My 2 Bits: The Excellence of 'Succession' vs. the Excrement That Is 'Great Expectations'
A gleefully contrived mashup of two unrelated things.
This is the second My 2 Bits post, which mashes together two seemingly unrelated things and finds some commonality at the end that hopefully isn’t too contrived. Honestly, I’m not sure I pulled it off this time; other than the fact that Succession and Great Expectations are both TV shows, I might have set myself a bigger challenge than my impressionistic thinking could master. You decide.
Do you like the lead image? If you’re watching Succession you’ll probably get it. Love it or hate it, it did take a day or so to get right. I haven’t seen many Substack newsletters yet that are put together with as much effort, dedication and self-love as I put into Quibblers & Scribblers.
Feeling guilty? Excellent! My Substack overlords require me to ask you to
If you’re not too stunned by the end, please leave a comment. Also please give it a like by hitting the heart-shaped thingie. Nobody in DEI will know it was you — Substack is discreet that way.
FIRST BIT: CONNOR ROY FOR PREZ!
There are no Succession spoilers here. I’m referencing a short monologue in a multicolored LED-lit karaoke room given by Connor, of all the unquotable characters in the series, the one everyone in my world agrees is their least favorite. The loathing he elicits is impressive; I agree that I’d find him an insufferable dinner companion, the kind with whom I’d probably pick the kind of fight that I’d have to call the hostess and apologize for the next day, after the flowers have been delivered. He might be a twat, but he’s very rich, and I’m not.
The scene is Connor getting ready to leave his half-siblings to their Machiavellian schemes. He casually delivers some of the most personally meaningful lines of the entire series, while casually putting on the jacket of his unstylish three-piece Brioni:
The good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is you learn to live without it. You’re all chasing after Dad saying, “Love me, please, love me! I need love! I need attention!” You’re needy love sponges, and I’m a plant that grows on rocks that lives off the insects that die inside of me. … It’s like a superpower.
Never thought I'd identify with anything Connor said or did, but Succession’s writers nailed an important part of what it's like to be the exile in your own family. Either you turn it into a "superpower” or your life is fucked: you crack, splinter, and the men in white jackets haul you off to the bin like so much family basura.
If you’re not a minotaur like me with the tenacity of a pit bull and a personality that’s often described as “a force of nature,” the overwhelming injustices meted by the people who are meant to love and support you crush your selfhood, and your sanity by extension. I’ve teetered on the brink of that abyss more than a few times; I spent the first half-century of my life with my brain swirling in a dark smog that I could only see through clearly intermittently. And there are still plenty who think I’m more than a little loco.
I remember my former domestic partner Jonathan Kemp's consternation one night in London in the mid-aughts when I said, honestly, "I don't need anyone." It's a childhood survival mechanism, like that character in a Korean movie stuck in solitary confinement for decades, determined to stay fit and sane so he can creatively slice and dice his tormentors for the rest of the movie after he breaks out.
It sounds horrid and brutal, even antisocial, a sad sort of superpower, but it's because of the horror and brutality of our experience that we develop it in the first place. I would never want to lose that ability, although better attachment styles in romantic relationships — no other kind of attachment — would be nice.
Connor’s words — tossed out in that garish, random, No Exit karaoke setting — are a perfect masala spice blend that synthesizes my take on a few aspects of the cult of victimhood, that lame zombie steed carrying Wokeism across the West, its whinny the sobs, moans and wailing of millions of falsely oppressed, those “needy love sponges” trying to find a distraction from this silly mass existential crisis they’re trapped in, demanding to be “seen! known! heard!” or an at-risk teen in the Midwest will top themselves.
The first aspect of my take on the cult of victimhood is one I’ve made before, in Part Two of my ‘The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood’ essay, in answer to Dave Chappelle’s rhetorical question in Sticks & Stones about how the LGBT Movement has managed to achieve so much, but Blacks haven’t. My point is that those of us he labeled as “Alphabet People” are the only remaining group in Western society that is truly oppressed. Chappelle’s riffs about us confirm that; no non-Black gay would be allowed to crack similar “jokes” about Blacks. As for the rest of the world, namely Africa and the Islamic world, we’re so oppressed that we don’t exist. Ask any Iranian official if you don’t believe me.
The truly oppressed want to be let out of that room they’re trapped in as soon as possible, whatever the cost, no revenge slicing-and-dicing, no looking back.
Black Americans like Chappelle, who are a world apart from my Black friends, are mainly victims of ongoing narratives about White supremacy and oppression that are having a hard time reconciling themselves with the reality of where Black Americans are in the world in 2023: in terms of proportional representation, they are the most influential socio-cultural group in terms of the arts, fashion, music, sports, and so much more.
When we become trapped in narratives of victimhood, they overwhelm our selfhood and our interpretation of the world and events that affect our lives. What Wokeism has managed to do all too successfully is justify those specious certainties of victimhood via its willfully complex, tangled intersectionalities of constructs that create illusions of ongoing oppression. Everyday setbacks that happen to all people now and then are blamed on the oppressor.
It’s a sticky web that is keeping tens of millions trapped, lorded over on the Liberal side by these monstrous, middle-aged, Marxist-feminist spiders with massive egos and intractable opinions, all sporting the same greying hair cropped in a 50s rockabilly style, or braids if they’re Black antiracists.
New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a piece two days ago about the many conservative King Lears currently oppressing the world, from Putin to Rupert Murdoch, the inspiration for Logan Roy. Murdoch is a man who has lived his life as the caricature of a modern Gilded Age robber baron who rose from nothing to dunk the rest of the world in his plebeian lies, bigotry, and muck.
Quoth La Dowd:
The Australian immigrant who ran anti-immigrant news organizations and let Fox News thrive on the racist “birther” lie about Barack Obama reaped billions by putting Americans at one another’s throat.
As most of the comments to her piece from readers point out, it has to be Dowd’s most “wait, what?” bit of scribbling in recent memory. Amidst the thorns of tortured logic, she expresses a prejudice about Australians that is common to Northeastern Anglo-American culture, which has a longer group memory than the rest of the country; if America is perceived as a rowdy Bamm-Bamm gleefully thumping the world with its club, Australia is barely out of its crib.
The majority of Brits have similar baked-in prejudices about Australians, but stronger: Dowd’s interpretation of Murdoch is in line with Jesse Armstrong’s vision of Logan coming from humble origins in Dundee, Scotland. He and his family are portrayed as crass parvenus, in stark juxtaposition to the patrician Pierce family.
That’s not the reality of the Murdochs. The crypto-elitist rags-to-riches cliché about King Rupert himself is the opposite of the truth, as I pointed out in a tweet to Dowd about her weirdo piece:
My use of “campesino,” peasant/farmer, is relevant: Murdoch didn’t come here fleeing poverty, claiming to be a refugee needing asylum, like the immigrants at our southern border. Nor did he come here — he also owns a sizable chunk of the UK media — seeking anything more than increased business opportunities, something Americans value highly, all pointless sticky-toffee socialism aside. In fact, in the scheme of Melburnian society, which is almost as casteist as the British, Murdoch ranks higher socially than my mother does.
Immigration is a colossal problem for America; illegal border crossings peaked last year at 2.76 million, all claiming asylum from life-threatening persecution. That’s when a few Liberal Marie Antoinettes I know scoff and say, “Big deal. They do jobs Americans don’t want.” To which I reply, “You haven’t seen Nomadland, have you? You should. It’s also about the reality of universal White privilege.”
Part of the case I’m building with this newsletter is that it’s not really about reality; it’s about the interpretation of it in order to make it fit established communal narratives. Every narrative spin, every fictionalization of facts, becomes a cog in our personal and communal cognitive dissonance.
Since I’ve spun my orthodox atheist interpretation of the reality of religions modern and ancient — Wokeism, Trumpism, Judeo-Islamo-Christianity, 12 Steps, atheism, democracy, marriage, and on-on-on — my mental image is of the insides of space-time as infinite clockwork layered with cogs of all sizes growing and shrinking, turning at varying speeds and efficiency; now and then a loose, dangling, rusted cog falls off into the abyss, to be replaced by a gleaming smaller one, the fate of all cogs eventually.
Ukraine has shown the size of conflict necessary to displace that many people who are eligible for asylum. It’s also temporary for Ukrainians, hopefully, whereas the intention of undocumented Central American immigrants is to find work and settle down for good. There is no conflict anywhere near that scale in Central America, or the U.S. would be down there putting out that fire, too.
Murdoch’s News Corp. alone employs over 25,000 Americans. My mother also set up a small interior design company that gave work to a dozen or so contractors, many of them immigrants of the kind Dowd is talking about, which hummed along for forty-odd years. She did have a job for a few years before marrying Dad and setting up her own business, as secretary to the Chinese ambassador to the UN, which is extraterritorial, so not actually the U.S. — but I quibble. And plenty of Ibero-American immigrants also set up thriving businesses.
Still, neither Mum nor Murdoch was escaping poverty, meaning they are essentially Australian expats descended from settler-colonists like my American father who decided to live in another Anglosphere country with a culture not dissimilar to their own, just a different accent and jargon speckled with deliberately quirky words and expressions.
Dowd continues torquing her argument till past its tendons snapping:
At long last, after a shameless career built on spreading poisonous lies about everything from climate to Covid to Trump’s stolen election blather, King Rupert, as Vanity Fair calls him, may be losing dominion over his dominion because of Dominion.
It’s hard for a journalist to argue that a news organization should be penalized, but Fox News isn’t a news organization. It’s a greedy business that freaked out when some Fox News reporters actually told the truth about Trump’s lies, and then it proceeded to broadcast the lies.
I try to avoid tu quoque equivalencies, but Dowd conveniently forgets that Fox News isn’t the only media outlet in Murdoch’s portfolio. He also owns The Wall Street Journal, which is presumably the paper that the Roys are trying to buy from the Pierces, who I assume represent the stuffy-stodgy Bancroft family of Boston, from whom Murdoch acquired the WSJ.
If the Times is going to throw stones, then it should be its only peer, the WSJ, not some televised tabloid like Fox News that I’ll bet Murdoch rarely watches. Just as the New York Times tailors its content to suit the tastes of its almost exclusively Liberal audience, Murdoch is giving MAGA conservatives — i.e., the 40% of the electorate that voted for Trump that has no other channel that supports their views — what they want. Someone has to, and someone else will if Murdoch doesn’t. That’s capitalism, Maureen, and your own paper is soaking in it.
Let’s talk about the truer equivalency for a moment: never has WSJ come close to something like incubating and launching the 1619 Project, not to mention a laundry list of other Woke lies and specious deceptions. Nor has it refused to cover massive scandals, like the thousands of detransitioning trans kids who now regret letting themselves be swayed by gender affirmation when they were too young and impressionable. The WSJ is the only one of the two that prints facts established through scientific methodologies about gender and biology, while the Times turns a blind eye and whistles Dixie.
The fact is that the Times and its opinion columnists in particular have lost the moral high ground they believe they built themselves, but was really dumped on the playing field as a gift from Trump. We know what Murdoch himself thinks of Trump, we always have.
As hard as it is for an ultra-liberal native New Yorker — who has lived most of his life in veneration of, and with so much pride for, the clarion of his socio-cultural group and his almighty city — to say this, the real reality is the Times has sunk till it’s neck-deep in a bog of its own unethical claptrap and daily sins of omission. Lost in the swirl of their narratives, their book deals, their Clintonesque smugness and egotism, their need to make themselves right at all costs, Times columnists and editors still believe they’re standing on that high ground, riding those high horses.
As for Dowd’s ignorant received prejudices about Australians, it pays to remember that the country was colonized because convicts could no longer be transported to America after the Revolutionary War. Dowd’s snobbery, like all snobberies, is one that Northeasterners should be cautious of given that America itself was once a British penal colony. Chances are that most Americans of British descent have convict or indentured-servant blood in them. As for Irish Catholics like Dowd… let’s not go down the path to that bog unarmed and unescorted.
SECOND BIT: GREAT EXPLOITATIONS
We take a giant leap from a highly original show that everyone is sad to see end with the current season to a limited series that should never have been made. Not that anyone cares what I think of Great Expectations: it has to be the worst-critiqued limited series in memory, the 'Showgirls' of TV. I’m not sure anyone’s watching it; I made it through the clichéd dream sequence at the beginning of Episode 4, hit pause, and shut the window forever.
Still, trashing something that reminds us that ‘vile’ is an anagram of ‘evil’ feels satisfyingly righteous, and gives me some agency over the neverending pandering of influential entities like Hulu and the BBC to the senseless, spoiled-brat demands of DEI.
Here’s my litany of White grievances about Great Expectations:
1) I have strict criteria about "diversity casting" that is very simple: If you aren't changing the meaning of the original text as insight into the human condition, then it's tokenism that is infantilizing and diminishing the very group it purports to elevate; and taking away work from actors who belong to the race of the characters in the source material for no good reason that justifies stoking all that rancor and divisiveness.
I will be writing about diversity casting in this newsletter soon, then following up with a podcast episode with hopefully both of the two Black women I worked with on productions that commented directly on racism/discrimination by casting them in traditionally White roles from the classics canon. One has committed to having a chat. I'm still waiting to hear back from the other — she might still be recovering from my directing technique. ("Look, stop acting for five minutes and just mimic what I do, k?")
1A) But what possible sort of further social commentary are you going to make with Charles Dickens? He invented it, ya great berks. There is nothing you can do to out-grim, out-unfair, out-greed, out-oppress, out-orphan, out-feminist good ol' Chucky D.
1B) I have to think that being deliberately offensive to the vast majority of a culture's people, and then calling them bigoty-buggery phobics when they push back, must be a perverse attempt for clicks and ratings, Liberal Trump-style. Not to mention that the only real offense is deliberate offensiveness, not Tropes, Microaggressions, Constructs, Appropriations and Associates, how may I direct your choler?
2) Peaky Blinders took that Guy Ritchie gangster hip-hop directing style and flipped it by slowing it way down. Steven Knight took a punt, went all-in with the stylizing and it worked: gangsters really are posers; psychotic episodes, violence and toxic masculinity are 100% them. Peaky is merely an expression of how gangsters see themselves.
There is an undefinable tipping point when trying too hard to be edgy makes you and what you're doing look like terminal dorkiness.
3) I cannot remember any show/film with so many unlikeable characters. They keep calling Pip "handsome," but I'd swipe left on that without even reading his stats. He's just young, not fat, and so anodyne I keep waiting for the real hero to show up.
The actress who plays Estella is not attractive in any sense, which is a major problem when the protagonist who embodies our aspirations and desires is driven to distraction with love for her. We stop trusting and believing in him.
But none are so cringe as Jaggers. Not just the actor, but the decisions about his character. Really antipatico, the only word for it.
4) The slovenly, next-gen-Dickensian-gross production makes you want to watch travelogue videos of luxury boutique hotels in Bora Bora just to rinse your eyes out from the sting of ugly.
5) And who was stupid enough to under-light Black people? What a buncha wet crackers.
Lemme put on my Woke tinfoil halo and see if I can pick up any beams of meaning coming from Stanford Law's DEI department about the cinematography... wait... getting a lot of static... I might have an answer coming in via a few tropes over rare intersectionalities... shhh! They're saying that they're drawing attention to the structural racism of camera and phone companies for inventing how light reflects/refracts differently off lighter and darker surfaces — in other words, Louis Lumière's real invention was light itself as an instrument of oppression, bien sûr — and accentuating it by shooting with available light in winter and closing down 2 stops.
6) Saving the series’ worst breach of sense and sensibility for last: Great Expectations the book isn’t about Black slavery in the Americas; it’s about White slavery in Australia. By reframing the focus to Black slavery, this version effectively erases my ancestors’ experience by supplanting it with Black victimhood in the name of diversity.
As I wrote in Part One of ‘The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood,’ the journey to Australia in the same conditions — the series even states that the manacles of transportees to Australia were refurbished to be used on African slaves — took twice the time as the passage to the Americas from Africa. Once there, convicts who were transported for relatively petty crimes, like fishing in the wrong lake, were made to slave away at the building of their own prisons and other public projects, under the scorching Australian sun against which their white skin couldn’t protect them. To paraphrase how Dave Chappelle describes Africans, indigenous Australians are “really black” for good reason. White Australians are obsessed with skin cancer, again for good reason: we aren’t made for that sun; there was no sunscreen in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Whenever I tell people that I’m descended from White slaves as a way of saying that it doesn’t make me hate the English, no more than the Highland Clearances that forced my paternal grandfather’s ancestors to settle in America do — an example of real persecution and a reason for asylum under the law, Maureen — I often get smirks, scoffing, or something like, “But they could leave at the end of their sentences.”
I now refer those who also seek to erase my ancestor’s experience by suggesting there’s a difference between Black slavery in the Americas and White slavery in Australia — and the Middle East and North Africa, but never mind them apples — to Dickens’ original Great Expectations to remind them that part of Magwitch’s challenge is he can never return to England.
So, what ties Succession to Great Expectations, other than an example of a superlative show versus an insulting abomination? I would say a few things:
Even though Logan Roy isn’t really Rupert Murdoch, it’s a rags-to-riches story much like Pip’s; even if Pip doesn’t end up a billionaire tycoon in the book, we might imagine as an old man, having turned Estella’s money into a fortune by trading in opium, ivory and whale products.
However, seeing as Murdoch is the basis for Logan Roy, and his less-brilliant children the models for the Roy kids, then it is also a tale of Australians enriching themselves in morally dubious ways, if we consider Magwitch to be an Australian.
Is it a stretch to think that Cousin Greg is a bit of a Pip character? Let’s remember where he was when we met him, getting fired from a job as an amusement park mascot in the hinterlands of the Waystar Royco empire. He’s got a bit of a Dickensian rags-to-riches trope going on. He’s also a semi-orphan, raised by a single mother in relative poverty, a thoroughly Dickensian setup.
There is an Australian amoral-criminal connection between Jesse Armstrong’s assumptions about Murdoch’s origins, echoed by Maureen Dowd’s prejudices, and Magwitch’s time Down Under, which is more extensively explored in Steven Knight’s version of Great Expectations than in any other adaptation. I might appreciate that more had Knight not thrown everything prurient, violent and gross about early Victorian England at the screen in a vain effort to magick it into Peaky Expectations.
There are also significant ways in which Succession is nothing like Dickens: it’s a mashup of the Murdochs and King Lear, as we were reminded in Episode 4. The name Roy is from the French for roi, ‘king,’ the root of ‘royal.’ Shakespeare was only concerned with the plebeians inasmuch as they served as comic relief for his culture’s obsession with great men of inherited rank, or military leaders.
Solidifying the connection to King Lear is the symbolism of the company’s name, Waystar, which I’ve always taken to refer to Kent’s line, “It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions,” perhaps meaning that it is the company itself that determines the fate of the entire family and its relationships, especially if “our conditions” is interpreted as “our ways.”
Dickens’ focus was the polar opposite of Shakespeare’s, primarily trained on the struggles of the wretchedly poor, the working class, and the increasingly influential bourgeoisie. Had Shakespeare lived in post-Enlightenment England — with the “great experiment” of America far from having collapsed, as the British ruling class, waking in the middle of the night from nightmares about falling powdered wigs and guillotines, hoped it might — he probably would have tailored his work to be more in line with Dickens’ concerns.
Thanks for reading.
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