What is Severance actually about? Mark S’s predicament, and a random office incentive, could provide an answer. Spoilers ahead.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Severance seasons 1 and 2.
Cacophonous marching bands. A blood-spattered Gwendoline Christie clutching a baby goat. Mr Melchick fruitlessly pummelling a vending machine for what felt like hours.
The Severance season 2 finale was filled with so much out-there imagery that it almost felt calculatedly designed to engineer talking points among its viewers. It was a bit like those TV adverts that employ surrealism to get people chattering around watercoolers (“Have you seen that ad with the drumming ape? Whatever will they think of next…”).
Severance doesn’t really feel like a series that throws out weird imagery to get attention, though. Its allusions to real-world politics and philosophical ideas – not to mention sci-fi and horror fiction – appear to be the mark of storytellers who actually want to say something about the modern landscape we all inhabit. There’s the question, though, of what it is, exactly, that Severance has on its mind; certainly, the breadth of opinion pieces that have emerged since season 2 began earlier this year suggest that it’s struck a chord.
This piece over on Prospect, for example, crystallises something I’d struggled to clarify in my own mind since I started catching up with Severance in February. The first season in particular appeared to portray a kind of Marxist uprising among the oppressed office workers at Lumon Industries; but then Lumon itself seems to be a mixture of Communist economy and doomsday cult, and as Prospect writer Aaron Brady points out, the show’s production design appears to be purposefully modelled on the architecture and chilly climate of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s. So is the show pro- or anti-Marxist?
Then there’s its portrayal of the workplace. A recent piece published by The New Yorker argues that Severance has a post-pandemic nostalgia for the traditional office job, even as it has its characters rebel against a dreamlike kind of corporate tyranny. The Lumon offices are depicted as a kind of Panopticon-like prison, perhaps crossed with the ice-white corridors of THX-1138. (Its cult-like worship of a patriarchal leader and obscure daily tasks also recall Richard Ayoade’s underrated The Double from 2013.)
Season 2, on the other hand, has one episode which suggests that Lumon’s severed floor might be some kind of Eden-like place of innocence, with its inhabitants being less corrupt and benighted by sadness and addiction than those outside. So is Severance against office culture and its absurd trappings, or for it?
Read more: Severance season 2 episode 10 review | A tale of two Marks
There are other questions, too: like several shows that paved the way before it, such as Twin Peaks or Lost, Severance mixes thriller elements with jabs of surrealism. But where on the continuum does one begin and the other end? Are there concrete, logical answers to some of the strange things we see in the series, or are they simply non-sequiturs?
All of these questions point to the tension going on beneath Severance’s expensive-looking and beguiling surface – a tension that makes it one of the most absorbing shows that has emerged from the streaming boom of recent years. I’d also argue that the tension between all these opposing ideas isn’t due to a lack of clear direction or ideology, for lack of a better word, but is instead intentional.
To explain what this means, there will now follow an incredibly brief recap of Severance’s premise.
An incredibly brief recap of Severance’s premise
As dreamed up by showrunner Dan Erickson, the show introduces Lumon Industries -shadowy tech company that has perfected Severance: a technique which essentially causes its employees to forget their everyday lives as soon as they enter certain parts of the building. Similarly, these workers will forget everything about their work as soon as they leave. This disparity in memories essentially creates two personas in one body – what the workers dub their ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ selves.
Because their pool of memories are so shallow and the work environment is so infantilising, the innies have an almost childlike quality – they innocently lap up all the cultlike corporate speak and tacky rewards without questioning anything too closely. Zach Cherry’s Dylan, for example, is particularly proud of the Chinese finger traps he’s been given for meeting his quotas. The innies are starkly contrasted with their outie selves – in season 1, it’s mostly team leader Mark S’s life we see out in the wider world. Personal tragedy has prompted him to turn from teaching to an office job at Lumon, and he’s signed up for the Severance program for the same reason he drinks all the time; to escape the pain of his grief.
Certain events in season 1 threaten to disrupt the equilibrium among the Macrodata Refinement division In the outside world, Mark meets a former colleague who abruptly left the company and is in the process of trying to ‘reintegrate’ the two halves of his personality divided by Lumon. Inside the company, personal relationships also cause trouble; Mark (Adam Scott) begins to have feelings for new recruit Helly (Britt Lower), who’s brought in a rebellious spirit with her. The otherwise jobsworthy office guy Irving (John Turturro) begins a furtive relationship with a worker from another department, Burt (Christopher Walken).
These, at least, are the early cracks that form into a full-on rebellion at Lumon – one that builds to season 1’s final episode. Like Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, Severance suggests that, no matter how hard those in authority try to turn humans into mechanical components, their desire for love and individuality will still assert itself.
In season 2, however, that positive reading becomes rather clouded. The outties’ lives are hardly better than those of their innies; Dylan’s wife, who gets visitation rights with the innie version of her husband, appears to find herself more attracted to the office-bound persona than the real-world one she married.
The season, in its meandering way, builds to Mark’s decision to go through the same reintegration process that ultimately killed his old work colleague; he’s since learned that the wife he thought dead, Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is alive and the subject of experiments inside Lumon.
The complication being that Mark’s innie self doesn’t want to cooperate; he’s in love with Helly, and knows that reintegration will essentially end his existence and endanger those of his colleagues. Season 2 concludes with Mark rebelling against himself. He rescues Gemma from Lumon’s clutches and ushers her through an exit door, but decides to remain inside the building with Helly rather than leave as his outie self had instructed.
On one level, it’s a romantic-seeming conclusion; but on another, it’s immensely downbeat. In all likelihood, Lumon will punish Mark harshly for his actions, which resulted in the death of one of his superiors. It’s unknown whether Gemma will ever get out of the building; if she does, she may never see Mark again unless someone stages another rescue attempt.
The trap
It’s here that we could ask ourselves what the real point of the Severance process actually is. Is it to protect corporate secrets, or is it something even more insidious? The true purpose could be a kind of ‘divide and rule’ tactic: subjecting workers to the process makes them not only easier to control within the confines of the building, but also compromises them to such a degree that it makes quitting far more difficult.
Viewed in this light, Dylan’s prized Chinese finger traps take on a new significance. The point of a finger trap is that, the harder you pull, the more difficult it is for you to extricate yourself. We see the same dynamic in Mark’s personas: they’re both pulling in different directions in the pursuit of their goals, and the result is that both of them end up trapped in Lumon’s sterile lair.
Taken together, Severance’s two seasons could be seen as an allegory for the chokehold late-stage capitalism has over much of the planet. Rising inequality and the climate crisis are widely acknowledged as existential problems, but what can we collectively do about them? In the present, we’re all so divided – both as nations and as individuals – that nobody can quite agree on a solution. It’s a division the director Asif Kapadia explored in his starkly prophetic documentary, 2073.
Mark could therefore be seen as a stand-in for a species locked in a cold war with itself. The two halves of his personality are like the opposing forces in any given argument: the outie Mark S is the voice that says we should get the hell off social media because it’s rewiring our brains. The innie Mark S is the response that we can’t shut down all our accounts because social media is simply too useful to abandon.
Any call for change or collective action could be broken down along the same innie/outie lines:
Outie: inequality is getting out of hand. We should tax the super rich.
Innie: Steady on. That might impact my personal wealth.
Outie: We should eat less meat and travel by plane less often.
Innie: But I like steak and annual trips to Spain. Get lost.
…and so on. Any meaningful course-correction for us as a civilisation will inevitably lead to some form of self-sacrifice. The problem is, nobody can agree on who should make those sacrifices. The systems currently in place have so successfully divided us that reaching any kind of consensus – or in Severance’s parlance, ‘reintegration’ is only becoming more difficult.
Like Mark, we’re caught in a particularly nasty finger trap. Time will tell whether Severance season 3 will come up with some means of getting out of it, or whether its characters will remain forever divided and too compromised to figure out a means of pulling together in order to finally escape.
Severance is streaming now on Apple TV+.
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