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“Let them eat cake.” She infamously responded, when she heard about a famine where people had no bread. In 1793, the Queen of France Marie Antoinette was guillotined by the Revolution. For purposes of public entertainment and moral education, her head was immediately shown to the crowd, who responded by crying “Vive la République!” Shortly after her death, her body was hurled into an unmarked grave in the cemetery of L'église de la Madeleine in Paris.
Well, she never said it.
The phrase "let them eat cake" was originally "let them eat brioches” — first appeared in Rousseau's Confessions. Written in 1765, Marie Antoinette was only nine years old when Rousseau only vaguely attributed the line to “a great princess.” In the years led up to and during the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette was constantly defamed in trashy tabloids called “Libelles” (under the same root as the English word libel). These often pornographic Libelles depicted the queen as a bisexual demonic figure, who was constantly reveling in drunken orgies with her dangerous sexuality. But again, none of this is true. According to Robert Darnton, a historian-researcher of these libelles, the “avalanche of defamation” leveled at Antoinette between 1789 to her execution in 1793 has “no parallel in the history of vilification.”
In 2005, Paris Hilton attended her sister Nicky Hilton’s new clothing line launch wearing one of the collection pieces. It reads “Stop Being Poor”. As part of the famous hotel conglomerate Hilton family, Paris’ sassy message sent the internet into a frenzy and this moment has immortalized as one of Y2K’s internet most viral moments.
And yes you guessed it, she never did that too. On May 4th, 2021, Paris set the record straight by debunking how the picture was photoshopped, when the design was from her sister's collection that reads “Stop Being Desperate.” The question of “Who Photoshopped It?” was never asked but it is more so how galvanized people’s reactions were — an “every day” we versus the rich and famous “them”. From the defamation of Marie Antoinette to the photoshopping of Paris Hilton — it asks if it has always been an equal two-way street between the everyday public and the powerful celebrity when envy likes to fabricate the diabolical crimes of its enemies? Do we like how unlikable they are? I understand often we have a psychological incentive to believe that people whom we envy are immoral monsters, precisely because in those envious moments we get the chance to label our hatred and violence towards them under the name of “justice”.
“My mom wanted me to be a Hilton, and I just want to be Paris.”
This is Paris Documentary
It is a cruel kind of love because cruelty generally cannot conceptualize itself as cruelty. And part of the reason for that is because calling cruelty for what it is, takes the fun out of it. It is fun to hate, maybe more fun to love. What does it say about the viewership when it comes to pop culture/media’s obsession with the rich and famous?
Succession
Much of the cult following for the show Succession is leveraged by the cultural backdrop that is American politics — when the franchise so far has spanned across the Trump and Biden administrations. In June 2018, the first season launched in a world unbeknownst to Covid, yet within the Roystar Cinematic Universe (RCU) — covid does not exist. A report from Vulture confirms the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong decided early on that the season’s finished scripts would not be rewritten to incorporate the ongoing pandemic. “These are really wealthy people,’ says Sarah Snook who plays Shiv Roy (the #girlboss of the family). “And unfortunately, none of the world’s wealthy people were going to be affected by the pandemic.” Well, it is true though — from Nicole Kidman granting special immigration treatment to Hong Kong, Kim Kardashian's private island birthday, Ellen just hanging out in her mansion. The list goes on as we continue to hop on Twitter to see who has been canceled — If I can’t have it, so can’t you.
The show’s premise is pretty simple — a powerful family teeming with dysfunction and spoiling for conflict. An aging patriarch, Logan Roy, pitting his children in competition for a role he may or may not be ready to yield. Kendall Roy, the troubled child riddled with vice; Roman Roy, the Loki-like trickster and part-time comedic relief; Shiv Roy the ex-political consultant girlboss finds herself more invested in the family business than she lets on. On the outskirts, a flock of malfunctioning parasitic relatives, waiting for an “in” to snatch up whatever scraps left when the battle is over.
There is barely any escape here, only to a visit to a neighboring reality. Fundamentally, this is a show about the rich and the powerful; vanity, greed, and dishonesty. Much of the success openly acknowledges these tropes are part of the American cultural backdrop and swings the flag of “unlikability” to liberate themselves from any sticky moral lectures. We knew these characters are fake, yet we know very well these people exist in corners we dare to dream of — from private helicopter rides, sky-high penthouses, hunting mansions in the Hamptons — if those things are real, the people inhabit those spaces must be real too. I think.
Writing on how the show Succession toys with viewers’ class rage, Michelle Dean observes how the show does not bother to hide the character’s unlikability — “these are terrible people.” Yet, again, we are drawn into the world of people we intended to resent, invested in their dramas, looking with envy at the fruits of their wealth. This is exactly the appeal of the show — using our resentment, sympathy, envy, or helplessness to build catharsis through episodic corporate hazing and beheading to see how the show can make this new moment more dramatic than the one before — than “in the grand scheme of class politics.”
Part of the Succession viewing experience has a similar cultural feeling akin to public execution, inciting the audience to jeer at these “terrible people” often feels like part of the show’s game. In some twisted way, the open claim to “dislikability” makes them ironically likable while we are living in a moment of growing inequality and resentment. The rise of guillotine memes, edgy teens tweeting “eat the rich” only itches the envy scab. Writing on the reality trope of “I am not here to make friends,” Roxane Gay explains:
[Reality TV contestants/stars] make this declaration by way of explaining their unlikability or the inevitably unkind edit they’re going to receive from the show’s producers. It isn’t that they are terrible, you see. It's simply that they are not participating in the show to make friends. They are freeing themselves from the burden of likability, or they are, perhaps, freeing us from the burden of guilt for the dislike and eventual contept we might hold them for.
I am not drawing that the Roys are likable because they are embracing their unlikability, but I am more so cautious of how “unlikability” has claimed itself as the new darling in our current timing more as an aesthetic than questions for accountability. Through the same logic, it is through the distance of a TV show we say “they are not that bad” that stagnates attempts of class analysis. Yet again, in Roy’s world, it is only the Roys that matter. I wonder if deep down we wanted to find answers to those so-called “Rich People Problems” through the show and watching the show with some precarious hope and despair — yes you can look into our Roystar empire but don’t you dare make a sound.
I know, I know it’s just a TV show — but can you imagine a universe where the Roys are real people and the public still have such a pornographic gaze into their lives? We are so invested in the series as we just waiting for them to slip up and catch one character say “let them eat cake” before we send them beheaded. In his video essay titled “The Succession Character You Never See”, Thomas Flight describes how the handheld cameraman makes the viewer into voyeurs like “I am not quite supposed to be here.” There are so many ways to position this, as part of the Roy family as a silent bystander moving closer to the scene, responding as it is unfolding. Or, a paparazzi on an assignment (The next assignment is on Paris Hilton).
Between the trope of embracing unlikability, camera techniques, cunning dialogues, and extravagant sets — Succession markets itself as a product that flirts with the everyday public’s imagination and fascination of the rich/powerful/corrupted and leaving us hanging. It offers us some respite from identity politics as calls for diversity find themselves eating their fists. When asked if diversity will be addressed in series three, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong said “Our show is about a white family of billionaires, media moguls. There are some things we can do on the show and there are some things we can’t. I think those ambitions you address over your career and over the number of things you work on. There are places where we can show what America looks like in our show, the broader picture of America, and there are places where frankly that would not be reflecting reality if we made our central world more diverse than the higher echelons of corporate America are. So, that’s a difficult path to tread, but it’s one, to be honest of that world.” What would the show look like if the Roys are a ____ family? You fill the blanks.
Jordan Peele’s Us (2019)
[*Light spoilers ahead, read with caution*]
Us begins with bold text saying under the United States are “thousands of miles of abandoned tunnels and mineshafts.” In the next scene, a family strolls through a carnival on the Santa Cruz beach. While dad is busy winning a game, his daughter Adelaide strays into a house of mirrors. She descends into its dark rooms, sees her reflection; it smiles evilly and grabs her. Fast forward to the now-grown Adelaide as the mother of the Wilson family — as they are hunted by their own grotesque doopelgängers called the “Tethered” living underground who mime the lives of those above.
In Natalie Wynn’s video essay on envy, she describes how Us dramatizes the repressed economic guilt and fear of the American middle class. In Us, the doopelgängers represent the repressed side of the “American Dream” and the nation’s painful and repressed history and memory. Consider this excerpt when Red (Adelaide’s Tethered double) confronts the Wilsons:
"Once upon a time, there was a girl and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody."
In Wynn’s analysis, she notes that the film is an expression of middle-class guilt about privilege and fear of envy. The Tethered are not the middle class looking for revenge, so much so it is “the anxious middle class’s nightmare of the working class” coming true: the fear of the envious past, the envious poor, or revolution, of a slave revolt.
I wonder what if the Succession and Us universe collide — where the Roys are being hunted by their own Tethered doopelgängers? What a silly idea — when the Roys are almost too elusive and too quick to catch. Both of these examples present class struggles in their own unique and total ways — the poisonous envy, jealousy, and resentment between the Succession characters vacuum seals the Roystar world untouched by the everyday public; and Us the Freudian anxiety of the middle-class confit itself. In Succession, a show that despite all its twists and turns is surprisingly static — brings questions about our gaze at the rich, powerful, and the corrupted. Is it some kind of misdirected adoration? Or a tamed sterilized envy?
Yes, Paris is Burning but Where Can I See the Flames?
In this continuum of examples, I tend to the Paris is Burning — a 1990 documentary about underground black gay drag ball culture. In these drag balls, attendees walk in categories such as “Executive Realness”, “Military Realness”, “Banjee Girl Realness” where they are scored for their realness (how real it is that it becomes the real thing) and hopefully winning a trophy for their house. The narrator of the documentary Dorian Corey defines “realness” as “to be able to blend…to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart.” As Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” plays in the background, the camera shows a montage of the everyday New York — women with extravagant up-dos, white collared men biting on an unlit cigar, power suits, etc. The narrator describes the troubled identification between drag with the white mainstream society:
This is white America. Any other nationality that is not of the white set knows this and accepts this till the day they die. That is everybody's dream and ambition as a minority - to live and look as well as a white person is pictured as being in America. Every media you have — from TV to magazines to movies to films. I mean, the biggest thing that minority watches is what? "Dynasty" and the Colbys. Or "All My Children." The soap operas. Everybody have a million-dollar bracket. When they showing you a commercial from Honey Graham to Crest or Lestoil or Pine-Sol, everybody's in their own home. The little kids for Fisher-Price Toys - they're not in no concrete playground. They're riding around the lawn. The pool is in the back. This is white America.
The narrator aptly summarizes how drag ball participants are tangled in this sticky web of real life, pop culture, consumerism, and racism. The underlying question remains — if drag is an imitation by mockery or mockery by imitation? How do people play this zero-sum game that is drag? For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate and envy. As bell hooks writes succinctly in her essay “Is Paris Burning?” — this “we evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.” What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like “real” black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of femininity that is white.
In the context of popular culture, envy becomes a convenient metric to evaluate the distance between the spectator and the spectacle; the Tethered and the Wilsons in Us; the handheld camera observer and the Roy family in Succession; the everyday public and Marie Antoinette/Paris Hilton; the black queers in drag and white femininity. Amidst all doppelgängers — the real, hyperreal, and the fake all mix into something we call a fantasy. And the lines between jealousy, envy, and resentment are becoming more blurry. Natalie Wynn distinguishes jealousy and envy:
“jealousy is defensive, it’s a kind of protectiveness over what is rightfully yours; whereas envy is offensive, it’s resentment over what someone else has that you lack.”
In popular and internet culture of what Wynn describes as “an incubator of envy,” the fantasies of love and hate are addictive (“I am gonna hate-watch Drag Race tonight”). Love is closer to hate than neutrality. If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and repackaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of pop culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known.
We can’t seem to catch up with pop culture — and it is ever more difficult to actively register our viewership in more engaging ways. Whereas we tend to imagine pop culture as docile, passive, and consumptive — I want to believe our viewership is active and invigorating, maybe not for intellectual reasons but to reposition our viewership as a part of our active living. My question is — what kinds of stories do we want to see? My point is to not give ourselves away into fantasies but to recognize their limitations. One must distinguish the place of fantasy from the use of fantasy as a means of escape.
Further Reading & References
“The Succession Character You Never See” - Video Essay by Thomas Flight
“‘Succession’ Knows How to Toy with Your Class Rage. Hence the Chicken” Michelle Dean from New York Times. Oct 30, 2019.
“Jordan Peele’s “Us” is a Middle-Class Guilt Trip” Nicholas Powers, April 14, 2019.
“Envy” Video Essay by Natalie Wynn/Contra Points
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