So the speculation about who gets what is finally over, and now we know it. How many weeks, how many years, I watched with the volume turned up, the subtitles turned on, the synopsis of the plot from the fan site, open on my phone, without even understanding what was happening. Surprisingly, it didn't matter, because the warring claimants to Logan's empire are as ignorant as I am, steeped up to their necks in inspired, spontaneous verbiage of insults, exaltation, stabs in the back, and self-deprecation. a delusion that I am only too willing to believe is the currency of money, media, and corporate masculinity when they are cut off from the reality of modest expectations.
Those who are made fabulously rich by the gods are forced to fly helicopters and are deprived of a language that makes sense. So my lack of understanding of what's going on is the highest tribute I can give to the genius of Legacy. Nothing really happens. But I may be wrong. Maybe everything.
The heir to 39 episodes, by virtue of her ambition and mastery of agility, is Kendall Roy. It was this huge hole in the universe that Kendall's name bore and that he tried to fill in with phrases whose meaninglessness had never been heard before, and that got me interested in Legacy in the first place. His lack of all the qualities that make a character exciting captivated me. After the long-awaited death of his father, he explained his panic to his sister with the words: «Shiv, we are fighting to the death with the ogres.» Her answer belongs to the immortals. «Ken, you're reading the papers,» she said.
It was a sublime insult from a woman who had yet to meet a man who could say a single sensible word, but Kendall's fantasy of fighting ogres to the death while reading the newspaper was majestic in itself. Same. This was the joy of the Continuity, in which fools chased each other like empty balloons through the empyrean of private jets and linguistic madness. Did it matter? Well, the empire that Roy's family fought over must skew elections and choose presidents. Yes, but don't we care? This ignorance is exciting.
Succession is too far removed from reality to be a satire. From the first dark moment when the ailing Emperor Logan Roy felt for the light and asked where the hell he had been, we knew we didn't know each other anywhere. The gear shift to harrowing comedy was immediate—Kendall, a young face-off pretender, sat in the back seat of his limo, headphones on, singing along to the rap while accepting the driver’s assurances that he was “the man.”
Flimmer Master: Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy (Succession) with Brian Cox as Logan Roy. Photo: HBO
That he was not «the man» for any task on this or any other planet, we knew from his bashful inadequacy. Perhaps he knew it too. «Obviously I'm a swimmer,» he soon told his father, hoping to hide the failed deal. What is soft-floater? Do not ask. We realized and shuddered.
Like Logan Roy, we wondered where the hell we were. The terrain was high and hellish, the towers of Manhattan graced the opulent backdrop, but the spirit was an existential pantomime—hyperbolic and scatological, transcendent, a kind of warning from a technofuture in a language we only half knew, as if we'd wandered into a rich man's Clockwork Orange. and never found the door.
The sophisticated illiteracy of the script called out other writers at every turn. Not Shakespeare, although the themes of royalty and succession have led some fans to find similarities where they are only superficial. Yes, there is old age and youth that does not get along, and in Kendall's brother Roman there is even an obscene fool, obsessed, like all good fools, on his penis. But the effervescence of the language keeps the deepest notes of Shakespeare's desolation at arm's length. However, if not Shakespeare, then the script is filled with the sounds of other writers — Tom Wolfe, John Berryman, Anthony Burgess and such great contemporaries as David Mamet and Martin Amis, these deadly comedic inventors of new ways of expressing greed to hide themselves. in.
'Indecent fool': Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy
At any moment, however, some character could break through the shell of lies and show us the kink of their humanity, as Kendall did when Roman's unexpected emotional breakdown at their father's funeral led him to deliver an impromptu eulogy. “I mean, look at this… lives, incomes and things he has done. And money. Yes, money. The vital blood, the oxygen of this wonderful civilization that we have built from mud…
Particles of life flowing around this nation… majestic, terrible power in it…
a man content with this world. “His feet cross the ocean…? Well, not quite.
But if we were expecting a tragic resonance, then this eulogy to the mechanics of heroic greed was it. It was like a reprimand. In what other ways have we denied Logan Roy, as well as Kendall, their measure of greatness? Should people be vilified just because they want to steal the world and their words have lost their minds?
Well, the music and opening credits always annoyed us, no matter what we thought about the capitalists. Clips of privilege and suffering, both absurd and elegant, began each episode, shifting subtly week after week to unnerving music that sounded wary of Beethoven's sonata and the strings sounded Italian (should we have thought ? ) and, if I'm not mistaken, hints of a hip-hop rhythm in a drum kit that tricked Kendall into thinking he was a «man». Music turns morality into a liar.
No matter how much we disdain these masters of the universe as they fly away in their helicopters into the empty blue of insensitive nonsense, Beethoven's honky-tonk set us up to take to the skies with them.
And now the cards are dealt. Alone in the back seat of a coffin-like limousine, Shiv and her treacherous husband Tom, now the CEO, touch the coldest of fingers. Nothing awaits them but the «planning opportunities» of their monumental cynicism. Yes, this is a fair pay, but the tragedy of retribution remains a tragedy. Look at Kendall, a man for all time, alone and looking out to sea with nothing to show for all those obelisks of words. Ask me who won and finally I know. Nobody. No matter. Fool Roman with a bubble of rattlesnakes delivered a not quite final verdict — «It's all bullshit, man.»
Television doesn't do much right, and no one reads serious novels anymore, but «Continuity» can be simply the first great piece of 21st century nihilism, or at least the first to make us laugh to the very end.
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