There are moments when Succession shimmers, visibly and physically. Like at the end of season two, when the high violin vibrates in tune with ripples reflecting off the shiny white hull of that yacht. And at a glance one might feel these shimmers as portraits of wealth and power designed to do whatever such landscapes of exponential extravagance do for viewers of other shows, from Million Dollar Listing to Big Little Lies.
But the veteran Succession spectator will experience these moments as expressions of the gaping trauma, the echoing caverns of humanity, that define its characters; or at least I do. Two full seasons have plotted a direct relationship between sumptuousness and emotional desperation; the more exquisite the presentation, the more piercing the cries for help.
So for me these moments make flesh the awesome emotional no-man’s land the characters inhabit, scooped out pits and torn barbed wire and shrapnel strewn about. They raise the shade on the heads of Shiv and Kendall and everyone else, inside which you can see the desolation throbbing behind their eyes, the fear gulping in their throats, as vividly as if they were wounded, their bodies marked with impressions, torn or scraped, red and glistening, the sting of recency ringing out.
This blaring human suffering is set back in a diorama of...despicableness? I don’t know; despicableness is too simple and dismissive a word with which to weigh the heaviness of these people’s unseeing of the world as they step out of Escalades and choppers. Their obliviousness to the stalling of the earth’s life-sustaining architectures, the spreading of mental nausea, and every other system failure as they pluck immaculately stemless glasses of green garnished fizz out of the hands of physical, yet invisible, human beings, and lie about a cushioned deck on the Aegean in their fine clothes and hats. These children also cannot even see, let alone feel in their guts, the rapidly dimming ambience of our unfolding history, the dark turn in the plot line of the narrative tapestry of all of our lives in which they are large, defining, non-ornamental figures.
I’m an out of tune voice among my generation of urban dwellers when it comes to the idea of the injustice of the world. Yet I feel anger at the depth, complexity, and massive intricacy of the conspiracy of denial within and among the Roy children as to the forces humans have unleashed upon the world and ourselves, that have escaped our grasp and now spin beyond our casual control.
But alongside of all the deep-stewing disgust that gurgles up from inside as I watch, the the vicious slicings, intentional torture, and indifference to pain these people sit around luxuriating in pulls out of me a kind of yelping compassion. This is Succession’s twisted harmony.