“Severance,” the Apple TV+ serial a few company whose staff have agreed to “sever” their workaday minds from their regular streams of consciousness, remembering nothing of workplace life at house and vice versa, is a present designed to interrupt my coronary heart.
It’s a serial within the custom of “Misplaced” or the primary season of “True Detective,” or “The X-Recordsdata” farther again — an unspooling thriller with science fiction and maybe supernatural parts, thick with clues that time towards a bigger conspiracy or mythology by which the characters discover themselves caught up. Some types of fandom depart me chilly (I don’t care concerning the Easter eggs on the finish of the umpteenth Marvel film, sorry), however after I fall for this sort of “puzzle field” present I fall arduous — with the information, hard-earned, that the character of those exhibits is to overpromise after which disappoint when the time lastly comes to drag the curtain again.
Perhaps “Severance” would be the exception; possibly the child goats and lifeless seals popping up within the weirder corners of its workplace dystopia aren’t identical to the polar bear on “Misplaced,” the image of a present whose pleased-with-itself mystifications ran forward of any elementary plan.
However quite than rehash my points with the puzzle-box mannequin (which I final mentioned when writing about “Yellowjackets,” a present that’s sadly misplaced my consideration), I believed I’d attempt to speak about what “Severance” is doing proper now, with out regard to its potential endgame, by providing three potential solutions to the query, What is that this present truly about?
The best reply is that it’s a present concerning the American method of labor, with the severing process a savage twist on work-life stability points, a sci-fi literalization of the concept of particular work identities (and distinct “work pals” and “work spouses”) as options of the fashionable workplace. And it’s about work in a method that’s particularly resonant in a post-pandemic panorama the place folks have been taken out of the workplace for an prolonged interval and discover themselves returning — or contemplating a return, or being pressured right into a return — in a cultural context the place the essential strangeness of workplace life has been thrown into reduction.
When this facet of the present is only, “Severance” performs as a surreal companion piece to “The Workplace,” with Jim-Pam-Dwight sitcom dynamics transferred to a a lot weirder airplane. Right here workplace tchotchkes and departmental rivalries tackle supernatural freight and company is a mysterious and baleful energy quite than a hapless bunch of fits. When it doesn’t work as nicely, it’s as a result of the present slips backward from surrealism right into a extra banal sort of company satire. “Severance” depends upon the deep weirdness of Lumon Industries, its peculiar rituals and hierarchies and inside company language, to weave dread into the acquainted panorama of computer systems and cubicles and wall-to-wall carpeting.
Then the specifics of the Lumon company lore counsel a second studying of “Severance” — that it’s a present concerning the WASPs.
Certainly one of my operating theories of early-Twenty first-century America is that our cultural conflicts and anxieties are formed, typically unconsciously, by the abdication-cum-disappearance of the particularly Protestant caste that based and dominated America’s elite establishments right down to the Nineteen Sixties. And at occasions “Severance” seems like a dreamlike reckoning with WASP energy and its disappearance.
The authorities of Lumon, the Eagan household, clearly belong to industrial-age quite than digital-age America: All the things from the company artwork to the hall-of-presidents figures of the Eagan dynasty to the cumbersome computer systems and ’80s-era vehicles counsel a mixed-up timeline the place the transition to the Twenty first century went considerably in a different way than in our personal. Together with the transition to some sort of racial inclusivity: The present’s African American center supervisor is presented, after a promotion, with a personalised set of Lumon paintings by which the corporate’s Victorian-era founder, Kier, is reimagined with black pores and skin. (He’s unsettled by the reward.)
The Eagan philosophy, as expounded in official paperwork and company jargon and Kier’s supposed knowledge, 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 appear to be a coincidence that the present’s two brushes with Christianity — at a church funeral and in a dinner-table dialog a few Lutheran pastor’s views on the souls of severed staff — each function types of Mainline Protestantism.
Think about a world the place the WASP elites shed formal Mainline commitments in favor of a bizarre mix of stoic, pagan and self-help influences, after which endured as a hidden, presumably even undead drive; that’s principally what Lumon Industries conjures.
However it additionally conjures an current American establishment that blends business-speak, self-help, peculiar psycho-spiritual jargon and techniques of inside management beneath the looming shadow of a departed founder. I’m pondering right here of the Church of Scientology, which yields a 3rd studying of “Severance” — that it’s a present about being in a cult.
There have been good documentaries about cults lately, from “Wild Wild Nation” to “The Vow,” but it surely’s arduous to efficiently dramatize what it’s prefer to be in thrall to such an enterprise, to expertise a cult-world in all its strangeness as one thing inevitable and inescapable.
On this, the idea of severing is dramatically helpful — it’s a literalization of our clichés of brainwashing, one thing that separates characters utterly from the skin world and makes it really feel like their very identities will disappear in the event that they depart the church of Lumon behind.
And there’s the same utility to the science-fiction or supernatural factor concerned in regardless of the higher-ups at Lumon are doing or searching for, because it makes it clear that this cult is known by its inside circle as one thing greater than only a rip-off or energy play — which is, I believe, true to most cults in actual life, nevertheless a lot scamming in addition they do.
As to what the essential factor could also be, what the cult is definitely searching for — nicely, now we’re again to the present as a puzzle field, and my near-inevitable disappointment, so it’s a very good place for my work self to clock out.
Breviary
Nathan Pinkoski on Richard Nixon’s revenge.
Perry Anderson on how concepts form historical past.
Kyle Smith on Gene Hackman’s reward.
Freddie deBoer towards Miranda July.
A dialog (with me) about faith, know-how and fantasy.
A unbroken argument concerning the multiverse.
Ads for Myself
Subsequent Monday, March 3, at 6:30 p.m., I’ll be speaking about my new ebook at Columbia College beneath the auspices of the Morningside Institute. You may RSVP for the occasion right here.
