One of the topics of the times is work-life balance. Should you work all the time, like Elon Musk? Should you embrace the workless life of social media influencers? To be middle class is a mix of the two. One has to work, to earn independence (and property), and also to mind one’s life, to make good use of that independence. It’s to be neither poor nor rich, but to be somehow both. Yet it might also mean to be divided, at cross-purposes with oneself, pulled by technology one way, to work; and by mortality in another, to live.
As with many other things, we have lost the paradise of the ’50s, in which work and family, home and community, and private life and American greatness all seemed of one piece. In 21st century America, there are far fewer marriages and therefore families; far fewer children, too. But there are also now all sorts of worries about jobs and careers, falling labor participation rates, and an anxiety about the gig economy and the problem of automation.
This is the world of the AppleTV+ show Severance, now in its second season. Disguising sociological observation, as is customary, in the form of science fiction, Severanceencourages us to worry over our loss of identity. Work-life balance, for example, implies a deeper common ground disputed by those activities and requires a higher standard by which to judge how to act. The old-fashioned word for that is soul. The state-of-the-art jargon is identity, or rather identities.
The identities of producer and consumer, or worker and nonworker, are severed from each other in the show, suggesting Americans sign away their freedom or self-government at work, becoming temporary slaves to corporations. Or rather, one corporation that organizes the identities, Lumon, which inserts chips in the brain to block short-term memories, so that the hours of work and the hours of life stay separate and one body ends up housing two people, at least. The corporation keeps its secrets, as with NDAs and noncompetes and so forth; the employee, once back home and away from the desk, gets to forget about drudgery and indulge the liberal hipster atheist life, as far as the show is concerned.
We see this exaggerated version of ordinary life play out with four unhappy but endearing middle-aged characters, Mark S. (Adam Scott), our sensitive male protagonist; Helly R. (Britt Lower), the brash woman who won’t take no for an answer; Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), the moral anchor, who is black; and Irving B. (John Turturro), the gay character. Every frustration to do with impersonal modern institutions, from boredom to an alienating futurism, is put on like an absurd pageant by director Ben Stiller and creator Dan Ericksen. But also every possible office romance plays out. The characters are trying to break out of a kind of behaviorist rat labyrinth but also trying to find out why they want out.
The plasticity or malleability of human nature is on display in Severance, in the particularly worrisome way of playing a role, of deception and self-deception, of self-help and the use of self-help as a therapeutic ideology by corporations. We rehearse the fear, as the story unfolds, of the use of technology to mutilate human nature, an attack on our memories, a replacement for experience, and a “whole-of-society” form of role-playing that spells out the consequences of our conformism, social media censorship, and “alienation.” But we also fear we may not deserve better, because we cannot deal with our own suffering, much less help others.
The show presupposes there is no such thing as the preferred liberal type, the well-adjusted individual. That’s just the lie corporate self-help, wellness, and carrot-and-stick incentives tell. But it accepts the notion that, without work and its tyranny, people aren’t even interesting. The “split selves” of work and leisure, innies and outies, coexist somehow. But the story is all about the innies, even though their “work” (“Macro-data refinement”) seems indistinguishable from simple number games. Our world is what we make of it, so we must find out what we’ve made of it.
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Season 1 of Severance played out a familiar American drama, rebelling against the system, blowing the whistle, appealing to democracy to fight off the oligarchy—TheMatrix, if you will. This fails, as it did in The Matrix. Social and technological experimentation on human beings is not frowned upon; the unhappiness of our characters is what keeps them going—secretly, it’s the fuel for the corporate engine of productivity. But what success they do achieve and what revelations we experience come from their willingness and ability to band together, in which regard they fare better than Mark’s friend Petey, who had broken out alone and suffered for it.
Season 2 plays out the other familiar drama, the origin story. What is the origin of the Lumon corporation, which seems to include everything from schools to health services to the manufacturing jobs that made small towns wealthy? What is the origin of Mark’s involvement with it—was it a rescue mission for the wife he had lost after she had a miscarriage and whom he has since forgotten and remembered again?
The unfamiliar aspect of the story is the willingness to turn office life into existentialist theater. What if you lived your life in the complete awareness of the fact that a third of it is sleep, and the rest is half at work, half away, realizing that the people in your home and the people in your office have nothing in common and yet you are split between them? What if you took that further and wondered how alien you are to yourself? Would you keep going back to work, once it suddenly seemed to you existentially demeaning—the office will always be there, but you are mortal?
And would that return to servitude make you somehow stronger? That’s the most interesting suggestion in Severance, the insight that makes Season 2 coherent. The motivations of the four characters become more sophisticated once they take themselves seriously as having a family for which they are responsible, beginning the process of integration of identity, but their partnership looking for escape now looks much flimsier. They’re headed in different directions, in short, and they might not even be able to trust each other. But work is what made them able to get this far.
I’ve avoided spoilers because the story isn’t over—the big “mystery show” problem, which goes back to Twin Peaks in 1990, is now looming over Severance. Will they stick the landing in Season 3? Will they be able to bring things together, which in a sense means coming back to reality once the corporate conspiracy thriller begins to run out of steam? But it’s already obvious what’s going on in the back of our heads that makes us willing to look at ourselves in this theatrical situation and what we could learn if we only reflected on the problem of corporations supplying identities in a world where family, church, or nation no longer have enough power over the American mind.
Still, we’re at the stage of puzzling over things, which is why we admire the show, so I’ll leave you with the woman question. A married woman who can’t have children is the emotional climax of Season 2. Another woman, apparently single and childless on the threshold of old age, apparently invented the tech to sever identities. A little girl plays boss in the strange kindergarten atmosphere of the modern workplace. Another single woman stands to inherit the corporate empire. Our male protagonist is supposed to become sensitive to a female influence that suffuses the story. But what will he (and what will we) make of all this?
