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Are we as humans, evolved to separate Art and the Artist ? Or, are artists themselves able to separate themselves from the art they created ?
The House of Cards
Something that I would call the 'dark' era began with the Netflix boom when they started to produce their originals. Most of their productions at that point of time were considered 'Too Dark and Gritty' by majority of the consumers. Albeit this is not the first time we see gore, violence and grimness in international productions but Netflix seemed to have bleakness, darkness itself (they literally named a series 'Dark') as a recurring theme until very recently when they started to diversify genres. Later many other streaming platforms started to make their original productions 'Realistic and Gory'.
Netflix's very first original production 'House of Cards' was a gripping political thriller about Democrat Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) who embarks on a journey to obtain power in the White House after he was passed over for appointment of secretary of state. This show had a successful six-season run with Spacey as the lead in five of it. He was fired shortly before the commencement of the final season after allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey surfaced during the #MeToo era.
What separates Frank from your conventional protagonists is that he is not just a caricature political villain that plays mind games, concocts brainy schemes to uproot his enemies. F. Underwood is intimidating, pragmatic and never stops at anything to achieve his goal.
In fact, his mode of operation is termed as ‘ruthless pragmatism’
But what was that goal ? House of Cards employs a very interesting Narrative device. Where now and then, Spacey's character breaks the fourth wall and talks to us, the viewers thus enabling us to interact on an intellectual level throughout his run. Similar narrative techniques were used in shows like The Office and Modern Family but with an amount of self-awareness.
In that way, House of Cards is much like the British tragicomedy ‘Fleabag’ where Phoebe breaks the fourth wall and seeks validation from viewers. But Frank doesn’t seek validation. He just reassures us that 'It' is what 'It' is and 'It' is required.
Spacey and the characters he has played
I have watched very few movies of Spacey. Sometimes oblivious to the fact that he was in a film I was watching (se7en). I watched few of his works after watching House of Cards like 21, American Beauty and Baby Driver. And everyone knows Spacey's breakout performance was "The Usual Suspects" .Now that I have all these data set, I couldn't help but wonder what Kevin Spacey's acting process was like, considering all of these characters had some elements of darkness within them
The most obvious ones would be The Usual Suspects and American Beauty.
He plays the unreliable narrator in both the movies - criminal mastermind Keyser Soze in the former and Lester Burnham, the husband with a mid-life crisis in the latter. People who have watched both of these movies would quicky understand that both characters carry so much depth within them than seen at the surface level.
Spacey in his breakout role 'Keyser Soze' from 'The Usual Suspects'.
And surely one wouldn't miss these elements in House of Cards.
Here's where it gets weirder
Post his cancellation and firing from Netflix, Kevin almost distanced himself from all media, public appearances. However the star took it to YouTube and released three cryptic videos one each around Christmas of 2018,2019 and 2020.
In all these three videos, he appears in character as Frank Underwood and addresses the viewers just like the shows, only difference is that he had fully subsumed the Frank persona and appears more intimidating than he was in the
series. Here are some snippets quoted from the video
"Conclusions can be so deceiving..." It's a crazy power play; subversion of expectations because he doesn’t give a shit about what YOU want— just like Frank."
"kill them with kindness"
“You wouldn’t rush to judgment without facts, would you?”
From these videos, it seems that he has not come to terms with his allegations and hopes to win the hearts of the people again - and will stop at nothing to attain that. Did I already mention 'ruthless pragmatism' ?
But the truth is that like his characters, all these videos are so cryptic in nature that it opens the viewers to draw their own conclusions of what is he trying to mean.
Hence, we come back to that old ethical qualm—can art be evaluated apart from its artist? Now as we hear that Kevin Spacey might be making his return in a few small-scale films, the civilian in me is conflicted, but the cinephile and art-lover in me is exited as hell.
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