Some Pointedly Suspicious Moments in Severance's "Goodbye, Ms. Selvig."

 Interesting that Seth Milchick is known by his (presumably) real name both within and outside of the Lumon headquarters. There's something special about Harmony Cobel/Selvig.

The second season's second episode fills in a few gaps regarding how things arrived at the end of the season premiere. Irving and Dylan were both fired, initially, and we have a very painful scene in which Dylan's outie must feign a lifelong fascination with doors to get work at a... a door factory, I guess, only for his former status as a severed worker to get him rejected. (He also gets a call from his wife and they discuss baby wipes, so it's clear that he has more than one kid, and that he probably cannot afford to be unemployed at the moment).

Naturally, Helly R, whom, as we discovered at the end of last season, is actually Helena Eagan and a scion of the cult-like clan that runs the Lumon Corporation, is under no such threat of termination, but she's forced to run damage control, while her father has just two words for her: "fetid moppet."

Which, you know, gotta hand it to the Eagans for their creative word choice, though I think this is born less from intellectual creativity and more from a self-imposed social isolation that allows bizarre linguistic patterns to become reinforced (along with the pseudo-religious mythos the company is built upon - one wonders if the original inspiration for the severance procedure was to get a whole lot of people who would not know any better than to take Kier Eagan's words as scripture.)

The episode concludes with Mark Scout (as in, the outie) confronting Ms. "Selvig," who refuses to answer his questions but does seem to confirm something is up when he brings up Gemma and she nearly runs him over, screaming. Following his innie's outburst at the reading of Rickon's book, Mark and Rickon both conclude that the "she's alive" scream had to be about Rickon and Devon's baby, who had been briefly abducted by Harmony. It's Mark's sister who retains a degree of skepticism for this simpler, easier explanation - much to Mark's chagrin. After all, Mark had to identify his wife's body, and also inform her parents and students. Mark went to the length of severing his memory to spend eight hours a day escaping his grief, and is hostile to the idea that he actually meant his wife was, somehow, still alive.

Given the final shot of the premiere, it might be that Macrodata Refinement is not actually just busywork, but could have something to do with Gemma/Ms. Casey.

But let's sit with some of the questions this episode raises:

Irving takes his firing and re-hiring fairly easily compared to Dylan's experience, (Mark's exemption from this firing must have something to do with his wife, right?) but he does find the address for Burt, and attempts to call him (on a pay phone! To be fair, everyone drives boxy cars from the 1980s, so maybe we shouldn't read much into that and put it down to style). While Burt doesn't pick up, it turns out it's because he's searching Irving out. Now, last time they were near each other, Innie-Irving was slamming his fists against Outie-Burt's door, and so Burt might have reason to want to see what is going on with this guy, but this is firmly a "stick a pin in this" territory.

Mark is convinced by Milchick not to quit, offering a raise and promises of some greater oversight (Selvig/Cobel is a perfect scapegoat for Lumon - and they offer her a "promotion" that sounds very much like she's being "kicked upstairs" while Milchick retains her old job.)

Now, I don't know if I misinterpreted things from the previous episode, but there seem to either be missing days that Mark comes into work and then departs, or perhaps he spent more time with the "other team" than I had understood from the season premiere.

However, regardless of what I got wrong, one thing I sure didn't miss was that Mark gets to work one day at 9:03 or something, and leaves at 9:15. That's either a very long day or a very short one - the security guard even says, questioningly, "Mr. Scout?" which Mark clearly interprets as a parting salutation.

Now... maybe I just need to watch that first episode again, but is there a moment where he spends only ten minutes or so down in the severed wing? And when Mlichick told Mark S. that it had been five months... that wasn't true, was it? The whole "you guys are heroes on the outside" was clearly BS from the start, but Mark goes back to work after just a single weekend.

One thing yet to be answered is whether the Helly R we see come down the elevator is truly Helly or if it's Helena. I don't think this episode gives us a solid answer, but especially after watching the scene in which she talks about what they owe the Outies, she certainly seems quite adamant about not being the same person. Granted, this is a Helly who tried to time things so that she would hang herself right as she swapped into the Helena Eagan persona - so that animosity isn't a crazy thing for her to express. Still, it doesn't contradict the theory that Helena is a sleeper agent (that being said, I really like Helly, so if this is a twist that's coming down the pike, I hope it's one that is revealed sooner rather than later).

Truly, one of the existentially horrifying parts of Severance is the notion that simply quitting means dooming one's Innie to non-existence - a threat that Milchick uses to convince Mark to come back to work when he's considering quitting. I'm inclined to believe that these people are, on some fundamental level, singular entities, but there's this chance of losing something you don't even realize you were missing.

As we saw last season, reintegration is not exactly a safe and tested procedure, so I don't even really know what the endgame of this series could really look like. Indeed, for our central protagonist, there's even kind of two separate goals for them to work toward - Outie Mark needs to learn the truth about his wife, and if it's possible, to rescue her. But Innie Mark needs to be allowed his own agency and identity.

What is on full display in this episode, though, is the immense weight that a corporation like Lumon can exert to pressure people into doing what they want it to do. In fact, this is one point that "Selvig" makes to Mark in their episode-ending confrontation: all it took was Milchick to show up with a pineapple and an apology to get him to come back to work, despite everything.

The corporate world has done an amazing job drilling into our minds, making its way of being seem the most reasonable, the most sensible. And it's so good at pivoting, reintegrating criticism of itself into another vector for profit. I mean, I've been using Apple computers since I was three years old, but I wasn't happy when they cancelled Jon Stewart's show for being critical of them. The cult of Steve Jobs may not be precisely the same as the cult of Kier Eagan, but I also think that even if such connections were made a bit more specific, the honchos at Apple would probably just chuckle along with the audience and say "hey, that's some good satire. Just another example of quality programming on our platform!"

Just as one little post-script kind of note: I find it interesting that the outside world in Severance is always depicted as such a bleakly depressing environment. Given a mention of Grand Rapids by the Bob Balaban character in this episode, I assume it's meant to be set in Michigan. I've never been there (I have some family that lives there) so no offense to all you Michiganders, but while the outside world doesn't seem like, run-down, dangerous, or suffering from poverty, it's feels like the entire world outside of Lumon has half the lights out, like Mark's house, as if the entire world is in a depressive grief. We only ever seem to see it in winter, with snow on the ground and grey skies. As someone who grew up in New England and the moved to Southern California, there's a kind of deep bleakness that I associate with that kind of low-light, chilly environment. Paradoxically, while it's a dystopian place, the Severed Floor is nonetheless an exciting and whimsical fantasy world. Is that simply what makes the show fun to watch? Or is there some deeper thing there? Maybe even something insidious?

Severence Returns

 It's been a long freaking time, but Severence's second season has finally premiered.

Back down in the Severed Wing of the Lumon Corporation's headquarters, we are reunited with Adam Scott's Mark S., in a premiere that focuses entirely on the "Innies." (Maybe.) It has been a while, so to refresh: the Lumon corporation has developed a procedure in which a person can have their memories "severed," essentially partitioning themselves into two people - the "Outie," who has all the memories from their life before this procedure, and who will remember arriving at their office building, getting on the elevator to go down to work, and then will remember coming up the elevator and leaving, the 8-hour workday passing by in an unremembered flash, and then the "Innie," whose first memory is waking up on a conference table in a windowless, labyrinthine, basement office complex, and who experiences only the arrival at work, the work day, and then a departure that immediately transitions back into the arrival for the next day.

Let's do a spoiler cut:

Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine, All Along the Way

 I saw my first David Lynch movie only when I was 19, my sophomore year in college. It was Mulholland Drive, and to be frank, I didn't like it.

But it lingered with me. And later, I would go on to watch Blue Velvet - which I liked a lot more - and then eventually Twin Peaks (including Fire Walk With Me and the Return when it came out,) which is probably my favorite of his projects.

Regardless of my feelings about one or another of his works, David Lynch was an influence on me before I had even seen anything by him. The Reaganite era that Blue Velvet vivisects and exposes as fradulent was the era I was born into. Twin Peaks, which brought surreal strangeness to the sacrosanct myth of "small town America" influenced a lot of other works in the 1990s and beyond that all then influenced me, bringing the otherworldly out of the utterly mundane.

If you have read any of my Dispatches From Otherworld blog, there are elements that were not necessarily intentionally "Lynchian," but I can certainly feel a subconscious draw to that aesthetic (in particular, I think of "the coffee" that allows people to see the faceless men - a substance that is probably not too far removed from Lynch's Garmonbozia, seen in Fire Walk With Me, which is a physical rendering of pain and suffering that looks like creamed corn).

Lynch's fascination with the mid-century (I guess pretty soon we'll need to specify that we're talking about the mid-20th-century) aesthetics is something that I think I kind of inherited. He was two years older than my dad, putting him in essentially the equivalent generation - the oldest of the baby boomers. I never experienced the 1950s or 1960s firsthand, but received it filtered through the nostalgia of the Reagan era and the skepticism and deconstruction that followed in the 90s, with Lynch perhaps as the vanguard of this response.

The artists I tend to really admire are the ones with a deep humanism. Lynch made scary movies - truly terrifying characters like Frank Booth or BOB. But the service that these villains played was always to allow for us to connect with the human beings around them. Twin Peaks' whole reason to exist was that Lynch felt TV shows were far too quick to dismiss victims of murder as mere plot devices. The show wasn't supposed to ever answer the question of who had killed Laura Palmer. It was meant to focus on Laura, to appreciate the life she had - both the beauty and the shadows in it.

I'm hesitant to speak on any artist's personal conduct, given that many artists I've admired have been revealed as quite monstrous. As far as I know, Lynch appears to have been a gentleman, though I think it's probably wisest to leave such judgments out of this remembrance. I certainly never met the guy, and couldn't tell you what he was like as a person beyond the snippets of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, which never reveal everything about someone.

And hell, that's kind of the point: we never fully get to know everything about Laura Palmer either.

I don't think I encountered this when he first did it on the gone-but-not-forgotten Indie 101.3 (a station that closed shop shortly after I moved to LA) but during the height of the pandemic, Lynch did daily weather reports - a little bit of normalcy and ritual that helped us get through those difficult times. These I'd hear on KCRW, LA's main NPR station. The reports were usually pretty simple, probably read off of some website or something, usually with some thoughts and ideas, typically in which he said "today I'm thinking about..." and then name a song, which the station would play after his report. Given that this is Southern California, the weather is usually pretty good - and he'd describe this as expecting "blue skies and golden sunshine, all along the way."

I'm going to miss him.

Poker Face

 While I fight anxiety about my city burning to the ground, I decided to pick up with a show I actually started while on the flight back from Boston (the fires in LA started while I was in the air).

Poker Face is created by Rian Johnson and stars Natasha Lyonne. It's a bit of an old-school murder mystery show in the tradition of Columbo. Unlike your typical mystery show, there's never a doubt to who committed the crime, because we start each episode with a lengthy cold-open from the killer's (or killers') perspective - only for each episode to reveal that Lyonne's character, Charlie, was actually there all along.

Then, each episode follows her as she finds the mistakes in the killer's plan and uncovers the truth.

One of the charms of the show, though, is that she's not a cop or even really a detective. Instead, she used to be a gambler who developed (or perhaps just possessed) an infallible talent for detecting when someone was lying. This is her main skill - she can always call bullshit when someone lies to her, and from there, she's able to piece together the crimes.

But she's also in trouble - I won't spoil the first episode, but its conclusion forces Charlie to head out on the road and stay on the run. This forces her into various odd scenarios, from assisting at a Texas barbecue to working the merch table for a band in the midwest.

The show plays perfectly to Lyonne's strengths, giving us a very likable detective who is also kind of a giant train-wreck of a human being. The show takes its time to humanize the victims - even if the cold opens might present the victims in less than flattering light, the subsequent rewind shows us why we should care that a person like this has been killed. There's a real ethos to this that sets it apart from most murder mysteries I tend to see, which often either make the victim out to be utterly unlikable (as in a lot of British small-town murder mysteries and Agatha Christie adaptations) or make them nothing but plot devices (as often happens in American police procedurals).

Charlie's predicament means she has to make human connections where she can, and in most of the episodes I've seen (the first four) she forges a bond with the victims.

Rian Johnson, of course, is a genre connoisseur, always eager to play with genre conventions and deconstruct or reconstruct them (his first feature, which I saw in college when it came out, was Brick, which was a pitch-perfect neo-noir that just so happened to be about high-school students). While Knives Out and Glass Onion have been his foray into Christie-style mysteries, as I mentioned before, Lyonne's Charlie is a detective more in the tradition of Peter Falk's.

Anyway, the guy is a meticulous storyteller, and Poker face blends fun mysteries with really solid humor (a scene in which a veterinarian shifts from professional mode to asking Charlie "what the fuck are you doing?" elicited probably the biggest laugh from me, if for nothing other than the flawless line reading.)

While the show is stuck on Peacock - a streaming service that my roommate happens to have thanks I think primarily to the fact that NBC's catalogue of sitcoms is still pretty top-shelf - I would recommend people find the opportunity to watch this one.

Fire and Fear in 2025

 This year is not starting off well.

Just as a caveat, this post is probably going to be less about art and storytelling than my anxieties for the future.

Last night, I flew back from my childhood home in Boston. I had been looking forward to the warm Southern California winter, where I could go out in a sweatshirt and rarely needed more than that, compared to the bitter cold of sub-freezing temperatures.

Well, the cold doesn't seem so bad now.

While I was in the air, several enormous wildfires ignited around Los Angeles. Now, the part of the city I live in is pretty deep inside the urban sprawl, which tends not to be affected by these things. I don't know if that's just because the denser parts of the city are less likely to burn (there's certainly less grass and fewer trees) or if there's a kind of Dawinian element - the places where the city has been able to grow densest are the ones that don't tend to get wildfires.

Anyway, right now I'm most frightened for my uncle in Pasadena - he's not far from Caltech, and apparently just got an evacuation warning. He's very close to both the university and the Huntington Gardens - the Huntington is one of Southern California's great places of beauty, both as a botanical garden and a library that holds countless rare books.

As far as I know, at least before I went to bed last night, no one had actually been killed. I'm dearly hoping that this statistic remains true. But this does feel really bad. The Santa Ana winds, which blow in from the dry north, have been fueling these fires. Normally we don't have giant wildfires at this time of year, in the dead of winter.

Ever since the election, I'd been dreading this year, knowing that we're at serious risk of seeing our democracy and freedom curtailed by people who have shown disdain for these central principles. And then, we had terrorist attacks on New Year's, and now these fires.

I am certainly not suggesting these things are directly related, but it is just a compounding sense that things could get really bad. Remember in 2020 when the massive wildfire in Australia seemed like it was going to be the disaster of the year, and then we were hit with a (hopefully) once-in-a-century pandemic?

I usually have a friend pick me up from the airport - most often my roommate - but had to hire a ride last night. We actually talked mostly about screenwriting - how I had come out to Los Angeles originally to get into the film industry. He was a more recent transplant, talking about networking and such (I think he must have been a lot younger than me). Personally, I've sort of moved past the idea of really working in film - I love movies, and still see my vocation as that of a storyteller.

But whether it's the rightward shift of politics or the industry moving to other places to make movies, I feel worried about my adopted hometown - one that is only sort of adopted because this is where my parents grew up, and in many ways has always felt like just as much my hometown as Boston.

I genuinely love Los Angeles. Since moving here, no matter what struggles I've had, I can't imagine living somewhere else. I think one of my greatest fears, to be honest, is being forced at some point to move elsewhere.

I'd love to think that we're just getting all the crises out of the way early in the year, but I don't think it works that way.

The damage of these fires is going to be massive when the final toll is counted. I'm hoping it's just property rather than lives.