#succession
Strong told me that, during the filming of the pilot, he asked Armstrong at one point whether they could spend some extra time exploring Kendall’s history. “Jesse said, ‘Let me sit with this for a minute,’ and I went and got some lunch, and then twenty minutes later I got an e-mail entitled ‘Window Rumination.’ It was a fully realized monologue—a memory he’d created of Kendall visiting the office when he was six years old. He was like this little prince in the office, and everyone was adoring of him and smiling, and he kind of wandered off a little too far, and there was this huge guy, a security guard, who didn’t know who he was, and it sort of escalated, and this six-year-old Kendall was powerless and tongue-tied, until his father came and found him. It was a poignant and beautiful piece of writing, and, to me, central to this character’s struggle and experience—being lost in this oceanic moment and being saved by his father’s embrace.” The scene didn’t make it into the pilot, “but it’s all embedded,” Strong told me. “It was an amazing experience of finding this character together.”
Based on an excerpt from the 2021 New Yorker Jesse Armstrong profile that @ratmonk posted
spacesweepers
Sorry for Succ discoursing on main, but Succ isn’t saying that queerness is decadent bourgeois degeneracy just because it’s implied of amoral wealthy characters. It’s actually one of the few points where the audience can sympathize with the Roy siblings, and reading the characters through that lens deepens understandings of them because their emotionally and physically abusive father is so homophobic (and the characters who knew them as children did nothing to intervene on their behalf).
Roman’s alleged affair with his male trainer was brought up by Gerri in s2 and Shiv in s3, and that relationship, whatever it may have been, and the fact that something is “wrong” with him, are framed as threats to him and the family, and are constantly weaponized against him or used to belittle him.
With Kendall, there’s whatever went on with Stewy, and also the cruising subtext with the waiter: their conversation sounds like a pick-up, they get into a car, and then “Uptown Girl” plays, which is arguably about both the waiter and Kendall, and Tom and Shiv. The idea of a pick-up is bolstered by the fact that the waiter also took Greg home with him the previous night. The fandom likes to joke about Logan being like, “Fellas, is it gay to kill someone in a car crash?,” but yes, of course it is! Logan asking if Kendall tried to fuck Andrew Dodds wasn’t out of nowhere. If Dodds was a waitress, even if nothing happened, people would be like, oh, the mistress? It’s the classic fiction trope of a powerful rich man’s partyboy lifestyle killing a disposable working class lover, and it happens in real life as well! This was assumed to be the case in the fictional Myrtle Wilson’s death (though it wasn’t), and also in the death of the real Mary Jo Kopechne, which inspired this plot line. There’s additional weight to Logan holding the waiter’s death over Kendall’s head because there’s the implicit threat of Logan outing Kendall in addition to everything else.
[content warning: discussion of fascism and mention of Nazism]
The fascist minor character Jeryd Mencken (played by Justin Kirk, best known for his lead role as Prior Walter in HBO’s Angels in America miniseries) isn’t gay-coded just to make him seem more villainous. Rather, he embodies the idea that homoeroticism is almost an inevitability (unintentional, of course) of hypermasculine homosocial spaces like politics and business, and also of his fascist ideology. Fascism is inherently misogynist and homophobic, but by glorifying a specific masculine ideal (body types, facial features, behaviors, style, professions, etc.), prioritizing male-male relationships in workplaces and leisure activities (friendships, business partnerships, friendly or unfriendly rivalries, uni drinking buddies, etc.), and relegating women into subservient roles at home in the domestic sphere, it creates homosocial spaces that also become accidentally homoerotic. (Jack Halberstam has written about how gay iconography of virile masculinity and homosociality paralleled Nazi iconography. Similarly, monuments erected under Mussolini’s regime, most notably at Foro Italico, also glorified ideals of virile masculinity.) Business and politics are similarly mostly homosocial (and women, if they even make their way into such spaces, have to perform “masculinity” in specific ways and “femininity” in others for even a modicum of respect). Roman, who expresses interest in fascism, has business dealings in men’s bathrooms, in what is either a conscious or subconscious manner of excluding Shiv. It’s also no coincidence that these meetings also have connotations of bathroom hookups. (Tangential but important to note: rich and powerful far-right men who experience same-gender desire or engage in same-gender sexual encounters may consider themselves above proletariat notions of sexuality (see the Roy Cohn clout speech in Angels in America).) There is a distinction here between queer-coding an unambiguously evil fascist to make him more villainous (which Succ is NOT doing), and having homoeroticism be an accidental byproduct of being in a misogynist homosocial environment reinforced by a similarly misogynist homosocial ideology.
desertendroad
stewy hosseini in charge of suicide watch next episode good luck soldier