Readers Write In #828: Golden Rings and Gilded Dysfunction

By Karthik Amarnath

In all statistical certainty, I’m on the other side of my life’s interval block, so I’ve been wondering where my character arc is headed. Looking at old characters in movies, there seems to be a spectrum of possibilities for where I might end up—from the V. S. Raghavan character in Ethir Neechal, head buried inside his own world, oblivious to what’s right under his nose, to Carl from Up, mumbling away to a dog, holding on to a mailbox full of regrets, to a wild-haired Doc Brown, crazy enough to  believe that life is a movie tape with rewind and forward buttons. I wonder, though—do we have a choice for this sort of thing? Can we decide what kind of old person we become, like a kid deciding to be a software engineer or a film critic (or both 😉 )?

Some of this wrangling about old age came on after I recently caught up with Succession, HBO’s TV series whose central character, Logan Roy, is a man in his eighties. Watching the show, you wonder if this man—or any of his middle-aged kids—have grown up at all, let alone grown old. Succession is like the opposite of a coming-of-age story. Take this moment late in the show: Logan’s second wife, a woman in her sixties, shows up to an event and finds herself seated next to the twenty-something secretary Logan left her for. She shifts uncomfortably in her seat, until Logan’s first wife enters—married to him thirty years earlier—and she’s flanked by a younger woman, a once twenty-something secretary Logan had left her for. The situation is perverse. It’s tragic. But the emotional recursion is just masterful. We see this over and over in the show—characters facing the same dire situations, making the same desperate, often self-defeating choices.

For the uninitiated, Succession is loosely inspired by Newscorp and the Succession of Rupert Murdoch, and it’s about a bunch of arrogant a-holes from a fucked-up family with a shitload of money. Pardon my French, but describing this show without cursing is like describing fireworks without saying “boom” or “bang.” It’s not just the frequency of profanity—IMDb clocks the average f-word count at 76 per episode—but the sheer intensity of the verbal crossfire. It’s like watching kids in a video game shooting at each other except in place of bullets and blood spatter, there’s barbs and broadsides and bare-naked bone-piercing truth bombs.  And these are packaged into killer lines straight out of a stand-up comic’s wet dream, like this one uttered by a CEO to his CFO: “if your hands are clean, it’s only because your whorehouse also does manicures.” There are times even the camera thinks its in a video game, restlessly roaming about, frequently cross-cutting between shots, catching characters in half-cutoff glances and stammered replies. And all this creates a sense of lurking danger, as if we’re just one turn away from violence— bloodless, emotional but vicious violence. 

Succession’s high-stakes game isn’t played just for money or fame, but for a seat at the apex of power—the kind of power that can shape societies and change presidents. Power that is immense, flagrant, and wildly volatile. Power that Waystar Royco, Logan Roy’s company, has accumulated through years of feeding people what they want in the name of news, denying them the truth, and stoking division. I know— that sounds like a tired trope. But Succession’s strength is that it keeps that global power game at bay, using it as a backdrop while grounding its story in something more intimate and accessible: the relationships inside the Roy family. And episode after episode, we see not just how intertwined the global and the personal are, but how eerily identical. The power Logan Roy wields over his children is one he’s built over years of pampering them with gilded comforts in the name of parenting, while denying them genuine affection and pitting them against one another. So it comes as no surprise that both the society denied truth, and the children denied true love, are so easily manipulated that neither gets a chance to grow up.

Viewers have compared Logan Roy to King Lear, a paranoid father who weighed loyalty over love. The actor, Brian Cox, though has likened his character to King Henry IV, the insecure ruler who sought power before he could fully grow up. Almost every major character in this show is a tragedy in a three piece suit, and there’s a dozen essays waiting to be written on the Shakespearean origins for any of them. For me, though, rather than The Bard, it was Tolkien that I had more fun linking Succession to. I know a connection between Succession and Lord of the Rings sounds bizarre, and trust me, it is— a bit like stitching together parallels from two very different fabrics, you know, like those baggy pants that Prabhu Deva used to shake his legs in back in the 90s. But stay with me, as I am a self proclaimed expert on this sort of thing. It’s called THE WEAVE. 

Let’s start at the very top, with the kings of the rings. Look at how they are described. Sauron, in Gandalf’s words, is “a power too great.” Logan Roy, as Kendall puts it, “a fierce force.” Both can bend people to their will, shape the world, and wound without lifting a finger. Look at how both stories begin— with the fall of these kings. But despite being indisposed, look at what they’ve both got standing. A massive media conglomerate and a huge, all-seeing Eye. How different are the two really? One manipulates orcs, the other feeds trolls. One breeds Uruk-hai to wreak havoc in broad daylight, the other pays talking heads to run amok on public television.

Look at the main narrative thread—it follows what happens to the root of all their power (the Ring and Royco). If the Ring has a Fellowship, Royco has a board. Both have a powerful trio at the center: Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli / Kendall, Shiv, and Roman. Kendall, like Aragorn, is the closest challenger to the throne, assisted not just by bloodline but by sheer narrative inertia. Roman, like Gimli, is routinely mocked for his height (“He’s not short. Just optimized for private jet legroom”). Listen to the sharp, barbed banter between Roman and his sister Shiv, isn’t that just a more caustic version of the one between Gimli and Legolas? And what about Shiv’s icy poise and her not-so-subtle air of superiority, aren’t those traits rather Elvish?

And then there’s the “hero” of both the stories. This connection clicked for me in that moment when Logan’s team is scrambling to douse a major fire, and Tom walks up calmly, puts himself on the line—“I’ll step up and go down.” That scene gains even more weight when he later talks about his capacity to withstand “psychological pain,” as he agrees to oversee the destruction of a colossal corporate empire. These took me straight to the moment Frodo steps forward, picks up the Ring, and agrees to carry it to doom at great personal cost. Tom, like Frodo, comes from humble origins— unlike the coastal elite Roy family— and throughout the series, never leaves his proximity to power, even if he never actively “takes” it for himself. 

Except you know when.  

That brings us down to the easiest connection, between the two most two-faced characters in these stories, Greg and Gollum. Both, like Tom and Frodo, come from humble origins, and both are defined by an inhuman endurance for humiliation, and survive by slinking in the shadows. And despite their close proximity to the “hero”, neither comes out of the story with any semblance of a soul. Along this line of thought, for those of you who are familiar with both these stories, ask yourself this. Looking at the ending on Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings, who do you think will really go down as the CEO of Waystar Royco were the series to be renewed? Would that surprise you?

Ok, so I’ve taken you down this bizarre indulgence a bit too far, and the seams are perhaps showing. Of course I know that the emotional registers of these stories couldn’t be more different. Tolkien’s fantasy is steeped in nobility and grandeur, built on the ideals of service and sacrifice. Succession’s real-life drama paints nobility and grandeur as a veneer, held together by tragedy, trauma and toxic relationships. Succession is an unapologetically adult show whose characters are not just flawed but barely even likable. Tolkien’s characters are aspirational, his narrative draw is ageless, and if anything, the fable-like form beckons your inner child. 

That said, LOTR has had a different kind of appeal every time I’ve watched it—starting in my early twenties, when Fellowship first came out. Back then, Aragorn was the man, a mass hero for the ages. That swagger. Brooding charisma. Swashbuckling swordplay. And an entry scene that made Rajni’s iconic Aboorva Raagangal gatecrash look like a delivery boy at a doorbell. But a decade later, when I rewatched the movies, it was Frodo and Sam’s journey that I most identified with. The characters were like two halves of a person, one part carrying an impossible burden, inching toward collapse, the other grounded in loyalty, love, and the kind of strength that doesn’t ask for credit. Their aching chemistry mirrored the everyday tension between the endless grind of profession and the quiet pull of home and family.

Fast forward another decade, I caught the whole series again, very recently— thanks to the extended 12 hour version that the blessed makers put out on OTT. The series still holds up as well as it did when I first saw it; Fellowship still evokes that wide-eyed adventurous spirit, and Return is still the operatic punch-a-minute finale the series deserved. But this time I found a deeper emotional resonance in the plodding mid-symphony march of Two Towers—amidst all the action was a weariness, in carrying the weight of time and memory, without knowing if wisdom matters in a world always in flux. A feeling best encased in the tall ten thousand year-old talking Treebeard. 

Okay, one last stretch of the LOTR-Succession parallels. A big reason for the character of Logan Roy to be humanized and even downsized from time to time is the presence of his older brother, Ewan Roy. Ewan’s mannerisms are measured, his voice deep and Entishly unhurried. At a funeral late in the show, Ewan starts his speech with “I,” and then lets the silence hang like the worn regret of old wood, before adding “loved him I suppose.”  Ewan is played by James Cromwell, whose towering frame makes the rest of the Roys look like squabbling hobbits. And it helps that Cromwell, like our Major Sundarrajan, was born to be old (on screen, that is). You dont hesitate to buy the hard-earned wisdom of his words. Having witnessed the slow withering of Logan’s moral fiber, Ewan stands as both judge and relic, condemning his brother for “running a disgusting enterprise and destroying the planet,” and yet wholly aware that he, like Treebeard says, “cannot hold back a storm,” even if he expresses regret that he “should have done more.”  It comes as no surprise that Ewan lives in a little cabin in the woods, and donates his vast wealth to Greenpeace.

Ok, so I started out by questioning where my character arc’s headed, and wondering if we have a choice for that sort of thing. If I’ve somehow led you to believe that Treebeard/Ewan Roy is my preferred destination, then I’m going to disappoint you. Don’t mistake me — I love trees. I love green. I love peace. And it sure would be nice to keep growing taller and gain enough far sight to see beyond the petty human recursions. But here’s the thing. One of the privileges of having crossed your statistical halfway mark is that you’ve seen enough to know that real life, unlike movies, does not grant neat arcs from ignorance to wisdom. If anything your arcs look like loops, and all you do is keep turning — perhaps not aimlessly, but with better rhythm, and more control, even if you keep arriving where you started. Give it time though, and you might see that the loop isn’t a trap, but a shape. One forged in experiences. One carried with strength. One that you hope smooths with age, and finds its finish, even if it weighs — like a golden ring.