Victory for Succession's New Gen Roys

In last Sunday's season premiere, there was a particular shot and movement that stood out to me because of how it veered, like a tease, from Succession's established visual language.

I once wrote about how Succession mobilizes affective ambivalence in its cinematography and formal construction. Rather than having to choose sides between either a satire of billionaires or a deep identification with those billionaires, I proposed that Succession is actually deeply invested in staging a relation of pleasure and disgust. Comedy is part of this, as is the extreme luxury on display, but its visual language, through a constant and unstable re-framing, zooming, and impulsive cutting, materializes that relationship. It makes the show feel photojournalistic but also literally upsets any sense of balance, any sense of purchase. The show's camerawork formally articulates a feeling of nausea. In Succession, there is no perfect balance of critique and pleasure, it is always a movement of too-closeness and pulling back.

I'm not going to give a full recap of the episode here, but, as often happens in Succession, an old plot point returned with renewed vigor — Logan is trying to buy PGN from the Pierces, but the New Gen Roys (Kendall, Roman, and Shiv's uneasy alliance) are trying to beat him to the purchase. They are in a bidding war spurred on by Nan Pierce's apparent distaste for the whole endeavor. Just as in the season two episode which introduced the Pierces (which I cite in the essay), Nan is disgusted with the Roys and with the whole prospect of selling something for money. It makes her feel dirty.

(Oh, but really, she does want that money.)

The Pierces are perfect foils for the Roys not just for their pretensions and political leanings, but because they wear their distaste viscerally. Nan's excuse to buy time for her other bidder before she meets with the New Gen Roys is that she has come down with a terrible headache. A part of me believes her. Of course, it doesn't change that she has orchestrated this whole back-and-forth to pit children against father. And it works, because the bidders seem to forget what they are even after, why they want it. Billions of dollars are just numbers to them – words. They just want to win.

There's something fitting about that, by the way, a show which is often reduced to phone calls and impromptu business meetings reduced further into the simple recitation of numbers. Six, seven, comfortable with eight, nine and nine-five, and then you might as well get to... well, you get the idea. It's mutually assured investment. But the New Gen Roys decide they want to end the discussion and a sufficiently large number ends the discussion (at least until other numbers get involved).

The shot opens with a close-up of the white French doors. Shiv sheds the doors open in a grand gesture, which reveals her in a close-up, and as she moves the camera tracks, keeping her centered. Kendall and Roy follow closely in Shiv’s wake. This isn’t a jerky handheld camera, zoomed-in with a long lens. It is, for a few seconds, everything the rest of the show is not. We are moving smoothly, steadily away from Shiv. It starts with a close-up and gets wider until settling somewhere between a medium and a medium-wide shot. That’s where things get tricky.

The sliding doors, the smirk, the walk. This is a moment of satisfaction and supreme confidence for Logan’s children. But the moment does not last long. As the camera continues tracking back and the Roys slow their advance, the frame trembles, even blurs, as it adjusts the trio’s final stance. This isn’t as shaky as the typical handheld, but the earlier movement’s confidence wobbles as the subjects finally pose. Kendall catches up to her sister and blocks the sunlight coming from their right side, darkening her in shadow.

The Pierces react. And, when we reverse back, it is from a side angle — the Roys looking more like targets than triumphant. The frame shaky as ever. The assuredness of that brief moment is gone, seeming even briefer in retrospect. Reality sets in.