Succession, Logan, Kendall, Shiv, Roman Roy, Family Psychology, Psychoanalysis
Succession has been an obsession for the past few weeks. Four seasons of intense drama – 38 or so episodes in all – each episode an hour or more filled with, as everyone I have talked with about it says; a cast of characters not one of whom is likeable, and yet, like the proverbial car wreck, we can’t turn away from looking at it. What is the draw?
We watched the penultimate episode last night and I awoke a tad early this morning, as I often do after watching an episode, from a dream about the episode. I cannot capture the dream itself, but could capture the feeling of it and I was finally able to articulate, as I lay waiting for it to be time to get out of bed, some of the draw to a show that has been this toxic for me.
The penultimate episode centers around the long delayed
funeral for Logan Roy (Brian
Cox), the media mogul, king maker, billionaire toxic patriarch of the clan
of misfits that would fill his shoes. In
this episode, we finally get the backstory on this man at the center of the
drama, and various rage storms, that have filled our screen for many
weeks. The four eulogies, one from his
brother, Ewan Roy (James
Cromwell), an aborted one from his youngest son, Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), a stolid one from the
oldest son of his second marriage, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong),
and childhood memories from Siobhan “Shiv” Roy (Sarah Snook), the middle
child of this group and his only daughter, paint an interesting picture against
the background that we have come to know.
(Logan also has an only child - his eldest son from his first marriage,
Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), a
kind of laughable, delusional son whose wholly apparent ineptitude allows the
other children, whose ineptitude is more subtle, to shine in comparison,
especially in their own minds.) It also
allows the family members to parade across the screen one final time before the
series ending showdown where the successor will be named…
Logan Roy built his empire from scratch (or close to it –
Ewan clarifies that after they made the terrifying crossing of the Atlantic in
the 2nd World War, in the hold of a ship that lost its power and
where the 5 year old Ewan and the 2 and ½ year old Logan, alone on the ship
without parents, were told not to make a sound lest the UBoats would blast a
hole in the hull; they arrived in the States to stay with an unspecified relative who had some unspecified amount
of money), and Logan’s fondest wish (and seemingly greatest fear) was to leave
the empire that he had created to his children – while he simultaneously did everything in his power to undermine
them, seemingly to ensure that they were unable to take the reins when his rule
came to an end, or, perhaps in his conscious mind, to avoid their stealing the kingdom from him before his
time was up.
In this reversal of King Lear, Logan hangs onto power too
long, and he sees everyone, especially those who most love and care for him, as
threats – and because he treats them as competitors who would take away what he
has, they become every bit as threatening as he fears they might be, but
because he is prepared for that, he can thwart them at every turn and no one is
able to trust anyone. Unfortunately for
them, his suspicions and criticisms and brutal attacks have crippled them so
that they are not effective threats to him – nor, then, can they be legitimate candidates to run the
company in his absence, but none of them can see that, except, ironically,
Roman – the initially most unaware character who, across the course of the
series, actually grows into an admirable human being.
In one scene in the second or third season, Logan, who
supposedly does not know how to swim, is swimming in Connor’s pool – ironically
in New Mexico, one of the driest states in the nation – and we see his back –
and it is covered in the scars from what must have been brutal beatings –
probably when he was a child. This hint
at childhood trauma, and the ways that he is enacting that trauma on his children
including, at one point, hitting Roman hard enough to dislodge a tooth, we can
imagine that he is justifying his treatment of them by saying something to
himself like, “beatings made me stronger – they need to regularly be beaten in
order to have the strength to head this company.”
Logan Roy is, then, like Stalin, or any other despotic ruler
of an empire, someone who is paranoid that those around him are as ruthless as
he. And his paranoia, his projection of
his own internal world onto those around him, poisons them; turning them into crippled,
angry broken versions of himself. But
where he was focused on proving to the world that he is a powerful person who needs
to be recognized and dealt with, his children become focused on getting him to
recognize that they are a force to be dealt with by him; but since he has all
the power, they fail, time after time.
The humane thing to do would be to leave them by the
road. To let them know that they are inadequate, to provide for them, but to leave them, but he is not able to do that. He is
forever stirring them up, appointing a new favorite, drawing attention to what this new one has to offer, apparently because, if he doesn’t keep them interested, who
will be interested in him? Who or what
does he legitimately have to offer the world that will result in the world loving him? Logan Roy is a deeply cynical man who sees through everyone's efforts to curry favor with him - what is it that he is looking for?
And why am I drawn to watch this super slow-motion series of car
wrecks? Why can’t I look away when
looking at it makes my own dreams toxic, disturbing my sleep at a time when I
am too busy to devote one or even two hours a day to something that is not just
disruptive, but unpleasant? What must this be mirroring in my own life that makes this so enthralling?
I think I am drawn in by a nearly universal thread about
fathers and their children that I didn’t get until the Eulogies. Logan Roy is a despicable man. He doesn’t like to receive gifts. He is not motivated by acquiring the
tremendous wealth that he has generated, though his children are addicted to
the trappings of wealth and he despises them for that. "You don't know the price of milk," berates them during one of the really crazy and dehumanizing episodes where every member of the family and the executive board is demeaned. Logan wants
power, and no amount of power is enough for him. He is the personification of the toxic, narcissistic psychopath who
is so vilified in our society. He is the toxic patriarchy writ large, with the ex-wives and mistresses to prove it.
This extended portrayal of the family and the business allows us to see – often in broad daylight – the
malicious cruelty that emerges out of his personal cauldron of hate and
bile. Because of the harm and the damage this causes to the psyches of those around him, the psychopath is
rightly feared and avoided. And yet, the
psychopaths in our society do not just fill our prisons, but they often turn up,
as Logan does, as leaders of our corporations and other entities. I would also propose that though we have called them a class of people, segregating them, as it were, from ourselves, they are also, to some degree, perhaps, present in each of us. Haven't we had a moment where we have taken pleasure in causing another pain?
Those who fit the category of psychopath of become leaders in part due to their single-minded
pursuit of goals and objectives. Famously
unhindered by guilt, their path is not impeded by the social concerns that
would prevent others from rising. But
this does not explain their charismatic pull – their ability to suck us into
caring about them despite ample evidence of their lack of caring for us. What they care about is the attention that we
focus on them – and it is important that we be clear that we are talking, then, about
the narcissistic psychopath.
As one such psychopath clarified, it is not that the
psychopath does not know the rules, it is that they are not bound by them except as it
serves them to observe them. Rather than
simply doing things because they are the right thing to do, as most of us do –
we have internalized the rules and the threat of punishment is essentially unnecessary
to sustain our inhibitions (though getting a speeding ticket now and then does
curb my speeding for a while) - they are consciously choosing to follow the rules
or the laws because it is strategic to do so – not because they have to. If it is advantageous to them not to follow
the law and when the risk of doing that is calculated to be low, they will do what
is expedient.
So why are we drawn to such people? First, and most importantly, because they are
alive. Their drives – their desires – their
feelings – are present to them. They don’t
defend against them, they manage them, or fail to manage them (Logan’s rages
are volcanic), and they are real. When we are
confronted by them, we don’t just deal with them. We need to think about them, plot against
them, and weigh whether confronting them is worth it to us. Do we really want to invest that much in this
interaction? Are we up for going toe to
toe at the drop of a hat?
A friend of mine who was bipolar talked about his experience
when he was manic. He felt so alive, so
aware, so awake. And he particularly
felt sexually alive and awake. And women
would respond to this. They would
frequently have sex with him after spending very little time with him. It was a combination of his losing his
inhibitions, feeling more powerfully sexual, and of being able to concentrate
all of the energy he was feeling on a single person at this moment that, at
least as he reported it, led to a very different sex life than he experienced
when not under the influence of mania. I
am suggesting that narcissistic psychopaths have access to similar life juices
on a pretty regular basis.
But, while this accounts for our attraction in the flesh –
and perhaps to our enthrallment with them as objects of interest, Succession
got under my skin for more personal reasons – reasons that I wasn’t aware of
until this episode. In this episode, where the loss of the father was expressed and felt by each of these damaged and largely unaware children, I think it came to me that all fathers have a kind of low level narcissistic psychopathy on a relatively normal basis. Freud focused his interest in the Oedipal
situation on the child’s experience and acted as if it were the child's attraction to the father and the mother that is driver of the whole
drama. I don’t buy that. So I will tell a slightly different fable:
Fathers, in our industrial society, traditionally left the
home to do work “on the children’s behalf”.
They were expected to be selfless providers. But, of course, they resented this. Instead of respect at work, they had to compete with others on a consistent basis.
And then, when they got home, they frequently found that their spouse
was more interested in the children and what was going on domestically than
they were with what was going on in the world of the father. Now they had to compete with the children for what should have been coming to them.
Heinz Kohut clarified for us that our narcissistic needs are
not somehow met and then they disappear was we become capable of working from our
full tank of self-esteem and self-confidence.
In fact, he said, we continue to need validation to maintain a sense of competence
and worth. Some of this, under the best
of circumstances, gets accorded to us at work – sometimes more than at home, so
we often spend more and more time at work, justifying it as somehow being for
the good of the family while using it as the replenishment of our tank.
Of course, in a post-industrial world, the need to be validated
by the world is compounded as two spouses are returning home to a place that
should be a refuge, but is frequently chaotic and where, instead of a caring
presence, additional demands are placed on each of them. We are in the middle of figuring out this
shift and, to this point, we have blamed the patriarchy for the ills that are
so manifest in Logan, but we will see if, as things evolve, our challenges continue
to be gendered or if we find new ways to manage them as the workplace becomes
feminized and men influence the domestic sphere.
In any case, I think that the plaintive cries of Logan’s children
– Roman’s inability to deliver the speech that he had been practicing with ease
all morning when he was confronted with the actuality of his father’s death;
Kendall’s putting together what needed to be said – pretending to be the grown-up in the room in the face of the loss of the true adult; and Shiv’s
vulnerability as she recalled being a child playing outside their father’s
office and his rage at being interrupted by the sounds of their play, somehow
brought home to me that part of what drew me to the show is that this is a
version – a distorted, larger than life, twisted version – of the family that I
grew up in.
We did not have multiple marriages in my family. We did not have inestimable wealth – quite the
contrary. But we did have a complicated inter-generational
family where, I think, there was a tremendous desire to be loved on the part of
each of the members – and, at moments, a tragic inability for any of us to see
the needs of the others for validation and loving because of the momentary strength of our own needs. And then, when this is a more or less constant state, it is only in the moment of loss –
only when the contact that is so desperately sought is no longer possible - that a new kind of reckoning has the possibility of occurring.
Would that it had been possible for each of these characters
to see themselves as a result of the “gift” of the loss of the mirror through
which each was seeing a distorted vision of him or herself. As I have mentioned before, Roman, once freed
from this mirror, is able to observe himself and to know that he is incapable
of performing the functions of the leader, something that has been painfully
obvious to us from the very start of the series. Roman is a glib, endearing fellow who appeared
to be tremendously shallow and petty and his failure to be able to have a
mature sexual relationship with a woman predicted his likely business impotence
as well. As the series progressed and it
became apparent that he was the most emotionally available of the three
children – that his shallowness may have been a cover for evolving emotional depth – it was also clear that
sensitivity is not an asset in this family – quite the contrary, it leaves you
open to ridicule and, indeed, destruction.
Shiv is finally able to see, as painful as it is, that
Kendall is also not able to fill that role.
It is less clear whether she can see that she is not fit for the role –
she has, at moments, seemed so capable to us – and the illusion has been that it
is only her gender that has blinded her father to her abilities. If it is the case that she has been able to
protect herself from the toxic burn of the family, performing this role will destroy
the parts of her that she has tried to maintain by staying outside the family
business to this point, but even a little reflection on the quality of her
relationship with her husband Tom reveals that she has been, at least in my
mind, deeply polluted by the stench of the family.
Which leaves us with Kendall. The early money was on him. But he has always seemed small while his
father was large. And with his father’s
disappearance, one might imagine that he would grow into the role, but instead
he continues to desperately aspire to it.
His failure to see himself in the absence of the distorting mirror – his
inability to recognize that he is not the person that wanted his father to
imagine him to be is not a tragic moment.
It is a sad and small moment.
Instead of realizing who and what he could have been – whatever that
might be – he will likely always harbor resentment that his legacy was stolen
from him.
When I was in college, after a summer working for my father,
I wrote him a note explaining that though I understood his wish that I would
take over his business at some point in my life, I did not believe that this
would be a good fit for me and it would not be good for us if I were to set my
sights on that goal. This was deeply
hurtful to him. I did not know how
deeply for years. He only referenced it
once. And figuring out how to see each
other outside of the narrow parameters that we had used proved to be a
difficult, indeed a lifelong task. I
believe that, on some level, I regretted not having followed in his footsteps –
it would have been a simpler life. I could have been the mirror he wanted and needed me to be. But,
ironically, if we had worked together for thirty years, we never would have
gotten to know each other in the ways that we did by my choosing not to follow
his path. Though I fear Kendell will never know
that freedom, I think I was drawn to possibility that there would be some reconciliation - some way out of the mess that only got deeper and deeper the deeper we got into it.
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