Severance is Just About Exactly my Corporate Nightmare

 I'm now three episodes into Apple TV's Severance. As I've probably posted about here before, since I was a teenager I've always been into "mindfucks" as a pseudo-genre. By this, I mean stories where we're shown a subjective reality in which both we and the characters are unaware of massive truths underpinning what we and they believe to be the solid ground upon which the story is built. This isn't just any twist, but one in which the viewer is encouraged to go back and re-watch things, wholly changing the meaning of scenes and sequences once we have the full context. Fight Club is a classic of this genre, as well as Memento. Really, I guess the common thread in all of these is that they are stories about the trustworthiness of our perceptions.

Severance is a bit different. We're privy to the two halves of our main character in a way that he is not, though there are tons of mysteries very much unrevealed.

Here's the premise: a megacorporation called Lumos has a division of employees who undergo a process known as "severance." What this does is that the person's memory is partitioned, such that, when they go home from work, they have no idea what they did at work, and when they're at work, they remember nothing whatsoever about their own lives outside of the office.

Lumos sells this as a way to maintain a clear separation between work and home life - just today, I was listening to an interview on NPR in which someone was talking about how France passed a law that requires employers to define an employee's work hours in their contract, and that the employee cannot be compelled to answer emails or texts or respond to calls outside of their work time - indeed, a company that violates this is fined. In the US, where labor unions have declined precipitously in the last 40 years, the idea of forcing employers to respect workers' personal time seems impossible to accomplish legally.

But here, the "solution" is existentially terrifying. Essentially, with two sets of memories, the "innie" and the "outie," the innie's entire existence is work - the record of their memory stops as they leave the office and starts up as they come back in. Yes, they feel the effect of the rest they had as their "outie," but they don't have any memory of that experience.

Where this gets particularly horrifying is when new hire, Helly (presumably short for Helena, though it seems somewhat meaningful that this is her name when she's condemned to live an endless existence of work in a subterranean limbo) is shown a door to the stairwell that leads out of the office - she's free to walk through it, and when she does, her outie memory-track replaces the innie. The outie, who has no idea why she left, shrugs and just heads back inside, and her innie experiences this as some kind of magic door that spins her around instead of letting her leave.

Later, she submits a request to resign to job - something her outie would need to approve - but this is declined.

With no memories of the outside world, the innies are kind of infantilized, and extremely vulnerable to both corporate propaganda and intimidation. Indeed, the methods by which they discipline workers are somewhere between Kafka and Orwell.

To top it all off, there's a philosophical question raised as well - if a worker so wants to get out of this job (and it looks like most don't,) does that mean effectively dying? It's not like they're taking their memories - the sum total of what made up the innie's identity - with them.

Furthermore, the work they do makes no sense - the department that our main characters work in (which is just the four of them) is "Macrodata Refinement," and seems like meaningless busywork - sorting numbers that "feel" a certain way into a couple of folders.

I've become wary over the years of "mystery box" shows that string you along with a bunch of questions that are never going to get satisfying answers, and I do have some worries that this will be one of them. Instead, I'm trying to approach this more from a Lynchian, Twin Peaks-y perspective, where the answers aren't really what I'm watching for, but the feeling it inspires and ideas it presents.