A Trope I Love
When characters beat the shit out of themselves, that's amore
In Succession’s finale last Sunday, Tom Wombsgams calmly asks Cousin Greg to accompany him somewhere private, pulls him into a bathroom and locks the door. Then the screen fades to black and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s voice echoes over Nicholas Britell’s final score: “This is a love story.”
Kidding! Although this ending would likely satisfy half of Succession’s viewership.
The show boasts many odd couples teeming with sexual chemistry, but none as electrifying to watch on screen as Tom and Greg. Matthew McFayden and Nicholas Braun have sparked dozens of fan edits imagining the two characters either in a tumultuous love affair or a slapstick romantic comedy. McFayden could have chemistry with a Lincoln Log, making the tension (romantic or otherwise) between them believable. But they do not go into the bathroom to make out. Rather, Tom hits Greg on the side of his head after learning of his betrayal, and Greg has the gaul to hit him back, prompting Tom to engage in a wrestling match with the protege he’s always loved and loathed in equal measure.
Tom, since the very beginning of the show, has been Greg’s tormentor — and his only friend. There’s a power element: Tom starts the series at the bottom rung of the Roy ladder, and he’s elated to find a spare Roy who he outranks. He allows himself to be the family’s punching bag as long as he has one of his own nearby. But it becomes clear throughout the show that Tom has a genuine affection for Greg. It’s possible Tom sees a younger version of himself: a striver1 who’s noticeably out of place in the mundane extravagance of the Roy family fortune. So he takes Greg under his wing. But in Tom’s greatest moments of inner torment and sometimes even joy, Greg reverts to an egg on a frying pan, cracked in the process of making a Tomlete.
These scenes are some of the best in the show. Tom flipping desks, chucking mini water bottles at Greg, cooing “fight me like a rooster, you weakling.” The scenes are absurdly funny but they’re also charged with emotion. Against the backdrop of Braun’s doe-eyed bemusement, McFayden is swatting at an anguish just beyond his reach. You see all of the characters do this throughout the course of the show, acting wildly as they fail to process the most basic human emotion — loss, fear, disappointment. But characters like Kendall or Roman have the luxury of sinking in a pool of their own despair or self-destructing publicly as they grapple with the limitations of who they are. Tom’s survival depends on staying quiet, not making a scene. So the only moments he can truly express anything are in locked rooms with Greg. Which is how you might get the greatest love story of all time. But in another more real realm, it’s where you get one of my favorite tropes of television: characters beating the shit out of themselves.
From Tony in The Sopranos to Eeyor in Winne the Pooh, characters are more interesting with a sprinkle of self-loathing. This dynamic can manifest itself in different ways — denial, true self harm, long brooding stares at the ocean. But my favorite manifestation by far is the doppelgangers, the body swaps and the tormenting of kindred souls.
For Tom, this is very metaphorical. Greg, with a body built like Salad Fingers, doesn’t look anything like him, and their mannerisms aren’t exactly identical. But it’s hard to imagine Tom could watch as Greg people-pleases and boot-licks his way through the web of Roy influence and not see a reflection of himself. Tom and Greg have both been put in demoralizing situations (Tom was ready to go to jail! Greg has been forced to do coke twice and that’s twice too many!). While Greg’s got a himbo mentality so strong most of this drips off his teflon exterior, Tom is a proud man at the end of the day — a midwesterner eager to please but with an end goal of respectability. That mixed with the Roy family’s antics can’t bode well for the psyche. He beats up on Greg because it’s the only control he can wield confidently, but the relationship (especially in its most physically abusive) transcends beyond a bully and victim dynamic into something more intimate. When Tom is wrestling with Greg, he’s wrestling with the parts of himself he hates most.
It’s a juicy character dynamic that you can also see in Beef, the anxiety-inducing Netflix thriller comedy in which a man and a woman from different class backgrounds, but with the same inner rage, seek to make each other’s lives hell at whatever cost.
Both protagonists, played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, clearly deal with shame, generational trauma and most evidently, an irrepressible anger that seems to come from nowhere in particular. They breathe that anger at each other and slowly their lives completely unravel. It becomes obvious to both of them at the end that they’re not so different. And perhaps they knew that all along. Sometimes to hate yourself isn’t enough; you find mirrors you can crack until they resemble only fractions of you.
But truly the best, and most literal, example of this trope comes from my favorite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season four’s “Who are you?” In it, Faith, the only other vampire slayer in the world (that we know of yet *rolls eyes in season seven*), has recently awoken from a coma that Buffy (*spoiler alert*) put her in at the end of the previous season. The relationship between Buffy and Faith, just like Tom and Greg, is one of the most dynamic on the show (sure as shit more interesting than Buffy and Riley, and I’ll say it a better watch than Buffy and Angel). The brunette and broody Faith is a perfect foil for the show’s blonde bubbly heroine, who, although she is powerful on her own, derives a great amount of strength from the friends and family surrounding her. Faith, meanwhile, is perpetually lonely. A bad girl who’s lived a harder life than Buffy and thus is, herself, hardened.
Faith exacts revenge on Buffy (who literally stabbed her in the back) with a classic switcheroo, swapping their bodies so that she can enjoy the perks of college life in Sunnydale while Buffy gets sent to the slammer. But just a few days in Buffy’s body sends Faith into a spiral, aching inside the gap of what Buffy has and she lacks. She sleeps with Buffy’s boyfriend as a tactical cut but finds herself bowled over by his tenderness. The love emanating from everyone in Buffy’s life, her best friends, her mother, her mentor/watcher, shines through more visibly in an episode where an intruder is taking a look inside — Buffy might take for granted the love that is guaranteed, but Faith sure doesn’t.
The episode ends in a battle between the switched up Buffy and Faith that takes place in my favorite venue for a fist fight: church. It becomes clear to the real Buffy that Faith isn’t fighting her, Faith is fighting herself. She launches her fists at her own face, banging her head into the ground. “You’re nothing,” she says with each punch. “You’re disgusting. Murderous bitch, you’re nothing.”
It’s absolutely devastating and I could watch it over and over again.
Maybe I’m a little sick in the head to delight in this form of self-degradation when it's portrayed on screen. I think it’s often where you find the best performances2, which is part of the draw. But watching characters beat the shit out of themselves offers a specific catharsis. To watch a character unleash all their bottled up hatred for themselves on another person (sometimes someone directly resembling them), is a little toxic, but it almost always results in some kind of resolution, or at the very least, a release. And at the end of the throwdown, you often see the character develop a tenderness or affection for the shadow they just pulverized. Tom says “I got you.” Wong and Yeun end up in each other’s arms. It takes a while, but Faith forgives herself and Buffy.
There’s an ugliness to being a person that’s sometimes hard to stomach, but it’s even harder to suppress it, to try and pretend it’s not there. You can feel so powerless, confronting your own limitations, so disgusted by the things you lack. When I find myself in these holes, I can’t help but picture being in a fight with my own doppelganger, pressing my thumbs into her eyeballs just to show that I know all the ways she’s wrong. It can feel empowering, in a way, to both submit to yourself and exert control at the same time. In the end though, the face you’re maiming will always be your own.
B Plot
Question: Which television show would you reboot?
Mallika’s answer: Lie to Me, not because it was necessarily an A+ show but because it deserves a second chance and I am a sucker for a procedural. Lie to Me — in which Tim Roth plays Dr. Cal Lightman, a House-like character and expert in reading body language and facial expressions — only got three seasons and still, I was obsessed. Cal might have been catching murderers and kidnappers, but I was convinced I was catching kids at school lying about who their crushes were or what grade they got on a test every time they touched they faces or breathed too loud. Nothing got passed me thanks to Dr. Cal! If Law and Order: SVU gets 24 seasons, this one should have at least gotten five.
Rachel’s answer: I’m getting meta with this and saying that I would like to reboot the show Reboot. This hidden gem which finally put Judy Greer on the masthead was a casualty this year in Hulu’s cruel attempt at cleaning up shop (another victim was an adaption of Devil in the White City steered by Keaunu Reeves that didn’t even make it to air: make it make sense). I think Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom might have pissed off some kind of TV witch. But this show deserved more. It followed the cast of a Full House-coded 90s show called Step Right Up that in present day is getting a spicy reboot. The twist? The writer pitching an edgier look at the show is the original showrunner’s daughter (played gloriously by Bloom). Greer, Johnny Knoxville and Keegan Michael Key (who seems to thrive in projects commenting on acting and comedy in practice; if you haven’t watched Don’t Think Twice, I highly recommend) have stellar chemistry as the three leads on the show, and taking a look inside the writer’s room is a blast. Imagine Aaron Sorkin’s Lucille Ball biopic, but actually funny!
C Plot
*In Goodnight Moon voice* Goodbye Succession, goodbye Barry, goodbye Sunday nights that aren’t so scary…
Kim Cattrall, who has famously feuded with the other Sex and the City women for decades, will be returning as Samantha Jones in the show’s reboot… for one scene that she filmed without seeing or speaking to anyone else in the cast. Ms. Girl really said she didn’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where she’s not enjoying herself and she wasn’t lyin’!
We’re going to have to wait until 2025 to find out if the girls murdered Lexie for that play in Euphoria and what the heck happens with Rue and the suitcase. At this point they might as well time jump to the gang appearing on The Golden Bachelor.
Whoopi Goldberg has pinpointed the downfall of society: American Idol. She says the show gave us too much permission to be judgy. We would love to blame our entire demise on Simon Cowell, but if any show taught us how to be a bitch back in the day, it was Arthur — and we love it for that.
Stole this phrase from Hunter Harris’ Power Rankings, no one sue me.
Gellar was robbed of an Emmy for all of Buffy, but that episode in particular. I honestly think it was her best performance of the entire series and yes I am counting “The Body.”