Scenes from a Failmarriage
An introduction to the Failmarriage trope in modern media.
So much has been said, written, ranked, and analyzed when it comes to fictional relationships that work out. You know, those rom-com stories about couples that are right for one another in the funniest ways. You project yourself into those stories, and you fantasize about meeting that person in that unusual situation, who will make you fall head over heels. Similarly, when you were a kid, you read those fairytales and watched those Disney movies, that led you to believe that someday you’d meet that one person who would make you happy ever after.
But what about the other side of the spectrum? The pieces of fiction that tell the stories of the couples who are together in spite of completely despising one another. Those couples who nurture so much hate and love. Those who root for each other’s downfall while setting the table for dinner, in complete domestic misery. You know, those couples that make togetherness look almost as appealing as being stuck in a torture chamber, and whose red thread of fate looks more like a prison chain?
The stories of these couples are everywhere in fiction. And these stories are what we call Failmarriages — the subject of today’s issue.
1. An introduction to the introduction.
First of all, Failmarriages in fiction always involve two people who have accepted putrid love.
And, I know, somewhere in the last decades, we have accepted that love doesn’t hurt. Or better yet, that “if it’s hurtful, then it’s not real love”. But I don’t think that’s true. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that we mustn’t accept, endure or romanticize love that is hurtful. But that doesn’t mean that unhealthy and even toxic relationships don’t involve real love. And that’s precisely one of the things that makes them so dangerous, complicated, and difficult to break free of: the love you feel is very much real. Even if it’s putrid.
And the appeal of a failmarriage in fiction isn’t about romanticizing that sort of love. It’s about finding entertainment in it. Like watching bugs in a petri dish, and cheering for them to live in hell until death does them apart.
I have to admit that there’s obviously something very deliciously sadistic about enjoying a fictional couple trapped in the ecosystem of toxicity of their own creation. And that is what the Failmarriage trope is all about: the dysfunctional, toxic, hellish prison of two.
When planning to write this, I contemplated going on about… why is it that we tend to find tragedy and toxicity in fiction so inherently entertaining. But that’s maybe something I’ll have to write about in the future, because that is way too broad to be just a digression. The real point of this issue is to explore the failmarriage trope in modern media. And, for that, I have studied several couples from different pieces of media - which I will be exploring more in detail later on - and I’ve found a few similarities that are present in nearly every failmarriage.
Those are: putrid love, mutual and self-hatred, and the unhappy ever after.
Meaning, that their feelings are always gray: they love each other, but the love is putrid; they hate each other, but they always hate themselves.
But most importantly, and that is something that I think is what defines failmarriage as a modern trope, is that their hellish prison of two - also known as marriage - never ends in divorce. “Till death does them apart” is something taken very seriously. And you might ask why: first, because they’re no fun to watch if they’re no longer making each other’s lives hell, but also because divorce IS (most of the times) a choice that they choose not to make.
Look, unhappy marriages are a tale as old as time. Fiction has taken its interest in them since ancient history. But failmarriages are a modern trope, exactly because what traps those two people in that marriage isn’t the legal, social or religious obligation to stay together, like it used to be when unhappy marriages were depicted in art before divorce was legal, common, and doable.
For this, I bring a quote from an article published in The Guardian called “The joy of unhappy marriage literature”:1
“While some modern marriages are difficult to leave, it is at least technically possible to escape them. The most tragic, claustrophobic depictions of unhappy marriage in English literature undoubtedly have to come from a time before divorce was legally or socially an option”.
That is precisely why I think there’s a very clear line between unhappy marriages depicted in fiction then and unhappy marriages depicted in fiction now. And the Failmarriage trope relates specifically to “tragic, claustrophobic depictions of unhappy marriage” in a time in which divorce is legally and socially an option, but the misery of staying together is the choice.
This leads me to the second part of this issue, in which I will explain these subjects further by exploring examples of Failmarriages in fiction, mainly in television.
The examples I will use are The Alpha Couple from The Mountain Goats’ discography, Shiv and Tom from the show Succession (2018-), and Tony and Carmela from the show The Sopranos (1999-2007). At last, in less detail, I will go over a few other pairings from other pieces of media. Bear with me.
2. The Alpha Couple: failmarriage sacred scripture.
Whether you’re a middle-aged indie rock fan, or a teenager with a tiktok or twitter account, you’ve probably listened to the Mountain Goats at some point. But more specifically, you’ve probably listened to their song No Children. You know, the song that goes: “I hope you die, I hope we both die”. This song has been everywhere on the internet lately, it even became a viral tiktok sensation.2
No Children portrays the dysfunctional, full-of-hatred, dooming relationship between two fictional characters. Their story doesn’t begin or end there, though. Because the characters in No Children are a recurring fictional relationship in The Mountain Goats’ discography, called “The Alpha couple”.
The story of the Alpha Couple is told throughout nearly 40 different songs, released from the earlier 1990s to the early 2000s. In fact, Tallahassee - the Mountain Goats’ most popular album and No Children’s home - is a concept album, written strictly about the Alpha Couple. The album tells the story of the phase of their relationship in which they decide to move to Tallahassee, Florida, where they wallow in isolation, alcoholism, self-destructiveness and the decay of their relationship.
Everything there is to be said about the failmarriage trope is portrayed beautifully by the Mountain Goats through the Alpha Couple’s saga.
First, the putrid love that is described in several songs in Tallahassee. For example, the song See America Right in which the narrator compares their partner’s love to “a cyclone in a swamp”, implying that their love is both heated and destructive.
Another song that stands out to me in this sense is International Small Arms Traffic Blues, in which the narrator compares the love they feel for their partner to powder keg, to the border between Greece and Albania, and to a Cuban plane flying up the Florida coast… Only to end the song by saying that their partner has got “the best of their love”. Meaning, that the best - the only - love they could give is treacherous and putrid.
Then, there’s the mutual and self hatred - as, in Have Explode one partner dares the other to: “name one thing about us two anyone could love”, and in No Children, as the song dares you - the listener - to imagine two people who can only hold each other’s hands because they’re both mutually unlovable.
At last, the unhappy ever after. Because, although No Children and many Alpha Couple songs are described as “divorce songs”, the Alpha couple (at least as I see it) never textually got divorced — or that, at the very least, is arguable.
That conclusion can be drawn from the song that finishes their timeline: Alpha Rats nest. John Darnielle - the genius mind behind the Mountain Goats - has acknowledged that song as the eulogy to their relationship. Alpha Rats Nest describes the explosive end of the relationship, as one of the characters quite literally sets their home on fire. But yet, the lyrics of the song still don’t implicate separation, as the song ends with: “sing for the damage we've done and the worse things that we'll do”... implying continuation.
In John Darnielle’s own words: “To do it together, to tear everything down, brick by brick and stone by stone until there’s nothing left and then presumably to perish in the flames with one another. We don’t really know. This [the Alpha Rats Nest] is the last we see of them.”3
Therefore, the Alpha couple either goes off to create more damage than they already have or they die together in the flames of the house they themselves set on fire. Either way, unhappy ever after - the only possible ending to a failmarriage.
Or, to quote another Mountain Goats’ song: There Will Be No Divorce.
3. Tom and Shiv: the Alpha Couple.
“Box-set death march” - those were the words used by Shiv Roy (played by Sarah Snook) to describe marriage, in a conversation with Tom Wambsgans (played by Matthew Macfadyen) on their wedding night, in the series finale of the first season of Succession (2018-).
It’s not difficult to believe that the first time the word “failmarriage” was used to describe a TV trope, either on Twitter or Tumblr (which are the two websites where stan culture thrives the most), it was referring to Tom and Shiv.
(And I know that because… I looked it up, okay? I was curious and I can get a bit obsessed - hence, the very existence of this newsletter issue.)
For those who don’t know, Succession is an HBO prestige tv show, that deals with a family of billionaires, their trauma, wealth, and other cursings. Shiv Roy is the only daughter in the family. Tom Wambsgans is the upper-middle-class midwestern man who got to marry her.
At first, their love arrangement seems quite fitting. He gets to be the social climber - climbing up to the executive floor of her family business. She gets to be with a man who, unlike every other man in her life, doesn’t have the power to undermine or betray her. Or, in Shiv’s father’s words, she “married a man that fathoms beneath her out of fear of being betrayed”.
It’s needless to say that both of them simultaneously refuse to hold their end of the bargain. Shiv does cheat on him repeatedly, but her ultimate betrayal, in his eyes, ends up being her quest for the CEO job of the company, which they had envisioned to be Tom’s one day. Tom, on the other hand, decides to betray his wife, at the end of season 3, by being the one to snitch on her and her siblings, when they tried to take the company from their father’s hands.
However, I’m selling their complicated, dysfunctional love story short here, I know that is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, I’ve struggled with which would be the right way to bring them up in this issue, because I could write pages about them, but that’s - unfortunately - not the aim of this essay. So, I will hit the few points that sum up their importance to the trope.
First of all, on the subject of putrid love.
A key question I always see people asking is whether Shiv loves Tom at all. Some people are certain she doesn’t. Shiv herself has affirmed: “You love me even though I don’t love you” in a scene in episode 8, of the third season of the show.
But I disagree that she doesn’t love him. Sarah Snook, the brilliant actress who plays Shiv, has stated several times that Shiv loves Tom, but she struggles with her own vulnerability.
In Sarah Snook’s own words: “She [Shiv] is hiding a smaller place of herself that’s scared of loving someone too much. I do think that she genuinely loves Tom. I do think he’s the person for her, in her mind. But the scared little girl part of her doesn’t want to be vulnerable given her upbringing, given how she otherwise needs to relate to all the other men in her life”.4
At another opportunity, Sarah Snook stated that Shiv is “a person who finds love difficult. Who finds the vulnerability that love expects and demands a difficult thing to sit in and inhabit”. 5
I think that is a beautiful understanding of not only Shiv’s feelings for her husband, but also of Shiv as a character altogether. However, I do understand why someone would watch the third season of Succession and draw this conclusion that there’s no love between them at all. Season three is the one season in which any sort of affection between those two is minimal.
We see Tom, who spends most of the season terrified that he’s going to jail for the corporate manslaughter and sexual assault scandal the company is involved. Then, we see Shiv, completely apathetic to his despair, offering no comfort at all, as she seems to be completely focused on her quest to become CEO of the company.
Many people point out Shiv’s apathy in regards to Tom’s fear of jail as proof that she doesn’t care about him. But I don’t think that checks out.
First, I’d like to point out that Shiv is the reason why Tom isn’t in jail in the first place. In the series finale of the second season of the show, Tom is Logan Roy’s (Shiv’s father) first choice to be the executive to take the blame for the company’s crimes. Shiv talks her father out of it. “Just not Tom. Please. For me” - she says. Then, she implies that she had already talked to her father before and suggested her brother, Kendall Roy, to be chosen as blood sacrifice. Which ends up being Logan’s final choice.
So, ultimately, Shiv sent her own brother to jail, so she would save her husband. However, Tom doesn’t know that Shiv was behind Logan’s choice to spare him. As far as he’s concerned, she’s done nothing for him, and all he’s seen is her heartlessness and apathy.
However, as we know, Kendall refuses to be blood sacrifice, and the weight falls on Tom once again, which is the reason why he spends most of season 3 scared of prison. And to explain Shiv’s apathy - even after everything she’s done - ends up being simple: Shiv doesn’t believe he’s going to jail. In a conversation between them, on the third episode of season 3, she states that “it’s very likely that no one goes to prison”. Which ends up being the case, because Tom walked out free in the end - and Shiv didn’t seem surprised.
This, in my opinion, speaks a lot about Shiv’s character. When Tom was on the verge of being sent to jail by her father, that was a real possibility that inspired action. When Tom was on the verge of being sent to jail by… The justice system, that wasn’t even considered a real possibility, because as someone who’s been at the top of the world her entire life, Shiv can barely process the possibility of someone in her position being held accountable for their actions. That is, unless her father - the ultimate autocrat of her and her siblings’ lives - is behind it.
Another scene that stands out to me when it comes to putrid love, is the scene in episode 8 of the third season of the show, in which Shiv has a conversation with her mother. Among other cruel things, Shiv’s mother states that her father “never saw anything he loved that he didn't wanna kick it just to see if it would still come back”. Immediately after that conversation, Shiv goes home to her husband, and seems to take pleasure out of telling him that she’s too good for him and that he loves her “even though she doesn’t love him”. Meaning that, much like her father, Shiv’s love for her husband is putrid, in the sense that she needs to kick him just to see if he would still come back. Going back to Sarah Snook’s words, this relates to Shiv’s “needs to relate to all the other men in her life”.
Tom’s love, however, isn’t pure. Although he’s clearly a much more affectionate partner, he’s openly intimidated by his wife being in a position of power in the company, as he is constantly feeling emasculated by it. Additionally, he did try to consolidate his place in the family by tracking her menstrual cycle so that she’d get pregnant, even though she doesn’t even want a child. In one opportunity, in episode 3 of the third season, Shiv approaches him to have sex, or as she calls it “making love”, and he says there’s no point to it because she’s taking birth control - basically implying that she’s… a breeder.
Tom’s love is putrid in the sense that he’s more interested in marrying the family than marrying Shiv - which also relates to his need to be more powerful than her within the company, and securing his position by fathering a Roy child.
At last, on the subject of their “unhappy ever after”. Well, there’s not much I can say, because at the time this issue is being published, the show has aired up until its third season, and there’s no way to know if they’ll get a divorce or not.
All I can say is that I hope not, because I have so much fun watching their box-set death march of a marriage - as Shiv beautifully worded it.
4. Tony and Carmela: The archetype.
“The sheer hell of a marriage between two people who hate themselves even more than they hate each other” - was the sentence used to describe Carmela (played by Edie Falco) and Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini) from the Sopranos (1999-2007), in a Vulture article published in 2016.6 This description always stuck with me. Because there is no quicker way to describe the Failmarriage trope in fiction.
That is why Tony and Carmela are the perfect archetype. And I will explain why.
First of all, for those of you who have never seen the Sopranos: please, take this as a sign to watch it. But beware that there will be Sopranos spoilers in the following paragraphs, but I will try to keep them as vague as I can, so that it’ll hopefully not spoil your experience if you ever watch the show.
A quick introduction: The Sopranos is an HBO show, that follows Tony Soprano, a Mafia boss, who seeks therapy because he’s been experiencing panic attacks. Once again, I’m selling it short here. But I can’t cover the whole show in a few sentences. Long story short, Tony is married to Carmela - a beautiful, catholic house-mob-wife - and together, they have one of the most classic failmarriages in TV history.
On Tony’s side, it’s simpler. He needs Carmela in his life, and that is evident. He needs her to be the stereotypical dedicated, clueless mob wife — to keep his life together, to cook him meals, and to raise his children. But mostly - and that is not the only bizarrely Freudian aspect of the Sopranos - Carmela, at home, is everything that Tony’s mother, Livia, isn’t. So, in spite of his hundreds of mistresses, Tony essentially can’t function in life without Carmela. “You aren’t just in my life, you are my life” - he once told her.
Or, to quote Tony’s therapist, Dr. Melfi: "Anthony, you'll never leave your wife. […] She might leave you, but you'll never leave her. Despite your mothering, you made one good decision in your life vis-à-vis women. You’re not going to throw that over. Your own selfishness is too strong to let that happen”
However, Carmela is the side of this relationship that fascinates me the most.
In the first seasons of the show, she is overwhelmed by shame and guilt. Her entire arc at the beginning is an ultimate christian dilemma. First, she feels guilty and sinful for being married to a member of the mob, a murderer, and also for enjoying the way of life his blood money provides. At the same time, she can’t leave him - god forbid she gets divorced - because she’s a devoted catholic, and devoted catholics don’t get divorced, because: “What God Has Put Together Let No Man Break Apart”.
Carmela is aware and ashamed of Tony’s life in crime at the beginning of the show. She confides it to her priest, and he tells her that it’s her duty, not to run away (because that would be sinful), but to deviate him from his life of sin. In other words, she thought she could fix him. But she barely tried. At a point, she ultimately separates her “path to heaven” from her husband’s - or, as she says to him once: “What's different between you and me is: you're going to hell when you die”.
The show evolves and so does Carmela. She falls in love with the pretty Italian capo Furio. She finally erupts at one point, when she finds out about Tony’s mistress “number 1001”. She throws Tony out of home and declares that she wants a divorce. Tony moves out, but he makes it impossible for her to get a lawyer - as no lawyer in the area wants to get in trouble with an Italian mob boss. Then, Tony offers her a deal: he’d fund the construction of a spec house that she would oversee - which is a project that she’d been longing to do for a very long time.
So, she takes him back.
At this point, the Sopranos has already achieved its peak of bleakness and hopelessness - you sense in every scene that nothing remotely good awaits any of those characters. And Carmela’s hypocrisy is one of the things that make her one of the most fascinating, complex characters in TV history. Because there’s not a single moment in which Carmela returns to the dilemmas she had at the beginning of the show: she doesn’t care that that money is bloody, even when the violence starts affecting her day-to-day life.
People close to Carmela start dying and disappearing by Tony’s hands - for example, her closest nephew and his fiancé, who was one of Carmela’s closest friends. He dies - but she never questions Tony’s involvement. She disappears - but Carmela refuses to even consider the possibility that she was murdered. That innocence is one that we know Carmela doesn’t have, but it’s one that she chooses to have, in order to keep both that life and a clear conscience.
Tony and Carmela’s marriage is a sinful prison. They are chained by the putrid love they have for one another, by the blood of their loved ones, the constant imminent fear of death and prison… All of that, carefully disguised by the facade of a quiet mundane suburban life - perfectly shaped as the American Dream.
In the 2016 article I mentioned before,7 the author says that Tony and Carmela “make being married look as relaxing and enjoyable as being burned alive”. Which is not only hilarious, but brings me back to the outcome of the Mountain Goats’ Alpha Couple story - which is the two of them ending up in the flames of the home they themselves set on fire.
If you’ve seen the Sopranos, you know that we have no idea about what happened to any of those characters in the end. We don’t know their outcome. But, whatever happened, they were together.
In this sense, Edie Falco, the actress who played Carmela, has once stated that “the love between Tony and Carmela was one of the greatest she’s ever known”.8 And there is no denying that Carmela and Tony’s love, tragedy and devotion for one another have laid the groundwork for every unhappy couple in TV that followed them.
So, at last, I would like to end this with a quote from “sacred scripture” - the Album Tallahassee - which sums up everything I could’ve said about Tony and Carmela:
“I am not gonna lose you, we are gonna stay married in this house, like a Louisiana graveyard where nothing stays buried. On southwood plantation road, where the dead will walk again, put on their Sunday best and mingle with unsuspecting christian men.”
5. At last: Hand in unlovable hand.
In conclusion, failmarriage is certainly a trope that has made its mark in modern media, especially television. We - the audience - have no idea why those people who despise one another stay together. We have no idea why those people who despise one another, also love one another. Either way, the drama and intricacies of those relationships do not fail to fascinate us and keep us entertained.
It is difficult to point out a “prestige” TV show that has been released this century that doesn’t feature a failmarriage at the center of it. In this issue, I analyzed Succession and the Sopranos as examples, but many others could be mentioned.
Mad Men (2007-2015) features several failmarriages in its 7 seasons. However, Don (played by Jon Hamm) and Betty (played by January Jones) are a highlight in TV history. Mad Men even transgressed the trope by getting the two of them divorced. Which, in my opinion, makes it an exception that proves the rule, because the show spends every episode onwards trying - and failing - to figure out a dynamic that would be as magical and interesting as theirs.
I could also cite Wendy and Marty Byrd (played by Laura Linney and Jason Bateman) from Ozark (2017-2022), whose outcome is a beautiful example of the “unhappy ever after” making their putrid love stronger (and unbreakable). Or even Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) from The Americans (2013-2018), whose putrid love blossoms into a somewhat wholesome, genuine love story as the show evolves.
I also think it’s worth mentioning more recent and lesser known shows. For instance, The Great (2020-) is a brilliant “modern” twist of Catherine the Great and Peter III’s story, which plays beautifully with historical inaccuracies and has a failmarriage at the core of its storyline. The recently canceled HBO sci-fi comedy Made for Love (2021-2022) is also a great example of a gorgeous, claustrophobic depiction of the trope. And, of course, AMC’s most recent dark fantasy Interview with the Vampire (2022-) provides a fascinating queer portrayal of the trope (which is also extra toxic, so please look up the trigger warnings before you check it out).
Dozens of other examples could be cited. However, there’s only so far an introduction can go. So, I would like to conclude this issue on the failmarriage trope in modern media, with a line in episode two of the third season of Ozark, in which it’s said that: maybe the only way to make a marriage last is mutually assured destruction.
Well, at least in prestige television, that is proven to be the case.
Thank you for reading!
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https://www.buymeacoffee.com/entertain
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/may/06/unhappy-marriage-literature
https://themountaingoats.fandom.com/wiki/Alpha_Rats_Nest
https://www.vulture.com/article/sarah-snook-succession-season-3-finale-interview.html?utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=vulture
https://stories.showmax.com/sarah-snook-on-playing-shiv-roy-on-hbos-succession/
https://www.vulture.com/2016/09/tv-couples-tami-and-eric-vs-tony-and-carmela.html
https://www.vulture.com/2016/09/tv-couples-tami-and-eric-vs-tony-and-carmela.html
https://nypost.com/2013/06/21/james-gandolfinis-tv-wife-edie-falco-the-love-between-tony-and-carmela-was-one-of-the-greatest-ive-ever-known/
you really helped me out with this new trope i have found and i thank you for that. they are not as well known, but Ross and Demelza Poldark (Poldark 2015) fit this trope to the T. the problem is that the show tries to act like they're not an infuriating couple (they are promoted as a huge love story) and there was this nagging at the back of my head that something wasn't quite right. i finished the show last march it was only this week did i stumble across the failmarriage trope and reading into your explanation and examples did i finally see the truth of what they are. many thanks.