The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal
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The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal Patrick Jones, Gretchen Soderlund American Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 4, December 2017, pp. 833-856 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680488 Access provided by University of Hawaii @ Manoa (21 Dec 2017 15:45 GMT) The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 833 The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television: Politics, Public Relations, and Journalism in House of Cards and Scandal Patrick Jones and Gretchen Soderlund irty little secrets always come out.” So says Olivia Pope, the beleaguered protagonist of ABC’s Scandal, and so says a 2015 “Dposter from the conservative student group Turning Point USA, which made news after the 2016 election for its “Professor Watchlist” of left-leaning, activist professors.1 In this poster, a close-up of Pope hovers above Turning Point USA’s signature slogan, “Big Government Sucks,” while smaller print references the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious and NSA scandals. Another Turning Point USA poster displays Netflix’sHouse of Cards protagonist, Frank Underwood, saying “the road to power is paved with hypocrisy and casualties.” From Scandal and House of Cards to Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games, Turning Point USA’s leaflets and posters take advantage of popular culture’s recent fascination with tyrannical leaders to drive home its libertarian message: big government cannot be trusted. The conservative group hopes there is slippage among audiences’ understanding of fictionalized dramas and the way we think about American government. Driven by a similar expectation, the streaming service Netflix commissioned a long-form “sponsored content” article for the Atlantic on the history of presidential power couples. “The Ascent: Political Destiny and the Makings of a First Couple” traces the goal-oriented partnerships of successful actual first couples like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and of less-successful couplings like Richard and Pat Nixon.2 A linguistic analysis of dominant and submissive language used by the fictiveHouse of Cards first couple, Frank and Claire Un- derwood, serves as coda to this multimedia advertisement/article. Made with the assistance of linguists from two major universities, “The Ascent” features an n-gram chart that tracks fractures in Frank and Claire’s marriage as they develop and deepen over time. Despite Turning Point USA’s and Netflix’s different goals (inculcating conservative college activists and drawing viewers to Netflix, respectively), 2017 The American Studies Association 834 | American Quarterly their spin-off media banks on the notion that popular culture shapes audience engagement with politics and history. Both suggest that television characters like King Joffrey Baratheon, Olivia Pope, and the Underwoods are political and historical figures in their own right. However, what unites all these characters is not only the space they occupy in political discourse but the fact that all of them achieve power by exercising their virtuosity in conspiratorial behavior. We argue that these protagonists’ schemes and machinations reflect a conspiratorial mode in popular culture and elsewhere in which conspiracy serves as the hinge connecting interpersonal relationships to political decision making. To unpack this conspiratorial mode, we focus on Scandal and House of Cards, two of the most popular and acclaimed political dramas on television. We chose these shows because both have maintained large, faithful audiences for at least four seasons, both take place in current-day Washington, DC, and both feature similar plotlines despite surface differences. Further, they offer similarly bleak visions of the political. However, rather than understand these political dramas as ideological reflections of political cynicism and distrust of government in the contemporary moment, we think of them as participants in a particular political/conspiratorial logic that is being recited, with different intensities and inflections, across social fields, from entertainment television and conservative talk shows to political campaigns, social media, and social movements. In many respects, the conspiratorial mode we trace here—which both uni- versalizes conspiracy and scales it down to the maneuverings of a small group of schemers—takes a sharp representational turn from the twentieth-century’s coldly rational conspiracies. In House of Cards and Scandal, fluctuations in affective, interpersonal economies drive political change. In style and con- tent, these shows share more in common with seventeenth- and eighteenth- century theater, which often portrayed individual social and political actors as inherently deceitful and secretive, than they do with Cold War narratives of large-scale conspiracy, institutional actors, and subversion from within. As the historian Gordon Wood has shown, the belief that human duplicity could set historical events in motion lay at the heart of political thought and artistic production during the Enlightenment, in part because it resolved one of the epoch’s central contradictions: the difference between what people say and what they do.3 However, the programs we analyze here do not simply rehash a centuries-old aesthetic or conspiratorial logic; their rendering of conspiracy has qualities unique to the technologically mediated world in which we live. Most notably, in these productions, the dynamics of revelation, exposure, and The Conspiratorial Mode in American Television | 835 scandal differ radically from both Western Enlightenment and US Cold War narratives of conspiracy, in which plotters seek, at all costs, to avoid all three. Adverse exposure in House of Cards and Scandal is not a disaster or tragedy. It is just something to be carefully managed by power brokers and politicians in relation to other overlapping conspiracies. Further, the characters in these shows themselves deploy conspiracy and scandal as public relations tools. An ongoing barrage of scandals, sometimes publicized, sometimes neutralized, becomes the fortress or smokescreen that allows the political machinations of House of Cards and Scandal to operate beyond the public’s gaze. Scandals become almost self-generating, so routine and expected that they lose their emotive capacity (indeed, Scandal might as well have been called The Death of Scandal). In what follows, we explore four dimensions of this new conspiratorial mode as it is manifested in popular culture. First, we argue that it sidesteps the epistemological considerations that were so central to twentieth-century conspiracies. Conspiracy becomes ontological, the very substance of politics itself as opposed to a deviation from politics as usual. In this mode, making a scheme publicly known is not an extinction-level event for the conspiratorial world. In fact, the constant exposure of partial conspiracies performs important maintenance work that ensures the integrity of a conspiratorial politics. Second, we trace an alternate lineage for conspiracy that locates it within the strategies and tactics of professional public relations. Exposure and scandal generation, which long existed in the service of investigation, are no longer tactics of the conspiracy theorist. In this new mode, they become the management tools that conspirators (now the primary protagonists) and political actors use to fortify their own plans—not the weapons used to take them down. We show how public relations, as a set of tools, strategies, and means for managing relation- ships, allows for the growth of a conspiratorial world that kaleidoscopically configures and reconfigures itself behind closed doors. Third, we contend that conspiracy alienates the public and the political in these productions. Scandal, communicated to the public by a denuded journalism, becomes the means by which a sealed-off, conspiratorially constituted political world communicates with an amorphous, unwitting, and depoliticized public. The result is that in each show the public becomes a metaphor used by those in power to conjure a nonpolitical reality, distant from the real machinations of power. Finally, we suggest that affect is key to understanding the political worlds in which these shows’ protagonists operate. Affect, manifested as relations of jealousy, anger, loyalty, or love, drives conspiracy and becomes the glue that holds the social 836 | American Quarterly and political together. The web of secrets that characters weave as they engage in conspiratorial behavior renders their intimate relationships political. We conclude with a discussion of conspiracy and the 2016 presidential election. We suggest that the simultaneous celebration of competence and artifice in these shows redefines political engagement along affective lines for an audi- ence increasingly cynical about formal politics and accepting of behaviors that would, in past political seasons, be seen as scandalous. Scandal Since its debut in 2012, Scandal has been one of the most popular television shows on primetime, with millions of viewers tuning in Thursday nights to watch the exploits of Olivia Pope, a savvy, quick-thinking political fixer whose crisis management firm specializes in delivering high-end clients from difficult situations. However, problems cannot be fixed by winning over hearts and minds alone: “collateral damage” mounts quickly. Played by Kerry Washington, Pope combines