Tag Archives: Severance

My Severed Self


(or The Reintegration of an Innie & Outie to Find The We We Are)

One of the beauties of Severance, like all notable television, is that it works on multiple levels.

You have the Apple show’s conceit: In a not-too-distant future, we will be able to manipulate, separate and even erase unpleasant memories. Severance imagines an America where the work self has no contact with or knowledge of the home self. It ponders what Americans — and corporate America — would do with that chasm. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets The Office, as filmed by Stanley Kubrick.

But the show works on just about any parallel it’s mapped onto: workplace politics; sexual politics; politics politics. Consider some of the subtler messaging:

  • Red and Blue political leanings. Note the use of reds in the workplace, which is a corporate wet dream of labor exploitation and capitalism unbridled. Blues dominate the outside world, where men are neutered, women are masculinized and dominant — and both have become comatose in Wokeness.
  • Unionizing. The workplace ”innies”, who know nothing of colleagues beyond their cubicles, team to contact their “outies”, who presumably live a freer and better life. Apple+ must have quietly uncorked the champagne when Amazon lost its union battle with the heroic unionizer Chris Smalls earlier this month.
  • Women’s and civil rights. It’s no mistake than the Eagan family, founders of the shadowy Luman Corporation, has had only one female head of the Board. And Lumen minorities are limited to mid-level management and carnival prizes for busywork.
  • COVID. Department heads know nothing of the other departments: who leads them, what they do, how many there are, nothing. It’s as if they’ve been quarantined.

But its most intriguing dynamic goes deeper still: the politics of consciousness. Could you work a well-paying job if it were literally mindless? Would you literally mind eight hours of amnesia? I think I know a few people who would leap at the chance like a bullfrog on a roasting toadstool.

It all makes for arresting television and self-application. If your innie self and outie self met after years apart through “reintegration” (as the show puts it), what would you tell your work self about life outside the workday? What does your outie know that your innie should?

I never thought about the question until my forced reintegration in 2015, when my paper gave me the axe. Since then — after losing my job as a writer — did I learn that I was actually a writer. I guess sometimes you have to do something for free to know it’s what you love doing.

Which would be one of the first things I’d tell my innie. Here are some others:

We see a projected world, not a reflected one.

Save for intent, faith and science are two sides of one coin.

We don’t deserve this planet, and she knows it.
Human consciousness was an error, and the planet will correct it shortly.
The pandemic taught us what we can live without.
Boredom is underrated. You know who never gets bored? The hungry.
Time machines exist. They’re called memory and hope.
When enraged, count to 10 before you speak: Anger melts in time like butter on a skillet. Technology is a wonderbra: It lifts and separates us.
WE are The Great Filter.
We all gotta shoulder something.

A Severance Package Worth Considering



What a divergent path television and film have taken since covid.

Even before the pandemic, visual storytelling was coming upon a fork in the road: to modernize or stick with tradition. Television took the former path, movies the latter. Perhaps both, driven by economic Darwinism, had no choice in the matter.

Television pushed for streaming, for smaller screens, for thinner windows between movies in theaters and movies at home. For immediacy.

Movies have always subsisted on the communal experience. On immersion. On a mutual journey, laugh or cry. On investment.

Pandemics aren’t big on investments. They favor the sheltered, the homebound, the non-ambulatory. Which is why television is in the middle of a new golden era. Witness Severance.

Ambitious, sprawling and eager to tackle issues it can’t quite bring down, Severance represents the kind of storytelling that was once the domain of Hollywood films in the 1970’s. It’s why Westwood worked more as TV fodder than film remake its second time around.

Severance feels every bit as original as Westwood — the film and HBO show. Adam Scott plays Mark Scout, a workplace drone straight from The Simpsons Sector 7G who wants to escape the drudgery of everyday life after losing his wife in a car accident. But not by suicide.

The sci-fi drama imagines a near-future dystopia where people can opt to have memories surgically erased with some nifty brain noodling, a la the 2004 independent film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

It’s a fascinating premise: If you could divorce your work self from your home self, would you? In Severance, the work self (or “innie”) has no memory or knowledge of the “outie,” whose life is being conducted out in the real world.

Ben Stiller, who directs the first three episodes, makes ample use of the hypothetical to examine how we live out our real and work worlds. Are they not separable? Do we not feel as if we’ve been marooned in our cubicles as worker bee zombies?

The series is a bit too in the future. We see employees who have already agreed to have their brains opened and snipped. While we know all “severed” employees likely suffered from a traumatic past, only Mark’s is explored; even then, the leap into Big Brother’s menacing, ghostly arms feels a bit forced.

But such is the price of brave narrative, and Severance is as brave as TV gets this millennium. The cast includes Patricia Arquette as an ice princess boss and John Turturro and Christopher Walken as mid-level paper pushers — with a budding romance. Both hit career highlights here.

Apple TV’s latest offering will run only nine episodes this year, and it is clearly trying to build to a conspiracy cliffhanger that will prompt a second season. Such is the path of today’s bankable entertainment: social misfits form a family of their own to face corporate villainy. There should be a handbook.

But it sure beats what covid has left for films to survive on: comic book movies and shameless awards fare.

It may not be Coppola and Lucas looking for a break in the Carter years. But Severance has a heckuva benefits plan.