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As any self-respecting zeitgeist-spotter knows, the quickest way to dress up a minor cultural trend as a fully-fledged aesthetic phenomenon is by adding “core” to the end of its name. The latest contender bearing that look-at-me suffix is dynastycore – television’s apparent obsession with notable multigenerational families.
Following in the wake of Succession, House of Gucci, Ferrari, the Sopranos, All the Money in the World (the story of the Gettys) and, of course, The Crown, now comes House of Guinness, currently being filmed at various swag locations.
What qualifies as a dynasty? The dictionary definition is rather wide: a succession of people from the same family who play a prominent role in business, politics, or another field.
All the above families, four real and two fictional, would conform to those criteria, but if we’re strictly enforcing the entry policy, The Sopranos are a bit too nouveau and petty-bourgeois to cut it. The New Jersey suburbs lack the storied opulence required for a true dynastic drama. So mid-level mafia are out.
Dynastycore rests on two fundamental qualities: material extravagance – the clothes, the cars, the houses – and advanced social position, that these people matter just by dint of being born. It may be a deeply retrogressive idea in our supposedly meritocratic age, but it’s one with which we appear to retain an abiding fascination.
“The appeal,” says David Jenkins, a senior editor at Tatler magazine, “is even if you’re not a member of a great dynasty, you can empathise because it’s family fights, and everyone has family fights.”
It’s true that family conflict has been at the heart of drama dating back to the ancient Greek playwrights, and nor is it a novel televisual concern. Back in the 1960s there was a 26-part adaptation of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on British TV, and in the 1980s came Dynasty, the big-hair story of an American oil family that Clive James called “a Disneyland game reserve whose leading characters were human holograms.” But the paradox that animates a dynastic saga is that while the characters are liberated by wealth, they are imprisoned by history – the knowledge that nothing they do will match the significance of their forebears.
It doesn’t start out like that, of course. At the beginning there is usually an entrepreneurial patriarch with an insatiable appetite for money, power and status, and the desire to build a familial legacy about which future streaming networks will make multipart dramas.
Even the royal family can trace its roots back to some ambitious warlord who slaughtered a rival or sold a daughter to wrest the crown. As Émile Zola noted: “A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.”
But what happens to the bloodline when the struggle is over and the treasure is made? A contemporary example is the Murdochs, the Australian-Americans that partly inspired Succession. That dynasty began almost a century ago with Keith Murdoch, the Melbourne-based journalist who founded the media business that his son, Rupert, would make into a multibillion-dollar global empire.
Last month a court in Nevada blocked Rupert’s attempt to amend the family trust to leave control of the media empire to his eldest son, Lachlan. For some reason no TV channel or streamer has yet seen fit to dramatise this diverting little family tiff. But no doubt there will be a 3D, 22nd-century production of The House of Musk, which traces the plight of the multibillionaire’s 12 (and counting) children.
The price of success is invariably paid by the succeeding generations that have done the least to establish the family’s fortune. And its currency is boredom. Dynasties may begin with a battle, but they soon reach a decadent phase in which notable family members are more likely to be models or muses. An instructive example of this rule is the Guinness family, the Irish clan that formed part of the Protestant Ascendency and who made highly profitable inroads into the worlds of brewing, banking and politics.
It’s their triumphs and travails that form the basis of the historical drama House of Guinness, from Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight, which is due on our screens next year. As befits the drink that made the family’s name, it is the story of stout hard work with dark undertones and conspicuous froth on top.
The dynasty was established by Arthur Guinness, the son of a farmer, who founded the brewery in 1759. Its position was secured by his third son, Benjamin, who became the richest man in Ireland.
But by the 1920s decadence had arrived in the shape of Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and one of the bright young things, the upper-class bohemians satirised by Evelyn Waugh. He married Diana Mitford who left him for Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader and acolyte of Adolf Hitler.
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Dynastycore is littered with paragraphs like the last one, dense with famous names, drama and unlikely connections, because the families spread out like Japanese knotweed, intoxicating and entrapping everyone they touch.
Mitford’s son with Guinness, Jonathan, became the 3rd Baron of Moyne, a staunch right winger and chair of the Monday Club, who, in the 1980s wrote a memoir in the voice of his mistress Susan “Shoe” Taylor, a peripatetic hippy and sometime acrobat from Oldham who was a failed tea girl at Apple, the Beatles’ music company.
The baron had three children with Shoe, three with his first wife, and two with his second, one of whom was Daphne Guinness, who married Spyros Niarchos, heir to the Greek shipping fortune. She is best known for wearing outrageous outfits and being Karl Lagerfeld’s muse, as well as the lover of the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. There’s enough there for her own series.
Then there are the untimely deaths, which along with family crests are a hallmark of great dynasties. The first, Baron Moyne, was shot dead by a Zionist paramilitary group in Cairo in 1944. Two decades later Lady Brigid Guinness’s husband, Prince Frederick of Prussia, drowned in the Rhine, and Oonagh Guinness’s 21-year-old son, Tara Browne, crashed his Lotus in London and died, said to be high on LSD. Legend has it that the Beatles’ A Day In a Life – “He blew his mind out in a car” – was inspired by Browne’s death.
But why does any of this matter? In an intellectual sense, it clearly doesn’t. Unless you work for Debrett’s, it’s of little consequence whether or not you know the circumstances of Lady Honour Guinness’s granddaughter’s death in Christ Church, Oxford, or that there is a painting of the model Jasmine Guinness in the National Portrait Gallery.
As Jenkins notes, “Gossip columns pay little attention to aristos these days. People are more interested in the bad behaviour of film stars.”
Yet somehow all the accumulated historical details, both grim and glamorous, add to the mythology of the dynasty, the sense that a renowned bloodline just powers on impervious to setbacks and personal tragedies. Although the headlines are often made by the messier members of the tribe, beyond the ennui and heroin addiction there tends to be someone running the show.
“Great wealth and great titles can in themselves encourage great eccentricity and no sense of limits,” says Jenkins. “But these families don’t keep going unless some very sober heads are in charge.”
And they do indeed keep going. The UK is a giant heritage attraction of dynastic families with their monumental stately homes and iniquitously expansive lands. Arguably the most impressive achievement of the aristocracy is that it has somehow managed to generate more reverence than resentment.
Perhaps in the end that’s why dynastycore is suited to our Silicon Valley-driven times. It’s yet another invitation to be beguiled, warts and all, by the unfeasibly super-rich.
