Sweet Smell of "Succession"

All are responsible for the Fox of all

“Alas, Kentucky,” creatures. Alas, virtue! Yes this whole newsletter is just about “Succession.”

Since my partner got me into “Succession,” I’ve been bizarrely confident that I know what kind of story it’s telling. You may think this is a story about who takes Logan Roy’s mantle, or perhaps who gets to triumph over him by destroying him. Or maybe it’s a “Hamlet” tale, where they’re all destroyed and then Fortinbras/Mattson arrives to take over the kingdom. But no, I’ve insisted it’s about escape. Will any of Logan’s children find some way out of their addictive, abusive wealth?

I like that story because it requires the writers to imagine ways of yielding power. The quest to dominate others has been the sole subject of these people’s entire miseducation, and it’s also their only coping mechanism (my very favorite moment here is from Hungary, when Roman starts filming “Boar on the Floor,” so brutally gleeful that this time it isn’t him—but it’s about to be him), and they also hate it, and they know it’s hollow. They know it’s all a pile of dead pigs they didn’t even hunt through the woods themselves. I think many of us have been in situations where we can’t see the doorway. Or we can see it, but to walk through it would be shameful, or obliterating, or it’s a doorway for losers. And anyway, nobody you know has ever walked through it before, and your home is here, on this side. Shiv said it in her eulogy (those four perfect eulogies!), a summary of the whole show thus far: “Goodbye, my dear, dear world of a father.”

Kendall asked, Why would you want to escape the world? Why wouldn’t you want to romp around in it? Why not get your teeth in? Everybody would do it if they could! And Shiv asked, How can you escape a world? How can you live outside the only light you’ve ever known?

And then they go to the Meow Mix mausoleum, and the light comes up so beautifully inside as they see the places their father has prepared for them, eternally at his side.

So far, the possible exits we’ve seen the Roy kids reject include: suicide (normal version), suicide (slow version, aka “I’m interested in becoming a meth head”), morality a few different times, love (maternal), love (sicko style), knockoff Bernie Sanders, and just quitting and taking the money. I’ve enjoyed watching them fidget their sweaty little hands on all these doorknobs and then turn back to the party! I specifically will say that I don’t want them to succeed at escaping via morality—because it’s funnier if they’re seeking something else and face-plant into morality, because our whole culture is way too comfortable with moralizing discourse rather than literally any other kind, because the show has its own morality and I don’t need the Roy kids to have that morality too… because judgment, even self-lacerating judgment, is still a more dominant stance than seeking mercy. The best representative we’ve had of the moral option so far is probably Uncle Ewan’s eulogy, but you couldn’t pay me to be Uncle Ewan, not even as much as they pay him. And if any of the kids ended up there, I would not think that they’d escaped.

But I do still hope one of them makes it out. If only because the other kinds of story feel punitive or dismissive to me; they feel like “People don’t change” or “Nothing ever changes.” Things do happen, Rome.

So, we’re almost at the end and it’s time to make predictions, like a sucker and a loser. (And also because it seems like a good way of articulating what possible stories can be told in the show’s world.) Who goes Nazi?

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KLRs, Thieves and Lawyers

# Connor. Connor gets neither better nor worse. He perhaps gives us a few more delightful political bonbons (“A pan-Habsburg, American-dominated EU alternative”! I surrender, Will Arbery, all is forgiven) but Connor escapes into irrelevance. Notice how he’s the only one who didn’t speak at the funeral? Connor’s getting out. He’ll probably be happy; come the revolution, he’ll make it through at least the first couple purges, and he’ll still be a true believer when they shoot him in the head.

# Shiv. Poor Pinky. I’m gonna say Shiv neither escapes nor ends up on top. She made that bed and she’s gonna lie in it. With Tom? With Tom.

# Kendall’s storyline was set when he emerged from those waves back in s4e5. He will gain the whole world, at the usual price. Good deal!

Alternatively, he gets shot by mistake; I’d laugh.

# Lol I have wanted Roman to make it out pretty much this whole time and I’m not giving up on God’s saddest fascist now. Notice how he’s the only one who stayed outside the tomb? How it happens I absolutely don’t know. Too bad his crimes have been less flagrant than the others’, so there’s less chance for a Chuck Colson Surprise (people do change!). And also not enough time left for it, really. All unready is my book of reckoning, as I think Logan Roy once said. Plus I think the fact that we’ve already had the church episode means it won’t be God, which is fine, if sad for me, I can’t tell you how much I wanted Roman wafting his bullshit at a confessional-hardened priest. But I don’t need the guy to know what life looks like on the other side of the doorway, just to go through it anyway: one very intense bout of retroactively-consensual humiliation. I believe that Roman can do this.

Or else he parlays his self-antifa’ing into alt-right martyrdom :/ :/ :/ Realistic but depressing. A parallel to Shiv the self-made puppet and woof-woof Hugo. (Beautiful line reading, or line barking, btw. Such a great episode for fans of humans making animal noises.)

Let’s all take a moment to note that none of these kids have acknowledged the fact that their abuser just died. Poor Roman had to seek out a normie Dem protester to be his daddy, truly the most pathetic replacement abuser.

# America/“Jeryd.” (Did we always know this guy’s name is Jeryd?) There’s an argument that even caring about the individual fates of the Royspawn is reading the show wrong. Caring about individual souls is neoliberalism!

“Succession” usually makes every line and conflict work on multiple, often contradictory levels: a plea for love is also a business ploy; real moral truths are stated out of raw self-interest or in a fit of pique. The “America Decides” episode stripped things down, so most words seemed to carry only a single layer of meaning. Roman and Ken’s fight about chicken vs. steak seemed perfunctory: We have to show you rich jackasses making world-shaping decisions for idiotic and damaged personal reasons, so here are the personal reasons. Contrast that to Logan firing Gerri ostensibly for the actual real worst thing we know her to have done, but really to punish his son. Now that’s synergistic storytelling, and a real moral mirror for us all. “America Decides” felt like it was intending to hold up a mirror only to people who aren’t in its audience. I like this less!

It felt off to me, and not only because Jesse Armstrong made all these Americans use “yeah?” as a speech tag the way British people do. Shiv did it a million times and okay, Shiv’s dad is Scottish, but a) she doesn’t usually! and b) now tell me why Ravenhead did it. Anyway, “America Decides” had to thread multiple needles. It had to make us believe that Trump/Mencken is unprecedentedly bad, without handwaving the shambling complicity of all the alternatives; it had to spotlight the power of hidden elites, without absolving the voters and TV audiences who form the unseen character, Leviathan. Imho the sarcastic episode title swayed a little too far in the direction of “oh those poor Americans, they’re all either manipulated into having awful politics or gerrymandered out of enacting good politics.”

So what happens to America, our damsel in distress, our very young democracy? The Roys are insulated, though not entirely, so maybe that’s why Armstrong’s America seems much less violent than it realistically would be. The car-banging scene is a split second long, the NYPD never get their batons out on camera. What we see is a far cry from 2020 in terms of violence from either the law’n’order mob or the “solidarity is burning down U Street” left. Maybe that’s coming; maybe Tom’s right that it’s getting “a little Tiananmen-y out there.”

Mencken could get shot or bombed or whatever, I dislike this; Mencken could implode. We’ve already had one sex tape this season and we’ve also had Jeryd sending that “eggplant eggplant flag” text to America’s favorite sexual degenerate. Can it mean what AOOO would love it to mean? Shall we see America rescued from fascism by homophobia? I’d enjoy that; it accomplishes Roman’s downfall and, just like in lots of real history, it’s unintentional and there’s no side to root for. I don’t think we’ll get something so personal, though. “America Decides” seemed to sway the show more into an institutional critique.

So maybe the show goes pure synecdoche, and leaves the political outcome unresolved while letting Kendall/Waystar or Mattson/GoJo stand in for the continuing power of imperial America or its global decline respectively. With Shiv crowned and moaning all I, Claudius in the palace, whoever wins.

But maybe a sign of the show’s vision and ambition is that it feels like it could end at almost any level of micro- or macrocosm. Kendall in a grip-and-grin with whatever lettuce is the British Prime Minister today, or that kid from the pilot episode who got a watch and an NDA, filling out a prep-school scholarship application as his dad watches ATN. Shiv brokering a deal to sell GoJo user data to the Chinese government, or a Rwandan kid in a charity Jimenez/Eavis t-shirt heading off to his job at the coltan mine. A team of workers stringing suicide nets outside an iPhone factory; Roman’s management-training mentor, the teddy bear who works hard and plays easy, taking a selfie at a protest march right before the van plows into the crowd.

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