This article contains key details from previous episodes of “Severance.” It does not include any spoilers for the Season 2 finale.
It wasn’t your imagination: Something was off about the food from the start.
That first glimpse of cantaloupe and honeydew, arranged in the office to welcome Helly R., played by Britt Lower, was a little unnerving: Melons in jagged halves — severed! — filled with anemic, out-of-season fruit.
“Severance,” the Apple TV+ show written by Dan Erickson and executive produced by Ben Stiller, follows a group of Lumon Industries employees with chips in their brains that divide their work selves (“innies”) from their main selves (“outies”). For innies, whose lives are confined to the office, who never sleep or see the sun, a snack is a treat. So why doesn’t it feel like one?
The food on “Severance” leaves a bad taste in your mouth because it’s as fluent in doublespeak as the show’s most ambitious corporate climbers. In the show’s second season, which wraps up this week, food has acquired all the chilling, spine-tingling dissonance of upper management, refusing your request for a raise with a warm, unflinching smile.
“I always try to design the props and food to have some connection, some metaphorical undertone,” said Catherine Miller, the show’s prop master, who devised season one’s melon presentation to fit the “very graphic, very minimal” aesthetic of Lumon’s retro office. “I think food has the ability to define time and place and mood and overall emotional connection — it can become its own character.”
As a character, the food on “Severance” never says what it means and never means what it says. Food at the office might be packaged as an employee perk, a reward for meeting project goals, but even a stack of golden waffles dripping with maple syrup is only there to enforce compliance.
At Lumon, food is manipulation, suppression, distraction. The company barely acknowledges hunger: Vending machines on the severed floor are filled with small portions of boring snacks like dried blueberries and sunflower seeds. Food takes the sharpest edge off an appetite, but never satisfies it.
On a corporate trip, known in Lumon’s parlance as an Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence (ORTBO), the team laughs at their manager Mr. Milchik, portrayed by Tramell Tillman, and his dramatic reading of Lumon’s mythology. Punishment is instantaneous. “The marshmallows, please,” Mr. Milchik commands. “Throw them in the fire.”
“We knew we wanted the marshmallows to be special,” said Ms. Miller, whose team made the thick, rectangular confections from scratch, printing them with images of the Lumon founder Kier Eagen’s face using food-grade ink in a precise shade of Macro Data Refinement blue. “We tend to do angular instead of circular for the Brutalist aesthetic.”
The excitement of food withheld, or deployed, at just the right moment is a tactic, an attempt to redirect characters from big, inconvenient feelings like defiance, curiosity, love or grief. The melon bar is first wheeled out to temper Helly R.’s outrage after she tries unsuccessfully to quit her job at Lumon.
Later, a more elaborate melon bar appears when Burt, the head of Optics and Design on the severed floor, played by Christopher Walken, is forced into retirement, ending his budding workplace romance with Irving, played by John Turturro. After Irving is fired, the team shares a horrific watermelon carved in the shape of his head, part of Lumon’s “bereavement kit.”
For innies, who exist only in the office, termination is death. But Lumon seems to think that melon can manage the full spectrum of their emotions, prescribing it as needed.
“Melon has been a theme over the two seasons, and each time we see it, we want to up the ante,” Ms. Miller said.
To create the eerie watermelon head, Penko Platikanov, the show’s sculptor, carved melons for a week. He used the dark skin of the fruit to form the hair, letting the white rind peep out at the nose. But each time he got down to the details of Mr. Turturro’s face, the texture was too mushy for definition, the water content too high.
In the end, Mr. Platikanov turned to lacquered foam for a realistic and unsettling wet look. Though for a scene where Dylan, played by Zach Cherry, eats some of the funereal watermelon, the team carved about 16 ears out of real fruit.
One glimpse inside the Eagen family’s home and it’s clear how their neuroses — their fear and avoidance of messy emotions and appetites — have trickled down, shaping the entire corporation’s ideology.
The penultimate episode opens with Helena Eagen, the daughter of Lumon’s chief executive, in the middle of her tightly controlled morning routine: a swim followed by a cup of coffee and a single egg, cut into six identical wedges.
“The egg was endowed with a lot of subtext,” said Ms. Miller, who trialed different tools and settled on a vintage wire cutter for the scene, which was shot with dozens and dozens of real hard-boiled eggs (before the current egg shortage). “We wanted a very violent ritual.”
She opens the severed egg on a piece of luxurious china with a menacing image of a child restrained in a chair. (That plate was a rare vintage find, Ms. Miller said, and unlike the endless supply of eggs, she only had one.)
As Helena eats the egg, in tiny bites, with great restraint, her father watches and criticizes her: “I wish you’d take them raw,” he says, in reference to Kier Eagen’s breakfast of three raw eggs. Helena is technically free, but her mornings are a warped mirror of Gemma’s, Lumon’s tortured test subject.
Gemma, played by Dichen Lachman, has her own exercise program and a daily menu of carefully curated foods. A drawer of Lumon branded pods holds all of her meals: rows of processed starches, meats and vegetables, manipulated beyond recognition.
The labels suggest flavors and textures the pods are unlikely to deliver, like “flaky dinner roll,” “rendered marrow” and “candied carrots.” Garnishes like “apple blossoms” give the final plates the look of a generic fine dining dish from the early days of molecular gastronomy.
“She can mix and match the foods so she has a little bit of ownership, but no control,” said Ms. Miller, who took visual inspiration from some of the food-pod startups on the market today, along with the food trays in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
These meals aren’t supposed to delight. Like that very first melon bar — would you like the green tasteless melon or the orange tasteless melon? — food maintains an illusion of pleasure and choice for Lumon’s most vulnerable captives, who aren’t supposed to experience pleasure on their own terms, or to make real choices. Not at meal time, not ever.
But a little treat obscures the full extent of the company’s control, and obscuring control is essential to maintaining it.
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