Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter, Patrick J. Adams as Mike Ross in “Suits.”
**I borrow my title from the late John Pettegrew, who invented it for his book on Progressive Era thinking about how the strenuous life could be made compatible with the sedentary careers of white-collared middle managers.
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Like millions of people around the world, I spent a lot of time watching “Suits” this summer. Not because of Meghan Markle—I didn’t realize she was one of those renegade royals until the third episode of Season 1, and by that time I was hooked anyway. And not because it’s a remnant of the “Blue Sky” era at USA TV, that is, the moment of those breezy, fluffy, well-dressed alternatives to the naked souls on display in “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” and “Breaking Bad.” Nor because I was marooned in beautiful Majorca for the month of September, where the only TV available after a hard day of thinking in search of a language—you know, like, writing—was good old Netflix.
No, I was happy to binge on this show because it’s a whole lot more complicated and interesting than its beautiful surfaces let on. Or rather, because those beautiful surfaces tell us a great deal about how the interlocking spheres of corporate law and high finance actually work as a kind of baroque theater, in a kabuki-like costume drama that is an unfolding criminal conspiracy pantomimed in the ornate choreographies, verbal intricacies, and tasteful silences of legal chicanery—in other words, racketeering on a scale impossible to diagram, or to prove.
To understand the machinery that makes “Suits” move so smoothly on these various planes, you have to get under the hood, where you can see that it’s a serialized slow-motion gangster movie appropriate to our times, which means that it borrows its language laterally, from the verbal play of screwball comedy as it was perfected in the 1930s, rather than vertically, from the contemporaneous TV tragedies featuring doomed, difficult men.
“Suits,” in short, is not the pointless, monosyllabic mess “Succession” tried not to be, nor the cringeworthy, unintentional parody of “Law and Order” that “Billions” has become, no, it’s the sequel Don Vito Corleone planned for—the moment when Sonny, Michael, and Fredo, the legitimate heirs to the family fortune, become legit, in this incarnation as lawyers on whatever side of the law will keep the inheritance intact. Unlike Logan’s hapless children, these are serious people who have turned the tragic form of the gangster movie into comedy: not the happy stupidity of humor, but the narrative form in which violations of the law, as laid down by God, by the Father, or by the State, don’t carry mandatory sentences of social death.
Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) is Sonny, of course, the impetuous, belligerent son who lives for the courtroom brawl, who fights only to win, who trains as a boxer when he’s off-duty and routinely threatens “to beat the shit out of” whoever gets in his way, whether he’s a client or an opposing attorney. He’s not a thug, in fact he’s a brilliant lawyer; but his pugilistic instincts often overrule his agile mind: he’s got barely repressed issues with infidelity because his mother cheated on his father.
Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) is Michael, the cerebral son whose equipment includes a photographic memory; he’s the kid brother with a conscience whose quick wits contain the volatile Sonny’s boundless energy, and whose intuitive grasp of the law’s infinite malleability lets him see the world less combatively, less personally, more politically, than the older brother can. Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman) is Fredo, the slightly ridiculous son with superior credentials but no standing, whose desperate need for recognition and approval from Sonny and Mikey makes him liable to illicit incentives or filial betrayals and thus able, if not willing, to sabotage the family by placing himself outside the scope of its norms and sanctions.
C’mon, you will say, these aren’t criminals, these are lawyers! But they are, and not just because they’re all in on the secret that makes Mike a felon in waiting—he practices law without a bachelor’s degree, let alone a Harvard diploma, unlike everybody else at the firm—and eventually turns the rest of them into knowing accomplices. Pearson Hardman is a criminal enterprise long before Harvey hires Mike because the senior partners have already covered up the gross malfeasance of the departed managing partner, Daniel Hardman. This transgression, not Mike’s fraudulent career, is the original sin that animates all that follows.
Not only that. The only emotional bond this family-minus-intimacy shares is loyalty, and this is apportioned hierarchically and dyadically, tying only two people at a time to each other, thereby leaving no trail of culpability behind, as per mob protocols: Mike to Harvey, Louis to Harvey, Donna (his Girl Friday) to Harvey, and Harvey only to Jessica Pearson, the matriarch of this crime family whose ruthlessness makes her invulnerable, almost inhuman (until Season 3, but not for long). The only “horizontal” ties that bind are between the associates, but they betray each other without blinking every chance they get—Mike does it, too—and between Mike and Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), the paralegal who falls for the charming fraud who has aced the LSAT many times for money.
Well, OK, these people are constantly talking about the lines they won’t cross (“I won’t suborn perjury!” or “That’s obstruction of justice!”), but the lines are never clear from case to case, and someone deliberately crosses them in every episode. The difference between legal and illegal behavior finally becomes insignificant, replaced by the highly personal code each individual articulates in performing, explaining, and justifying the practical meaning—the effects—of his or her loyalty to the person immediately above them in the familial hierarchy. The signature line of the series thus becomes the retrospective: “I/he/she did what I/he/she had to.” They all make or receive offers that can’t be refused.
But seriously now, gangsters?
Consider the fact that the archetypal gangsters in the real world of the 1930s were not the lone sociopaths played by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Ceasar” 1931), Paul Muni (“Scarface” 1931), and James Cagney (“Public Enemy” 1932), violent, murderous men who lived and died by the sword. Like Al Capone, the real deal, they were instead sober businessmen trying to bring order to an insanely competitive market that, because it was beyond the law, had no customary or statutory boundaries to contain entrepreneurial ambition and excess. (Recall that Capone was jailed for income tax evasion, a white-collar crime, not for ordering the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.)
Most gangsters, then as now, wanted to be bureaucrats in control of a managed market, not outlaw heroes like John Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson or Bonnie and Clyde, who prided themselves on sticking up banks that were foreclosing on small farmers in the Midwest. Accordingly, those real-life gangsters used novel, often extra-legal means to complete the mergers and acquisitions that would consolidate and stabilize the markets where they had a foothold or an edge. On behalf of their corporate clients, so do the lawyers at Jessica Pearson’s firm. Most of their business is some aspect of M & A, which came of age when the “financialization” of the American economy made its great leap forward in the 1980s and 90s, reaching its apogee in the debacle of 2008.
Consider too that the real-life gangsters felled by the anti-racketeering crusades of the 1990s spoke the language of “The Godfather” in explaining themselves not just to the public—to the DAs who prosecuted them—but to each other long before they were indicted and flipped. They created and inhabited an illegal world by narrating it with dialogue from the quintessential gangster movie, the one that proved, once and for all, that if all you care about is your family, you’re the most dangerous man in the world. Harvey and Mike have the same skill in narrating the events that constitute their extraordinary working lives by borrowing from movie scripts, either defusing or debunking whatever fraught situation they suddenly face: the perverse effect of such recitation is to render these scenes more realistic, more believable, because they’re now contained or domesticated by generic references available to most mere movie fans, not only Masters of the Universe.
This is the Tarantino effect at work in TV: as he understood better than any other filmmaker of the 90s, movies have become the master text of our time, which convenes a moral itinerary that is memorable because it has an acoustic effect, like the oral tradition embodied in the post-Mycenaean epic whose “author” we call Homer. Tarantino also understood better than most that crime—thus a mystery to be solved, as per Henry James’s “figure in the carpet”—is the indispensable setting of American stories, because in this part of the world, deviations from the norm and departures from the past are not merely acceptable dimensions of everyday life, they’re results to be expected from its routines. In the US, “crisis become the rule,” as John Dewey put it. Or, as his admirer Kenneth Burke explained, “any incipient trend will first be felt as crime by reason of its conflict with established values.” It’s hard for Americans to distinguish between criminals and heroes because we’re all somehow expected to make it new, to break the rules, and to get ourselves beyond the status quo.
In this part of the world, moreover, the self-made man is the ideal type because he’s the descendant of the freeholder, the artisan, and the citizen-soldier who was the social bulwark of the republic at its imaginary inception, when wage earners were considered “wage-slaves”—that is, people whose will was for sale in the labor market, proletarians who would, of necessity, be susceptible to the material sanctions and incentives of their employers. But that unbound individual, the self-made man, is also the unruly horror D.H. Lawrence called “the masterless,” the father/Frankenstein of his own monstrosity. He is the hard, isolate, stoic killer Michael Corleone must become if he is to make the transition from gangster to upstanding citizen, and bring his family into line with the Don’s American dream. Mike Ross knows how that sequence works; by Season 4, he’s been there, done that, first as an investment banker and then upon his return to the family that will become Pearson Specter Litt. He resists the changes, but he does what he has to.
The vernacular of “Suits” is the one Don Corleone perfected, the one in which gangsters like Donald Trump still cloak their commands. It is made of personal debts, the kind that go unwritten, and that accumulate by word of mouth to the point where reputation—the representation rather than the performance of a role—becomes reality, where expectation is everything. It’s the language that constitutes a gift economy, wherein the point is not to complete but to prolong transactions, to create an emotional climate that binds all its participants in situations that recreate an asymmetry of favors given and received. Debts are the adhesive that amount to the social capital that matters—loyalty sealed by silence.
[Spoiler Alert]
The breaking of these bonds unravels the hierarchies of “Suits,” just as it destroyed what was left of the Five Families—it’s what breaks up the law firm, sends Mike to prison (thus cancelling his wedding to Rachel), and turns the world upside down by placing Donna in command of everyone’s future. Has comedy given way to tragedy? I’ll let you know when I get home and finish watching.