Who Are You With

 

Succession: A More Honest Great Gatsby

There’s a homesickness evoked for me by the settings of Succession, the accurate, accessible cinematography of New York, an inaccessible place when you submerge to the heart of the matter, versus Los Angeles, where inaccessibility is more of a convincing illusion, and this ache arises to the strains of a pitch-perfect theme song. I feel homesick even though I did not move in those 0.01% circles beyond the mere wealthy in New York, as they repulse me and people who do move in those circles can discern that in any disinterested party immediately. The tenets of these circles extend to the arts at times, too—the coldness, alleged rationality, competition, and status-pushing more often than not overshadowing what would ideally be collaboration.

To be raised in any part of the state of New York is to be more of an open book. We’re, in fact, not any angrier than anyone else in the country; we’re just more open about both anger and what we find joyous, an openness Joan Didion, who I used to just love, sneered at as too sentimental in the style of those who move in those certain concentric circles, revealing now to me in my 40s how ignorant she was regarding the true nature of New York, despite having lived there, embracing obvious class illusions and fashioning her own chilly conceptions of success into a quasi-journalistic version of alleged objective reality, then coming to comprise a perfect caricature of herself in her later name-dropping, self-serious works that are overrated, much like Manhattan versus the landscape of New York's five boroughs. Money is not class; true class transcends finance. 

I didn't watch Succession until this past year due to my aforementioned repulsion, though the show, too, is repulsed by dynasty, and depicts its subjects' eviscerating disconnects without mercy versus romanticizing them as titans, a modern, more honest Great Gatsby for our times. These stark characters, as hyper-real as "the city" itself, don’t believe in happiness, but convenience, material wealth, capitalist power that long ago bypassed the mysticism of a Gotham they don’t see. They flatter themselves as Jokers, but they’re not that interesting, or intelligent, and they are not having any fun. Fun is to be frowned upon; upper-income success in this universe demands a dour disposition.

The way the city is shot in the show reflects the comfort and seeming stability of the realm outside the scope of these characters, the same strength I still felt a few months ago there as an adult who had opted back West years ago. There’s so much more to New York and its role in larger society than the characters of Succession, by conscious design, or earlier caricatures, by less conscious design, can even begin to glimpse, a spectrum of genuine humanity beyond the reach of self-proclaimed gatekeepers, these corrupt faux guardians looting everyone, starting with themselves.