the roys are dead; long live the roys
a farewell to Succession & my favorite corporate monsters (spoilers ahead!)
“Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. / All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; / thinking.” — from “Dream Song 29” by John Berryman.
“With Open Eyes” is the title of the series finale of Succession, drawn from the above line of the Berryman poem. Watching the episode, I kept thinking about the poem, how it’s served as a structure for the entire series, and the particular resigned dread of “All the bells say: too late.” Succession appears to end on this very note—with open eyes, though? I’m not so sure. The insular, mythical game the Roy siblings live within has splintered, irreparably, maybe, but it’s unclear, at the end, if any of them have really experienced a clarity of vision. So perhaps it’s important to note the end of that line of the poem— “He attends, blind.” The contradiction embedded into the “open eyes” is that how, exactly, do you open the eyes that have already been gouged out, maybe since birth?
I sound pretentious and probably intolerable, I know, as I often do when talking about Succession. I can’t help it. This show is one of those pieces of media that gets called “brilliant” and “genius” and actually, in my view, deserves all of these praises. When I first began Succession a few years ago, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it; a corporate satire featuring a bunch of deplorable ridiculous white people in suits with daddy issues?? That didn’t quite appeal to me, at least on the surface. But the much-acknowledged intelligence of Succession is how fucking tricky it is, how clever and disarming—the draconian corporate drama functions like a red herring of a plot, and as you continue watching, you realize that this boardroom-comedy appearance is actually a garish and stylized mask concealing a very real, very intimately-familiar monster; the comedy is certainly there, always, but underneath it—or rather, lodged into that humor, arterial to it—is a tragedy.
Jeremy Strong is sometimes mocked for being pretentious or taking himself too seriously, but I actually think his interpretation of Succession, and of Kendall Roy, is the most apt one: it’s funny in, yes, the way that Chekov is funny. There’s a loaded gun always in the vicinity, disguised as a joke or a comic situation or an irrelevant detail that eventually metastasizes and malforms—nothing feels unintentional. The humor is there, obviously, unrelenting, but its very insistent and ironic presence actually seems to only emphasize the underlying tragedy. These people are fucking ridiculous. The finale delivers this conclusion to us, if we ever had any doubt, in that conference-room fight between Roman, Ken, and Shiv, in which Shiv seems to detonate the plans they’ve tentatively made, and Kendall being Kendall, loses his shit. He becomes his most embarrassing, helpless child-self, petulantly screaming “I’m the eldest boy!” because he is, clearly, still very much a boy, desperate to ensnare his dad’s love, throwing a tantrum in a see-through room, on display, always.
Frankly, Kendall Roy is the character that reminds me most discomfortingly of myself: all my worst, most self-indulgent impulses, the ones I never act on, coalesce in him. I will say that he’s the worst possible version of me if I were also a rich white man, entitled to endless space and feeling and cruelty without immediate consequence. His woundedness emanates from him, pungent, and it becomes everyone’s problem in the most insidious way—and perhaps that’s what I’m talking about whenever I half-jokingly say that Kendall has eldest-daughter-syndrome. But it’s true: he has the martyr complex I’d have if I were a white man who could give fully into self-pity, the grotesque love-hunger sublimated into schemes and mediations and manipulations (to be really embarrassing for a sec: he’s so fucking “Mastermind” coded/ “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love me and make it look effortless” like!!), vulnerability always contorted into a ploy for power because—if you can’t be loved, you can be feared, you can be admired or respected, and you take what you can get.
I was listening to an old playlist from high school the other day and Lorde’s “The Love Club” came on, a song I haven’t heard in forever, and weirdly enough I realized that Lorde distills the Roy siblings’ dynamic perfectly: “We’re all competing for a love we won’t receive.” It’s cliché but it’s true. The Roys were never going to win. Going into the finale, I knew this, felt it in my gut. No one wins on a show like Succession. You can out-monster the other monsters, sure, you can gain temporary and tenuous and soul-depleting access to power for a handful of sunlit moments, but the light always dies or moves quickly onto the next tyrant. There’s no happy ending, and even if there were, none of the people in this show really truly “deserve” one. But still. Still the writing is so nuanced, so complex and devastating at the most surprising moments, that you can’t help but want something better for these characters.
You can’t help but empathize with Shiv, who will never be taken seriously by any of the men in her life, whose entire selfhood hinges on subservience and maintaining proximity to power rather than power itself, even (or especially) if it means debasing other women or herself; she’s a shit person, terrible in many ways, but she’s also deeply fucked-up and seems to me one of the most complicated, well-written women on TV, ever. Her final choice isn’t surprising. Of course she can’t “stomach Kendall,” of course she can’t stomach seeing her brother “win” the thing she’s been bleeding and burning herself for, that empty promise of her dad’s love, love from a man who, in her own words, could “never fit a whole woman into his head.” Of course the resentment and envy and rage and self-preservation/self-destruction (both?) would arise at the last moment, because the three of them are all, inevitably, unfailingly, it seems, their very worst impulses—Logan has ensured this. And of course Ken reacts the way he does, as a child, violent and incredulous.
There is a moment of startling self-awareness, or at least something in its vicinity, the closest I think the siblings have ever come. Roman says “We’re nothing. We’re bullshit.” He repeats this line, staring at nothing, laughing a little to himself, and the resignation is palpable. It’s almost a breakage in the fourth wall, or at least a meta-commentary, in which the “real” world slips ever so briefly into contact with this world, their made-up and fantastical, nightmarish sphere of bullshit—for a second there Roman sees through his own life, and whatever veil they’ve all assembled to keep themselves afloat in their wealth-insulated fantasy loosens, slackens, just for a moment. It’s devastating. This fight between them is absurd, embarrassing, infuriating, silly, but this comment does what Armstrong’s writing always does, at its very best: ricochets us from the moment’s comedy into its more structural and inescapable tragedy. The structure deviates. And we almost see them recognize their own transparency, their own roles as just that: roles.
But of course Succession isn’t about healing. There’s no healing, at least not visibly, not yet, at the end of the series. Shiv’s choice undoubtedly emerges from a place, first and foremost, of selfishness, of petulance much the same as Kendall’s, her child-self furiously withholding something from her brother simply because she cannot stand to see him take it. But it also emerges from a very real rage and grief—they’ve never really considered her a viable candidate or competitor, have fucked her over countless times, and why is it that her scheming is interpreted as somehow worse than theirs? I love how complicated and terrible she is, how you cannot reduce her to the #girlboss caricature or to a helpless victim. She suppresses victims, quite literally—but she’s also not not a victim. Misogyny is the blood she mistakes for water, I mean. It’s everywhere, and she thinks she’s somehow protected, powerful, inside of it. As if shark-bait could ever be anything other than endangered in a pool entirely filled with blood.
Succession is a class critique. But it’s also a Shakespearean tragicomedy, and I have to agree with Jeremy Strong’s take. Like I said: I feel like he perceives the show much the same way I do.
Recently, my friend and I watched the funeral episode together. What interests me is how much our reactions diverged: he was laughing, and I was crying. Some sensation did froth up in my chest, startled; we had opposite responses, but also, equally visceral, equally disoriented. Seeing Roman flail and fuck up in front of all those people, watching him utterly crumble without anywhere to hide, hearing his choked-out Is he in there? Can we get him out? and how his crying split open the church and all the bravado he’d assembled, seeing him outwardly become the traumatized child he never really stopped being, gutted me, clawed at me, turned me inside out. My friend found this fuckup funny, and for good reason; Roman’s been near-intolerable this season, enabling fascists and losing any grains of earnest feeling he had left, seemingly, and to see his parody of machismo disassemble so painfully and publicly is poetic justice, in a way. I mean, the episode almost opens with Rome essentially hyping himself up, adorning his own nonsense in bravado and aggrandizement. Of course the emperor has no clothes: it’s a clever, ironic way to remind us that, underneath the costumery and slicked hair, there’s dust and fear and not much else.
And yet. And yet I couldn’t laugh. And yet I still feel the ricochet of his pain against my own, disarming me entirely. There’s a precision to this depiction of grief, how it can shove you into re-inhabiting your neediest and least competent child-self. The silliness of Roman up there, sobbing, a helpless baby who also happened to do insurmountable damage to democracy and people’s lives without any scruples, doesn’t, for me, lessen the pain he’s expressing. I know he doesn’t “deserve” sympathy. But watching him, I saw a young boy abused and unstrung by the man supposed to unconditionally love and protect him. I saw a warped irreconcilability that feels familiar: the scarring left behind and the unutterable mourning for the very person that ripped open the flesh in the first place.
In Conner Reed’s excellent essay about the ending of Succession for Jacobin, he distills what I find to be so brilliant about the show:
“For a while, the structure of the show itself seemed to bend to Logan’s will. A total absence of flashbacks (save the title sequence) trapped the action in an eternal present tense; moments of pathos were washed away by or absorbed into more pressing matters of business. Ever since Logan’s death, though, the center of gravity has shifted, and the show has illustrated how woefully insufficient the meeting-to-meeting mentality Logan inflicted on his children and contemporaries is in the face of forces as tidal as grief and fascism.”
I hadn’t really fully considered how the absence of flashbacks might reflect the myopic violence of Logan’s subjectivity in itself, but it’s a crucial element of how and why Season 4 in particular feels so chaotic and almost dissociative, I think, after the wedding episode. Logan was the narrative device that assembled and organized the Roy siblings’ entire context: he was the focalizing agent, the planet they all orbited and relied upon to give their own selves and lives any shape whatsoever. His death—sudden, almost anticlimactic, unromantic—usurped their grasp on their own (already tenuous) self-narratives entirely.
The scene in which Connor has all of the other siblings and the “secondary tier” of Logan-associates put stickers on items of his they want to keep might seem like a less important one in the scheme of the episode, but really this moment took on a surprising poignancy suffused in absurdity—what Succession does at its best. Of course they’d all end up forced to cleave their attachment to their father into pieces, parts, objects. Of course their grief could only really be distributed in the format of an auction, of wealth and excess, as it’s truly the only language they’re fluent in.
There is also a moment here that is the closest to a flashback we ever really get—a video projected of Logan at dinner with Connor, Kerry, and his main underlings, with the conspicuous absence of Shiv, Kendall and Roman. They watch their father onscreen, collectively and individually enter this sliver of a moment and a man they never really had access to, and they see a Logan that never quite existed for any of them, not fully. The camerawork here is especially bittersweet, as we glimpse a shaky, half-visible moment of tenderness between Kerry and Logan as she leans against his shoulder, and he recites a poem, and quickly, we cut back to each of the siblings’ faces as they watch, entranced, eviscerated by the immortalization of this myth they can’t ever seem to entirely let go of. Logan appears primarily in the form of bad video footage this season, as a hologram of himself, flattened and hollowed, as an emptied signifier that the kids are nonetheless still unable to entirely divest their own hope and desperation from. It’s a beautiful, terrible editorial move.
There are moments of unconcealed tenderness, of childish joy and sibling-love that briefly exists as it maybe never has—unmarred by their father and his cruelty and the cruelty he’s wrought in them, perpetuated, passed down. The kitchen scene in the finale is maybe the gentlest scene in all of Succession. The second I saw it, reveling in the uncharacteristic sweetness of this scene, my stomach dropped. Because of course it wouldn’t end well. Because every tentative, glowing flicker of maybe things will be okay for once! quickly self-destructs, burns itself out. They’re devoted, the three of them, to a lineage of cruelty, of inner and external violence, of burning their lives and selves up for the possibility of—well, what, exactly, is unclear at best. It doesn’t seem like any of them actually want to be CEO. But they don’t know how to survive the world if they relinquish the performance, the Sisyphean sport, of wanting-it. Of not wanting the other sibling to “win,” as if there’s any game outside of their own familial shit-show, as if they’re not all needy and maladjusted, angry children beneath the generational wealth and arrogance.
I’ve been reading Judith Lewis Herman’s well-known book on trauma theory, Trauma and Recovery, and almost every other paragraph reminds me of the Roys in some way or form (can you tell I get unhealthily invested in fictional characters?). One common feature of the traumatized child, she writes, rings particularly true here: “Dissociation thus becomes not merely a defensive adaptation but the fundamental principle of personality organization” (150). Yes: the Roys live inside of this communally dissociated world, removed from the reality that lives anywhere outside of the immediate planet of Waystar Royco and Logan Roy’s influence. Their very identities hinge entirely upon this dissociation from that real world, that everything else. Perhaps this is why we so rarely get shots of the “outside” in Succession. In this season, the “outside” seems to creep in more and more, bleeding into the edges of the frame, and borders dissolve more than they usually have. The ongoing “threat” of protestors, for example, is omnipresent throughout Season 4, always hovering at the periphery, never quite escalating to full volume but still in view. Roman even essentially throws himself into the mass of protestors, as an obvious act of self-harm, masochism as self-soothing mechanism. He ruptures that “dissociation” for a moment, and later on, he’s the one who actually articulates that dissociative non-relationship: we’re bullshit.
Listening to Jeremy Strong talk about the finale on the Succession podcast this morning, he likens Kendall to Icarus flying far too close to the sun, and falling “ass-backwards” into the deepest possible ravine below. I have to agree. At the end, Strong notes, he conceptualizes Kendall as a “wraith,” an ember just barely alight, haunted. All of the siblings (except maybe Connor, largely because Willa is the best) arrive at what feels like an anti-metamorphosis, an anti-mimetic anti-denouement, nebulous and irresolvable. There’s no obvious way out or forward.
And yet it’s the only possible ending, really—and, while I think it might be besides the point and reductive to talk about what characters “deserve,” I do also think it is, in a sense, their ending to bear, to experience. Because what can actually be surprisingly easy to forget, amidst the complexity of the writing and the depth of the characters, is that the Roys (and Tom, and Greg) suck! Like, really fucking suck. They’re engines of cruelty, of mass exploitation, facilitating and enabling authoritarianism and violence and bigotry, etc; they’re billionaires. Of course they suck. It seems stupid and obvious to say this. But the show manages to deepen their histories and selves, their legacies of trauma, enough to make them very human and very difficult to entirely castigate or dismiss. They are hyperbolized versions, each of them, of the worst impulses within many of us, except that their trauma responses can affect much more than just themselves, can influence how other people’s lives unravel or end. Maybe we understand why they are the way they are. But they’re also all committed to reenacting their own trauma, recreating the violence of their father’s wealth, never fully severing themselves free.
I return to Herman here: “When it is impossible to avoid the reality of the abuse, the child must construct some system of meaning that justifies it” (151). That “system of meaning” governs the Roy children, imbues their lives with some pseudo-meaning which they constantly scramble towards, terrified of the water off the edge of the cliff. Without it, what and where are they? Without it, who, especially, was Logan Roy? How much more denial can they live in, about their father, his abuse, the terror and pain he’s inflicted upon and into them, if there’s no “meaning,” no corporate structure, no fantasy world to “justify” the carnage? Their primary attachment, that to their father, and even their mother, is intrinsically disfigured and thus Waystar Royco is the sole tether they have, the only way they can envision maintaining that attachment, since love was never a real possibility.
Is the ending hopeful? I’m not sure. I’m not sure hope is a very useful metric when discussing Succession. The ending is open, is what I’ll say—wide-open, for better or for worse. The Roys are, in a material sense, certainly more than fine. They’re all filthy rich and set for life. They’re white, privileged, entitled assholes who will continue being all of those things, I think, sans Waystar Royco. But they’ve also lost their only shared structure, this context that has maimed them irreparably but has also provided, if nothing else, any structure at all. They don’t know what they are without Logan, and without Waystar, they’re adrift even as they have every resource at their disposal. Shiv has granted them freedom even if she didn’t mean to. But whether any of them have the capacity to recognize that freedom for what is is—and not mistake it for another cage, another game to conquer and damage and “win”—remains uncertain.
The show ends with a wavering, simultaneously constrained and amorphous shot of the afternoon light passing over Kendall’s stoic, depleted face as he gazes out at the Hudson. I thought he would jump in, throw himself under. I’m sure the thought is there. There’s no more parody to enact, no more bullshit to dress up their inadequacy and loneliness in, there’s no way to entirely evade the wreckage now.
But it ends with this moment, of passing light: if it’s exposure or illumination, warmth or an imminent burn, is unclear.
great analysis!!