You want catharsis. You want peace. You want closure. You want unicorns farting glitter flying up a rainbow against the sunrise. You want the face of God. But God dies off camera, in an airplane bathroom. Nobody sees God die. And that’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? The climactic anticlimax of it all. The idea that any day could be the day Logan Roy dies, and you’ll still find yourself telling him “it’s okay,” “I love you,” no matter how false it all sounds. Any day could be the day you tell him he can’t keep expecting you to bend over for him, being cunty, fucky fucky, and you will get no answer. No answer except the pulse of a defibrillator. The only thing more beautiful than a wedding is an unexpected death.
“Your dad is very sick. He seems kind of hurt. It is very bad. It’s very very bad…So Frank, Frank thinks you should speak to your dad, and I can hold the phone–I could hold the phone near him if you’d like.”
I could cry at you, like Logan’s kids cried into the phone as he died at the back of the plane, but you’re still alive, so what would be the point? You wouldn’t hear me. The only time Logan Roy can possibly hear his kids is when he’s dying, getting his chest pounded uselessly by a hopeless medical staff. It would be nice to make an exit like Logan Roy does, revealing the pointlessness of everyone’s lives as I remove my vortex of hate from the spacetime scene. Am I in your bad books? Am I as visually aggravating to you as you are to me? A bit more fucking aggressive, you say to the world. But I will not be joining the fucky-sucky brigade.
“Uh, hey, Dad, I hope you’re okay…you’re okay…you’re going to be okay…Uh, because you’re a monster.”
Even the monster dies, Roman must learn. Even the monster was a good man, a good dad, if only in words, words uttered to make up for the silence of the dying man on the floor of the plane.
I hope there’s at least a tracking shot. I hope there’s at least a moment where I’m not sure, where I’m piecing it all together in the din of a cruise ship wedding. My brother’s wedding, maybe. At least once I would like to be crying and to say, “No, no, I can’t have that!” As though to say, “no, I can’t not have you in my life to hate, to say I stand against.” Nobody hates a dead man. Not really. Because he isn’t there.
“Daddy, uh, I love you. Uh. Uh, don’t go please. Not now. No, I uh…I love you. You fucking—God! There’s–there’s no excuses for–But I…fuck! I don’t know. I do love you. And it’s okay. It’s okay, Daddy. I love you. I…I don’t want it. Please.”
Siobhan gives the phone back to Roman because she can’t bear the pain of telling him she loves him. I am not saying she lied, or that any of them lied. Rather, they faced the most painful truth of all.
Victor Hugo writes, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” But you can’t know what this means until you know that God has no true face, that God is a stunt double with Brian Cox’s face pasted on His body in composite. You see the face of God when He leaves you, face unseen.
The French is more accurate: “Aimer, c’est agir comme si l’on voyait le visage de Dieu.”
“To love, it’s to act as if one saw the face of God.” (Italics mine)
A man who never shows his face can only be loved in pantomime, in imagination, in the voices of those who relate his death to you over the phone. Logan Roy will forever be an “as if.” His children know him “as if” he were their father, “as if” he were their God.
“I never got the chance to make him proud of me. He’s dead.”
As Connor suggests, Logan Roy is a man who has always been dead, has always looked at himself as a dead man, an inanimate business position, and has always made his children treat him accordingly. And that is how he is loved. And it is love all the same.
