new vid - "Keep Your Picture Clear" - House of Cards
Keep Your Picture Clear
Fandom: House of Cards (US)
Song/Artist: Keep Your Picture Clear by Tom McRae
Duration: 3:45 minutes
Summary: Do not mistake any history you have shared for the slightest understanding of what our marriage is, or how insignificant you are in comparison.
Spoilers: s1 - s3
Made for destina for the VVC 2015 auction.
Click to viewPassword: black egg
You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
Here I go, back again, sliding off the ceiling
Was I gone for long
Did I just flick the switch?
Across the street, away from me
A man is singing Sympathy for the Devil
and he's getting all the words wrong
His newspaper flies desperately
but words aren't wings like gravity
they'll keep you here
It's a theory to subscribe to
but you know you're being lied to
So keep your picture clear
Stay awake, the lines are drawn
You're never right until you're wrong in the eyes of the world
And a picture tells a thousand lies
Little dots in black and white, you have no idea
The strongest will survive but it's the scum that always rises
So keep your picture clear
You talk just like a diplomat
but hide the gun behind your back
Leaders need a bloody war
Congratulations, this is yours
Looking through the history books
of liars, cheats, and petty crooks
They'll print your picture clear
Keep your picture clear
Destina very kindly bid on me for the VVC auction, and - even kinder - basically told me to vid whatever I wanted. It just so happened that high on both of our lists was some sort of Claire vid, and I had a song in mind already, and am extraordinarily lucky that Destina was so accommodating.
We agreed from the outset that we didn’t like where season 3 took Frank’s character and how that impacted their marriage, so that’s mostly passed over, including the season ending. I still have faith that things can be mended, but that depends on what Frank does next. We’ll see.
So that created a problem of, if the vid deliberately ignores what happened at the end of s3, does that seem disrespectful or dismissive of Claire’s hard-won agency? Claire giving up what she wanted for what Frank wanted wasn’t a new thing, it happened in seasons 1 and 2, but season 3 pushed it to a new level. I didn’t want to diminish her decisions in any way, but couldn’t agree with the events that brought them about. That was a particular problem with this vid because it was so dominantly about their teamwork in seasons 1 and 2, so tonally it felt wrong to try to wrangle it into a complete 180 in the last 30 seconds.
The other concern is how to communicate that her pain mostly came from feeling underutilised and underappreciated, with only a small part to do with Lady Macbeth guilt*. There’s no doubt that she felt bad for the things they had to do, but I maintain that she felt bad mostly for herself. She knew she had to break some eggs on the way and she had more or less made her peace with that; it was the lack of personal reward that made it not worth it. Again, if there was more room to manoeuvre that might have been better executed with a light hair / dark hair distinction, but the vid structure being what it is and things only really getting going by about 2:45, it just didn’t seem like the right sandbox. So just the usual problems of talky show with lots of intricacies + unable to make a vid that is anything other than a blunt instrument. That said, I think that a quintessential Claire-ness did come through. Might be better viewed as a primer rather than an in-depth character study.
* Off topic - zomg Fassbinder/Cotillard Macbeth. I die in anticipation.