Complicated Airflow
The power of language in HBO's Succession
Spoilers for Succession Season 4
What do the Roy’s do? I’m not asking about how they proceed with the co-CEO status or sweep the wreckage left by Logan’s passing. What do the Roy’s actually do at their jobs? How do they spend their 9 to 10:30’s? Sure, they prepare for board or shareholder meetings and attempt to maintain control of a sinking ship amidst the GoJo deal, but mostly they walk around blurting expletives and very important-sounding jargon. The Roy’s don’t really do anything, they’re richer than entire countries for spending their days in offices getting into shouting matches consisting of nothing-sentences: arguing about leveraging audiences, optimizing capabilities, it’s the same kind of language you use to pad a resume so it gets better results on a company’s AI recruitment tool. This business-speak is native to the world of the C-Suite that the characters exist in and jockey for control over, but it serves to reinforce one of the show’s main themes: language’s power, and the ways in which characters are able to use it to manipulate the world around them. Succession is a show that is fascinated with language and exploring the ways in which words, despite being maligned by Kendall in the first season as nothing but “complicated airflow,” do in fact matter.
The players don’t just use this business jargon to appear busy or to make them seem as important as their job titles and paychecks necessitate; they use it to shield themselves from consequences. By replacing human speech with the language of corporations, they are able to get rid of all moral value systems or convictions that they may have. Shiv, formerly a Democratic political strategist, rationalizes her presence at a conservative summit by claiming she is just “shopping at the marketplace of ideas,” Tom refers to Greg’s hiding of documents revealing the scope of the cruise ship sexual assault coverups to blackmail him as a “valuable piece of capital,” and after attempting to negotiate the new terms of his forced open relationship with Shiv refers to their marriage as an “unbalanced love portfolio.” Kendall, refusing to pledge loyalty to Greg when asking him to join the revolution against Logan says that it is “a margin call” whether or not he should be trusted. By adopting this language they give themselves the permission to do anything that would “serve their interests,” a phrase used by Gerri after she backstabbed Roman, who considered Gerri to be one of his closest ally’s (and object of weird sexual displacement), allowing themselves to reposition and re-orient on the fly, regardless of who is affected or hurt by what actions they may take.
These are next-level bullshitters, capable of spinning the finest golden yarn with the straightest of faces. Half of every episode is spent following them around verbal cul-de-sacs, where they may suggest an idea or feeling but never actually articulate concretely for fear of having an actual substantiated opinion or claim being held against them. Some of the show’s most iconic and funniest scenes take advantage of this phenomena - Cousin Greg testifying in front of congress (“If it is to be said, so it be — so it is”), Connor eulogizing the head of cruises Mo-Lester in front of a reporter writing a hit-piece on Logan, forcing him to deliver the world’s first entirely neutral eulogy (“Lester was alive for 78 years, but no more. Now he is dead”), and Tom’s re-brand of Waystar Royco in face of fallout from spying allegations (“We Hear For You”) are among the many examples of empty words occupying the show’s airwaves.
In the world of Succession, whether it’s through dressing their language with sweet nothings or speaking truth to power that corporations are in fact people, insincerity is the rule, as words are dangerous things capable of revealing one’s true stance and feelings, opening them up for attack. You see this in the way that Roy siblings talk to each other in the first three seasons, whenever someone makes an honest statement or partakes in a moment of real intimacy their immediate instinct is to laugh it off. When Roman, post a near-death experience, asks his siblings if there is a future in which they are open and straight-forward with each other about their feelings, Kendall and Shiv respond in a baby-voiced babble that has gone platinum in my household: “you wanna talk to normally? You wanna talk about the big shit? We don’t have any feelings, what are you talking about?” The kids are unable to find the words to even start to be genuine with each other; when Shiv pays Roman a compliment she doesn’t even know how to do it authentically, calling him a “super awesome superstar,” something he refutes with the Succession classic - “oh, fuck off.”
It isn’t just the siblings who are incapable of saying what they mean, one of the shows most recurring scenes is a group of people in a room unwilling to tell Logan Roy what they actually think. The failed board room takeover in Season 1, family therapy (bang, bang, bangbangbang) at Connor’s ranch, the dinner on the hunting retreat regarding the Pierce deal, the round table spent picking someone to take the fall for the cruise scandal, time and time again you see people dress their language in non-commitments, non-statements, or when pressed for an answer a deferment to whatever they believe Logan supports. To speak their truth would mean becoming vulnerable, open for interpretation and destruction. When you exist in the world Logan Roy built, when you spend your life constantly fighting for power or for for his favor, your words are your last line of defense; to be guarded or be believed to be nonchalant is the one thing protecting you from facing his wrath. It’s this impulse to hide, to deflect, that exemplifies how the characters in Succession are acutely aware of the power that language has, and how it terrifies them.
The death of Logan Roy has created a vacuum in the Succession universe, one that every character is trying to fill (minus Connor maybe, he’s just happy with his 1%). In this moment of complicated power plays that the players find themselves in, language has never been more important, and the last two episodes have seen them use it to gain leverage over the unreal situation they find themselves in. Minutes after finding out about Logan’s death the siblings have to wrest control of the narrative from the Waystar employees aboard the plane who have already started to draft a statement while Logan was receiving chest compressions. As Kendall aptly puts it “everything we do today will be what we did the day our father died,” and the first order of business is to establish that there was in fact no great schism between them and their father, that they were still a part of the family business, and that he was a great man. None of those three things are true, but that doesn’t matter, what’s important was the kids re-entering the equation and manifesting a relationship with their late father to maintain family control of Waystar Royco, that they were the ones to say it and put it on the record in the court of public opinion.
When an argument over an undated document claiming that Kendall would succeed Logan as CEO is put into speculation because Kendall’s name is either crossed-out or underlined, the ambiguity over the markings don’t deter Kendall; what matters to him is that it’s his name “on the fucking page.” In the end that is all that carries weight; Kendall, scratch-out be damned, with fellow board-mates and siblings are able to name himself and Roman Co-CEO’s, finally (if only intermittently) fulfilling the original question pitched by the show - who will succeed Logan Roy? A 30 second statement delivered in an airport hangar comprised of lies and a scribble on a piece of paper, that’s all that is left of Logan Roy. His legacy was defined, and per last episodes’ ending perhaps up for re-interpretation, by the the way his own words are able to be used against him, by the way his children are able to take a page out of his own book and construct a world in which they were the rightful heirs to the Roy throne all along, despite over 30 hours of story proving why none of them are in fact fit for the job.
One of the shows most distressing pair of scenes takes place halfway in season 2. After a business conference where Shiv, after being prepped by Logan to step in and take control of the company, oversteps the agreed upon narrative, calling for a “dinosaur cull” in response to the cruise scandal, leading to an argument where Logan slaps Roman. It’s the first time we’ve ever seen Logan be physically violent with his children, we’ve seen him use words as weapons in the proceeding season and a half, but this provides one of the most illuminating glimpses into the early lives of the characters - Kendall immediately stepping into defend, the onlooker’s speechless or attempting to quickly de-escalate the situation, Roman shrugging the whole thing off. This is a choreographed sequence, one they’ve danced before.
The devastating bit occurs in the next episode, when Logan “apologizes” to Roman for The Slap. If before was the first time we’ve seen Logan be physically violent, this is perhaps the most we’ve ever seen him manipulate his children, his words bearing no relationship to the reality of the situation. He first questions if he even made contact, he claims that he didn’t even know that Roman was behind him, and then puts the matter to bed by saying that hitting him “is not something I do.” Roman pushes on, also not wanting to acknowledge what happened, letting his father’s words be the truth of the incident. What’s ironic about this was that seconds before The Slap, Roman blows off his own failures at the conference by saying, “it’s just words. There’s no press anyway, so who gives a shit?” Words only have an impact when they are recorded or observed, when they are forced to have consequences.
Succession is a show about a lot of things: power dynamics, abuse cycles, controlling optics, playing the art of the possible, but it’s a show that’s obsessed with words, the weight they carry and the consequences they have. This specific seed has been planted from the very beginning; specifically an earlier quoted moment from Season 1’s second episode Sh*t Show at the F*ck Factory. When Kendall tries to reconcile Logan’s erratic decisions to fire Frank and promote Roman to CCO before his (first) stroke, he takes stock of the scene, realizing that there’s no paper records of any of his decisions, meaning that everything was just words, nothing material - “complicated airflow.” If he were to say what “actually happened today, it would be nothing.” Without someone keeping language accountable it evaporates - it has no consequence, no meaning. We see how this same philosophy extends to actions as well, with no one to hold Logan accountable for the abuse he inflicts on his children it simply goes away; gone, but certainly not forgotten.