What Severance says about our fractured selves

In the first episode of season two of the Apple TV+ drama Severance, security chief Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is rewarded for his loyalty to the sinister Lumon corporation with a gift of art. Milchick’s main responsibility is dispensing teddy-bearish menace to Lumon’s ‘severed’ employees. A ‘severed’ worker has a chip in their brain that splits their personality in two and they switch from one persona to another when descending to their workplace in the lift. One persona, the ‘outie’, has no awareness of what happens in the office. Their workday is over in a blink. The other, the ‘innie’, never gets to go home or leave the office. This disturbing practice is reinforced by Lumon’s internal culture, which revolves around fervent regard for its founder, Kier Eagan, and his descendants: ‘Praise Kier,’ employees say to each other, and a multi-storey stone bas-relief of the Eagan profile presides Marx-style over the lobby of headquarters. Art is so important to this cult-like business that it has its own division, Optics & Design, which is constantly reproducing and revising a series of heroic paintings depicting scenes from Kier Eagan’s life: ‘Kier Pardons His Betrayers’ is the title of one of these uplifting works, although the betrayers don’t look as if they’re really off the hook.

As you might imagine, discontent is brewing among the denizens of the ‘severed’ floor and Milchick has just quashed a rebellion. For this service, he is given his own set of the company paintings in a presentation box. But this set has been ‘re-canonicalised’ so that Milchick might better identify with Eagan and absorb the official lessons of the founder’s life: they have been repainted so that Eagan is Black, like Milchick. Though he is required to be outwardly grateful, Milchick is understandably shaken by this gesture and stashes the paintings on an inaccessible shelf in a storage closet. The gift is still gnawing at him (and the viewer) several episodes later.

Corporate art: Kier Pardons his Betrayers, one of many scenes from the life of Lumon Corporation founder, Kier Eagan, can be seen in the background. Photo: Apple TV+

What is being satirised in this incident? The perverse psychological demands of corporate conformity? The multi-ethnic group photograph on the front of the company report, which diverts attention from the all-white board of directors at the back? Is it a comment on well-meaning but tin-eared private-sector efforts at diversity and inclusion just as – in the real world – those efforts wither under the blast of political reaction? Whatever it is, it’s an example of what Severance – directed by Ben Stiller – does very well: a business environment that feels completely topsy-turvy, but also shrewdly observed and timely.

Like many of the best sci-fi concepts, the simple premise of Severance becomes fiendishly involuted as it plays out. (Possibly too much so in season 2, as mysteries pile up and the show stumbles over its own rules.) The innies, who have no life outside the office, are not the same people as their outies: the pressures of their subtly hellish predicament have altered their personalities, but they also have the curious liberation of being without history or future. This is often why the ‘outie’ side has chosen this segregated existence – for instance in the case of Mark (Adam Scott), who is trying to cope with crippling depression after the death of his wife.

This is an extreme version of the quite normal psychological conditions of the white-collar corporate workplace. We are not quite the same person in the office as we are at home. One existence sustains the other – but which is sustaining which? Do we work to live, or live to work? Although the innies are told that their work is of world-historical importance – and this is what management sincerely, almost fanatically, believes – it is on the surface an abstract and pointless business of shuffling numbers into folders. So maybe there is more than an echo of Marx in that stone effigy of Eagan, and you feel that Karl had a lot to say about Severance: it is essentially a drama about alienation. ‘Severed’ employees are starkly, literally alienated: entirely separated from the benefits of their labour.

‘Deeply uneasy in a Thomas Demand way’: Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and Adam Scott in the dystopian office environment of Severance. Photo: Apple TV+

The theorist David Graeber grasped the abstraction and alienation of much modern office work like few others have. In The Utopia of Rules: Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015), he wrote that individuals are rendered into pliable abstractions such as ‘the workforce’ and ‘consumers’ by what he called ‘institutionalised frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating’. These frames include offices, and the rituals of the workspace, which Severance makes significant and uncanny.

These bureaucratic spaces, Graeber says, ‘are the instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered’, and primarily exist to enforce extremely limited horizons. Horizons don’t get much more limited than the antiseptic, inescapable, subterranean world of the innies, Lumon’s ‘severed floor’. The severed floor is so bleached of meaning that even its more normal areas are deeply uneasy in a Thomas Demand sort of way, and it slowly reveals itself to be a boundless labyrinth filled with disturbing and enigmatic corners.

In this world art plays an important – if inscrutable – role. What Lumon actually does, besides perfect and distribute the severance technology itself, is not entirely clear. The Eagans’ wealth came from the manufacture of ether, an early anaesthetic. That is to say, they made a means of oblivion. Their aims are equally obscure and debatable. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys forming and discussing theories about TV shows, Severance is probably the best material since Lost. It’s hinted that they want a ‘severed world’, or to produce innies without outies, perfect economic cogs without inconvenient lives.

Another uplifting scene from the life of Kier Eagan, in the offices of the Lumon Corporation. Photo: Apple TV+

Shorn of outside influences – even the snack packaging is designed in house – the innies are given a paternalist corporate religion to replace their lost individual hinterlands. As a reward they can visit the ‘Perpetuity Wing’, which contains a full-scale reconstruction of the Eagan childhood home, an unsettling display resembling an installation by Gregor Schneider or Mike Nelson. Elsewhere Lumon’s internal communications are brilliantly off-key, combining hypocritical chumminess with hermetic jargon. Milchick receives a glossy performance review brochure that somehow combines the merry tone of Spotify Wrapped with the coercive psychological brutality of a self-criticism session: ‘Let’s discuss Seth Milchick’s contentions…’

This sense of separation from the world is mirrored in the painterly way Severance composes many of its shots. While the in-show art produced by Optics & Design is in the Romantic mould of Joseph Wright of Derby or Caspar David Friedrich, Stiller’s camera continually evokes the more disillusioned and alienated work of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. This applies in particular to shots featuring one of the show’s great physical assets: the Bell Labs research and development complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, a modernist masterpiece designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1962, which plays the role of Lumon’s HQ. This austere steel-and-glass slab is surrounded by a parking lot that comes to resemble an occult mandala, a frigid psychic wasteland enclosing the Lumon building. These remarkable mid-century modernist corporate campuses were the expression of capitalism in its most utopian moment, a heartfelt effort to improve the quality of work and attract employees through architecture and design, and the creation of a total world. But that was 50 years ago, and sits askew to whatever Lumon is doing there now. Severance isn’t really about capitalism, either for or against. The Eagans are too messianic for that – one senses that making money is incidental to their real goals. It’s more about the workplace, and about bureaucracy, and whatever is left of the private individual. It’s about the thing that has replaced capitalism and squats in its temples.