COMPELLING ‘INDUSTRY’ IS ‘WALL STREET’ FOR GEN Z
“INDUSTRY” UPDATES THE YUPPIE ETHIC
The nickname “zoomers” might never stick to Generation Z, but what do you think about zuppies? For all their passion about the environment and social justice, might Gordon Gekko’s proverbial grandkids have turned out to be just like him?
That’s the flavor faintly suggested in HBO’s “Industry,” an engaging but thematically thin drama about a group of five freshly minted business-school grads chosen for highly competitive entry-level jobs in the trading pen of a London-based financial powerhouse called Pierpoint & Co.
“Industry,” the first show from creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, updates the 1980s yuppie ethic, which certainly hasn’t vanished in the 21st century: Greed remains almighty, but why stop at money? Let narcissism trickle down into every crevice, particularly as it pertains to one’s sexual and pharmaceutical appetites, swiping left and swiping right and then snorting up.
When they’re not throwing elbows and sometimes thwarting one another’s ambitions, the zuppies of “Industry” get it on like nobody’s business. Bright lights, big city — they’re still bright, still big and there’s still something bitterly nihilistic in the mix. As with the beguiling “Euphoria,” you’ll be struck by how old “Industry” can make you feel, even if you aren’t that old.
These young bucks and buckettes start at the bottom rung (though privilege has carried a few of them this far) in a company that is trying, at least nominally, to reconcile its cutthroat environment with modern workplace manners — and not doing such a hot job at it. Myha’la Herrold stars as Harper Stern, an American with fraudulent cre
dentials, immediately immersed in Pierpoint’s hornet nest, pitching investment ideas to demanding clients with big portfolios, under the watchful glare of her managing director (and fellow American person of color), Eric Tao (“Lost’s” Ken Leung).
Herrold is immediately compelling as a resourceful protagonist who is in over her head and yet driven to outperform her peers in an unwelcoming environment; it’s not immediately clear, however, what “Industry” hopes to gain by giving Harper a fatal flaw, in the form of a bogus college transcript. If discovered, it will only affirm whatever negative biases her colleagues may already harbor. In her determination to prove them wrong, Harper runs a terrible risk of proving them right.
This is probably why “Industry’s” twists and turns are strewn with scenes of microaggressions, awkward mistakes and selfabsorbed entitlement streaks , as a way of demonstrating how the rules of race and class were made to be broken — and another way of noting how the yuppie narrative has morphed in 35 years.
What remains, of course, is the soullessness of it all and the tendency for its characters to steer deliberately clear of any deep or existential qualms about capitalism, exploitation or any of that.
If you took away the sheen of HBO, the nudity and the British setting, much of “Industry’s” sudsiness would have been right at home in a prime-time Shondaland slot at ABC in recent years. Based on the first four episodes that HBO made available for review (there are eight in all), the show’s entanglements and provocations are what manage to pull a viewer in.
The dropped opportunity here is one of meaning and intent. We get that greed is good, but “Industry’s” message, which could be a lot stronger, is that greed itself has become a rapidly vanishing resource. The point for these zuppies is to get whatever’s left, before it’s all gone.
can be continued in the future,” she says. “It’s interesting to think, going forward, what methods are developing during this time to connect and keep music vibrant, even when you’re not in the same place as the audience.”
Hahn has such an affinity for the Houston Symphony, “I feel like all together we’re a unit,” she says. She was the featured soloist on the orchestra’s eight-city 2018 European tour and participated in an orchestral exchange between Houston and Medellin organized by music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada. Those and many other collaborations have kindled a special rapport between the two.
“I can’t speak for him, but I feel like the way we do certain pieces together, you wouldn’t find me playing the piece that same way with someone else,” Hahn says. “It’s just specific to that particular combination of artists, and I have that with the conductors I work with frequently, and who really get what I’m trying to do.
“I feel very free to try different versions of my ideas, so I really value when there’s a collaboration that is unique, even within my own musical world,” she adds. “So yeah, I’m sad he can’t make it. I was like, ‘Noooooo!’ ”
Since Orozco-Estrada will be unable to travel to Houston due to European COVID restrictions, another participant in the Women in Classical Music symposium will step in. Longtime director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (from which she is retiring after this season), Marin Alsop is perhaps the world’s bestknown and most acclaimed female conductor and an old friend of Hahn’s.
According to the violinist, whenever the two have shared a stage — in Baltimore, Sao Paolo and Chicago, among other places — “it just cooks.”
“I’m also grateful that she’s doing these concerts with the socially distanced setup, because that’s also an interesting challenge as far as everyone hearing each other differently when they’re playing together,” says Hahn, who was raised in Baltimore.
“Me having that connection with the conductor and also me having that experience with Houston, I think it’ll help us quickly adapt to the spacing and the different way of hearing each other,” she adds. “I’m just really glad that Marin could step in.”
Hahn has been playing the piece she’ll be performing in Houston, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major, since she was about 12 years old. Her hands weren’t big enough to fully master the piece’s demanding fingering, she recalls. But that was then. Today, Hahn has mapped out the piece so thoroughly she has several options for how to play any given measure.
“Along the way, I’ve done that whole process many, many times, so now I feel like I have a lot of confidence in my interpretation of it, and it’s clear to me where I’m going with it,” she says. “It doesn’t feel awkward anymore.”