Warning: this story contains spoilers
“The problem with heaven on earth is that when they get it, nobody wants it.”
SO SAYS ERIC TAO, one-time master of the universe at fictional hedge fund Pierpoint, who in season 4 of HBO’s slow-burning – but fast-talking – corporate hit piece, Industry, we find rocking a reversed blue beret, Oakley sunglasses and an Argyle sweater, attempting to play golf.
Eric is finding retirement doesn’t really suit him – he misses the stakes and excitement only the market can offer him. He wants to be a better father but is quietly alarmed that his daughter appears to be following in his morally ambivalent footsteps – she’s been in trouble at school. At the same time, he’s bored by the mundane rhythms of family life. It only takes one call from his former protégé, Harper Stern, to entice him back into the fray.
The pair reunite to form SternTao, a short-selling shark fund that smells blood in the water in the form of shadowy fin-tech firm, Tender. That firm’s startlingly nascent trajectory is being shepherded by the mysterious ‘man without a face’, CFO Whitney Halberstram, (Max Minghella), who makes a calculated appointment of failed entrepreneur and idealistic political aspirant, Henry Muck (Kit Harrington), as CEO. As the season unfolds, it’s beginning to become clear that Eric is no longer of much material value to Harper, who has taken and possibly sharpened his most self-serving, predatory instincts, to become an even more venal corporate gunslinger.
“Harper is taking after him in a different way,” says Leung. “She’s taken all his lessons and ran with it. She’s now surpassed him. So, I think she is suddenly a possible answer [to Eric]. She can now mentor him, and I think that’s kind of flipped. She wants him for her venture. She doesn’t quite need him.”
But Eric, Leung argues, needs Harper, who he believes might help him connect with his own daughter. “He needs her to learn a thing or two about young people to eventually reach his kid,” Leung says. “I think that he’s being left with nothing else to do in retirement but look at himself in the mirror. He’s at least come away with that much. [He realises] Oh, I am missing something. Where can I get it?”
A bigger question is whether the world of high finance still needs someone like Eric, for the emerging thru line of season 4 is that this once male-dominated bull pen is quickly becoming a young woman’s world, dominated by the likes of Harper and her frenemy Yasmin Kara Hanani (Marisa Abela).
Another character who finds himself sidelined this season – almost wholly through his own actions – is Rishi, played by UK actor, Sagar Radia. The former trading floor colossus, who became a fan favourite for the comic relief offered by his verbal pyrotechnics through the first three seasons, is a shell of a man this season.
That’s due to the drug-fuelled trail of destruction the character blasted through season 3, which ultimately led to the death of his wife and loss of the custody of his child. Season 4 finds Rishi digging dirt on clients for Harper and selling coke to young traders from his car, the character reduced to a hollow-eyed zombie lingering on the fringes of the financial system.
“From a character perspective, I think it was interesting to explore Rishi in a different way,” says Radia. “I think when you strip back his swagger and the front-footed, outward chested behaviour and personality that he had, he was always the loudest person in the room, always tried to be the funniest person in the room. So now, creatively for me, as an actor, to look at a new version of Rishi when the noise is all gone and he has to sit in that silence and look at the grief and at the guilt that he’s carrying around . . . he’s potentially addressing a level of honesty that he’s never had to before.”
Both characters face reckonings wrought largely, but perhaps not entirely, by their own flaws. In the context of the show, they’re dinosaurs – T-Rex’s, perhaps – that have tended to bite down on those, often female characters, beneath them in the show’s first three seasons.
Back then, it was tempting to view Industry, particularly the barbarous savannah of the Pierpoint trading floor, as a post-racial dystopia born out of the meritocracy demanded by the free market’s singular pursuit of results. As the show has progressed, however, each character is increasingly defined as much by the weight of their background as they are by whatever talent they may possess. Eric, for example, discovers in season 3, when he’s made partner at Pierpoint, that the UK class system and its implicit racial hierarchy, are both entrenched and escalating in nature.
“I think it’s very clear for Eric at the beginning of season 3, where he seemingly has reached a pinnacle of his efforts and made partner and almost immediately, he realises that he’s not on the top of any ladder,” says Leung. “He’s on the bottom of a new ladder. You work all your life to get to essentially the same place on the never-ending hamster wheel.”
Radia, meanwhile, believes Rishi’s coruscating invective and macho posturing are an attempt to fit into what, for him, has always been a hostile, unforgiving world. “I think when you strip it back a little bit more, you could argue that Rishi’s humour, Rishi’s bravado, Rishi’s alpha boisterousness, comes from a form of assimilation,” he says. “I think he would’ve grown up in this environment and joined the banking world where he felt like he had to be a certain type of person to be respected. He had to be a certain type of person to be taken seriously. Why? Because people who look like him don’t get taken seriously.”
Of course, people who look like Eric and Rishi don’t enjoy the same safety net as someone like the aristocratic face-first failing Muck does. That both characters should find themselves so precariously positioned this season, is revealing of the way the show views the true nature of the financial system’s power dynamics.
But while race is as decisive a factor as ever in Industry, the show has bigger fish to fry in the form of gender. I put it to both actors that while the show’s narrative arc across four seasons could be read as a commentary on late-stage capitalism and the types of people predatory funds both attract and devour, the fate of their characters is perhaps indicative of a wider malaise in midlife masculinity and the conflict that exists between men’s roles as providers and fathers.
“I think a lot of men these days are caught up between this old idea of masculinity and new emotional realities,” says Radia. “For someone like Rishi, he’s stuck in that gap and it’s almost painful to watch. Instead of asking for help, Rishi is someone who internalises everything, and that’s actually a very familiar masculine pattern. He’s turning that guilt into a form of self-punishment. I think Rishi was taught that masculinity means control, whether that’s control of money or emotions or perceptions. And I guess when you look at season 4 for Rishi, it shows what happens when all of that disappears.”
Leung believes the frequently colourful language used by characters like Eric and Rishi, a vocabulary that’s long existed in male dominated workplaces and persists in the adrenalised world of stocks and shorts, isn’t so much a weapon as it is a brittle form of armour that’s increasingly exposing men (in most cases) for what they are: weak, often wounded and incapable of seeking help.
“The great writer, Ocean Vuong, once said that in our parlance today, we like to say things like, ‘You’re killing it, man’,” Leung points out. “‘You’re crushing that. You’re crushing this’. It’s such destructive language, like it’s good that you’re killing something? And that that’s become a very masculine way of being, to destroy and kill and conquer. That’s a very dated way of looking at things. It’s easy to scream. It’s much harder to face truths and look at each other and care about another person.”
Radia nods in agreement. “For both these characters, it seems like they grew up in a world where vulnerability was seen as a weakness.”
Season 4 of Industry asks what that belief ends up costing you.
