In HBO’s “Industry,” Words Are More Violent Than Violence Itself

“I am violence! I am violence!” 

This is not the war cry of a gladiator in the arena, but the primal scream of a trader on the floor in HBO’s financial drama, Industry. The words belong to Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), following his threat to crack people’s heads during a tense trade, which inspires his boss, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), to remind him that he can’t threaten actual violence at work. That’s rich coming from Eric, who keeps a baseball bat ominously within reach of his desk.

Even if Rishi is all talk and Eric never swings the bat, violence pervades the fictional, London-based investment bank of Pierpoint. And while the blows exchanged by this cutthroat band of bankers are all rhetorical, they’re no less bloody for it. Pierpoint’s many players wield flowery metaphors and baroque phrases as swords, dictating and narrating their trades like archaic bloodsport. And ethics aside (which could be the Pierpoint motto), they’re not totally off on their self-casting as warriors and killers. While literal punches are rarely thrown, the financial schemes these one-percenters enact with a handful of carefully chosen words often have a crushing impact on the everyday people they hardly consider—and that’s to say nothing of the way they cut each other to the bone in the process.

By creating a kingdom where concepts of respect and civility are only as valuable as they are lucrative, Industry becomes its own cycle of violence: casual cruelty trickles down from the top, saturating the trading floor until it feels normal to its inhabitants. It’s no coincidence that the series premiere features an employee literally working himself to death, a tragedy from which his coworkers are expected to promptly move on. When an environment that unhealthy goes unchecked from the jump, it can’t help but overflow into its employees’ personal lives, and ultimately out into an unsuspecting world. 

In the show’s third season, Rishi emerges as one of the clearest embodiments of Pierpoint’s vicious ethos. He has so absorbed the spirit of the land that his moral compass has been completely demagnetized, and his seeming addiction to high-risk/higher-reward opportunities seeps dangerously from his dealings at work into his personal finances until he finds himself in levels of debt he can’t escape from. While almost everyone at the firm uses violent language to describe their trades (they don’t “outmaneuver” the competition, they “kill” and “gut” and “slaughter” them), Rishi transcends any metaphorical buffer to be directly and intentionally hurtful. 

Blinkered by the pursuit of profit (and Eric’s bat-wielding encouragement of that pursuit), Rishi doesn’t even notice the violence innate to his language. When it’s pointed out to him after being brought to the attention of the HR department Pierpoint often pretends they don’t have, Rishi can’t fathom why he should be reprimanded for the very thing that makes him good at his job. “Why would I censor myself?” he asks. “The contract in this place is simple: as long as I’m making money, I’m free.” 

Despite the HR charade, he’s proven right: during an intense, drug-fueled trade in which Rishi spearheads a highly risky position, Eric calls a security team to remove him from the desk—until the risk pays off in an eight-figure win for the company. Right on cue, Eric calls off the dogs, and Rishi’s would-be funeral turns into a parade. 

Lost as he may be in the fog of war, Rishi understands that Pierpoint’s charter is purely financial and wholly insatiable. Ultimately, the company doesn’t care if Rishi’s language is violent or not, literally or in effect; they only care if his violence is profitable. As long as it is, it will be tolerated and even venerated, due process be damned.

It’s a mindset that follows the employees home. For Rishi, that means cheating on his wife and gambling greatly with their money. For Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and former employee, Harper Stern (Myha’la), it permeates the fabric of their friendship. 

After two seasons of using each other as ladders to grapple their way up the financial ranks, Yas and Harper have cautiously rebuilt a friendship by season three. When an argument with Yas’ lecherous, embezzling father leads to him jumping off a moving yacht and drowning right in front of her, it’s Harper that comforts Yas and helps cover up the non-murder (fittingly, it was only words that sent him over the edge). This act bonds them together, even as Harper’s Machiavellian scheming leads her to run her own investment fund as Yas’s client—less because Yas is a friend than because Harper sees her as easily influenced. 

After all, a friendship forged in the war zone of Pierpoint’s trading floor is subject to the same rules of combat preached by Rishi and Eric. When Harper’s new business partner, Petra (Sarah Goldberg), commands her to use Yas’s gullibility to exploit Pierpoint’s vulnerable position in the market, Harper acquiesces after only a few mild protestations, just moments after comforting Yas in the midst of a crisis about her father’s death. If profit is king, then any profitable angle—no matter how personally horrific—demands to be exploited. Harper may have absorbed Pierpoint’s killer ethics, but she hasn’t yet accepted the consequences of the game; when she preys on Yas’s weaknesses, she still privately believes she can silo her personal relationships from her professional violence. 

But the two are inextricably intertwined. When Yas realizes that Harper played her, the pair incinerate their friendship as a result. In classic Pierpoint fashion, Harper and Yas lob linguistic Molotov cocktails back and forth until even the viewer feels scorched. “My pain is useful to you,” Yas says. Harper simultaneously hides behind her professional justification and takes a personal stab at Yas’ wealthy upbringing: “This is the business. Sorry the world is showing you what it is, without any of the protections that you are so clearly used to.” 

This blurring of the professional and the personal is the culture Pierpoint creates: not even a fight between friends is free from the violent language of its corporate origins. If Pierpoint has taught them anything, it’s how to work an angle, and as they weaponize their shared history, the fight evolves from broad slashes to heat-seeking missiles targeting any vulnerability they can find. They sharpened their knives cutting deals for the company, and now that they have each other in their sights, they’re simply throwing what they know.  

Only once they’ve emptied themselves of all the poison they have to spew do they resort to actual, physical violence: one slap to the face each. Compared to the verbal onslaught, it’s almost funny, a formality to commemorate a war without weapons. It couldn’t possibly hurt more than what’s been said.

Watching Industry’s characters cut into one another is often as hard, if not harder, to watch than even the bloodiest fights from Game of Thrones. The violence here is not a simple physical act stemming from an emotional turn or an escalation of tensions; rather, the violence dripping from every one of their words represents its own emotional escalation. Thrones had its share of acid-tongued schemers and back-room machinations, but at some point, its characters would usually take their personal issues to the arena or the battlefield, where any blows they landed were simply reflecting emotions they had already expressed. 

As shocking as a hacked limb or slit throat can be, viscera doesn’t carry emotional valence, and ironically, most gore is so extreme as to be almost intangible to viewers. By contrast, watching Industry’s characters engage in a full-on psychological blitz is both excruciating and exhilarating to witness. When Harper and Yas drop bomb after verbal bomb on one another, each detonation opens a fresh wound that may be less visible, but is all the more relatable for the way it echoes our own scars from friends or family. And theirs isn’t even the grisliest battle to watch.

As savagely as Harper and Yas act toward each other, they’re still only the militarized product of Pierpoint—the trickle-down violence compared to the original source. Eric may not have been party to the company’s original sin, but he’s a few decades of experience and several rungs up the corporate ladder closer to it than the analysts and associates below him. That close to the top, the imperative to do whatever it takes to protect profits is even more concentrated, combined with a heightened instinct for self-preservation; no one wants to fall back down the ladder once they’ve climbed it.

In that atmosphere, a friend is only a friend while their interests align with yours. Harper and Yas are still young enough (and newly unemployed by Pierpoint enough) that a future reconciliation is possible, perhaps when their personal and professional aims are no longer at cross-purposes. Their coin might be flipped to contempt for now, but by season’s end, it already looks primed to flip back to friendship, with the two killers reconnecting once they have new targets in their crosshairs. But in the rarified air that Eric occupies with the other Pierpoint elites, there’s less oxygen to spare on friendly considerations. 

Still, if you’ve managed to scrape and claw your way to the top like Eric has, you’ve likely only done so with the occasional support of other climbers. In Eric’s case, that’s Bill Adler (Trevor White), who Eric hired during his New York salad days. Bill has since lapped Eric to become a global head at Pierpoint, and despite the expected corporate grappling (I play you, you play me), they’ve maintained about as close an approximation of friendship as their stratum would allow. They’re close enough that Eric is the only person at Pierpoint Bill confides in when he discovers that he has a malignant brain tumor and not long to live. Eric is sincerely affected, and the men share one of the show’s rare moments of true tenderness, even if it manages to characteristically circle back to Pierpoint as they swear to fight for the company’s soul together. 

It’s still a surprisingly moving moment considering all of the horrible things we’ve seen these two men do, which makes it all the more crushing when Eric uses this information to trade the remainder of his own soul–-and Bill’s career—for one more rung on the ladder. After another exec warns Eric that Bill is only keeping him around as a “useful idiot,” Eric commits one of the most violent acts in recent television history with nothing but a few carefully deployed words and a blackened heart. At a crucial moment, when Bill is about to close a deal that may save Pierpoint from bankruptcy, Eric fabricates a conversation that never happened in order to slyly suggest to Bill, in front of a table of execs and investors, that he forgot the nonexistent conversation they’d supposedly had mere moments ago. 

The masked barbarity of Eric’s words hits us just as their implication hits Bill, who is visibly shaken by his apparent decline in mental acuity. Eric, having successfully teed himself up, lands the final blow by convincing Bill to tell the entire table of execs about his tumor, knowing it will spell his doom. The betrayal is horrifying to witness; between the mock concern on Eric’s face and the crestfallen look on Bill’s, we feel as though we’re watching a word-of-mouth execution. 

In weaponizing the deeply personal for professional gain, Eric pledges his ultimate fealty to Pierpoint and their ethos. When he goes on to bring in suspicious foreign investors as his own save-the-day plan, he’s not betraying his earlier goal of preserving Pierpoint’s soul; he’s affirming the fact that it was always corrupt, and he its corruptible pawn—a useful idiot to the company, if not to Bill. Unlike Harper in her betrayal of Yas, Eric holds no illusions about being able to keep his personal and professional lives separate. He’s just willing to trade one for the other, dropping the friendship/contempt coin down the slot machine and hoping for triple sevens. 

As Eric and the remaining execs plot to pin Pierpoint’s bad performance on Bill’s lapses, an unnamed c-suiter says the quiet part out loud: “While I respect the rules of the game, I find pinning this all on a sick man morally unconscionable. But, tomorrow is more important than yesterday for Pierpoint.” 

Contained in that deadly couplet is the Pierpoint ethos writ large: an ability and a willingness to write over any amount of human cost with simply a few words. It’s also a penthouse echo of something Harper previously said to Yas when explaining why she enjoys working in their industry: “It’s a perpetual present tense.” Whether using their words to paper over past traumas or to create new ones in the name of profiteering, the ultimate joke of the show’s language is not on the people harming one another with words, but on the countless others their words ultimately hurt. 

The punchline is that the chosen vocation of these linguistic assassins is one where their words are underwritten by more than just personal animus. When wielded by Industry’s besuited executioners and empowered by the invisible weight of the British pound, words can end careers or mint millionaires; they can make the wind blow and shape reality, causing trickle-down effects their speakers wouldn’t have time to consider even if they wanted to. Ironically, those same violent words help to insulate their speakers, abstracting the consequences of their market-moving actions and absolving them of all crimes—after all, it’s just language. 

The flimsiness of a system built on that lie comes under scrutiny in the season finale, which sees the younger bankers attempt to double down on it even as the veterans finally feel a wobble. Even though Yas and Harper haven’t spent nearly as much time being indoctrinated into Pierpoint’s primeval ways as Eric and Rishi, they’ve spent long enough in that home built on violence that they both choose to make violence their home rather than embarking on healthier paths to unknown ends. For Yas, that means heart-stabbing a man she probably loves to get engaged to a man she probably doesn’t, but whose family name (and wealth) makes her instant demiroyalty. For Harper, it means growing dreadfully bored of the (relatively) respectful, legal work environment she and Petra have built after all of thirty seconds. If there’s a way to exist in their industry without back-stabbing or killing everyone around you, she’s tried it long enough to know it’s not for her. Rishi, meanwhile, is far beyond any moment of choosing violence and has arrived at the point of being swallowed up by it. His reckless words and gambles culminate in the shocking murder of his wife, a scene that suggests clearer than ever that violent words do, in fact, beget violent actions. 

As for Eric, he turns out to have sold his soul for nothing, his coin fruitlessly eaten by the slot machine. After the takeover, he’s laid off by the same executive who inspired his betrayal of Bill.  “There’s no business need for you at Pierpoint now”: a death sentence if he’s ever heard one. As it turns out, Pierpoint’s new bedfellows have as little respect for their acquired workforce as Pierpoint does, and Eric is well enough acquainted with the cycles of corporate violence to realize his fate even quicker than Bill did: “I get that I was a useful idiot.” 

The problem is, Eric—like Yas, and Harper, and Rishi—doesn’t know how to be useful in any kingdom that won’t cosign his violence. “Your desk is your house,” he says in one last speech to rally Pierpoint’s troops. That makes Eric spiritually homeless now, a victim of the snake finally eating its tail. You can’t teach your employees to kill everyone in sight and arm them with the language to do so without eventually facing some collateral damage. 

As he makes his final arrangements, Eric tosses his ever-handy bat away. He’s leaving the arena; he has no use for it anymore.