kendall cordelia thesis
or how I learned to stop worrying and love my emotional dependence on HBO succession
The study of parallels between HBO Succession and King Lear are typically as subtle as, generously speaking, a brick to the face. Yet I will stand by the fact that my sixth form’s forced study of the latter over Hamlet (hey guys, let’s do something different!) will not be put to waste. This pursuit is my god-given right.
HUGE spoilers for Succession, and also King Lear I guess?
How do you solve a problem like Cordelia? The play’s easy, conveniently provided, answer to some objective moral core in an abjectly and often nonsensically cruel world. But do people like Cordelia? Perhaps a question best left to others, beside a group of sleep deprived seventeen year olds who wanted desperately to slouch home after their only lesson of the day- in their case she sucks, dude. At least Edgar is afforded the luxury of stage presence for vague existential struggle, and may even get his dick out if the performance is one of a particularly edgy company. Whoever plays Cordelia is provided, really, two extended sequences where their performance must be calculated to hit just right, responding aptly to the model of Lear constructed on stage in her absence. It’s an unforgiving task.
The difficulty in pulling off Cordelia, in avoiding her fall into twee convention, avoiding a holiness that forcibly represses any attempt at complexity in the family dynamics, have led to long imessage chains with my friend Peter. Who could do it? Throwing out the name of a powerhouse actress that sprang to mind, the oracles of 4am. Robin Wright circa Princess Bride. Lily James. Denee Benton. Rosamund Pike, once we overthrow her casting director.
Kendall Roy is, in certain niches of internet, quite the softboy of the moment. Never before has one witnessed so many at least halfway-earnest ruminations on where the moral boundaries lie in desperately desiring to ‘fix’ such a broken man, who just so happens to be emblematic of all the horrors of nepotistic business practises. His role in a series that has been labelled as ‘Shakespearean’ so many times a lesser show would have leached it of all value, is one of an unconventional Cordelia (though, of course, nothing is so simple as it seems, and there’s some interesting etymology at play.) Is is horrendously misogynist to boldly claim a man outsold in the performance of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic women? Perhaps. Unfortunately for us, Jeremy Strong went there and verified that claim.
Beyond blindness, language and the choice to speak or not appear as the central theme of King Lear, as evidenced by some of the more quotable tidbits (“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth” “love and be silent” “nothing will come of nothing, speak again” “speak what we feel not what we ought to say” and so on). Though perhaps more obscurely than in a simple case of silence versus speech, Succession concerns itself with similar issues of the gulf of distance possible between what is said and what is meant. In a somewhat useful video Nerdwriter tragically published as I was lazily putting off my own writing, he expounds on these dual levels of communication present in the show. He speaks of the ‘flimsy relationship’ words hold to their original meaning, and he isn’t wrong in the heavy atmosphere of suppression that only thickens when sincerity is attempted.
Kendall spends much of his screen time either pathetically crying, or medicated to the point of being wholly checked-out from reality. With this constant state of emotional turmoil it’s easy to forget the man with which we are originally presented, one ready to make a go of it, holding control to the point of an attempted coup in episode 6 of season 1, be it one that painfully fails. He leads the insurgent army. When he has his illicit coffee shop rendezvous with Stewy, he turns away from his family in a far more pronounced manner than any of the other Roy children. Following his father’s stroke, from his arguable callousness of setting up a pop-up boardroom in the hospital to emphatically trying to sus out the situation with Marcia restricting visits to Logan’s room, it is Kendall who refuses to bow to power as his siblings are willing to.
Yet it is Cordelia’s likeness with Lear that makes her so enigmatic, she is after all perhaps the inciting agent of every tragic death from the opening scene onward. Her stubbornness, the child to match her father in that aspect, tears apart the fabric of social order required to keep the conceit of nobile succession stable. As much as we (choosing to implicate everybody in my actions here) adore woobifying Kendall, he unavoidably is directly responsible for the death of a teenager, as well as more benign symptoms of crappy-manhood, like being unable to hug his own children. Its twee, sure, but Larkin was right. Kendall is the only child to have at least attempted constructing a family of his own, within its attempted fix ironically enacting the same sins as his father.
Snooping around on twitter, and unfairly judging other’s takes on the situation, it becomes clear that prior to the masterpiece of the season 2 finale that is ‘This Is Not for Tears,’ there were considerably more ambiguity as to who was who in the Lear-Succession doublecast. Now is the time to hedge my bets and handwave away the fact that, obviously, though it takes clear influence from King Lear, Succession is not a precise modern retelling with a precise 1:1 ratio in cast. But it is much more fun to ponder that it is. There’s surely an argument to be made for Roman-as-Cordelia in his refusal to heavily involve himself in the running of the company, as well as the blatant youngest child syndrome. What if it’s Shiv? Because she’s, uh, the girl. (For the record, she’s utterly Regan.)
“but”
With his monosyllabic act of brilliance, our number one boy solidified his spot as the Cordelia in addition to rising to the top of the official succession power rankings. In the court of public statements, as in the royal court, he is willing to publicly shame his father in refusing to bow to ritual convention, as others silently shoot concerned glances about the patriarch’s state of health.
Beyond this, my final point of argument, is the centrality crying occupies in both characters. While Jeremy Strong’s excellent impression of crying_cat_face.png may not precisely match the image of shaking “holy water” from “heavenly eyes,” their hold the same position as notable outbursts of all-consuming, irrepressible emotion in works where such vulnerability is rarely expressed. There’s an uncomfortably raw honesty in the pathos of a grown man desperately weeping in front of his dad. In response “NRPI” he is rewarded by the narrative for his emotionally driven response, in contrast to the smug suppression of humanity that has rewarded Logan previously. Both works present the bittersweet hopefulness of a future that allows space for feelings, even among its leaders, though corpses may be otherwise strewn on stage.