Underwood's speech in House of Cards shows astonishing resemblance to Bush's address to the Congress in 2001 when the War on Terror was declared. Although season 4 was not as good as previous ones I applauded the ending just because it was an ultimate sarcastic representation of reality. 15 years gap between those speeches and both scare the same. The fear tactic was brilliantly adapted to a TV series, and it deserves a closer look. In this video I compare the last scenes of season 4 of the political drama House of Cards and what happened in the US after 9/11. WARNING- contains major spoilers for season 4.
House of Cards is a Netflix original series running since 2013. Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is the ruthless and sarcastic democrat US president. He is under investigation for a series of crimes, and in order to divert attention he creates his own war on terror in the hope voters will support him in the coming election.
The former republican US president George W. Bush used this fear tactic several times. The one in the video was in 2001 after the terror attacks of 09/11. He used it again in 2008 when the economic crisis was hitting hard (a brief extract of Michael Moore's documentary -Capitalism: A Love Story was used here to illustrate the fear tactic).
Create fear to push reactionary agendas was used in several countries in different contexts throughout the history. The War on Drugs is another good example. As tragedy is always fun on the screen, let's enjoy season 5 of House of card. All episodes now available on Netflix.
The Best on Sreen is my new series of posts analysing the psycho-social-political content of movies and TV series.
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