By Sam Casey
The popular Apple TV series Severance recently returned for its second season. One of the most watched shows across various streaming services, Severance is a psychological, sci-fi thriller that depicts the lives of a group of workers at the giant tech corporation, Lumon Industries.
We follow four workers from Lumon’s ‘severed floor’, where all the workers have undergone a neurological procedure to split their consciousness and memories in two. This effectively means that, once they enter work, they are an entirely different person with no memories of their outside self. And once they clock out, they transform back from their “innie” into their “outie”, with no memory of the work-day.
The “innies” live their entire lives within the walls of the ‘severed floor’, a maze of drab white walls resembling a mid-century corporate office. The second they enter the elevator to leave work, they reawaken the next day in the same elevator returning to the office. This allows Lumon to completely dominate their workforce, controlling every aspect of their lives. The workers’ split consciousness becomes the central pivot of the show’s ever-unfolding mystery – as both the “outies” and the “innies” struggle to find out what Lumon is up to, beginning to band together in a striking metaphor for workers unionising.
Similar to Black Mirror, Severance uses dark-comedy to investigate aspects of modern capitalist society. It forces us to ask questions about corporate power, workplace alienation and where the billionaire tech-oligarchs of our own world may be leading us. It is a show about workers rebelling against corporate overlords. Its massive popularity reflects a growing disillusionment and unease with work under capitalism.
While none of us are ‘severed’, most working-class people can relate to the feeling that the time they spend in work isn’t really their own. That time belongs to the boss, because under capitalism workers are forced to sell our labour-power to companies that exploit us for profit in order to survive. Even the term “work/life balance”, which is hardly a reality for most workers forced to work long hours for low wages, is itself an acknowledgement that somehow “life” must end where “work” begins.
Lumon is not so dissimilar to the massive tech corporations that dominate our own world. Ironically, Severance is the flagship show of Apple TV – precisely the kind of company that the show is skewering. And the show’s concept doesn’t take too much suspended disbelief, given tech billionaires like Elon Musk are themselves developing dystopian-sounding products like the “neuralink” brain microchip.
In addition to its strong writing, the show is being hailed for its incredible filmmaking. It is so meticulously detailed that the viewer can find meaning in everything from the creative cinematography, to the brilliant score by Theodore Shapiro, and the intricate differences in the actors’ performances as their “outies” and their “innies”. Season 2 contains what many have claimed to be one of the best directed episodes of TV ever.
Severance brilliantly satirises the mind-numbing drudgery of office work. Throughout Season 1, it wasn’t clear exactly what Lumon Industries even does. The four central characters – Mark S (Adam Scott), Helly R (Britt Lower), Dylan G (Zach Cherry) and Irving B (John Turturro) – work in the ‘Macro Data Refinement’ department. They spend all day looking at a series of shifting numbers on a computer screen. Every so often some of these numbers begin to stir deep emotions in them; feelings of fear, dread, disgust etc. When this happens, they simply file the numbers away. What does it all mean?
Many workers can relate to the feeling of doing a job that they have no control over and that seemingly holds no real value to society, part of what Marx described as the alienation of work under capitalism. In Season 2, the workers begin to uncover the mystery behind their own labour, and the full extent of their exploitation is revealed.
Where Severance really hits its stride is in its cringe-inducing depiction of corporate culture. The managers, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Mr. Milchik (Tramell Tillman), act as the face of the shadowy, unseen “Board”. Milchik in particular perfectly encapsulates the worst kind of corporate manager. Always with a grin on his face, he enforces Lumon’s oppressive, prison-like rules on the severed workers while constantly acting as though this is all one-big-happy-family. He goes between torturing workers for insubordination to giving them meaningless rewards, like the “5-minute music dance experience”. Tillman’s performance is hilarious and genuinely creepy at the same time.
As they live their entire lives on Lumon’s terms, the company uses elaborate propaganda to influence the “innies”. Its internal culture is eerily anachronistic, with outdated language and visuals that are reminiscent of the Gilded Age of American capitalism. It all centres around Lumon’s “visionary founder” Kier Eagan, similar to how CEOs are venerated as supposed “geniuses” in our own world. Lumon’s “Compliance Handbook”, which contains “the word of Kier”, is drilled into the workers, who are told lies about times in the past when workers from other departments violently attacked their fellow workers – a classic example of the ‘divide and rule’, union-busting tactics used by capitalism to dominate workers.
Despite this, a revolutionary spirit begins to break through, as the severed workers band together to take Lumon down. In this way, it is fitting that Season 2 was delayed due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike in 2023, which pitted the show’s writers against Apple TV and the other Hollywood studios that were attempting to use AI to make it impossible to make a living as a working writer. Just one example of many of how the world of Severance isn’t so far from life under capitalism in the 21st century.
