Dear Friends,
I’m sharing some reflections on Succession and Game of Thrones. There aren’t any spoilers exactly, but this pretty much assumes that you’ve seen all of both shows.
Best,
Sam
HBO’S ROMAN HISTORY OBSESSION
You may have noticed, if you’ve been watching Succession, that the characters — for lowest-common-denominator-feeding media moguls — are surprisingly well-versed in Roman history.
At an important meeting with the Pierces (a stand-in for the Sulzbergers), Logan Roy announces helpfully, “Like Romans among the Greeks. I’m sure you find us all rather, you know, big, vulgar, and boisterous.” Of an encouraging defection, a businessman remarks, “She could be our Coriolanus.” Watching a gala, Ewan Roy aptly notes that “Tacitus comes to mind. He’s made a wasteland and calls it an empire.”
The allusions extend to the names as well. Rhea (the ‘Coriolanus’ character) is a pretty classical name for a 21st century woman. And Roman Roy isn’t just called Roman — his father’s pet name for him is “Romulus,” a reference both to Rome’s founder and to its last, forgettable emperor. And the rest of the inner circle seems to be in on it as well. With the team brought to a fairly humiliating look-over in Sweden, the general consul remarks, “They can be Vikings but we’ve been raised by wolves.”
And when Tom Wambsgans — avowedly middle-class, from an outsider middle-American background — is facing a jail term, he checks out, of all possible reading material, “a big book on Roman history to read in prison.”
The not-so-subtle allusions (the show’s characters themselves get sick of them, with Logan telling his COO to “take your library card and fuck off” with his Coriolanus reference) are, taken together, meant to anchor a very particular narrative for the show. America is the Roman Empire is the basic premise. And the arc of America can then be charted with confidence — a loss of fundamental values and virtues; a tilt into autocracy and corruption; and then gradual, inexorable decline followed sooner or later by catastrophe.
What’s interesting about us as a society is that, a long time ago, we wrote our own epitaph; we just know that this is how it’s going to end. Much of it is the explicit structuring of American government on the Roman Republic — the Senate; the consciously Neo-Classical architecture; the Latinate phrasation; the myths of Washington as “Cincinnatus,” Adams as “Cicero,” and so on — and then, with the pronounced turn towards Empire around the time of World World II, and with it, an extension of the imperial power of the presidency, it’s become a fusty genre to simultaneously decry the abandonment of republican virtues while assuming that nothing really can be done about it. (It’s treated as kind of a given of Roman history that, after 500 years as a republic, the turn towards empire was irrevocable; once that system was established, ‘the die cast,’ there was never a serious attempt to turn back the dial, to restore the careful republican balances.)
Succession maps itself exactly on this set of ideas. On one side of the divide is Ewan, the embodiment of republican virtues, with his personal integrity, his store of classical quotations; and then, all the way on the other side, is the image of the collapse of the civilization, the stony-eyed protestors in the show’s penultimate episode standing for the barbarians; Matsson and his Swedish techies meant to suggest Viking pillage. The Roy media empire is what takes us from one point to the other — the diet of bread-and-circuses, of populist and yet-self-aggrandizing politics, of the steady consolidation of power — and the premise is that the perspective advanced by Ewan (and by other ‘noble’ republicans like the Pierces or Senator Eavis) is completely unavailing against the sheer animal force of the Roy empire, of money and power in their naked, essential form.
And I suppose what’s most interesting about Succession is that it doesn’t attempt to fight this narrative at all — takes it for granted. The various claimants to the purple try, at different times, to present themselves as espousing some better set of values. Shiv’s shtick is that she’s fighting the patriarchy; that appeals, above all, to the Pierces. Kendall has some idea of being a cleaner, more humane version of the empire; more tech, more charts, less office brutality. But, as the characters approach the sanctums of power, the pretenses fall away. In probably the show’s most memorable line, Logan tells Kendall, “You’re smart and you’re good, and nowadays maybe [it’s different], but you’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.”
Which is feedback that Kendall really takes in — and, the next time we see him, he has a very different look. Same goes for Shiv anytime she comes near the top. The liberal, feminist sensibility turns out to run very thin, and proximity to power for her always means back-stabbing and betrayal, an ironclad sense of power as a zero-sum game.
There is never even a hint that some other system might actually prevail — nothing like the concluding scene of Gladiator, where the dying Russell Crowe gets the bright idea of turning Rome back into a Republic. And, sort of astonishingly, there is even less optimism in Succession than in HBO’s other great Roman Empire-themed show, Game of Thrones.
Recently (trying to keep up with my 9-year-old brother and his encyclopedic knowledge of history) I’ve been reading about the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE — a period that’s poorly documented and rarely thought about — and sort of couldn’t believe how much that period matched up with Game of Thrones. There’s Hadrian’s Wall falling into abeyance; there’s the start of the barbarian incursions; the emergence of palace eunuchs; of mothers wielding outsize power over child emperors; of adventurers-turned-emperors; of potentates serving as regent-for-life in the name of pliable emperors. Even many of the names (e.g. Valyrian) line up. As far as I can tell, Joffrey is Heliogabalus, Cersei — Julia Maesa, Bron — Philip the Arab, Theon — Valerian; Tommen — Gordian II; Euron — Stilicho; Yara - Bodicaea; the Sparrows — the Christians; the religion of the Red God — Mithraism; the Wildlings invasion — the Great Conspiracy.
But, in Game of Thrones, despite the incessant breakdown of the social order and the flourishing of various sociopaths, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Game of Thrones, in its historical references, mashes up the later Roman Empire with the High Middle Ages, and if there is a sense at the end of Game of Thrones of the world dissolving into medieval mythology (Daenerys, Bran), there is also, more pertinently, an idea that shrewd, enlightened figures (Tyrion, Varys) could create, in a word, the Renaissance, push past the medieval mumbo-jumbo and the zero-sum sociopathic politics and develop an efficient, technocratic state built on something other than brute force.
Succession — which more closely mirrors contemporary American reality — offers no similar path out. The premise is that money has captured the political system (Logan may be exaggerating when he calls the president “an intern” but only slightly) while oligarchy and nepotism have supplanted the meritocracy. People who are working their way up the ladder — like Tom, like Rhea — are well-served by displaying the absolute minimum of personal initiative or integrity, by slavishly turning themselves over to whomever happens to be in charge.
It is an extraordinarily bleak vision — and the show’s creators are brilliant in making it as bleak as possible. As the finale makes clear, the show is really about Kendall — and always had been. Kendall’s central problem — as Logan had observed; and which underscores the constant criticism of him by other characters within the show — is that he’s fundamentally a pretty nice, gentle person. He’s not — using the terms that are regularly thrown out for Logan — “a brute,” “a silverback,” “a bastard.” And nobody can ever forgive him for being not that; for being not his father.
There’s a parallel scene in Game of Thrones in which Daenerys revisits the Dothraki years after she had been their queen and finds them to be fairly pleasant, low-key barbarians, far less musculatured or ambitious than what she is used to — and is thoroughly disgusted with how far they have fallen. From the perspective of Daenerys or the Roy siblings or the mindset we get into as we watch these shows, we might be upset with the Dothraki and with Kendall for being weak, for not having what Kendall calls the “magnificent awful force” of Logan.
But — the shows’ creators keep quietly insisting — this is not a good way to think. Societies get into dangerous places when they venerate force; when they fall for the charisma of raw power. It can work for a generation or so, with the sort of leader who combines authority with a degree of benevolence (e.g. Robert Baratheon), but sooner or later it fractionalizes and, in the scramble for power, it’s the sociopaths who have all the advantages. Kendall seems, throughout the show, like a somewhat weak, somewhat awkward figure, who’s not really ready for the challenges of running Waystar Royco, but that’s actually not what the show is about. What it’s about is the breaking of a fundamentally good man — of someone who would have been a fair, reform-minded administrator but who cannot compete with a veneration of force (and, with that, of sociopathy) that runs through the culture.
Wonderful, thoughtful take, especially--and speaking as a ‘Succession’-head--on the dynamic of power in that remarkable, and remarkably bleak, series. I just wish to highlight this paragraph below, which speaks to the institutional capture and decay and -- as TalkingPointsMemo put it recently--the ‘moral rot’ at the heart of today’s Republican Party, which more correctly should be called the Trumpublican Party. This paragraph evokes the hazardous historical moment America now is facing:
“Societies get into dangerous places when they venerate force; when they fall for the charisma of raw power. It can work for a generation or so, with the sort of leader who combines authority with a degree of benevolence (e.g. Robert Baratheon), but sooner or later it fractionalizes and, in the scramble for power, it’s the sociopaths who have all the advantages.”