hold the following ideas simultaneously and give them equal weight:
- irving going to vietnam because his dad was in the navy and likely homophobic
- irving committing war crimes in vietnam (or, at the very least, being complicit in furthering american imperialist ambitions)
- irving being a gay man in the US army
- irving locking away his uniform but keeping medals on display
- irving having a service dog, doing community organizing (children, the elderly, the insane and his lumon sabotage) and spending his time outside of the severed floor engaging with art (painting, opera, film)
- irving listening to notorious neonazis motorhead because the song is about veteran guilt with a sheen of irony
i don't want you to cast a specific moral calculation, i want you to treat this with the same weight you give helena's stalking and raping, mark's entitlement to the women in his life, dylan's snapping at his wife on the phone and impulsive financial decisions. because i guarantee you that these are not remotely equivalent in scope and the difference is the material power the perpetrator holds.
power dynamics are at the core of the themes of family in the show. the eagans as a family also have power as a capitalist entity. it's from this power that helena can act and shield herself, but she is also a woman in a patriarchal institution, and from things like the waffle party, or the perpetuity exhibit, or the general value of the woman-as-childbearer in the show, i imagine this also determines her position within her socioeconomic class.
mark is a white man with an academic career, and his relationship to gemma, devon, alexa, and even cobel engage both with the gendered aspect of the power dynamics exerted towards them. gemma being asian and with a more successful career, reduced to her relationship with him and marked by her childbearing capabilities. gemma is washing the fucking dishes in a rose tinted sequence of the romance of mark's life. devon, who has sidelined her career in favor of caring for mark and ricken, and now eleanor. alexa, a black woman, a midwife, who is almost presented as a therapeutic tool and Symbol of Healing for mark, harmony cobel who does have power over him from a corporate perspective but is also a childless mother, a widower, a nanny to the severed floor, barely dirt to helena eagan's birthright.
dylan is a working class black man with debilitating mental illness. he's married to a white woman and their salaries combined are barely enough to feed themselves and their children, their material circumstances are collectively precarious. gretchen is functional in an economic sense, dylan is not. dylan has to get severed to provide, and in doing so he loses access to many other jobs he struggled to keep anyway. dylan impulse spends on courses and class markers and it's gretchen doing the accounting to see if it can work. gretchen is a white mom and that makes her highly employable for certain jobs (for misogynistic reasons, but also for racist reasons in her favor). dylan being black and mentally ill is in conversation with his heterosexual masculinity and the ways a family man should be, but he can't be.
milchick and natalie, blackness in different social strata, a farce of agency. but natalie has the money and controls the public relations of lumon, even when she gets turned into a mouthpiece by the eagans. seth milchick only gets promoted because a white woman that got away with murder fucked up enough to get punished, and when he does, he's still running errands, still getting tasked with keeping people in line through violence, because that's what black men do for the eagans.
there's so many more lines to be drawn between the overlap and exclusivity of experiences between all these characters and, say, ms. huang, or felicia, or reghabi. the complexity in these power dynamics is relevant, it cannot be flattened, and it shouldn't be. family and capital are held up by different intersections of oppression of the subjects that their power feeds on. you can't separate white supremacy, classism, ableism, misogyny, queerphobia and imperialism because they all sustain the same kyriarchy and don't operate isolated from the rest of the subject's embodiment.
