“Severance,” the Apple TV+ serial about a corporation whose employees have agreed to “sever” their workaday minds from their normal streams of consciousness, remembering nothing of office life at home and vice versa, is a show designed to break my heart.
It’s a serial in the tradition of “Lost” or the first season of “True Detective,” or “The X-Files” farther back — an unspooling mystery with science fiction and perhaps supernatural elements, thick with clues that point toward a larger conspiracy or mythology in which the characters find themselves caught up. Some forms of fandom leave me cold (I don’t care about the Easter eggs at the end of the umpteenth Marvel movie, sorry), but when I fall for this kind of “puzzle box” show I fall hard — with the knowledge, hard-earned, that the nature of these shows is to overpromise and then disappoint when the time finally comes to pull the curtain back.
Maybe “Severance” will be the exception; maybe the baby goats and dead seals popping up in the weirder corners of its office dystopia aren’t just like the polar bear on “Lost,” the symbol of a show whose pleased-with-itself mystifications ran ahead of any fundamental plan.
But rather than rehash my issues with the puzzle-box model (which I last discussed when writing about “Yellowjackets,” a show that’s sadly lost my attention), I thought I’d try to talk about what “Severance” is doing right now, without regard to its potential endgame, by offering three possible answers to the question, What is this show actually about?
The simplest answer is that it’s a show about the American way of work, with the severing procedure a savage twist on work-life balance issues, a sci-fi literalization of the idea of specific work identities (and distinct “work friends” and “work spouses”) as features of the modern office. And it’s about work in a way that’s especially resonant in a post-pandemic landscape where people have been taken out of the office for an extended period and find themselves returning — or considering a return, or being forced into a return — in a cultural context where the basic strangeness of office life has been thrown into relief.
When this aspect of the show is most effective, “Severance” plays as a surreal companion piece to “The Office,” with Jim-Pam-Dwight sitcom dynamics transferred to a much weirder plane. Here office tchotchkes and departmental rivalries take on supernatural freight and corporate is a mysterious and baleful power rather than a hapless bunch of suits. When it doesn’t work as well it’s because the show slips backward from surrealism into a more banal kind of corporate satire. “Severance” depends on the deep weirdness of Lumon Industries, its peculiar rituals and hierarchies and internal corporate language, to weave dread into the familiar landscape of computers and cubicles and wall-to-wall carpeting.
Then the specifics of the Lumon corporate lore suggest a second reading of “Severance” — that it’s a show about the WASPs.
One of my running theories of early-21st-century America is that our cultural conflicts and anxieties are shaped, often unconsciously, by the abdication-cum-disappearance of the specifically Protestant caste that founded and dominated America’s elite institutions down to the 1960s. And at times “Severance” feels like a dreamlike reckoning with WASP power and its disappearance.
The authorities of Lumon, the Eagan family, clearly belong to industrial-age rather than digital-age America: Everything from the corporate art to the hall-of-presidents figures of the Eagan dynasty to the bulky computers and ’80s-era cars suggest a mixed-up timeline where the transition to the 21st century went somewhat differently than in our own. Including the transition to some kind of racial inclusivity: The show’s African American middle manager is gifted, after a promotion, with a personalized set of Lumon artwork in which the company’s Victorian-era founder, Kier, is reimagined with black skin. (He is unsettled by the gift.)
The Eagan philosophy, as expounded in official documents and corporate jargon and Kier’s supposed wisdom, is a mash-up of old-America influences, from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard to the Rockefellers and Carnegies to Ford-era managerialism. And it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the show’s two brushes with Christianity — at a church funeral and in a dinner-table conversation about a Lutheran pastor’s views on the souls of severed workers — both feature forms of Mainline Protestantism.
Imagine a world where the WASP elites shed formal Mainline commitments in favor of a weird blend of stoic, pagan and self-help influences, and then endured as a hidden, possibly even undead force; that’s basically what Lumon Industries conjures.
But it also conjures an existing American institution that blends business-speak, self-help, peculiar psycho-spiritual jargon and strategies of internal control under the looming shadow of a departed founder. I’m thinking here of the Church of Scientology, which yields a third reading of “Severance” — that it’s a show about being in a cult.
There have been good documentaries about cults recently, from “Wild Wild Country” to “The Vow,” but it’s hard to successfully dramatize what it’s like to be in thrall to such an enterprise, to experience a cult-world in all its strangeness as something inevitable and inescapable.
In this, the concept of severing is dramatically useful — it’s a literalization of our clichés of brainwashing, something that separates characters completely from the outside world and makes it feel like their very identities will disappear if they leave the church of Lumon behind.
And there’s a similar utility to the science-fiction or supernatural element involved in whatever the higher-ups at Lumon are doing or seeking, since it makes it clear that this cult is understood by its inner circle as something more than just a scam or power play — which is, I suspect, true to most cults in real life, however much scamming they also do.
As to what the crucial element may be, what the cult is actually seeking — well, now we’re back to the show as a puzzle box, and my near-inevitable disappointment, so it’s a good place for my work self to clock out.
Breviary
Nathan Pinkoski on Richard Nixon’s revenge.
Perry Anderson on how ideas shape history.
Kyle Smith on Gene Hackman’s gift.
Freddie deBoer against Miranda July.
A conversation (with me) about religion, technology and fantasy.
A continuing argument about the multiverse.
Advertisements for Myself
Next Monday, March 3, at 6:30 p.m., I’ll be talking about my new book at Columbia University under the auspices of the Morningside Institute. You can RSVP for the event here.
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