Meagerness

On The Poverty of the Rich. In Life + in Succession

Succession is over. So bummed.

This is a show David and I have been obsessed with to the point that we rewatched the previous seasons leading up to this last one to get the full impact. And since he has been traveling, we made a very serious pact that we are only allowed to watch the episodes on Sundays together, in bed, while the phone is on speaker. 

No one wants to be the one “who cheated.”

This devotion has fueled amazing marital bedroom discussions about class and empathy and these characters and how their relationships get played out around food and whether or not there is truth to this. There are some great pieces about food and Succession here and here. They cover a lot of the show details that reference food. I will not be that detailed here.

What I’m thinking about mostly is the word meagerness, which is such a specific and wonderful, and dare I say, under-used word. It is used to great effect in the funeral scene when Ewan is summarizing the life of his brother. He says:  “He fed a certain kind of meagerness in men.”

I nearly squealed at that line. I’ve thought about it a great deal since. 

When asked about this word in interviews, actor James Cromwell who plays Ewan, has said that “Meagerness is the lack of willingness to subrogate yourself in another’s shoes.”

“The trauma and power from war and Logan’s success erected a barrier between him and other people,” Cromwell told reporters at High On Films, adding, “Logan’s meagerness was a measure of his empathy.”

Meagreness shows up on Succession all the time. 

The ones who fill their plates, they are the ones who don’t come from money. Willa’s mother (Willa is the call girl turned wife of Connor, who comes from the lower classes) piles her plate with food, showing off that she isn’t couth, doesn’t have restraint, is baldy wanting of something and giving it to herself in large quantities which makes her other and desperate and different.

“There go the grapes!” Roman says of her. 

And Connor responds: "Gotta love her, her plate is groaning."

By being so publicly wanting she is showing herself to them. The lower classes are needy, desperate, unsatiated. They don’t have the self control to hide their desires. 

“Compare this to a working class show like Law and Order, one of the commenters says in the comment thread of Tejal Rao’s New York Times piece. “...especially those with Jerry Orbach, they are always eating, if not a pretzel, or coffee or an ice from a street vendor  or a sandwich or Chinese food in the squad room…”

There is even a Tumblr dedicated to the food on Law + Order.

There is an art to appearing rich, and the overconsumption of food isn't it. Hunger, and the perception of it, is for the lower, more banal classes.

The focus on food as a prop (not on the set but in the Roy world) is seen in Tom’s disdain for Greg’s love of something as low class as a California Pizza Kitchen, a mall and airpot pizza chain. This pairs up with the pricey, gross, status-infused ortolan dinner, this idea that food has power and it signifies important things. Rich people don’t like California Pizza Kitchen, they want us to know, because it’s not for the rich. There are restaurants for the rich and those for everyone else. For Greg, its about how the pizza tastes, for Tom, it’s about the choice. This is the way in which class is both about and not about money in your bank account. They way Tom is rich but not Roy rich. Again it’s not about the number in the bank.

This is partly why it was so exasperating to learn that the former President of the United States (Trump) had a proclivity for eating McDonalds and Warren Buffet drinks five Cokes a day. I mean aren't they supposed to be dining at Per Se and ordering every last tasting menu? Don’t they have better food than us? Don’t they want better food than us?

The food in Succession is notoriously bland, simple, ignored, dysfunctional, ugly, less than, something to not be indulged in, to be avoided, it is a prop in their lives. It even saddens the characters, as we see Connor upset about how his wedding cake reminds him of the cake his family bought for him every time his mother had to be institutionalized in the psych ward. He calls it “sad cake.” I am struck that some of the strongest emotions about food are how depressing and traumatic they are. I bet lots of people have these disconnections with food and food memory.

Food as a disposable dysfunction. A stand-in for shame and loss.

Take Cousin Greg stealing cookies at the hospital where Logan was recovering from a stroke. He steals hospital cookies and keeps them in a doggy bag. Sumptuous buffets thrown out, and being thrown out by the staff who probably never get to eat this kind of food, and so it feels gross. Opulence at its worst and most wasteful. Might someone say: “Make sure the staff take food home?”

No. Because no one cares. No one is thinking about anything except their bubbles. The way Roman dips his finger in the caviar so thoughtlessly and then wipes it off. Caviar as garbage.

The idea of meagerness is a constant theme in the show, and based on the research, also sometimes among the super-rich in real life. Check out the Paris Hilton cooking show that lasted for a season on Netflix. Hilton is hard to watch even as she wears fingerless gloves to cook “for fashion not cooking.”

“I hate touching bacon, it’s gross.” she says and pulls out a large serving fork, saying, “I don’t know what the name of this is,” and awkwardly stabs and hacks away at the bacon. There is a moment where she stops cooking and tells us how to take better selfies.

Meager.

We also know FOR SURE that the rich live separately from the rest of us in the US.  Probably in many ways like the Roy family. 

Aside from the great writing and acting on the show, people also love to see how the super-rich function, how they live, how Hilton cooks a fritatta, “Hot! I’m scared!” Maybe we want the rich to have some meagerness in their lives because we haven’t been invited to the party?

+++++

We live in a time when there is more income inequality than in any time in recent memory. There are more people impossibly mind-bendingly rich and way more of us impossibly mind-bendingly impoverished.

This is largely because of things like tax and wealth benefits that have been given to companies and wealthy families, while clamping down on the kinds of benefits that help people in the lower income brackets. As the rich glean more favour with the government handouts, for the lower classes there are fewer ways to own a house, a lack of tenant rights, not enough low and no-income housing, wages not keeping up with cost of living, lack of unions advocating for workers, more media consolidation giving us fewer takes and more wealth behind our news, and less stringent antitrust legislation allowing big cats to get bigger, not to mention the constant con job against the poor that I write about in my book. 

The rich, like the characters we’ve been watching on Succession are often completely removed from the public. They are not interested in their money going to taxes which help public spaces, like roads and parks. If you get around in a helicopter or hopping on private jets,  why would you care that people have dirty water, or that the parks are overrun with unhoused people? It would be to you a blur of otherness. Something that happens alongside pictures of hungry children in war-torn Somalia or Ukranian families in refugee camps. 

Would it even flag your attention to learn that a neighborhood somewhere on the other side of your city feeds its people with gas station food, expensive convenience store products, fast food and dollar stores? Would you even think about it? Not only does it not ping your concern, it might feel even more deluded, like maybe those people created this for themselves? Maybe this is how they want to live, so let them. maybe you think everyone has the same choices as you, while forgetting that money itself bring choice.

And of course, this can complicate your vision of who and what is dangerous.  I write more about perceiving danger here. When your bubble is that cushy, anyone not in that bubble can represent danger, and this is the basis for racism, sexism, bigotry of all kinds. Did you know that when white middle class people move into gentrifying neighborhoods, calls to the police increase substantially? 

It’s the bubble. 

Weirdly we live in a part of Vegas, downtown, just off the North end of the Strip, a zip code that is considered one of the most dangerous in Vegas. Our neighborhood is a hot zone of discussion about gentrification which usually ends in someone squealing: “But we want cool restaurants and breweries and a Trader Joes!”It’s a place where when people visit from the suburbs, they take off their good jewelry so as not to instigate a mugging and often leave their “good car” at home for fear it will be vandalized. A friend overheard someone say at a dinner party I hosted, “We crossed Las Vegas Boulevard for this?”

The insulation against perceived danger is a bubble. It is also isolating. 

Which is desired by the rich, but is probably why the research tells us that, like the characters on Succession, the very rich tend to have less empathy than people in lower classes. In fact, study after study tells us this. The rich can lead lives filled with a kind of meagerness. 

Why?

Well, the brain gets good at stuff it does all the time. So the more you do something, the more you get good at it. People who are struggling often have more empathy, because if their lives are unpredictable, they have to be able to read people’s feelings, their reactions. They need to get a read on the boss so they don’t get fired. Most of us rely on other people to survive and thrive. They have to depend on other people to get by. 

But the super rich don’t have to do this as much. They don’t need their neighbor to hold their baby for 20 minutes so they can get a shower in. They would have to cultivate that relationship first and then create an air of reciprocity between themselves and the neighbor. Instead of that effort into the dynamics of empathy and reciprocity, they could simply pay for full time help. They aren’t sending a plate of tacos to their neighbors because everyone around them has food handled. It is easily outsourced. You don’t have to borrow some olive oil from your neighbor because you can have someone go get it or bring it to you or a personal chef is worrying about it or all your food is ordered in, jetted in, whatever. 

There is also the discomfort I often discuss here. Being uncomfortable gives you perspective. It sometimes forces you to think about the other person, and what they are about, or your own force upon the world. 

If you can pay the problem away then how much attention will you pay to it? How much of everyone's feelings will you consider? Remember in Succession, the rich buy people off to take the hit for them. It is the very thing that got Tom to the top.  It is the way Logan got Ken off from letting that boy die. If you have enough money, the discomfort and the  accountability can be sorted out by someone else, so maybe, possibly, there is less tolerance for that?

One of the things I jokingly say is that if we get super-stupid-rich that I would pay someone a ludicrous amount of money to simply clean up the dishes and the stray toys and settle the house after dinner each night. The reality is the rich just do that. They decide they need something done or managed or cleaned or cared for and they hire it out. Or have someone on their staff hire it out, all the shitty tedious things can be conquered with another human on salary, outsourcing and a hyper-focus on the self. 

The road is smooth. The tedium is wiped out. It sounds intoxicating and I am dreadfully jealous of that freedom, the freedom to make choices that only money brings, except that we know what water running over stone, over time, does to it? 

It smoothes it out. 

It cleans off the edges. 

It rounds people. 

You gain so much, yes. And also maybe lose some basics of humanity?

+++++

I’m thinking about how love is expressed through food on the show.

In the finale, when there is a moment for the siblings in their mothers kitchen, they play with food, they make some gross concoction from the paltry food items in their moms fridge (Why don’t these wealthy people ever have abundance? It’s the meagerness…..) Roman licks his mothers husband’s expensive cheese, licks it like he is performing oral on it. Then, they revert to their childhood selves, the food is a prop, a way to play and express and connect. It’s beautiful and a fun scene to watch.

It is not quite love though. 

As I have said many times, food is not love. Love is the act of feeding people. It is the act of giving another food that makes it love, that breaks people open, that creates connection and complexity. And sometimes discomfort. Ken, Roman and Shiv play at connection, play at siblinghood, play at cohesion and trust and water under the bridge. There is something here, a familial nostalgia, a kind of love, but there is also meagerness. There is no feeding. Just food displaced and disconnected, and bad food at that.

In fact, it gets dumped on Ken’s head.

I wondered who cleaned it up in their fictional world? Did they have a night person on duty? Did they clean it themselves? The things I ask myself…. LOL.

The next day, whatever they created in this moment, disappears in the board room. The connection itself is meager. The connections are loose bulbs, transient, on when convenient, off when necessary.

Everything is transactional.

Do all rich people experience meagerness? Do all struggling people have greater empathy? I’m sure this is not the case. We know examples of each these contradictions. And yet something about this feels real. Maybe more of us experience meagerness than we care to admit.

It leaves us to contemplate how to bring everyone together.