Talking about talking about Succession
Not a typo, literally talking about Succession discourse
Today’s Tangent
“Words are just nothing. Complicated airflow”
Is something said by Succession’s Kendall Roy (played by Jeremey Strong) in the second episode of the series and I think my jaw dropped when I first heard them. It was an early, strong indicator of the show’s approach to dialogue that showcases a strange, unexpected poetry — coming from the mouths of morally reprehensible characters.
It’s one of the things that makes Succession one of the most gripping and philosophically fascinating shows...ever. I promise I’m not being hyperbolic just for the sake of it.
The quote in particular I think highlights one of Succession’s thesis statements: that language and speech are often used as a tool to gain power, rather than pure ideological expression. You can say anything you want to gain power, and then take it all back and the only thing you’ve really done is, as Kendall puts it, complicated the flow of air in front of you.
And as a show centering on specifically a media empire this idea gets magnified into epic, terrifying proportions. It’s not just that a few powerful people manipulate language in this way, it’s that they are given the platform and the means to replicate this sort of speech on a mass scale.
One of the easter eggs of the show are the fake news headlines that appear in the opening credits, changing every season (my favorite being “Gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice’”). And they serve as a clear example of how this sort of vacuous speech, that doesn’t really mean anything, has very real effects on the way we think and feel, again both on an individual and a cultural level.
The thing about ~ the Internet ~ is that it has given us access to an unprecedented amount of speech, the kind that aims to describe and express in a genuine way, and the kind that is used simply to manipulate a situation to a certain advantage. And let’s be real, all speech contains elements of both ends of this spectrum. It’s because of the mechanisms of the Internet that you are reading this flight of fancy newsletter right now, rather than this just existing in my head. I’ll let you decide if that’s ultimately a good thing or a bad thing.
So I think it’s both interesting and important to consider Succession and what it reveals about language, not just as an isolated text, but in the larger world. Since it so clearly is trying to convey something about the world at large. And I think it points towards a world where language and expression are both addictively powerful and also totally ephemeral and meaningless. A world where it’s difficult to distinguish, even within ourselves, between what is “genuine” speech and what isn’t.
How Succession Talks
I’ll be honest and a lot of this is inspired by this video essay by Nerdwriter1, detailing how people in Succession are often/always using language to manipulate: from lying, to empty business rhetoric, to outright gaslighting.
Succession is a very walk and talk kind of show. Aside from some establishing shots and rare moments of silence, people are speaking almost all the time. And yet it’s almost never clear what anyone’s true motives or feelings are because they never express them. So everyone is saying a bunch of stuff that is essentially meaningless, while also trying to figure out what other people are really thinking or feeling.
In this way, characters are very focused on their public image, but are either unable or unwilling to confront their own hopes/fears/dreams/whatever on an internal level. Logan wants to be seen as the big bad business guy. Kendall wants to have “cool tweets.” And as viewers it is equally difficult to figure out what is “real” behind what characters are projecting (and also remembering they are not, in fact, real people). You get the obvious sense that they’re bullshitting you, it’s just difficult to know exactly how.
And that really puts you in a similar headspace to the characters: confused to the point of paranoia, trying you best to use the tiniest of clues (a facial expression, a movement, a hesitation) as any sort of indicator to what is really going on.
I’ll also recommend a second video essay about how the show’s cinematography really captures this feeling, it’s signature shaky cam/documentary style look (which, I’ll be honest, did really annoy me though I’ve come around as they’ve polished their approach) puts viewers as direct observers into the lives of these characters. Not as viewers, but as people in the room (where it happens), not seeing things as an impartial judge, but as someone with particular things that catch their eye, or things that surprise them.
I also want this to be an excuse to talk about Succession’s absolutely amazing score by Nicholas Britell (I will take any excuse to talk about this). Not only is it just fabulous as music, but I think it is really impactful as a counterpoint to the obscurity of the rest of the show. When characters are constantly lying and obscuring reality with words, the score cuts through to some amorphous truth in a way that only music can. In a show (and world) where it can be incredibly difficult to unpack what’s “really” happening, we cling to the few things that feel like truth.
And that’s why it’s OK and in fact normal that the Succession soundtrack was my top listened to album of 2020.
Talking about Succession
Of course, Succession exists not just within itself, but as a piece of media in the world. As Season 3 has started airing, this is the first time I’ve been watching in real time as episodes come out. And I’ve noticed in myself this...let’s call it an insatiable desire for discourse. It’s an impulse I’ve had with a lot of my favorite shows because I am unable to be chill about anything ever. I was desperate for anything from funny tweets to episode breakdowns, to just general conversation.
The dearth of conversation (not to say people weren’t talking about it, just that they weren’t talking about it enough) lead me to...the Succession subreddit. No hate to reddit, exactly, but it’s definitely not the first place I go for these sorts of things. And got frustrated as I felt like the discourse wasn’t as, I guess spicy, as I was hoping. There weren’t interesting ideas that I hadn’t thought of, or fun facts from behind the scenes. It was just very...basic “I think this character might be up to something!!” (yes every character is always up to something).
And I truly don’t mean to be making fun of the posters. This isn’t a Succession subreddit attack piece. It’s just that it got me thinking about this impulse in me. What exactly am I looking for when I am constantly refreshing the Succession tag on Twitter? Or liking every TikTok referencing Succession so I get on “the Succession side of TikTok”?
I don’t think I’m alone in this impulse, or that it’s truly unique to our time, but I think the Internet and social media play a pretty crucial role in stoking this sort of behavior. Whatever your interest, there’s always some sort of ongoing conversation about it...somewhere. You just have to figure out where it is.
The thing about the Internet is that, as Greg realizes in season 3: it’s big. But it is not infinite. And even if it was...how could you possibly always find what you’re looking for? Sure, you can get good at searching, or spend a lot of time digging through sites, but for everyone there will be a time where you’re left hanging a little. Not figuring out that movie you vaguely remember watching 10 years ago, or, in my case, the exact sort of Succession breakdown that I was in the mood for.
This kind of wealth of information is certainly useful in many ways, but it can also be addictive. Maybe this is just me, but sometimes I will go down rabbit holes of stuff, going through pages and pages of Google results, a dozen plus tabs open, only to suddenly think: “wait why am I doing this? Am I really getting what I want out of this?”
It’s like, on a smaller scale, how streaming services like Netflix try and make it seem like they have an infinite library by constantly adding new content, but if you actually start looking for something in particular, you realize it’s not there. You might be infinitely scrolling through the different categories, but there’s less there than you think.
And what’s the point of things operating like this, anyway? It keeps you More Online, sure. But what’s the purpose of all this speech, all this content? I’m not saying that everything written on the Internet is useless (said as someone contributing to the noise of the Internet on a twice monthly basis). But how much of it has substance and how much of it is just airflow?
Talking on the Internet
I truly do not have the answer to these sorts of questions, and honestly I think it’s dangerous to try and simply lump things into “meaningful” vs.“unmeaningful” boxes. But I think that this sort of cultural environment is what produces some of the things that we see now as scary impacts of the Internet.
The influx of information, and disinformation, makes it very, very difficult for any one person to sort through in any sort of sustainable way. We try to categorize people and ideas in ways that become so shorthanded that they are stripped of any nuance and totally removed from the original intent of that statement.
We tend to use whatever tiny context clues to infer as much as you can: a pride emoji in a person’s bio, if they say Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays, who they follow on Twitter. All these things say something about these people, but maybe not as much as you assume. The pride emoji could be an overly enthusiastic ally, the Merry Christmas person maybe says both interchangeably depending on context, the Bad Twitter Follow might just be from years ago and never updated.
And as soon as you start making all these assumptions, it becomes almost impossible to actually understand each other in any sort of meaningful way. Someone says “Happy Holidays” to you and you yell at them “why do you hate Christmas and our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” How can two people have any sort of productive conversation after that?
The combination of having an overload of information, with no easy way of knowing what’s real or true encourages people to 1. Make wild assumptions based on what little they know and 2. Be constantly on the hunt for more information, to try and make sense of what they have already learned.
It’s sort of a quality vs. quantity issue, if you want to oversimplify it. Just having a lot of information isn’t necessarily better than limiting yourself to a contained sample and actually going through and evaluating it. And as soon as you become overly reliant on shorthand (something your brain is hardwired to do: notice patterns and make assumptions), it becomes much more difficult to untangle those ideas from the reality that is staring at you. Maybe that person was just saying Happy Holidays, no additional agenda attached.
Obviously I fail at this all the time — I was just detailing how I was infinite scrolling through inane tweets just saying “I like succession, it’s a good show” (no hate to them, this is a Valid Point) just in hopes of getting some morsel of More Discourse for some vague desire for Content, and getting frustrated that the posters weren’t giving me the exact kind of ideas that I wanted them to. It’s a weird thing that the Internet does to our brains.
Please watch Succession
Look, maybe this was just an elaborate way to trick you into watching Succession and then you can talk about it with me, and then I don’t have to go on a manic hunt for fun conversations about it on the Internet.
The thing I love about it is how well it is able to touch on central questions of our time — from big picture ideas about corporate greed and consolidating wealth, to the more human drama of “how do you deal with deeply flawed people?” — and the way it builds a world that is parallel to our own without it ever becoming a simplistic one to one metaphor.
And to me one of the most interesting questions is the one of language and speech. Not only is it a superbly well written show in its own right: just the most beautifully poetic and hilarious uses of the word “fuck” you can imagine, it also is very interested in the way words do and don’t have meaning — and how, despite the lack of substance to most speech, what we’re really looking for is that oh-so-hard to find genuine human understanding.
Latest on Letterboxd
Ready Or Not — I’m just saying I wouldn’t hate to marry into an eccentric but evil family who owned a board game company, no matter how many satanic rituals they do
I also watched Scream but haven’t reviewed it yet. Happy Halloween!
Best of my Pocket List
In a stroke of luck, this piece about the QAnon-y nature of gossip site crazy days and nights is also about parsing meaning out of scraps of information, in one of the more sinister ways it can manifest
Figured it would make sense to recommend Vox’s Emily VanDerWerff’s writing on Succession, since it is great. It does contain spoilers for Season 3 Episode 2. She also did recaps of the previous two seasons which are what made me fall in love with the show in the first place.
Best of the Rest
Since I used it so liberally in the images for this newsletter, I feel like I have to recommend the No Context Succession Twitter account. Honestly, the whole show is so weird it always feels like it’s happening without context, but this preserves the very best bits.
