Severance: of Body and Soul

Image from Severance

Severance, whose first season concluded this spring, is the pop-culture mirror in which neoliberal society has needed to see itself for a long time. Superbly written, acted, and directed, it remains disarmingly funny throughout while probing the deepest anxieties of contemporary working life. That phrase— “working life”—in fact seems too narrow, because the show really exposes, with stark allegorical clarity, the most terrifying truths of contemporary life in general. According to its main premise, however, the great horror of the present is the ever-growing indistinguishability between working life and life as such.

It might sound odd to say that the main premise of Severance is the indistinguishability of work and life, since the show’s explicit sci-fi conceit is that a large corporation has developed and implemented a technology which “severs” employees’ working lives from their personal lives. This means that, while at work, the characters have no memories of and no feelings about their lives outside of work, and vice versa while at home. (Caveat: I won’t belabor the show’s details because I assume that if you’re reading this, you’ve watched it. If not, be prepared for major spoilers.)

But this fantastical idea reacts to, satirizes, and criticizes the very impossibility of such “severance” today. It’s a commentary nearly everyone can relate to—from low-level corporate employees, like the show’s protagonists, to upper management, lawyers, doctors, academics, government employees, gig-workers, service industry workers, whoever: we all feel that the idea of “work-life balance” is an ideologeme delivered from on high, in a voice from nowhere, mainly to insult us. Ultimately, its impossibility crashes down even upon the dystopian fantasy world of Lumon, the corporate leviathan at the center of the show’s action, when in the last episodes the severed selves of work and life, who had agreed never again to meet, fight and claw to reunite. The first season ends by leaving open the question of what the fallout from that explosive reunion will be.

Insofar as it is science fiction, this show has a strikingly anti- “sci-fi” aesthetic. The only futuristic thing about it (despite the guess by one of its most endearing “innie” characters that humankind, out there, has suffered an unimaginable apocalypse and is now trying to migrate from the land to the sea, a subtle gesture at the more heavy-handed tropes of dystopian literature Severance resists) is the technology that allows “severance” to occur. The computers which Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan use all day at work look like early PCs from the 1980s, and the neighborhoods in which their “outies” live look like any affluent suburban neighborhood today.

The revolutionary technology of severance is not digital and has nothing to do with the internet or with artificial intelligence. It’s a medical device that is surgically, bloodily implanted into the physical brain. The pains and joys of the working self take place in a body it shares with the non-working self, though they’re perceived by these separate consciousnesses, their causes in one life forgotten in the other. In the first episode, Mark’s boss, who we soon, and he much later, learn is also his next-door neighbor, says he looks hungover. We soon, and he again much later, learn that in fact he is hungover—he always is—and that his boss/neighbor knows this too. More dramatically, when Helly hangs herself at work, but survives, the bruises remain on her neck for both of her selves.

And more joyfully, we also gradually discover that the employees’ pleasures and affections bleed over between their severed selves. Mark’s working self, inexplicably to him, wants to help and protect the human resources agent (of sorts) who we learn very late in the season is really his wife, whose supposed death drove him to undergo the severance procedure in the first place and still torments his “outie.” When Irving, the most constant corporate sycophant among our four severed protagonists—up to a point—falls asleep at work, he dreams of his desk being flooded by the globby black paint with which we later find his non-working self artistically expressing his rage to the tune of Motörhead.

This continuity of the body and its affects beneath a discontinuity of consciousness defuses a major theme of science fiction from The Matrix to Inception to Westworld: the fantasy world as a utopia or dystopia of consciousness despite the body, abstracted from the body. We have gotten used to this basically Platonic trope: the body is paralyzed or enslaved, but the mind thrives or suffers in a separate, imaginary dimension, uploaded to a cloud—just as our identities as consumers are uploaded to a dispersion of online databases. While The Matrix, Inception, Westworld, and many other cultural artifacts of their type communicated the anxiety which accompanies such a digital consumer consciousness, Severance forcefully returns us to a more existentially challenging reality: the fact that our minds are, despite all our efforts, still limited by the limits and traumatized by the traumas of our bodies.  

To that point, the most disturbing moment to me in Severance, which eschews prestige TV’s usual shock-value repertoire of gore, inhuman cruelty, and sexual violence, is when Helly’s “innie” watches a video recorded by her “outie” that denies her wish to quit her job—denies her wish to, in effect, un-sever their separate selves. It’s so disturbing because it so jarringly dramatizes the separation of the consuming self and the producing self that underlies the show’s central allegory. The protagonists, after all, do not know what they actually do at work, and it’s implied that their clicks on a circa 1988 computer might correspond to atrocities in the real world, “out there.” This distancing recalls the stockbrokers who engineered the sub-prime mortgage collapse of 2008, or even the remote drone pilots serving the US military in the Middle East, all of whom have (or had) families, loved ones, hopes and fears and dreams— “out there.”  Helly’s “outie” tells her “innie,” “I’m a person—you’re not.”

I had to watch this scene twice, because at first I assumed the video denying Helly’s resignation was some fabrication by the totalitarian company, evilly tricking her into continued enslavement. But it isn’t—it’s really her, her other self, her “free” self, which is much more terrifying because it means that her consuming self is enjoying her life of consumption, enjoying it all the more because she no longer has to reckon with the moral sacrifices which sustain it. Her producing self (but producing what? We still don’t know) is a slave to her consuming self, which lives in the world her producing self labors to sustain. Many of us today, lacking the benefit of severance, design our whole lives around avoiding the guilt that accompanies the gap between these two selves, and in that we nearly always fail.

Such is the moral and existential wager of neoliberalism: If you give your whole soul to the enterprise, for the sake of your desire to live a meaningful life beyond its reach, you might be rewarded with the blessing of forgetting that such a life was ever possible. And, perhaps, with waffles.

Dr. Daniel Cunningham is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Villanova University. He specializes in political philosophy and philosophy of history.