My birthday is October 4th, which is the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. I’m not a Catholic, but my father is, at least sometimes, and the talismanic nature of saints have always interested me. Among other things, St. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals.
A few weeks ago, I was in Rome on a brief weekend holiday while in Europe for my day job. Rome, however, was a research trip for a writing project, and I anticipated being tightly focused on documenting things once remembered about the city in preparation for a project that is set mostly in Rome and Southern Italy. To a certain extent, I was successful. But I was also distracted by the things that always distract me in Italy: Great food that is surprisingly often gluten-free, and the gloomy, less visited churches that are barely even footnotes on the tourist maps.
One of the things the eclecticism of my religious upbringing (if you missed it: Dad changed religions a lot, my mom is Jewish, and my childhood was a sea of hippie oddities) is actually really helpful for is pulling apart pop-culture. And so sitting in a church so blackened with soot that the interior was nothing but ominous, I started turning over House of Cards‘s Francis Underwood — his name, his faith, and the structural function of each in the narrative both of the show and his own life — over in my head.
And I came back, in that dark church, constantly to saints.
Because Francis Underwood is, absolutely, also a patron saint of animals. When we first meet him, he puts a dog out of his misery, with his bare hands, and doing what is possibly the right thing has never seemed quite so unsettling. It’s one of the great moments in scripted media ever. It jumps off the screen, because of how spectacularly it jumps off the page.
But the motif of animals, blood and murder, certainly doesn’t end there. Not with the way Francis makes a bloody x by swiping his finger across a newspaper photo of a rival after eating ribs, and not when there is so much discussion of in S2 of who is whose dog .The hacker Gavin Orsay, goes to his knees and barks to both show he understands and loathes his place, while businessman Xander Feng is essentially held hostage in what becomes a slow death by politics not-unlike the slow, illegal, bleed supposedly performed on the pigs served at Freddy’s BBQ. Everyone is an animal in House of Cards. As one of the key promotional lines of S2 constantly reminded us: Hunt or be hunted.
The thing is, there are a lot of saints named Francis. St. Francis de Sales, for example, is the patron saint of writers and journalists. Our Frank Underwood puts some of those out of their misery too, doesn’t he? And his victory at the end of S2 is won, quite significantly, by his writing a letter to the president on a typewriter that bears his other name, Underwood.
It should be unsurprising. After all, Frank Underwood says in S1, “I pray to myself for myself.” It is perhaps one of the most shocking moments of the show thus far, at least in a nation that places so much value on religiosity both in politics and pop culture. This statement of Frank’s, however, is, I believe, less atheistic than it first appears and more gnostic or Thelemic in nature. If it reads as a rejection of, as opposed to a oneness with a god, it does so largely because we’re supposed to consider Frank Underwood a very bad man.
While he is no villain I ever wish to be, and I view his schemes as a constantly cautionary tale (never come up with a plot that is dependent on the other parties involved doing what you think they are going to do; people will always surprise you and you’re never going to be as smart as you think you are), I find a great deal about Frank, and his wife Claire, profound and useful to me as I navigate my own relationship with the world.
Frank’s moment in the church, and his saints names, remind me, in spite of all his sins, the we each carry within us remarkable power, terrifying resilience, and peculiar affinities that allow us, if we’re paying any sort of attention, to write the story of our own lives through the living of them. These possessions of Frank’s also suggest tantalizing clues as how the series may progress through S3 and perhaps beyond.
Because without House of Cards morphing into a totalitarian horrorscape, Frank does not have much more to achieve. Other than reelection as president, he now can only fall. But as a saint of animals and writers, and as his own god who writes himself into being (praying to himself for himself), he must necessarily also write his own fall and achieve it too as a victory.
To that end, I would suggest keeping your eyes on Claire. Frank is in so many ways her mentor and in so many ways she is surpassing him. It is my very strong suspicion is that Frank’s final victory can only be his own written and wished for demise at her well-trained hands.
This weekend, Erin and I are in the deep edits from our publisher on Starling.
Letters from Titan 