The Conflicting Masculinities of Frank and Claire in ‘House of Cards’

It is this point at which things significantly begin to shift in Frank and Claire’s relationship. This entire situation, which occurred in a succession of embarrassments for Frank, clearly served as a challenge to his dominance and an infringement on his masculinity, especially coming from his wife. For Claire, meanwhile, it is evident that while Frank is fighting desperately to enforce his masculinity and remain in power, she has lost all of hers.

Frank and Claire Underwood gaze at each other. ‘Like sharks love blood’
Frank and Claire Underwood gaze at each other. “Like sharks love blood”

 


This guest post by Tilly Grove appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.


The attributes required to be a head of state and the attributes associated with masculinity have long been concurrent. Indeed, this is at least partly why so many heads of state, certainly in Western societies, are and historically have been men. Leaders are seen to be, or need to be, strong, rational, wise and assertive; these are also traits of masculinity, and considered to be the opposite of those associated with femininity and thus women. Women are seen to be peaceful, impulsive, weak-willed, timid and submissive. Though this is clearly untrue, the perception ensures that women are only able to succeed and be taken seriously in politics if they adopt masculine traits and disown feminine ones. They are placed under intense scrutiny by their rivals and the public to ensure that they do not revert back, and criticism will be invariably gendered.

Francis “Frank” Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the lead character of Netflix’s American remake of the British show House of Cards, is practically designed to showcase masculinity as he schemes his way to the President’s office. We are first introduced to Frank, who is then a congressman of the Democrat Party and House majority whip, finding out that he has not been appointed Secretary of State, an arrangement it is soon revealed that he had orchestrated by securing the election of President Garrett Walker. The show then follows his progression through the White House via less conventional means. He manipulates, exploits, backroom deals, and even kills his way from congressman to vice president and finally into the Oval Office itself. He has no qualms in disposing of his fellow congressmen, lovers, and even the President of the United States to get there, and no method is too underhand.

Frank’s ruthlessness is central to his masculinity. He is unashamed of his thirst for power and he will do anything to achieve what he wants. Even when we think we are seeing a softer side to him–for example when he takes young congressman Peter Russo under his wing to get him on the nominees list for Governor of Pennsylvania, or when he embarks on a symbiotic professional and then sexual relationship with the journalist Zoe Barnes–all is never as it seems. Frank makes reference to the fact, when he visits Barnes on Father’s Day, that he considers those he draws into his web as children when he responds knowingly to her statement that he doesn’t have any with, “Don’t I?” However, far from caring for his “children,” he uses them for his own gains and disposes of them when he is done or they threaten his dominance. When he sabotages Russo in order to fill the governor position with the incumbent vice-president, opening up that seat for himself, he sends the former alcoholic into a downward spiral and eventually kills him, making it look like suicide, when it becomes clear he is a liability. Likewise, when Barnes begins to suspect that Frank is behind this death and the other dealings occurring in the White House at that time, and after she has decided she no longer wants to sleep with him, he pushes her in front of a subway train.

In a more traditional story, we might expect Frank’s wife, Claire, to provide a feminine, maternal complement. Instead, we are given a character who at least on first appearances is every bit as ruthless and power-hungry as her husband. In her appearance, she opts for short, sharp haircuts, grey-blue outfits, and constant steely eyed determination. In her professional life, she is head of an NGO, the Clean Water Initiative, and her own career path seems very important to her. When she works together with Frank on an environmental bill designed to improve Russo’s public reputation and Frank does not give her the money she is expecting, she goes behind his back to ensure the legislation does not pass, and then goes to stay with her former lover Adam Galloway without informing Frank where she is. Considering that up until this point we have seen the two as a unit, sharing cigarettes and supportive words, this is a shock.

Frank and Claire Underwood stare off into the distance. ‘Trouble ahead?’
Frank and Claire Underwood stare off into the distance. “Trouble ahead?”

 

After this, it is difficult to gauge exactly the nature of the Underwoods’ marriage. At times, it seems healthy – mutually supportive, loving, and even where they both engage in extramarital affairs, this is only an issue when they are not open with the other about it. At other points, it seems that perhaps Claire is just yet another pawn in Frank’s game. He states in Chapter 3 that he loves her “more than sharks love blood,” but the image that this creates is not one of tenderness, but one of violent lust. Given the two rarely have sex with one another, this lust is defined by power instead. Frank uses Claire’s role with the CWI when he needs to, he uses her personal experiences of rape when he needs to, and he uses her support and her presence when he needs to. Claire is supposed to gain from this situation, too, but in Season 3 it becomes evident that she has not. Claire tries to get voted into a UN ambassadorial role and fails, so she relies on Frank to get it for her instead. When circumstances lead to a public fall-out between the US and Russia, she is then forced to resign, and performs only the role of First Lady. For Claire, this appears to be feminisation against her will.

For both of the Underwoods, we do get an occasional glimpse behind their masks of masculinity. With Frank, it is in his sexuality. Homosexuality is often regarded as being in direct opposition to masculinity, because it is both seen as taking on the traits of femininity and women and also because it requires that a man does not perform the task of dominating a woman. Perhaps this is why Frank is never open with anyone about his tendencies, but it is heavily implied in Chapter 8 that he had some kind of relationship with one of his old friends at military college, Tim Corbet. Later in the show, in Chapter 24, we see the Underwoods engaging sexually with their bodyguard, Edward Meechum. Claire remarks that Frank “needed that.”

For Claire, her struggle appears to be with her latent femininity. When she shows up at Barnes’ flat to demonstrate that nothing about her affair is secret, it is obvious that she is desperate for control, but given that she immediately restarts her affair with Galloway after learning of what is going on with Frank and Barnes, it is likely that there are elements of jealousy and insecurity too. In Season 2, when she uses her friendship with the then-First Lady Patricia Walker to enable Frank to continue to manipulate her husband out of the presidency, upon being told by Patricia that she is a “good person,” Claire puts down the phone and bursts into tears, clearly feeling guilt. Meanwhile, in Season 3, her decision to stay with a gay activist imprisoned in Russia as he starves on hunger strike ultimately leads the relations between America and Russia, that Frank had been working tirelessly on, to break down.

It is this point at which things significantly begin to shift in Frank and Claire’s relationship. This entire situation, which occurred in a succession of embarrassments for Frank, clearly served as a challenge to his dominance and an infringement on his masculinity, especially coming from his wife. For Claire, meanwhile, it is evident that while Frank is fighting desperately to enforce his masculinity and remain in power, she has lost all of hers. This was not the agreement on which their marriage was founded, symbolised by the argument they have on Air Force One after the Russia debacle where Frank states that he should never have made Claire ambassador, and she retorts that she should never have made him president. This conversation sets into motion a chain of events that ultimately leads to Claire packing her bags and leaving. There can be little doubt that the presence of this indomitable masculinity in their relationship, and the constant fight to retain it, played a significant part in the breakdown.

 


Tilly Grove writes about feminism, pop culture, mental health and more at That Pesky Feminist. She tweets too much about the same at @tillyjean_.

 

 

‘House of Cards’ Season 3: There’s Only One Seat in the Oval Office

“I’ve been in the passenger seat for decades. It’s time for me to get behind the wheel.”

Walking side by side in this season 3 promo still.
Walking side by side in this season 3 promo still.

 


Written by Leigh Kolb.


Season 3 Spoilers Ahead!

See also: “Ruthless, Pragmatic Feminism in House of Cards


Season 3 of House of Cards, released Feb. 27 on Netflix, ends abruptly, as we dangle on the edge.

As Claire gives her blood in Iowa–literally for the Red Cross for a nice photo op and figuratively for Frank’s career–she gets lightheaded, and tells their biographer that she thinks about jumping of a bridge. Before she passes out, she tells him that when Frank proposed, she’d told him that “every seven years, if it’s still good enough,” they’d stay married for another seven years before reassessing the marriage.

They’ve been married for 28 years. And it’s time to take stock of the partnership, which has been feeling less and less like a marriage of equals. There’s only one seat in the Oval Office, after all.

Season 3, at its core, is about a series of clashes. Not only are the Underwoods clashing, but so also are countries, special interests, and air and water temperatures. These clashes of powers and contrasts of ideologies can be violent, but season 3 is less shocking, less violent, less sexy, than seasons past. Frank and Claire Underwood were maneuvering and clawing their ways to the top, but now they’re there. Or at least, Frank’s there. Season 3 concerns the delicate and perhaps less passionate dance of staying at the top, when the only place you have to go is down.

Because of this, Frank and Claire seem decidedly less evil than they have in the first two seasons. All of the characters are complex and none is simply good or evil–the show has always been excellent that way, and that writing certainly lends itself to being decidedly feminist, as I’ve argued for the last two seasons. Frank even seems like a tragic hero sometimes, more disheveled, more pitiful than he was while he was violently rising the ranks. Of course, he opens the season by pissing on his father’s grave–so Frank is still Frank–but his desperation to hold onto power weakens him.

Claire accomplishes very little on her own in season 3. She needs Frank’s help to appoint her as UN ambassador when she can’t get the votes from Congress. Her role as First Lady repeatedly overshadows her own goals, and she eventually must resign her UN role because President Putin Petrov bullies Frank. She then must launch full-force into First Lady mode, dying her hair to please focus groups, kissing babies, shaking hands, living and working solely for Frank. This is not Claire Underwood. She knows that this is not who she is. By the end of the season, she’s acknowledged this, and is leaving the White House. “Claire!” Frank shouts as she announces that she’s leaving him, and the credits immediately roll.

Claire must exist to support Frank.
Claire must exist to support Frank.

 

As is suggested by the promo shots for season 3, Claire is becoming more and more an equal player in House of Cards (in season 1’s promos, she didn’t appear; in season 2’s, she sat behind Frank; in season 3’s, they are walking side by side, as they often do in the episodes). However, her role in the White House had to be for Frank, and it–and he–wasn’t enough. When Frank yells out for her to not leave at the end of the season, it’s because he also knows that he’s not enough. Without her, there will be no White House.

There are, as always, some incredible moments woven throughout this remarkably feminist political drama. Here are some of them:

Episode 1: They are sleeping in different bedrooms, and it’s clear that Claire is being left behind. She requests an appointment to be the UN ambassador, because the work of a First Lady is “not the same as contributing in a real way.” She says, “I’ve been in the passenger seat for decades. It’s time for me to get behind the wheel.”

Episode 2: Claire channels Hillary Clinton in during her nomination hearing, snapping that the “US military is irrelevant.” Of course, it’s taken completely out of context, just as Clinton’s “What difference does it make” statement was during the Benghazi hearings (the nods to current events in season 3 seem clearer than ever before). Claire is attempting to secure an incredibly important position in the UN, and at the same time, she has to pick two Easter Egg designs for the yearly Easter Egg Roll–a First Lady duty. The contrast between world power and decorative pleasantries is stark. “It’s too pink,” she says of one egg. “Girls like pink,” responds the woman with the eggs. Claire does not choose the pink egg.

Episode 3: Pussy Riot! Le Tigre! Russian President Petrov represents a time when “men were men.” He and Frank smoke Cubans and jockey for power while Ambassador Claire Underwood and Secretary of State Cathy Durant play beer pong and work toward peace. The masculine old guard often looks silly–the gifts, the games, the pride–but they too often still wield the power. By the end of the episode, Frank is lauding Pussy Riot and is flanked by Claire and Cathy (certainly not the last time he’s flanked by more powerful women in this season).

Episode 4: Solicitor General Heather Dunbar rises to power early on in the season. Frank asks her to consider his nomination for Supreme Court Justice, but she quickly realizes she wants to run for President instead. This episode deals with the US’s drone strike policies, and challenges the idea that killing innocent people to stop one guilty person is just. Meanwhile, a gay American activist is arrested and detained in Russia. In a bit of a heavy handed scene, Frank speaks with a priest in the church about justice and love, and ends up alone in the sanctuary, where he spits in Jesus’ face. The statue falls and breaks into a hundred pieces after he goes to wipe the spit off.

Episode 5: Dunbar starts campaigning, and takes the gay activist’s husband with her. She comes out strong on social issues that Frank has stayed moderate on. Frank’s dismantling of entitlement programs and his approach with America Works is Tea Party politics compared to the D next to his name. A powerful female reporter from The Telegraph replaces the former reporter whom Seth Grayson kicks out. He tries to silence one woman who asks challenging questions, and is faced instead with someone who is even more threatening. When Dunbar learns that Claire lied about her abortion on national TV, she says, “I would never do that to another woman,” in re: using the information against her. And in an incredibly powerful scene, Claire makes the Russian ambassador meet her in the woman’s bathroom while she puts on makeup, and then urinates with the door open. He’s uncomfortable, and she’s in control.

Episode 6: Claire goes with Frank to Russia to meet with Michael Corrigan, the imprisoned activist. They have a compelling conversation about marriage. Claire is unable to talk him into reading the prepared speech to be let free (he would have to apologize to President Petrov and Russia for parading nontraditional sexual ideas). Instead, he commits suicide while Claire sleeps in the cell, and he uses her scarf. She speaks out for him at the press conference–much to Frank and Petrov’s horror. “He had more courage than you’ll ever have,” she tells Frank.  “I should have never made you ambassador,” Frank says. She responds, “I should never have made you president.”

Episode 7: Tibetan monks will work for weeks on intricate sand paintings, mandalas, and then ritualistically destroy it to symbolize the impermanence of the material world. A group of Tibetan monks are in the Underwoods’ White House as part of a cultural exchange. The gorgeous, time-consuming nature of their work, and the beautiful destruction of it, serves as a backdrop to Claire and Frank deciding to renew their vows. Claire changes her hair color to the dark shade it was when they first met. She’s being honored by GLAAD and other gay rights organizations. They must show the world that they are a team, but they are feeling less and less like one. Frank visits the FDR Memorial and reflects upon their similarities to the Roosevelts (his revamped “New Deal” and Claire’s human rights and United Nations activities). Claire rises again in this episode, and while they renew their vows and sleep in the same bed again, the monks poured all of that beautiful sand down a flowing river. Nothing lasts forever.

During episode 7, Claire and Frank sit at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, reminiscent of this scene from Citizen Kane. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
During episode 7, Claire and Frank sit at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, reminiscent of this scene from Citizen Kane. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

Episode 8: A hurricane is brewing, and it’s being narrated by two voices: novelist Tom Yates, whom Frank has asked to be his biographer; and Kate Baldwin, the enterprising Telegraph reporter. The feminine and masculine (not necessarily female and male) are frequently clashing in House of Cards. These forces–whether they be stereotypical ideals of compassion and power or embodied in figures like Tom and Kate themselves–are often at their best when combined. Freddy is back in this episode, and delivers a powerful message to his grandson after meeting with Frank: “He lied to you. You’ll never be president,” he says. “It’s good to have dreams, as long as they’re not fantasies.”

Episode 9: The women are always on top in season 3’s sex scenes. The sex scenes are less exciting than season 2’s, but this positioning doesn’t go unnoticed. On the campaign trail, Dunbar is taking a decidedly feminist approach: raising the minimum wage, fighting for gay rights, and ending corporate greed. Frank, on the other hand, chants “You are entitled to nothing,” and toes the individualistic, masculine line. Remy is faced with racism–from an Iowa lobbyist and the police. Doug–whose story line is terrifying and constantly uncomfortable, except for a few warm moments with his brother–is working for Dunbar to get info for Frank.

Episode 10: Claire sits between Israel and Palestine–she’s a powerful force. She’s tricked by Petrov, however (who has always clearly been threatened by her or anyone/anything that threatens the traditional order), and her fake intel leads to a US troop’s death. When Petrov and Frank meet in the Jordan Valley (the House of Cards version of the Gaza Strip), it’s a masculine scene–guns, ammo, tanks, kevlar, camo. Petrov tells Frank that Claire must not be an ambassador anymore. Frank agrees. This, then, is the beginning of what was already an end in sight. By the end of the episode, Claire is looking at a history of headshots, agreeing to go blonde because “Iowa in particular likes the blonde.” In what has become a necessity for each season, ambiguous sexual tension takes place between Tom and Frank. Tom admits that he used to “turn tricks” with men for a living, and got addicted to hearing their stories. They hold hands for a moment–it’s an incredibly intimate scene–and then it’s over. As others have noted, it’s refreshing to see sexuality treated with such nuance.

Claire Underwood
Claire Underwood

 

Episode 11: Blonde Claire gives a campaign speech at a fancy little ladies’ luncheon, quite the opposite of negotiating peace talks as she had been just days before. Claire is so much like Hurricane Faith, which was poised to make a huge difference, but then did nothing. Frank can’t control the weather, but he’s trying to control Claire. Jackie Sharp is also running in the Democratic primary, but only to split the vote to eventually be Frank’s VP. She doesn’t want to do what Frank tells her to–calling Dunbar sexist or bringing Dunbar’s children into the debate–but she does when Dunbar won’t promise her Secretary of Defense. So Jackie pulls the sexism card and pulls the private school card during the debate, and Frank attacks her for it. Shortly after, Jackie suspends her campaign and endorses Dunbar. Seth calls her a “Judas Bitch,” and Remy resigns as Frank’s Chief of Staff. Players are choosing sides, and Frank must rely on Claire’s likability to get the numbers he needs for Iowa. She’s reading children a book at story time now instead of attempting to broker peace between Israel and Palestine.

Episode 12: Claire is told to be more and more in the spotlight, even answering Q&As. She’s “favorable” to voters, and there are moments where it looks as if she’s the one running for president, and she certainly feels the sting of that not being the case. “I’ll keep waving my pom-poms,” she says. She spends time with a young mother in Iowa on the campaign trail. The Underwood signs in the yard are her husband’s, though. “I wish you were running for president,” she tells Claire. The exhausted young mother talks about her unhappy marriage, and laments to Claire that if it weren’t for the baby they took out two mortgages to have via IVF, that she would leave. Moments later, Frank calls Claire to tell her that Dunbar knows about her journal and the truth about her abortions. “No, Francis. This can’t happen. Whatever you have to do, fix it.” Doug brings the journal to Frank and burns the page, promising that he’d just gotten close to Dunbar to prove his loyalty to Frank. He requests, and gets, the position of Chief of Staff. Claire is rightfully furious, considering her reproductive choices have been used as political pawns by other people. Frank has stopped seeing Claire as an equal; as soon as he was in the Oval Office, she was just the First Lady.

Episode 13: Doug’s subplot of using Gavin to find Rachel climaxes in the last episode, as he buys a trash-heap of a white van to drive to her and avenge the fact that she’d beaten him almost to death in season 2 (after she had assumed–probably rightfully so–that he was going to kill her). These awful scenes are made more tragic by the fact that Rachel has escaped her former life and is helping other abuse victims in the process. Doug comes close to love and compassion when his brother stays with him while he gets clean, but he doesn’t come close enough. Claire tries to get Frank to “fuck her,” to “be rough,” but he won’t. He sends her back to DC, and we hear the screams and clapping for him campaigning while she gets back to the White House alone. Frank wins Iowa without her there, but he knows that she must be by his side for him to be successful. When he gets back, she’s sitting in his chair in the Oval Office–where she, and probably he, knows she should be. “For all these years,” she says, “I thought we were in this together. This is not what I thought it would be. It’s your office. You make the decisions.” He snaps back that she can’t have it both ways–to be an equal partner, and for men to control her (bringing up the sex scene in a powerful way). She feels “weak” and “small” and can’t feel like that any longer.

“Without me, you are nothing,” Frank snaps at her. “It’s time for you to do your job. You will be the First Lady.”

She looks at the picture of the Tibetan mandala–capturing a moment that was destroyed–and she packs her bags, but not for the campaign trail. Claire Underwood was meant to be first, not First Lady.

 


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

 

Claire Underwood: The Queen Bee in ‘House of Cards’

House of Cards poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

The first season of Netflix’s House of Cards set the tone for an amazing series, populated with nuanced characters, conflicting motivations, and a whole hell of a lot of awesome scheming. When the primary antihero, Frank Underwood, brilliantly portrayed by Kevin Spacey, addresses the camera, breaking the 4th wall, it’s reminiscent of the way in which Shakespeare’s Richard III addressed the audience, sharing the breadth of his intentions and the depths of his wiles. House of Cards paints a bleak world where everyone is compromised while the dictates of money and power seep into everything from our political system to our press and, finally, to our very homes. I’m particularly impressed with the multifaceted female characters.There’s Zoe Barnes, the young up-and-coming journalist who’ll do anything for a story, but she’s the kind of hungry reporter who’ll bite the hand that feeds her.

“Okay, so you think when a woman asks to be treated with respect, that’s arrogance?” – Zoe Barnes

 

Then there’s Linda Vasquez, the White House Chief of Staff, who is perhaps the only honest, plainspoken person in the entire series, and though her intelligence, strength, integrity, and lack of guile are admirable, they may make her easy prey for the likes of Frank Underwood.
“Tough as a two dollar steak.” – Frank Underwood of Linda Vasquez…too bad she’s not actually Latina
We also have Gillian Cole, the brilliant water rights activist whose conscience compels her to tell lies in order to smear her boss, Claire Underwood.
“I won’t let people like you fuck up the world my child has to live in [even] if I have to tell a few lies…” – Gillian Cole to Claire Underwood
Finally, there’s Janine Skorsky the seen-it-all jaded journalist who gets the chance at a career-making story through her dogged persistence and the help of Zoe Barnes, a fellow woman who happens to be a junior reporter.
Janine Skorsky in House of Cards
Though there are even more interesting female characters on the show, I’d like to focus on the queen bee; the show’s ultimate female antihero (antiheroine?), Claire Underwood portrayed by Robin Wright. She’s the wife of Congressman Frank Underwood and the Executive Director of the Clean Water Initiative (CWI). She is smart, infinitely capable, poised, and absolutely ruthless.
“No, I’m not going to ask for your blessing on every decision I make.” – Claire Underwood to Frank Underwood

One of the first meaningful interactions we get with Claire is when she fires 18 staff members in order to create a new water well building project while not taking donations from SanCorp, a source that would indebt her husband for political favors. She has Evelyn Baxter, her office manager, do the dirty work, and then Claire proceeds to fire Evelyn because she was vocal in her concerns about the mass layoffs. The impression this gives us of Claire is that she is cold, calculating, and completely intractable. More than a match for her husband, the master manipulator Frank, Claire is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve her goals, regardless of whether she must apply her cutthroat ambition to a philanthropic enterprise like well building.

“I love that woman. I love her more than sharks love blood.” – Frank Underwood of Claire Underwood

Though the layoffs at her job set Claire up as the restrained, soft-spoken, heartless “ice queen,” we later find that these sorts of sacrifices actually affect her deeply when she uses her status as Frank’s only completely trusted ally in order to sabotage his education bill for her own gains. After repeatedly asking for her husband’s help with finances and influence (because his political aspirations have grievously limited those things for her organization) and after repeatedly being rebuffed and ignored by him, Claire, as a favor to Frank, agrees to speak to a couple of representatives who are leaning against voting for his education bill. By intentionally not swaying these votes, Claire causes the bill to fail and therefore secures the necessary influence with the Sudanese government she needs to begin her well building project. When Frank confronts her, we see Claire’s most impassioned response of the entire season:

“[I did it] For myself. I can’t operate based on plans you haven’t shared with me…I don’t feel as though I’m standing beside you…I fired half of my staff for us. I have turned down donations for us. I drafted Peter’s bill for us. I diverted time and energy…for us…Be honest about how you’re using me just like you use everyone else. That was not part of the bargain.”

Claire asserts that Frank hasn’t behaved in keeping with their agreement, their partnership. She makes it clear that she will not allow him to take advantage of her and that if they’re not working as a unit, she will take matters into her own hands to meet her needs and objectives. Claire then proceeds to leave town to visit with a former lover of hers, thus also meeting the emotional needs that Frank has neglected. Her independence and her unwillingness to tolerate Frank’s complacency here are admirable.

The imperious Claire Underwood

The marriage between Claire and Frank is also unique. Claire recounts Frank’s marriage proposal:

“Claire, if all you want is happiness say no. I’m not going to give you a couple of kids and count the days until retirement. I promise you freedom from that, I promise you’ll never be bored…He was the only one who understood me. He didn’t put me on some pedestal, he knew that I didn’t want to be adored or coddled.”

They have a very open, autonomous, conspiratorial relationship wherein they sleep with other people and keep no secrets from each other. I do question the fact that Claire’s affair with Adam has genuine depth and substance, while Frank’s affair with Zoe is a blatant cliche replete with the middle-aged married man sleeping with the young ingenue, the power dynamics grossly skewed (though even that tryst ends up taking us into surprising places). The two affairs are in keeping with the notion that men can have casual sex and women cannot because they require an emotional connection.

I also question Claire’s rising desire to have children. Is this budding maternal instinct meant to humanize her? The idea that she had always wanted children but repressed her desires to accommodate Frank’s hatred of children is not at all in keeping with her character. Since when does she relegate her wants to the backseat, especially for decades? I do, however, appreciate the continued independence that she shows in this regard, seeking fertility treatments without Frank’s knowledge because he has failed her as a partner. Not only that, but the pregnancy itself could be a strategic play to thwart Gillian’s lawsuit for wrongful termination due to pregnancy discrimination; the logic being: how could one pregnant woman wrongfully fire another pregnant woman due to her pregnancy? 

Claire Underwood in House of Cards

There’s no denying that despite her highly suspect morality, Claire Underwood is an extraordinarily powerful woman. Her power stems from a confidence in her capability, her intelligence, and her ambition. Claire has power because she knows she has power. She has power because she’s taken it and guards it fiercely. Is she a decent person? Absolutely not. Is she a feminist role model? Probably not. But representations of nuanced powerful female characters are in short supply in Hollywood. I’d love to see more women (on screen and off) with Claire’s sense of her own strength and self-worth. Let’s hope Netflix is onto something, and keep our fingers crossed that House of Cards Season 2 is just as rich with complex women as its first season was.

Indie Spirit Best First Feature Nominee: Margin Call

This is a guest review by Jessica Pieklo. 
———-
It’s hardly a surprise that a movie chronicling life inside a major financial firm during the 24 hours before the Wall Street collapse of 2008 would be dominated by men. Margin Call boasts a stunning ensemble cast featuring Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, and Demi Moore as a group of investment bankers, analysts and traders at fictitious financial firm, loosely based on Lehman Brothers, as the bottom falls out of the mortgage-backed securities market. 
Moore plays Sarah Robertson, the steely head of risk management and only woman on the management team. We don’t actually see Moore or meet Sarah until close to midway in the film and she’s given sparse dialogue. As the film unfolds we start to see why.

Demi Moore and Simon Baker in Margin Call 
Instead, the film opens in September 2008 as this unnamed investment firm is in the process of terminating 80 percent of its risk-management team. The terminations are executed with the cold precision that only corporate HR professionals can muster and magnified by the self-importance that fuels Wall Street corporate culture. It’s an assembly-line of assets in and liabilities out and even from the beginning we see the a shedding of “waste” that frames the rest of the drama. 
Senior risk analyst Eric Dale is one of those fired. Dale, played brilliantly by Stanley Tucci, gets the news just as he’s about to discover that the company is recklessly over-exposed in bad mortgages. Dale’s termination, and his behavior in handing over a flash drive full of damaging information to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) telling him to “be careful,” initially sets the story up to suggest Dale was fired just before becoming a whistleblower but instead suggests the fate that awaits anyone else who might question the culture of risk at the firm.
It’s not until the junior analysts have put together the pieces laid out by Dale and alerted their bosses that the real faces of the financial crisis emerge and among them, Sarah Robertson. We first meet Robertson in an emergency middle-of-the-night meeting with upper management to discuss the firm’s exposure and create a strategy to handle it. The strategy, the firm decides, is to dump the bad debts and offer up an executive sacrifice as the face and blame of the disaster.
Of course they choose Robertson.

Kevin Spacey in Margin Call 
The writing is on the wall and it’s clear in Moore’s performance that it’s an outcome Robertson must have been bracing for her entire career. During the meeting Robertson points out, firmly but not too aggressively that she had warned the firm of problems with the mortgage-backed securities and nothing was done. The men in the room just look at her. It’s clear. She’s going down for the whole thing.
Almost the rest of Moore’s performance consists of Robertson sitting in her office, looking out across Manhattan both a part of Wall Street and isolated from it’s upper reaches–the logical and final destination for female executives in this world. 
Writer/director J.C. Chandor’s father spent almost his entire career working for Merrill Lynch and its obvious he understands Wall Street culture. Bright ambitious talent gets wooed away from careers that better serve society like engineering and the sciences, to make buckets of cash moving around buckets of cash. There’s a sense of conspicuous waste in nearly every scene. Boxes line empty trading cubes as nameless traders cycle in and out. Nothing’s permanent and nothing’s real except for the stories of all that cash.
Given Chandor’s intimacy with Wall Street life it’s hard not to see some deliberate choices behind Moore’s character. Shortly after the 2008 collapse some of us started asking if the financial crisis would have been mitigated, or perhaps avoided all together, had more women served in executive functions and on boards of directors. It was hard not to broadly generalize but the major Wall Street Firms–Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America–the list continues–all firms where women were virtually absent in leadership and culture building. In their place was a testosterone-fueled culture of rampant greed and avarice, a world where 25-year-old traders were promised million dollar bonuses over t-bones and strippers and nobody blinks. It’s hard to imagine that culture existing so robustly with a lot more women involved.

Jeremy Irons in Margin Call 
And that hypothesis seems to infect Moore’s character and her performance. She’s at once tough, ambitious and intensely insecure. You get the sense she’s used to having her work more heavily scrutinized, less-readily trusted. At first during the emergency meeting Moore comes off as emotionless and cold, almost robotic in the face of catastrophe as if aware that showing any emotion as the only woman in the room would automatically kick her out of the club. Later when she’s waiting out the night in her office Moore offers us a woman tragically isolated and coming to terms with the fact that her brief foray into the forbidden world of male privilege has officially ended with not much more to show for it except a severance package that will ultimately cost her reputation and sense of dignity.
The fact that Moore’s character had warned of the crisis approaching and was alternatively ignored or blamed for not warning emphatically enough also perfectly captures the bind so many women in corporate culture face. As head of risk management Moore’s character was in charge of managing exposure and was the voice responsible for setting the culture and appetite for risk. It was the woman who first saw problems, tried to draw attention to them but was ultimately not taken seriously and was dismissed. Rather than push the issue Robertson knew what she had to do–push ahead like the men around her. 
By the end of the film there’s not much left to Moore’s character. She’s practically an afterthought as daylight breaks and the trading panic ensues and we close with a sense that nothing much will change even after the house of cards comes crashing down.
Links of interest:
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Jessica Pieklo is a lawyer and writer blogging at Care2.com and Hegemommy.com. Her work focuses on women’s rights, ethics and the law.



Top 10 of 2011: Movie Preview of ‘Horrible Bosses’

Everyone loves/hates a Top 10 list, right? We thought we’d kick off 2012 with our top posts of 2011, with the only criteria being page views. (Tough to argue with that!) Stay tuned all week as we count to #1, with a few honorable mentions thrown in for good measure. 
2011 was our best year yet, and we have you readers and guest contributors to thank for that!
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At number 10, we have a guest post from the incomparable Melissa McEwan, founder and manager of the award-winning political and cultural group blog Shakesville, who had a few things to say about the trailer for Horrible Bosses.
[Trigger warning for rape “humor,” fat hatred, sexual assault, violence.]

Tool Boss” Colin Farrell tells “Disrespected Employee” Jason Sudeikis, “We’ve got to trim some of the fat around here.” Sudeikis says, “What?!” to which Farrell replies, “I want you to fire the fat people.”
Maneater Boss” Jennifer Aniston, who is a dentist, suggests to “Harassed Employee” Charlie Day that they have sex on top of an unconscious female patient. “Let’s use her like a bed,” she says, to which Day exclaims in response, “That’s crossing the line!”
Psycho Boss” Kevin Spacey tells “Abused Employee” Jason Bateman, “I own you, you little runt,” to which Bateman sheepishly replies, “Thank you.”
Editors note: We later ran a review of Horrible Bosses by guest writers Kirk Boyle and Byron Bailey. You can read that here.