I’ve been enjoying this latest season of Industry. I don’t think I’m alone — the reviews for this season in particular have been far better than they were for the show’s initial two, which I felt suffered from a certain heavy handedness and narrowed scope that the third season has managed to break out of. It’s a line I’ve seen repeated a lot on Twitter re: Industry — this is what happens when you let a show work it out for a couple of seasons without hitting the Cancel button. Nice when that happens. Anyway.
Industry follows the graduate class of the fictional investment bank, Pierpoint & Co., as they rise and fall in the ranks of London’s competitive world of finance. Industry is one of a few other late-Pluto-in-Capricorn prestige shows borne of, steeped in, and semi-parodying the opiate of late-capitalism’s money glut (Succession and its less self-aware sister show, Billions). There’s a lot of absolutely unintelligible trading jargon, sickly office fluorescents, and cocaine hangovers. Something that Industry started in hot with in its first season but has, as it stands, not properly returned to was an intriguing and unconsummated will-they-won’t-they between two of the show’s main ensemble. It was a classic pairing: Yasmin, the beautiful heiress nepo-hire and Rob, the Oxford boy with an RP accent contrived to hide his humble Welsh origins.
What made this will-they-won’t-they so good was its genuine mean-spiritedness. The emotionality in Industry is always played out in the negative — feelings of desire are expressed as contempt, moments of vulnerability as disguised by cruelty. No offer is made without a catch, no feeling of shame goes without a corresponding act of violence. Rob and Yasmin’s Sam-and-Diane routine develops under these same auspices, initiated and continued by Yasmin as an act of sexual centrifuge and power reclamation.
Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) is the tragic clown of Industry, doomed to failure despite her best attempts to fight back, which are never very good in the first place. It’s an unlikely assignation for a silver-spoon heiress, but it fits. Born with every advantage in the book, Yasmin finds herself floundering in Pierpoint’s ruthless workplace with her soft-skills and Cheltenham Ladies’ College vibe. She simply lacks the grit she needs to get ahead and quickly falls behind her street-smart, hardscrabble colleagues Harper (Myha’la Herrold) and Rob (Harry Lawtey). What she does know how to do, god bless her, is be hot.
As the screws turn on Yasmin at Pierpoint she begins a (consensual) psychosexual torture campaign on Rob. Her games are all ones of dangling and withholding, bringing Rob to the brink and pushing him back. As the harassment she’s fielding from one particularly repugnant manager starts ramping up, Yasmin responds in kind to Rob, until the two find themselves engaged in a particularly twisted exchange during the office Christmas party involving a mirror. Yasmin’s request of Rob even makes her recoil (“Sorry, was that too much?”). He does it anyway.
This week is the beginning of an odd Libra season. For the majority of the Sun’s time in Libra, Libra’s ruler, Venus, will be in Scorpio. This makes for a different tenor of Libra experience than we might typically be used to. Scorpio is the Mars ruled water sign and the sign of Venus’ detriment. Where Venus as Libra’s ruler likes to connect, understand, and cohere, Venus in Scorpio is doing it under the banner of Martial prerogatives: to possess, exploit, and manipulate. There’s a feeling of wanting to relate but knowing it’s for the wrong reasons, or using the ‘wrong’ tools in desire’s name. Repugnance and attraction are two sides of the same magnet. Which of our relational gestures are actually being dictated by some of our baser, more disgusting instincts? Under Venus in Scorpio? Probably a lot of them.
NOTES ON THE WEEK:
Monday, September 23
Spell check; a flood of information is swept up and sorted with unceremonious critique. A desire to uproot the rotten parts of your psyche to figure out why you’re drawn again and again to that which you instinctively find repellent.
Tuesday, September 24
Covert and potentially unpopular discoveries, but discoveries nonetheless. Moving the letters around reveals the answer.
Wednesday, September 25
Pure subjectivity. Moving on instinct alone and intuiting one’s way to a secret doorway.
Thursday, September 26
Anti-diplomacy. Saying one thing in order to get another. Passing by unnoticed in some hall of power.
Friday, September 27
The mandate is don’t show or tell. Tempted anyway because you look so good.
Saturday, September 28
Things happen in repeating sequences for a reason. They keep leaving because they need to leave.
Sunday, September 29
What you know to be true you know by the way it forces all other options to disappear.
this rocked my shit (complimentary)
This was so good thank you