#his relation with masculinity and family and political world that engulfs him

[hotwheelschili]

Sainz Sr has always rubbed me the wrong way, maybe not like Jos Verstappen levels of ick, but pretty up there… that mentality he taught Carlos from the young age that he has to toughen up if he wants to succeed, I can’t imagine saying to my kid that he can’t be himself and be successful at the same time. And sure, maybe this mentality is right for the sport, but it seems like it’s not right for Carlos as a person which in turn affects him as an athlete because he’s afraid to disappoint his father or embarrass their family name so he has to play up the ‘tough’ act. Idk. My perception is that he’s just different than his dad but he’s been molded into someone else his whole life so there’s a big conflict inside of him. His dad needs to step away from managing Carlos’ career me thinks, I feel like that would bring Carlos at least some peace

I wanna relate the ‘toughen up’ with the way he acts around people, he’s so constructed around patriarcal masculinity that being soft around people is weak and so he has to masc his affection by being rough (ie. his way of showing affection is physical touch but feminine! So I’ll hit and shove and throw you around bc I’m a man and I’m supposed to be rough)

It’s so obvious that senior is the most important member of the sainz family, he’s a renowned sportsman plus I’m guessing he’s the responsible one for the family’s wealth and political power so everyone looks up to him as the leader and so being named Carlos, after him is such a big honor and you’re the only boy! So you have to carry on the legacy of the successful sainz family, so you have to live up to be as great and efficient and be a leader, be a shark, a force to be reckoned with, that’s what you father tells you since you are 6, and all the family around you telling you “you got to be as great as your father”. In a family with such conservative and patriarcal values there’s no room to make a mistake or even be mid, it’s glory or failure, and they won’t hesitate throwing at his face everything they have given him and his only job being to be the person they boast around in gatherings and events.

But Carlos, he’s soft, he show he cares, he doesn’t like putting people down, he never boasts about winning bc he can see that the real fun part was the activity and not the result, ofc he likes winning, everyone does but like with lando, when asked who wins at golf and saying ‘oh in the end we didn’t keep score’ or with charles in the challenges, whenever charles gets too competitive he always offers to share the points instead or recognizing his efforts out loud.

I think he does feel immense pressure of living to his dads standards, show him he can be as good as his dad expects him to be, a carlos sainz as good as carlos sainz and the spanish media have a whole cultural background approach to carlos that he has to be perceived as a tough, emotionless guy, he always sounds snarky and very masculine coded when talking to dazn, very matter of fact. With his country also expecting him to succeed like the other spaniard in the grid with 2 wdc.

I agree with you, if his dad stopped managing him I think he would be able to relax and craft his approach to the sport that he loves in a more personal way and not with his dads expectations but also financial and political interests looming over him.

This was very rambly and messy and the anthropological pov discourse possessed me for a little bit there.

If you have any more thoughts I’ll be happy to read them.

[transmutationisms]

@yassifiedgollum ok, i’ve kind of been poking at this here and here and here and probably throughout this tag. but basically, drugs on succession are part of how characters react and adapt to the psychological and affective demands made of them under capitalism, specifically logan’s social darwinist kingdom of biopolitical, authoritarian (neo)liberalism. this disrupts the type of linear ‘addiction arc’—familiar to many of us from approximately 70 bazillion trillion tv shows and movies—that proceeds from substance use -> mental disease state -> recovery (read: sobriety) -> possibly relapse. 

like, when kendall uses coke, it’s in moments where he needs to live up to what logan demands of him, which is why i call it the business world’s performance-enhancing drug and dalia oreganosbaby has called it “synthetic masculinity.” like, it’s all filtered through kendall’s relationship to logan and the logan in his head; kendall uses as part of his overall attempt to make himself a ‘better,’ ie more productive, capitalist. logan sees this as kendall being weak and submitting to the allure of a party drug, and a frankly shocking number of viewers essentially go along with that view, but it’s not what the show is communicating. and importantly, this is why “go to rehab” is such an impotent and frankly carceral response lol. like, kendall can’t be rehabbed out of a behaviour that is reinforced and demanded of him by capitalist standards of bourgeois masculinity, which are of course also the standards by which logan rules his family, because on this show the family is a microcosm of, and embedded in, the capitalist social matrix.

(i don’t think the writers figured this out until ‘austerlitz,’ because the conceit of that episode demands a confrontation with the logics of psychiatry and an exploration of how that epistemology fails these characters and fails to deal with the social context of affective suffering in general. this is one of the things i think weakens the first 6 episodes.)

another, maybe more obvious, example is the way the roys drink. they do it socially, in business settings, trying to seal deals and also to signal their political affiliations (remember rhea not drinking being conflated with her democratic party views). so consuming alcohol is not some individual pathology, it’s something the roys all demand of each other because of how they conduct business and their standards for productivity, dominance, etc. the fact that kendall’s world is so engulfed by the business is also why we rarely see him doing or seeking downers (these are not productive businessman drugs) and when we do, it’s communicating important information about his psychology and where he sees himself in relation to his father at that moment.

so, i find it ultimately very pointless to try to talk about drugs on this show, and kendall’s addiction in particular, without reference to capitalism and the type of subjectivity that waystar creates and encourages. kendall, as the heir apparent, is being structurally and overtly encouraged to engage in this type of constant striving and auto-exploitation; his drug use is part of how that manifests and is occasionally (ie, with downers) part of his futile attempts to escape from it. his addiction is not some random quirk or something he’s doomed to just for kicks; it’s explicitly created and maintained by his circumstances and specifically by the way neoliberal capitalism functions and what demands it makes of him.