What did it mean, this winking reference to sex and weed? What was the richest man on Earth trying to convey about his mind and the market, which are edging ever closer to the same thing? In a recent episode of Succession, the Roy family finds itself asking similar questions while attempting to decode the statements of a Muskily obdurate tech tycoon named Lukas Matsson.
Matsson is a new character on Succession, but a familiar figure: someone who enters the mix as a potential business partner for the Roys and who does extremely little, in the end, to alter their circumstances.
Its inertias, shaped by the whims of the wretchedly rich, double as indictments of a culture that loves to talk about change—and then chooses, again and again, to side with the status quo.
“Maybe there were always going to be death camps, and maybe the planet is going to fry, and there’s nothing we can do.
All of the airflow gets interrupted, though, by the force that operates, in Succession, as variously a looming threat, a tool of interpersonal reprisal, and an all-purpose rationalization: “the market.” At one moment, Kendall is yelling “Fuck the patriarchy!” to paparazzi at a gala; at another, he’s telling his sister why she’ll never be CEO.
If metaphors tend to reflect their times, from human as machine during the industrial age to human as animal during the height of Darwin, then many of today’s metaphors come down to capital.
The language trickles down, on the show as elsewhere.
Caroline, Shiv’s absentee mother, explains to Shiv why she didn’t fight for her after divorcing Logan: “I gave him custody so you could protect your shares and I could protect your interests.” Kendall informs Greg, his cousin and sometime ally, “I’m still not saying I will burn you; all I’m saying is I might burn you.
I guess I’m a climate denier.” One of the most brutal lines of Succession’s first season, “no real person involved”—the phrase that protected Kendall from the consequences of killing a worker at Shiv’s wedding—has become, by this point, a refrain.
The revelations lead to a flurry of dramatic action—congressional testimonies, Logan’s decision to sacrifice Kendall, an FBI raid of the Waystar offices—and in the end, for the viewer, almost no catharsis.
It holds them in its grip and elevates them at the same time—guaranteeing a world of limitless choices and exceedingly few possibilities.
The history professor and author Yuval Noah Harari talks about “imagined orders”: the mythologies that shape people’s most fundamental conceptions of the rules of the world.