What does "they stack up so well" mean?

In House of Cards, Frank leaked the Education Bill to the media on purpose and when he was having BBQ rips in one morning, he noticed the trick he played had already made the headline in a newspaper.

Frank drew a red line with BBQ sauce on the newspaper and said "You know what I like the most of people, they stack up so well"

My interpretation is:

Frank is seeing his political enemies as dead human bodies, when he foresees their downfall, their dead bodies stack up so well.

is my interpretation correct?

house-of-cards

Best Answer

Yes it is and it is my opinion that this line was more than likely the suggestion of, or inspired by David Fincher (producer of the series and director of episodes 1 & 2) who was alleged to have poignantly used the phrase before, during the troubled production of Alien 3.

In the the documentary Wreckage and Rage: The Making Of Alien 3, Ezra Swerdlow, executive producer and Fincher's line producer for the principle photography shoot at Pinewood Studios is shown to have worked desperately hard as a moderator between Fincher and the many entities he regularly clashed with at 20th Century Fox and Brandywine Films.

Through archival footage and in depth interviews, Swerdlow makes a convincing case regarding his ability to see both sides of the argument, clearly aware from an early stage of Fincher's talent and dedication to perfection and empathising with the directors day to day frustrations with the impossible hand he had been dealt with from the films writers and studio executives.

Yet at the same time it seems apparent that Swerdlow could see that Fincher's combative attitude towards the senior producers and other crew members (Costume designer Bob Ringwood states elsewhere in the documentary that he found Fincher to have an extremely unpleasant attitude) was not only hindering progress but was becoming more and more fundamental to the counter production.

Running out of ways and means to practically placate the director, Swerdlow states in one of the interviews that he had tried to explain to Fincher that many of the confrontations may be assuaged by approaching situations with a standard of positive regard, stating that he said 'The thing is David, I approach relationships with the belief that I essentially like people' to which Fincher allegedly responded 'I do like people - they stack well!'

I may have to be corrected by this but was the line not also spoken directly to camera by Underwood in episode 2 (which I have already stated Fincher directed)? If so then this would make my support my theory that this may have been a particular catch phrase the director liked to use, as I have not heard it anywhere else despite understanding its meaning when first watching Wreckage and Rage.

RIP Ezra Swerdlow (21 Jump Street, Spaceballs, Alien 3) 1954 - 2018 IMDB link