I have been thinking about this article about Succession for a bit, and it ties into one of my little hobby horses: I don’t think irony or satire work in mass entertainment.
The article lays out why Succession can feel awful to watch, as funny and well done as it is: the story removes all perspectives except those of the Roy’s. As a result, we end up invested in them to the exclusion of any other message the show might be trying to get across. The show is clearly meant, I believe, as a satire. No one is a good person, they flail all the time, and they ultimately are unsatisfied and unhappy. But they also literally get away with murder (or at least manslaughter) and ruining people’s lives with no consequences. From the dead waiter to the little boy they traumatize at the softball game to the media website they ruin, we spend no time with the people they impact beyond “look at how these people are bad! Aren’t they bad! And isn’t it interesting who is going to take over?”
That last is the issue: despite attempting to satirize the wealthy morons who too often run our world, the show invests the viewers in their struggle. They are funny and fun to watch and the show elevates their succession plans to the level of high art, making it the center of the show. People, then, naturally, start to become invested in the well being of the characters. Because the show hides the consequences of their actions from the viewers, it is hard to take those consequences seriously. And that, I think, diminishes the satire.
I have said this before, but I don’t think that satire and irony work in mass entertainment. I genuinely think that they require a shared way of looking at the world, a shared language, that pretty much does not exist in the modern media environment. And so if you have a show that centers the “bad” guys, then all you have is a show that a significant portion of the audience is not going to have the language to understand. Satire is meant to chop down the target of the satire — so anything that undermines that chopping is probably not what the creators intended. If you want a mass audience to get your point, I think you need to center other stories.
Sometimes I will hear this idea dismissed as writing to your dumbest readers/watchers. I don’t think that is the case. It is the equivalent of saying that if you refuse to write in French for an English market that you are pandering to your dumbest readers. The language for broad satire does not, I think, really exist. I think you need to have more focus on the consequences to get your point across (and don’t give me any shit about how you are just writing about people, man. Satire has targets and you know damn well you want those people to think less of those targets when you are done.). Plus, the idea that you cannot write intelligently about the lives of the less powerful is bullshit. The Fargo shows are a better satire of modern American life than the Wolf of Wall Street because it shows the consequences through the eyes of the people living through them whereas the Wolf of Wall street doesn’t really. One makes us understand consequences; one makes us understand that rich people have pretty good lives even if they are assholes.
Bluntly, stories about people who face no consequences are boring. The online media story in Succession is modeled on the Gawker media saga. The thing is, the some of people who were fucked by the private equity firm that set out to destroy them managed to create their own successful media firm, writing the kinds of stories their owners never wanted them to write. To me, that is a much more interesting fallout from the destruction of a media firm than one Roy child feeling a little smaller in front of their father. The lives of the waiter’s friends and family, of the boy at the softball game’s family, would be richer stories to mine, much more incisive and interesting and meaningful than yet another version of the Roys feel temporarily bad about something — wait, who is in the lead for the CEO job???
Maybe I am thinking too small. Maybe I am falling prey to the notion that writing should have a message. Maybe I am just too dumb to appreciate fine work. Maybe. But satire already has a a message, or it wouldn’t be satire. I think that if you are going to go to the trouble of crafting a message, you should probably craft it in a way that most people who encounter it will understand. It does not mean an end to satire, but it does mean thinking more critically about how you craft that story. And maybe, just maybe, we should stop pretending that anti-heroes are the most interesting people in their stories. They usually are not. Forgetting that, centering them, usually doesn’t get you great stories. It usually just gets you indulgent ones.
Weekly Word Count
About one thousand. Yeah, I suck. Work and life have been crazy, which I could, and astute readers will notice I am, using as an excuse. But I am going to blame my contrary nature: since many people are still doing the write a novel in November thing, even if NaNoWriMo as an organization is pushing up daisies, my psyche demands I produce nothing.
Actually, I kind of understand George RR Martin better. I am working on the book version of the tech/abortion play since I do have a very small press interested in it. But I think, since the play is done and off to a handful of contests, that I feel a bit underwhelmed by the book version, as the story has been told. Yes, books and plays are very much not the same thing, but the story itself is largely told, and I think that makes me, at some level, less interested in re-telling it.
Or I just suck. It does say failed writer on the door. I probably just suck.
Have a great weekend, everyone.