Claire Fan - Week 5: Adam Scott's Cool New Gig in the Office
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| Season 2 of Severance is out now on Apple TV+ and I will get around to it. Someday. |
Lately, I’ve been trying to make time to watch more television. Yes, it sounds silly, but it’s true: these last few years, I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time to unwind, and when I did, it was almost never by watching TV. I’ve heard a lot about different critically acclaimed shows I never watched. Arcane, Andor, Stranger Things…it felt like I was missing out on experiencing great pieces of art with everyone else. So when I clicked on the first episode of Severance, it was my expectation that I would breeze through Season 1 and to my great delight that I would finally, at long last, be able to discuss Season 2 with my friends and on the Internet™. Only nine episodes, right? Easy.
Of course, I was very, very, wrong. Sorely mistaken. One might even say I felt tricked, backstabbed, and quite possibly bamboozled.
Severance is a complex show with a simple premise: that through a nifty brain implant, it’s possible to bisect the consciousness. One side, the “innie,” is only ever at work, while the “outie” can spend time with family and friends with no knowledge or memory of ever going to work. To the outie, besides the initial discomfort of having an eight hour-shaped hole (a third of the day!) in the memory, there are no downsides. For the outie, it’s all play, no work.
For the innie, however, severance means something else entirely. To the innie who never leaves work and can be abused however Lumon (their employer) sees fit, severance is nothing short of oppression. And for Helly R., working at Lumon is a living hell.
Ah, yes. Cleaving your consciousness and effectively splitting the self in two…for business purposes. To me, Severance is representative of the gradual societal shift towards an emphasis on work and productivity above all. It offers an easy solution to a hard problem—don’t like working? Have someone else do it instead. Severance is an interesting proposal, while Severance is an interesting show. I ultimately interpret Severance as a criticism of the current economic system in America, one that has an ever-growing list of demands from its citizens. Work faster, work harder, work more, all in the name of providing more value to about ten people in Silicon Valley in the end. Severance seems to be an expression of the terminal velocity we’re headed towards. And ultimately, the show poses to the audience one salient question, one that haunts the backdrop of every episode (in Season 1 at least. I haven’t started Season 2).
Are we okay with that? Or perhaps, to be more to the point: Are we okay?
Hi Claire!! I thought this blog was thoroughly interesting. I honestly relate a lot to your point of not having time to watch TV lately; I can’t remember the last time I actually sat down to watch a show. I think this situation is in itself related to the conflict presented in Severance: we sacrifice things for the sake of productivity, but how important is it really? As a student, it’s always been important to get good grades, but how much should be compromised for that to happen? Of course, it’s not just a matter of TV, it’s how we often isolate ourselves for academics—we may be our own "innie." I hope you can start season 2 soon; don’t suffocate yourself for David Coleman’s (mysteriously) filled pockets!
ReplyDeleteHey Claire! I’ve only seen short 1 minute clips of Severance from scrolling on YouTube Shorts (only the greatest of show recap websites), but even from that—and your blog post—Severance sounds like an immensely interesting show with a very adaptable concept. Although different in premise, Severance seems to be heavily influenced by Roger Sperry’s research on the “split-brain” phenomenon, where humans with their corpus callosum severed as a treatment for epilepsy seem to have their two brain hemispheres operating completely separately from each other, each controlling different body functions. This can lead to all sorts of scary phenomena such as “alien hand syndrome” where the two halves of the brain will disagree on a decision and quite literally fight each other using, well, your hands.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn’t be surprised if that was an eventual plot point in the show: the brain chip malfunctions and the innie starts fighting the outie in an imitation of class consciousness where the innie finds a way to free all the other innies in a gigantic revolt against capitalism. For reference, I have not watched the show yet, so I wouldn’t consider myself as any less than a genius if this was actually a part of the show (only joking of course).
Hi Claire! Severance sounds like such a mind-opening film (get it haha), although I fear I would be questioning my existence for the rest of my day. I agree that our modern-day system in workplaces is in a really bad state. The fact that the top 1% of the US owns 31% of the nation’s wealth is unbelievable, and not to disregard their hard work, but it can definitely be unfair to lower class people who put in the same effort just to make significantly less money. It seems like society doesn’t reward people based on hard work, and differentiates a poor person from a rich person by a gamble. I can definitely see how Severance reflects our society; I interpret it as a system that reformulates our brains to follow a work pattern. Working has been such a fundamental part of our lives that our common goals in the future are to have a job and create a family. I saw a recent TikTok about how school systems put a lot of academic pressure on students who are still very young kids, and I definitely agree. As humans, we have been surrounded by a system of education and working that has been taught to us since birth that our human nature of living life to the fullest doesn’t become a priority to us. I love how the movie interprets these two feelings as separate entities; it really shows how separated we are from our human nature and how we’re moving towards being robots programmed to function for the system until we wilt and die.
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