When is a drink of water not just a drink of water?
Melissa and I have been burning through David Fincher's brilliant new political drama House of Cards over the past few days. If you don't know about it yet, be sure to listen to David Bianculli spot-on review here.
Needless to say, we were moved to watch some of the State of the Union last night, and, of course, Marco Rubio's Republican response ... And then it happened ... the drink of water. I sighed, shook my head, looked to Melissa, and we both shook our heads in collective incredulity, and we immediately agreed that this is destined to be a Saturday Night Live skit. In an age of hyperreality and manufactured pseudo-events, how can the Republican dream boy botch such a brief moment in the sun? Doesn't he know the Frank Underwood principle? That to control information is the power to create and shape reality, and when you abdicate that control, someone else usurps the storytelling power from you—to tell it about you.
This principle is one of the brilliant elements in House of Cards, for which the writer seems to have done his homework. Specifically, Daniel Boorstin's The Image: a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America and Jean Baudrillard's writing on Hyperreality permeate the fabric of the show's concerns. The power to control information is far more important than simply "making news."
In HoC Chapter 2, we see Congressman and Majority Whip Frank Underwood use the advances of the young, hip, and hungry journalist Zoe Barnes to his own reality-shaping designs. He understands that creating/manufacturing news is more powerful than merely, passively, "being" the news. This sort of information warfare has been the cornerstone of the American political scene since the 1960 Presidential debate—the basis of Boorstin's meditation on image.
In HoC Chapter 6, this image is creatively executed when Frank Underwood goes to the CNN studios to debate with the head of the teacher's union. The set tells the story: A table and chairs are draped and dominated by the very icon of image manufacturing—the green screen. When we cut to the televised event, we see the sophisticated and somewhat chaotic horror vacui of the CNN backdrop bleeding information ... but it's all an illusion ... just as illusory as the manufactured issue that Frank Underwood is debating for his own designs of power—and he's not about to abdicate that control.
So ... When is a drink of water not just a drink of water? When it's not calculated to look like a drink of water. Welcome to the age of hyperreality.
The times are certainly out of joint ...
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