Church and States of Grief
“Is he in there?”
“Well can we get him out?”
“Church & State,” the penultimate episode of Succession, opens with the Roy siblings getting ready for their father’s funeral. Roman walks through his apartment, practicing his eulogy; Shiv talks to Matsson on the phone in her apartment; and Kendall sits in the back of his car talking first with Roman and then with Rava. Meanwhile, protests over the election have been taking place all over the country. ATN’s call has upended America, as Mencken is already appointing his cabinet while Jimenez has refused to concede until the situation in Wisconsin can be fixed; Darwin’s threatening to resign; and Tom is angry that ATN employees have talked to the Times for a major exposé on how they made the call (and that his photo in the article is smaller than Darwin’s.) The world the Roys have created is falling apart — but all they care about is how it will affect their getting to the funeral.
If Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? provided the template for “Tailgate Party,” then Jean Genet’s The Balcony is the template for “Church & State.” Genet’s masterpiece takes place in a bordello where the 1% cavort while protests against the inequality they have wrought take place in the streets. Throughout much of the play, we don’t actually see the protestors, but we hear their protests offstage. Similarly, in Succession, we learn most of the information about the unrest through TV clips playing in the background (and Succession’s production team is to be commended for putting together all the fake broadcasts that play in the posh apartments and offices towering over Manhattan), rather than through onscreen action, save for a few choice moments. The Roys’ unwillingness to comprehend the consequences of their actions — such as when Kendall throws a tantrum over Rava’s decision to escape upstate with the girls rather than subject them to the protests surrounding the funeral, and when Jess asks to leave the company — only adds to their callousness.
But if the Roys were wholly callous, we wouldn’t be as obsessed with this show. We understand that the traumas that produced them have resonated into their adulthood, and we can understand the same with Logan. When his brother Ewan assumes the podium for a eulogy nobody expected, he shares stories of their childhood that would make even the most ardent Logan-hater feel sorry for him, the most striking being a description of their crossing from Dundee into Canada during WWII, during which the engines on their boat stalled and they had to remain silent for three days lest a U-boat detects their presence. This, plus the death of their infant sister (which Ewan says Logan believed he may have caused) gives us insight into Logan as a man who’s just as much a product of childhood trauma as his kids. But before we invoke the tired cliché “hurt people hurt people,” Ewan reminds us that inflicting your trauma on others is a choice, not a mere subconscious byproduct of a hard life:
“He was a man who has here and there drawn in the edges of the world. Now and then darkened the skies a little. Closed men’s hearts. Fed that dark flame in men, the hard mean hard-relenting flame that keeps their heart warm while another grows cold. Their grain stashed while another goes hungry…He was mean, and he made but a mean estimation of the world and he fed a certain kind of meagerness in men. Perhaps he had to because he had a meagerness about him and maybe I do about me too, I don’t know. I try. I try. I don’t know when, but sometime he decided not to try anymore and it was a terrible shame.”
Ewan’s honesty sets a tone that the Roy kids, who have not come to terms with the damage their father inflicted upon them, can match. Kendall manages to get through his eulogy by talking about the wealth Logan created, and Shiv discusses how despite the terror her father could inflict, “when he let you in when the sun shone, it was warm.” These speeches are impressive given that they’re each delivered impromptu, and they each establish Kendall and Shiv as the front-runners for control of Waystar, but they’re about nothing. Jezebel writer Ashley Reese compared them to the way Trump’s kids talk about their dad because Trump’s kids are also incapable of honesty. If they had that capacity, it would be seen as a point of weakness in their quest for power. And Shiv, like Ivanka, uses the pretense of competence to disguise her duplicitousness.
When her brothers betrayed her on Election Night by handing the country over to Mencken, Shiv was on the verge of tears. She had opposed his candidacy from the start, claiming to care deeply about the future of the country. But in “Church & State,” she has no such cares. Her job is to persuade Mencken not to kill the Matsson deal, and she and Hans Christian Anderfuck come up with an idea: tell Mencken the company will have an American CEO, and that American CEO will be — who else? — Shiv Roy (in her own mind but it appears Matsson is just playing her). Who cares if she’s pregnant? She’s “just one of those hard bitches who’s going to do what, 36 hours of maternity leave, emailing through her cesarean.” If Walter White had to put a child in danger to outwit the most dangerous adversary he ever faced, Shiv has to suck up to the man who might tank American democracy, who her family enabled, in order to destroy her own family. There’s no way Kendall can match her with his petty blackmail schemes. Every single plan he’s come up with has ended in failure. Why should he succeed this time? Besides, Mencken has agreed to Shiv’s proposal — and she’s positively glowing over it.
But what about Roman? Well, while I’m loathed to make predictions about what will happen next week, as Jesse Armstrong is always 10 steps ahead of his audience, the odds do not favor him. Even though Roman claims that he “pre-grieved” at his father’s memorial, the moves he’s made throughout this season — firing Gerri, enabling Mencken, taunting Matsson on the mountaintop — all by his inability to confront his feelings. The closest he’s come to a genuine show of emotion was when he sat in the back of his black car, watching a deep fake of Logan taunt him for having a tiny penis. But Roman learns the hard way that when it comes to grief, the only way out is through, as he approaches the podium, says the first two lines of his eulogy, and collapses into tears. “Is he in there?” he says as he sobs over the coffin. “Can we get him out?”
If “Church & State” has another title, it’s “Give Kieran Culkin an Emmy.” His breakdown is so truthful because, as Armstrong told Culkin, “You shoot yourself in the foot by just being a human being.” Even more extraordinary is the fact that Culkin did not rehearse this breakdown before the cameras rolled. In fact, Mark Mylod filmed the entire funeral sequence in one full take before moving to coverage, much of which was used, so if Culkin was able to do this on the first run, it’s proof of his ability to live in the moment — a gift that cannot be taught in acting classes.
Roman, who has masked all his childhood traumas — and based on what we’ve learned about him, he had arguably the most traumatic childhood of all his siblings — with a lacerating wit and masochism, has finally experienced something that separates him from his family, so much so that he cannot possibly communicate it. While his siblings are able to comfort him at the moment, at the episode’s end, Kendall chides him for letting everyone down. With the most genuine moment in his life misinterpreted as a sign of weakness, Roman falls back into masochism, walking into the middle of a protest and taking a beating. He might as well have some external wounds to cover the internal ones. It’s hard not to relate to Roman during the most vulnerable point in his life. The cycle of abuse sends him down the only path he seems to be comfortable with — self-inflected torture and pain. Self-destructiveness during times of despair is comforting to him, he sees it as a means to cope. When I see Roman during his most vulnerable, I don’t see someone who is acting out for attention. I see someone who doesn’t know how to handle emotions.
I see me.
