A common and very fair criticism of Succession is that while the creators build some really intense dramatic moments, the show tends to lack meaningful follow through for many of those moments because the Roy family is so insulated from consequences due to their immense wealth and power. Brandon Taylor’s analysis of this issue in season 3 is, in my estimation, the best characterization of this facet of the show. Whenever there is a real threat to the show’s status quo, things eventually return to stasis. The characters are so wealthy, powerful, and predictable that the other shoe never drops so much as it is put down with varying degrees of emphasis.
In season 3, one of those shoes is Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), the fascist presidential candidate selected by Roman (Kieran Culkin) and confirmed by Logan (Brian Cox) to be favoured in Waystar-Royco’s election coverage. While this takes place in the sixth episode of season 3 and fades into the background for the season’s third act, this may end up being the episode that most shapes the final season(s). There is a bleak Italo-German co-production from 1969 that I have not seen mentioned in analysis of Succession so far, and I think it might be a major influence on the show, perhaps even picking up where the show could end if the Roy children are ever able to actually become the people they think they are.
Luchino Visconti was a gay communist filmmaker from an aristocratic family, active from 1943 to 1976, and I suspect someone in the Succession writers’ room is a fan of his work. While Visconti had a long and varied career, in North America he is perhaps best known for movies that explore the undoing of families: Rocco and His Brothers (1960) surveys the slow dissolution of a rural family after they move to Milan in the 1920s; The Leopard (1963) tracks the decline in the power of aristocratic families as Italian nationalism sweeps the peninsula; and The Damned (1969) explores a family of wealthy German industrialists consumed by violence, blackmail, and incest as they transfer their status as aristocrats to positions in the Nazi regime. These ensemble epics detail the ways that family members fray each other’s edges, the mercies and betrayals that keep the order in tact, and the gravitational impact patriarchs and matriarchs have on their offspring regardless of how loyal or rebellious each child is.
While there are shades of Visconti’s other epics in Succession’s character arcs, relationships, and plot points, the shape of the show bears the most resemblance to The Damned, though less as an adaptation than a kind of reflective spiritual prequel migrated from 1930s German fascism to 2020s American capitalism. Both set their opening credits using footage of their wealth generators, use King Lear-esque inheritance tragedy plot structures set in the industrial and professional sphere, and are true ensemble pieces without a consistent, clear protagonist. Both share a visual interest in the non-familial characters that accessorize the focalized families’ lifestyles, and both have been criticized for being a little prone to stagnance as larger arcs and dramatic scenes are set up.
These stories are not identical by any stretch, but there is enough strange symmetry between the characters and narratives of The Damned and Succession that comparing the two can highlight the eerie relationship between capitalism and facism, and potentially the ease with which the wealthy can transition from one to the other.
The Damned opens as the Essenbeck family gathers to celebrate the birthday of their patriarch, Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals), a celebration which is interrupted by news of the Reichstag burning. The birthday dinner culminates with Joachim’s announcement of his retirement from his position at the Essenbeck steelworks and plans for the company to be split between his nephew Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff) and grandson Martin (Helmut Berger). Succession also begins with Logan’s birthday, includes his announcement of retirement, and is interrupted by Logan’s hemorrhagic stroke. Unlike Logan Roy, Joachim Essenbeck, a baron and the owner of the company which funds the lavish lifestyle of his family, has already determined how the company will be split when he passes, but that clarity does not spare him from his family’s violent greed. Joachim is somewhat more personable than Logan; conservative in the sense that he is an aristocrat with monarchist sympathies, kaiser nostalgia and no love for the Nazi party, and prone to micromanaging the company beyond the wills of his children. But where Logan keeps his power hungry anklebiting children under his thumb, Joachim’s fascist flock kill him by the 40 minute mark and frame the only non-Nazi adult in the familiy for his murder.
Visconti’s films have a nuanced approach to aristocracy, particularly in The Leopard. As a child of the aristocracy, one might expect Visconti to favour monarchist apologia. However, his depiction of Italian princedom in The Leopard and baronhood in The Damned contextualizes these systems of power with early democratic governments in ways that do not really celebrate aristocracy so much as they use them as a litmus test for democratic systems, often highlighting the ways that nationalism and capitalism can enshrine familial dynasties of power just as effectively as aristocratic status can. The cruelty of aristocrats, in many Visconti films, comes from being out of touch, both with the consequences of their actions and the people whose lives they control; they are isolated in their enigmatic little worlds with esoteric rules and develop myopic entitlement and an inability to see others as people rather than props. People who successfully navigate capitalism and liberal democracy in these two Visconti films are cruel with intention and calculated precision, and they are able to transfer and codify the immunity of aristocracy into the capitalist nation state. Aristocratic parents in these films are not great people, but their children who grow up under capitalism have a much greater capacity for strategic cruelty. In Logan Roy and his children there is an inversion of this dynamic, with Logan capable of far more sophisticated schemes than his offspring, who were born into the immunity from consequence and reality provided by billions of dollars. The Roy children bear the brunt of the abuse tactics Logan honed as a successful capitalist business owner, but they exhibit the entitled obliviousness of Visconti’s nobility and are constantly out-maneuvered by those who got into the Waystar-Royco boardrooms by doing their own dirty work.
The Roy children have counterparts in the Essenbeck family, but unlike the Roys, the Essenbecks are able to be the tacticians that the Roy children wish they were. Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) find their counterparts in the controlling Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), who married Joachim’s beloved and now dead oldest son, and Sophie’s secret beau Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), an executive in the Essenbeck company. Sophie pulls the strings of all the family members, certainly more effectively than Shiv, while Friedrich attempts to make moves but is unable to deliver, making him easily walked over by the Essenbecks (though both Tom and Friedrich have their successful machiavellian moments). Depending on how the show continues in season 4, however, Shiv may take on the role of dead child (to Logan, at least) while the effective manipulator Tom and lackey Greg (Nicholas Braun) take on the Sophie/Friedrich dynamic.
Connor (Alan Ruck) bears perhaps the most resemblance to Konstantine, a brash and anti-intellectual SA officer whose hunger for power is matched by his inability to understand the more nuanced games being played by the other family members. Though Konstantine’s machismo is acknowledged (and worked around) by his family members, Connor’s every scene emphasizes his failure to embody the mature, independent older brother role that he desperately wants to play.
Roman’s mannerisms and more successful maneuvering bear some resemblance to Ashenbach (Helmut Griem), Joachim’s nephew and an SS leader. Aschenbach successfully plays almost every member of the family off of each other and has a role in each death. Unlike Roman, though, he doesn’t hesitate to orchestrate the death of the patriarch. The characters share a sliminess and tendency to shift the overton window of any given room through reactionary and aggressive rhetoric. Roman’s parental complex, insecurities, and the target on his back due to his sexual proclivities bears perhaps a bit more resemblence to Martin, Sophie’s son, though where Roman is constantly making bad-taste jokes about incest and other sex crimes, Martin is an actual incestuous pedophilic rapist. The Succession/The Damned comparison really clicked into place for me in the season 3 finale when Shiv takes up the mantle of shock-humor-sibling and needles Roman about having an oedipal complex in a constant barrage of volleys that Roman, uncharacteristically, does not return. In Aschenbach and Martin’s tense, manipulative relationship we can find a distorted reflection of Roman’s cruelty, self hatred, and dependency on/resentment towards his family members.
Many of Aschenbach’s sentiments are peppered throughout the language of all of the Roys, though. “Personal morals are dead” says the Nazi, moments before the Reichstag is burned down. “A semblance of legality can be useful sometimes.” How many times have we heard the Roys utter something similar? White supremacy, authoritarian desire, and corporate fascist sympathy make up the devil on each of the Roys’ shoulders.
“But what of Kendall,” you may ask. The Essenbecks also have a betrayed brother, Herbert (Umberto Orsini), the Cordelia of the Essenbecks who is reported to the Nazi regime by his siblings and framed for Joachim’s murder. Kendall is nowhere near as severely wronged or morally upright as Herbert, but just as prone to failing to read the threat level of his family members. Herbert is a humanitarian, if perhaps a touch hypocritical given the luxurious life created by his aristocratic status; Kendall is far more power hungry and much more myopic in his politics. Both leave the family business as a matter of personal principle, though in Herbert’s case this principle is resistance to Nazism and he is repaid by having his wife and children sent to Dachau; in Kendall’s it’s about performative activism and he is repaid by bad press and legal threats. Both are also publicly accused by their siblings of betraying their father and rendered powerless by the access and sway of their underhanded family members. Kendall attempts to play the part of a member of the #resistance, but buckles under the slightest pressure whenever he tries to put his morals where his mouth is, while Herbert is the righteous rebel sibling willing to lose everything when his siblings show their true selves.
In many ways, the Essenbecks are what the Roy children are constantly failing to be. Sophie is a successful manipulator while Shiv is betrayed by her own husband; Konstantine wrests control of the steelworks whereas Connor has never come close to inheriting his father’s kingdom; Aschenbach and Martin ultimately play their games successfully to inherit everything and Roman is cut out as soon as he shows any aptitude as a cutthroat c-suite type; and Herbert’s stoic return puts his fascist family members to shame while Kendall’s siblings undercut him at every opportunity and never really acknowledge his emotions or beliefs with any gesture more loving than awkward, if not contemptuous.
The Damned belongs to a specific subgenre of post-WWII films about what kind of person becomes a facist. Many entries in this subgenre tend to assume that fascists are uniquely evil and depraved people prior to their fascism, and The Damned is not an exception to this rule, though it combines it with the figure of the immoral aristocrat. Aside from Herbert and his family, the characters in The Damned are all constantly in a state of becoming increasingly monstrous, and most of the story tracks how these monsters fight and kill each other. While the film is focused on the role of industry and aristocracy in the rise of fascism, it is less concerned with the actual ideology itself and how it gains traction in a populace than it is with the way that the ranks of the Nazi regime catalyze the moral corruption already in these characters and give them license for increasingly extreme, horrific behavior. Their humanity is only glimpsed when they are vulnerable and fallible to each other, and in those specific moments, they are still disgusting. If that is how The Damned uses fascism, how do Succession’s parallel characters relate to capitalism? What could this show say as it turns towards its ending (assuming The Damned is a key text on the Succession syllabus)?
With the introduction and endorsement of Menken, the writers could end the show by having the Roy children take up the positions of their Essenbeck counterparts. It seems plausible that Roman and Connor could take up positions in the alt-right even without their dad’s convention tickets and company, Tom could stay with the company and Shiv could learn how to really play interpersonal games, while Kendall could, somehow, become the beacon of morality he has believed he could be all along. An ironic plot point of The Damned is that the factory ultimately ends up in the hands of the patriarch’s eldest son’s son (though really in the hands of the Nazi regime), with fascism restoring a partially broken patriarchal line of inheritance. Perhaps Connor will inherit the Roy kingdom in the end. Though, if we are playing by Visconti rules, it’s just as likely that Logan would become the fascist figurehead and his oblivious children would experience nasty ends. Either way, the showrunners could really vere towards more extreme character development and push the Roys to such vile places that people will stop misinterpreting the satire as a fetishization of wealth.
Beyond the fact that a total retread might be a little too derivative, I’m not sure that I can imagine Succession taking such a decisive approach to its political commentary. Succession is very caught up in the humanity of the Roys, and this impacts its approach to characterizing capitalism. The show’s cinematography really emphasizes every realization of failure, every loving remark refused, all of the moments of pain and regret and embarrassment, every punch landing. The Roy children are not in a constant state of increasing monstrosity; they have moments when they try to be better siblings (if not better people), which are almost always rebuffed. They are all much more bearable characters than any members of the Essenbeck clan. This approach makes Succession’s depiction of cruelty and abuse within the Roy family effective; it’s what makes Logan such an effective manipulator and disgusting influence. The interpersonal consequences are given much more weight in the show than the consequences of the Roys’ actions on the world they live in. Keeping those outcomes offscreen and only alluded to and focusing on the interpersonal is part of what keeps the stasis state of the show in place; it also defangs some of the political commentary. While they do horrible things, the show is much less focused on the Roys as abject than awkward. Unless the final seasons swing hard in the other direction, the show may end up replicating the Roys’ myopia rather than doing something more substantial with it.
While The Damned is very focused on the psychology of the Essenbecks, the Essenbeck’s are also Visconti capitalists: murdering, raping, exiling, molesting, and destroying each other at a consistent enough rate that their capacity for cruelty, authoritarian desires, and fascist moral corruption are not really in question. The Roy children talk a big game about their own ruthlessness, but don’t seem to be able to stomach putting their words into action, at least on screen. Rather than having the Roy children consume each other under the influence of a political party or a version of Waystar-Royco that is less synonymous with Logan, Succession has cast Logan as an emissary of capitalism. This move both characterizes capitalism as intertwined with the family structure, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc., but it also makes it much easier to read the situation exclusively in terms of the familial dynamics, especially because the world of Succession has so many other emissaries of capitalism that are seemingly less vile than Logan. So often, the Roys’ victims disappear from the show before the full impacts of the Roys’ actions are realized, while the emotional fallout from one of Logan’s outbursts can fuel multi-episode character arcs. That has made for compelling television. In a world with a lot of great, painful, and awkward character driven shows, I’m not sure that it makes for especially memorable television in the long run, though, at least without some major shifts that fundamentally break the stasis state of the show.
The last scene in season three began that shattering, but with a fascist presidential candidate, Logan’s failing health, and Waystar-Royco slipping out of the family’s control, there are options for where that breakdown primarily goes from here. While these factors have interesting counterparts in The Damned, the inheritance tragedy is an ancient archetype, and comparative reading with other texts that draw on this archetype can be very generative for thinking though what the show does effectively and ineffectively and what the histories of these plot structures, themes and character types might suggest about the plot structures, themes and characters in the show. Doing this comparative reading with The Damned really illustrates not only how much more miserable and horrifying this story could be, but also where it could be much more incisive, at least relative to some of the narratives of wealth, status and security that have become a little cliche in both fiction and non-fiction alike in 2022.
