The thresher of the modern world and the human condition can make us all feel a bit alienated, from reality and nature, from ourselves and from each other. There’s the split between our work and social lives, political and personal sentiments, our digital and physical selves, or just the different sides that come out in different relationships. And today there are no shortage of digital escapes on offer to splice up the continuous stream of our attention and dissociate from reality.
Now imagine a literal option was presented, being able to choose to forget the pain and get through each day, but at the cost of splitting your soul into shards. This is the premise and tension underlying the hit Apple+ TV series Severance. Created by Dan Erickson and produced by Ben Stiller, the series offers an absurdist and dystopian sci-fi mystery centered around the modern workplace. While the second season has just wrapped up—with a cliffhanger of an ending that brought to a head the conflict of having two separate selves in one body—its enduring themes of emotional detachment and trauma linger beyond the specifics of the plot.
In a world not unlike our own, citizens are given the choice to “sever” between their experience of the workplace and life outside of it through a controversial procedure known as severance: A chip, developed by the sinister Lumon Industries, is placed in the brain, bifurcating their consciousness into two distinct parts. Severed workers show up at Lumon headquarters, are mysteriously whisked into a sterile office environment, and whisked back again with no knowledge of what happened in the intervening hours.
But what might seem like a dream scenario for those who crave separation between their professional and personal lives quickly descends into a nightmare. One’s work self, known as an “innie,” is trapped at Lumon’s offices for the entirety of their life, unable to communicate with the outside world. And once severed, one’s innie has a life of their own, and to quit would essentially mean to kill them. The innies are stripped of a vital piece of their humanity, their memory, personal history, and selfhood—the ability to choose their destiny and recall their past—presenting difficult questions around human consciousness, identity, and choice. Indeed, as one of the show’s outies says to their innie, via video message: “I am a person. You are not.” It’s a kind of hell, and work is even referred to, on the outside, as “down there.” But if we choose our own hell, does that make it okay?
The show opens with a disturbing question: Who are you? A woman named Helly, a fiery new hire at the firm, wakes up sprawled on a conference room table with no clue who she is or why she’s there. Helly is being on-boarded to her new role at Lumon over a speaker by Mark, a severed worker at Lumon’s department of Macro-Data Refinement. Mark lost his wife in a car accident and has chosen severance to escape his pain; we first meet him crying in his car, before he goes into work and changes into his giddier office self, with no memory of a wife in the first place.
The severed workers are heavily monitored and controlled, with powerful incentives to keep them from stepping out of line: rewarded with chinese finger traps, waffle parties, melon cubes, office dance parties, and punished in the “break room” where they are made to repeat an apology mantra to their psychological breaking point. None of them know what they’re actually doing down there. The work involves placing numbers in boxes on a computer screen based on how the workers feel about them. Dylan, one of Mark’s coworkers, thinks they’re cleaning the sea; another coworker, Irving, thinks they’re cutting swear words out of movies.
The work environment is creepily repressive and sexless, with all sorts of pokes at corporate culture. In the building there are goat farms, secret passageways, weird artwork, tributary manikins of its historic CEOs, and we get frequent allusions to sacrificial animals, larvae, and self-cannibalization. When Helly is being oriented, she asks Mark if she’s livestock. “Did you grow me as food and that’s why I have no memories?”
The plot is carried by the enduring mystery around Lumon, what severance is really all about, and what the company is up to—inspiring endless theorizing online among viewers of the show. But in the spirit of earlier shows like Lost and the puzzle box mystery concept, the answer is secondary to the inner struggles and conflicts of the characters and their relationships. Beneath the dehumanizing environment there’s a palpable element of sweetness in how these people connect and find meaning within this bizarre vortex.
Severance is about conflicted and broken characters seeking redemption and healing and love in a twisted world. And the idea is that we can’t truly separate from our pain, which is a part of us—the different parts of ourselves, the conscious and unconscious, bleed together. Outside of work, Irving creates dark paintings of one of the company’s murky floors without knowing why or what he is depicting, while at work he has hallucinations of enveloping black ooze that functions as a powerful motif of the unconscious bleeding through.
As Petey tells Mark in the outside world, “You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there, too. You just don’t know what it is.”
While observing an exhibition of Lumon’s company history, Irving says: “It’s an unnatural state for a person to have no history. History makes us someone. Gives us context.” But even without memory, without the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, without time and continuity and ego, there’s still a part of us that would remain untouched and unvarnished, something irreducible and unquantifiable, a soul, as it were. And if our identities and personalities can be made, molded like clay, they can also be unmade, and can be broken.
Inspirations for Severance—spanning from anti-bourgeois films like Office Space (1999) and Being John Malkovich (1999), certain computer games and even an extended Sizzler’s commercial—include the 2004 sci-fi romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey. In the film, characters are presented the option to erase their memory of a particular loved one after the death of a relationship. Joel Barish seeks to erase his ex-partner Clementine after she’s erased him, yet they end up meeting again anyway, before discovering they already had this whole relationship that ended painfully. Even if we could erase a person from our memories, would we not still feel them in our bodies, in our souls, that nagging emptiness and longing for the part of ourselves that knew them? At the climax of the film, Joel and Clementine, knowing they’ve been through all this before, decide to go through with their romance anyways. Because love is a risk worth taking. Because pain and love are siblings.
At the heart of Severance is this interplay of love and suffering. How the series deals with the effects of trauma and grief through Mark’s loss of his wife is the beating heart of the story. As part of a company-mandated wellness check, Mark is asked to sculpt his feelings out of clay, and he ends up recreating a tree at the scene of his wife’s fatal car accident, although his severed self has no conscious knowledge of the event. On the outside, we see him return to that same tree in mourning. And if it’s the pain that has caused Mark to sever, it’s the memory of that love that offers hope of unsevering him.
Trauma and tragedy necessarily dissociate us, setting off certain pathologies within us to avoid remembering that pain and powerlessness. We give into compulsion and addiction, as though we can fix the brokenness by cleaving ourselves into smaller and smaller bits. An anonymous quote from someone in recovery goes, “people are not addicted to drugs or alcohol, they are addicted to escaping reality.” The modern world presents endless ways of distracting ourselves and dissociating from uncomfortable realities, and the dystopian vibe of the show stems in part from all the other ways severance could be applied and all the difficult things in life we might choose to avoid if we could—all the ways we avoid dealing with each other already, from dating apps to social media filters and doom-scrolling. But forgetting is not the same as healing. In contrast, to become unsevered, to familiarize ourselves with our depths and consolidate the shattered pieces, especially the painful bits, is to become more fully conscious and human. But individuation is a dangerous and discombobulating process, and in the show, reintegrating the innies and outies can scramble the brain. In capturing the human struggle to know ourselves and others, Severance drives home the truth contained in Corinthians 12:12: There is one body, but it has many parts. But all of its many parts make up one body.
