narcissistic woman to nag you into letting go of your most fundamental family values, to literally sign away everything you believe in.

Doug Stamper is the only person who isn’t turbocucked in this entire season, and Claire literally stabs him in the gut. She’s stabbing virtue in the gut, because we live in the age of cuckoldry, and she’s offended there are men better than herself out there. The existence of good reminds her of what she lacks.

The all-female cabinet spelled it out: it never really was about inclusivity. A truly random selection couldn’t ever be 100% female. It was intentional, because your feminine dictators were never really interested in equality; they’re just offended they aren’t the ones in power. And once they are, they will continue the exact same, bullshit centrist policies.

You know, America Works as a replacement for the welfare state wasn’t something I agreed with, but at least it was something out of the mainstream, something genuinely of Frank’s making, something he believed in. Claire has none of that. Policy is an afterthought for her; it’s all about the politics. These changes to her character are so extreme she doesn’t even look like herself anymore, just a pawn for the writers’ feminist power fantasy.

Come to think of it, Claire is literally Hillary Clinton. She’s everything the writers wished Clinton would be. Younger. Prettier. More scornful of her husband. All-in on the identity politics. Aborted three babies—one several weeks into a pregnancy. There isn’t a single episode where she doesn’t play the woman card: the fact she has a cunt colours everything she is or does. There is no Claire beyond her vagina. Claire is a vagina. That’s why she must get pregnant later on, because only women can get pregnant, and that’s why the child must be female, because even if it is Frank’s, at least it won’t inherit the filthy Y chromosome; at least the future will be female. That’s how much Hollywood has degenerated a once great character in service of their ideology.

And that’s what it comes down to, then, isn’t it? For the future to be female, and specifically white female, there has to be idpol. Idpol is what gives white women power. Throughout history, white women have been able to climb the social ladder only because they have warm, fleshy holes, because they see and admit and internalise that all they’re good for is the achievements of the men they attach themselves to, that there is nothing valuable in themselves, no soul to cherish but raw, unadulterated hypergamy. If idpol was dropped and we were to simply talk policy, why, the Hillary Clintons of this world would be genocided out of existence. That is the final solution.

It’s been two years, and the neoliberals are still triggered their queen didn’t inherit the crown. I guess if that was your goal all along, you were right to vote Trump, or even to abstain. Credit where credit is due. You fucked with their heads. Please keep up.

They’re offended, deeply, on an existential level, that even though they ＴＨＥＹ＇ＲＥ ＷＩＴＨ ＨＥＲ, it still ＩＳＮ＇Ｔ ＨＥＲ ＴＵＲＮ. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to recover. They’re traumatised for life.

It’ll never be her turn. I hope she runs in 2020, I really do, so she can have her arse handed to her by a middle-aged white male, be that from my man Bernie or from the orange man. I would rather a million years of middle-aged white men than a single term of your hollow feminist icon. Claire lectured her military officers on misandry, but if you paid any attention, all the nameless, powerless victims of this series were men. At least the women had the privilege of a sob story; the men were simply erased. Misandry isn’t hatred; it is blindness.

The age of NPCs is over. It’s time to be woke. Gynocentrism, identity politics, hypergamy, this million-year-old system of privileges will collapse around you like a house of cards. Your roast beef won’t last the third millennium.

Final Verdict: 4/10. Pirate it.