SUCCESSION’S DEFEATED CHILD: CONNOR AND THE MATTER OF AN OMNIPOTENT FATHER
The Emmy Award–winning American drama Succession captivated audiences with its striking performances, the complexity of its family dynamics, and its sharp sense of dark humor. Over four seasons, the series presents the turbulent relationships within the Roy family, an empire in the media and entertainment industry. It takes little more than a single episode to recognize that the frame of the story rests upon the concept of Oedipal conflict. An unending sibling rivalry unfolds among Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan as they compete to become the successor to Logan, the emperor of Waystar Royco. We witness the destructive tension between their need for their father’s approval, their longing to inherit his success, recognition, and power, and their simultaneous need to forge their own identities and independence. Throughout the series, we also come to understand that their mother lacks the capacity to contain Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan’s emotional worlds, failing to form deep and loving bonds with them.
While each character in the Succession offers rich material for understanding the traps of being human, perhaps each deserving an essay of their own, I will turn my attention here to the one who appears the faintest among them: the half-brother, Connor. In the unforgettable opening sequence of Succession, the four siblings stand side by side. Even in this frame, Connor is positioned at a distance from the other three. When the camera lowers to show the children’s feet, we notice that, unlike his brothers, Connor’s stance is not one of attention. It is as though he declares from the very beginning that he will not actively participate in the merciless rivalry among his siblings. His choice to live in New Mexico rather than New York functions almost as a physical manifestation of his psychological distance from the family. Yet preserving self-respect and actualizing one’s potential cannot be an easy journey under the shadow of a self-centered, manipulative father and within a family saturated with destructive envy. We are given a clue to Connor’s early losses when we learn that, while he was still a child, his father abandoned his mother in a psychiatric treatment facility.
In the first episode, the Roy family gathers to celebrate Logan’s 80th birthday. After several attempts, Connor finally manages to give his father his gift. Unlike Logan’s son-in-law, who does not know what to offer a man who can have anything he desires, Connor presents him with a container of sourdough starter, the kind traditionally used for making bread. Yet immediately after handing it over, perhaps influenced by the puzzled glances of his siblings and father, Connor appears to regret it, as though the gift were foolish. In offering something that means nothing to Logan, Connor seems, in his inner world, to be extending the gift to an imagined father. Symbolically, the “starter” in a sealed container can be read as an expression of a self that has, for a long time, awaited contact and shaping. Connor remarks that he thought his father might want to make something with it. Or perhaps we might hear this as Connor projecting his own desire onto his father. This unanswered invitation once again reminds him that his “starter” is spoiled, and he turns away with the familiar shame of having exposed something inappropriate. Though Connor appears to have abandoned hope of ever being seen by his father, we come to understand that this longing has not vanished. Like the starter itself, it waits in a closed container for the day it might rise. In a scene where Logan suffers a stroke and is hospitalized, Connor proposes cryogenic body freezing, which is the preservation of the body at extremely low temperatures in the hope of future revival. Once again, we hear something less about Logan and more about how Connor copes with the knowledge that he will never be his father’s singular, cherished child. With this idea that seems bizarre to his siblings, Connor appears to tell us that he has frozen his authentic self to shield it from the paralysis of his relationship with his father and the worthlessness it engenders, yet he still hopes that one day it might come back to life.
Throughout the series, Connor never asks his father for a position within the company. Yet he does request money from Logan from time to time, whether to support Willa’s theatrical ambitions or to finance his own presidential dream. Connor gives the impression of someone who produces nothing meaningful, but rather consumes what already exists. At one event, we even witness Willa belittling him with a joke about his “doing nothing.” Connor’s own self-description, however, is more poignant: “I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside me.” In a sense, he speaks of himself as someone who continues to carry all his losses within the habitat of a father as hard and non-nourishing as rock and someone who has grown numb to these losses and remains utterly alone. When he learns on his wedding day that his father has died, his first reaction is: “He never even liked me.” It is as though he experiences even his father’s death as something done to him, as if Logan, even in dying, has cast a shadow over his happiest day.
Connor’s inwardly preoccupied and isolated psychic world leads us to understand his peculiar interests. For instance, throughout the series, he demonstrates an obsessive fascination with Napoleon. When he learns that Napoleon’s penis has re-entered the auction market, he becomes intensely excited and sets out to acquire it. Perhaps this relic, belonging to one of history’s most grandiose figures, serves as a prosthetic symbol of power against the lifelong reminder that his father’s insatiable hunger for dominance rendered him perpetually insufficient. Similarly, despite having no intellectual investment or experience in politics, Connor launches a campaign for President of the United States, falling under the illusion that he might win. In identifying with political power, he reveals how deeply he needs to inhabit a fantasy of omnipotence. It is striking that this fantasy emerges precisely as Logan deliberates which child will inherit the throne of the company. For the son who seems not even to exist among the potential heirs, the presidential dream reads like an answer to an internal summons to reality. Yet competition inherently carries the possibility of defeat. By remaining outside the rivalry with his siblings, Connor appears to neither win nor lose. He safeguards the fantasy realms in which he is forever victorious. Shielded from both the burdens and the rewards of adult responsibility, he mounts his presidential campaign on anti-tax rhetoric, conjuring a childlike vision of the world: one in which the taxes that uphold the very machinery of the state simply vanish into thin air. In his romantic relationship, too, we see him attempting to become the savior of Willa, who comes from a different sociocultural class. Their wedding on a yacht initially seems like a minor detail of billionaire life. Yet for a man who describes himself as a plant growing on rocks, it is telling that he takes the first step of his new life not upon solid ground, but upon a surface steady only so long as the waves permit. It appears that a part of his self that longs to feel extraordinarily valuable and another part that likely feels profoundly worthless together shape the trajectory of his choices.
