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#eeeeeeeeeee i need to be sedated i think
lyinginthesnow · 1 year
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something about childhood in succession.. the way it casts its shadow over the entire narrative, the rotten root of the roy siblings’s pain, all wrapped up in Logan’s power and abuse and love. The opening credits are filled with images of them as kids, beginning every. single. episode. by emphasizing the importance of their childhood: the siblings posing for a photo, playing sports, standing on a manicured lawn, riding an elephant, etc. and then the shots of logan, in which he is always shown from behind, or far away. It is a childhood the viewer never gets to see in any other context, since there are no flashbacks in the show, and therefore as integral as it seems, we know almost nothing about it. What exactly happened? What are the details? We feel its presence, we can tell how it informs their relationships, we can put together the pieces of incomplete and contradictory memories expressed through dialogue, and if we trace their struggles and dysfunction back far enough we know it leads there, to when they were kids. But there is so much empty space we can’t fill in. It’s almost like their childhood is presented in that horror technique where you never get to see the monster clearly straight on. It’s always in darkness, and chopped up into close-ups so that the viewer’s imagination is forced to invent something, however vague, and that is far scarier than it would be if we could actually see it — a monster that is terrifying BECAUSE it’s unknown. The roy siblings’s childhood is a major force behind so much that happens on screen, but what specifically occurred is out of the reach of our understanding. We are shown the monster’s shadow but not the monster, we are shown the frightened faces of the characters as they look at something behind the camera we never get to see, we are shown the running or the fighting or the blood but never the true, bigger-picture, clear details of the horror itself
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