Apple TV+ Series Severance Psychology Psychoanalysis Meaning of Work and Work Life Balance
What if you could not remember the color of your mother’s eyes? Or any other details about her? What if you could not remember your own name,
or anything about your life outside of work?
The creators of Severance, a gripping new series streaming
on Apple TV+ asks us to grapple with the impact of this experience – and in so
doing, they expose multiple fault lines in our actual work/life balance, while
simultaneously making a powerful political statement.
Interestingly, in a series that severs its players from the
rest of their lives, it evokes many, many other series and films – as if it
were offering homages to them or perhaps appropriating them while having a look
and feel that is also very much its very own.
It feels like a David Lynch film, but the eeriness in this is not
that like what David Lynch provides - images an unprocessed dream – a dream where the symbols are left without any referents
(except maybe the baby goats); instead the vision is that there is a sense that there is an
underlying order that the writers and directors want to help us understand. Furthermore there is a sense that, in so far
as chaos lies very near to what is being described, that chaos is the chaos that we
all are in contact with and trying (perhaps desperately) to keep at bay, and
the writers and directors are as afraid of it as we are, not in league with it, the way that David Lynch sometimes appears to be.
Using the Bell Labs office building designed by Eero Saarinan as the setting for Lumon Industries puts us in an interesting space/time dimension. Futuristic when it opened in 1962, the building still feels futuristic and therefore vaguely impersonal, like the sets of the film 2001 A Space Odyssey. Like Bell Labs, which was tremendously successful, breeding Nobel prizes and products like cell phones that would be tremendously successful and profitable, the venture was doomed – as we hope that Lumon industries will be, too. We strongly suspect that the attractiveness of the above ground facility hides a cancerous underground menace.
The actual office layout that the severed workers descend to
under the modern edifice feels even more blatantly anachronistically
futuristic, with its lavish use of space, outdated and slightly mod but off
colors, fluorescent lighting, 1980s computer consoles and graphics, and rat
maze hallways that create a sense of claustrophobia - a sense that we are
trapped in a space that is essentially hostile to our existence as organic
creatures – not something that is supportive to human life.
The people who inhabit this space that seems akin to the space
in the movie Office Space, people who have been severed from the rest of their
lives, including memories of their mothers and fathers and siblings and
children, live lives that are centered on their work experience. Even though they have no memory of who they
are on the outside (their outies), the innies are not children playing together
in a play space, but fully formed adults – adults who “remember” how to have a
personality, even if they don’t have the memory of how that personality was
formed.
The relationships between these “innies” is reminiscent of
our work relationships. They are
half-formed. There are work parties that
feel forced and odd and are fun, kind of.
Kind of the way my work parties feel.
People don’t expose themselves at work parties the way they exposed
themselves at birthday parties when they were two or four or six, nor in the
ways they exposed themselves at peer parties when they were 16 or 18 or
20. These are fully formed adults who
know how to protect their secrets, even though they themselves don’t have
access to them even when they want to.
The mechanism behind this is a chip that is inserted in the
brain and we watch the outies transition to innies in the morning, after they change
into their work clothes at their lockers and after they are checked to make
sure they are not taking contraband down to their work station. They close their eyes and we can see their
outie persona melt away as they return to their work environment in what seems
to their innie to have been only a moment.
Of course, when I return to work, it is as if I never left,
but that is because I have been worrying about it all night – sometimes quite
literally. What have I forgotten to
do? How can I understand this thing that
is at a tight spot in this therapy? How
can I work out how best to teach this concept?
Or deal with this administrator?
It is as if I never leave…
The work that the innies do is odd. The work of those we follow most closely, in
the “Macrodata Refinement” department, sort numbers into bins based on an
intuitive feel for those numbers. What
they are really doing is anyone’s guess.
It seems quite odd, but there are quotas and rewards for work well
done. There are also promotions – we
join Mark S. (Adam
Scott) on his first day as the leader of the four person department on the
day after his best innie friend Petey (Yul Vazquez) leaves the
work for reasons unknown. He inducts a
new innie, Helly R. (Britt
Lower) in the first episode into the organization to replace Petey and join
Dylan (Zach Cherry) and
Irving (John Turturro)
to complete the department. The
department is overseen by the menacing Harmony (Patricia
Arquette) and her henchman, Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman).
While the work they are doing is mysterious – and there may
be meaning to it that will be revealed in later seasons – their primary role,
in the first season, seems to be being severed workers. Their true job is to prove to a skeptical world
that the amnestic work world is productive and acceptable – perhaps even
useful. As an aid in this endeavor –
since it is we, the audience, who need the most convincing, we follow Mark S.
as he transforms into his outie Mark Scout and discover that he is a grieving history
professor who lost his job when he could no longer concentrate in the wake of
his wife’s death. He chose to sever his
work life in part because he couldn’t find other work, but mostly as a means of
making a third of his life – if not unbearable, at least off limits.
We empathize with Mark Scout. Not only is he grieving, his sister is
married to a complete idiot who is so narcissistically involved that he doesn’t
realize that his self-published self-help book is a complete waste of time, as
are his pompous and clueless friends.
Mark is so depleted, though, that he relies on his sister, her social
life, and alcohol to simply survive one day after another. He seems genuinely relieved that he has no
access to his work life, for it would surely complicate the rest of his life,
and he is already failing to manage the minimal complications that this life presents.
Our complacency does not last long; however. We see how shallow and lifeless the work of
the innies is and we detest Lumon, the corporation that would pit them against
each other – in this case, using the myth that the “Optics and Design” department
attacked the Macrodata Refinement department in a failed coup years ago. Irving, the most loyal of to the organization of the Macordata Refinement deparment –
the person who can cite chapter and verse from the Lumos Bible – is attracted
to Burt (Christopher
Walken) in O&D. This leads the
group to bond over fighting to connect with the other severed workers against
Harmony and Milchick and ultimately the entire weight of the Lumos Corporation.
So, this series, like Office Space and The Truman Show, becomes a story of man against corporate America. The Macrodata Refinement department begin swashbuckling like superheroes, and the chinks in the corporate armor emerge, as does the stench from the lies and moral compromises that support it. All of this is ripe for interpretation: Why would we become subservient to a corporate master? Perhaps more chillingly current, why would be become subservient to a dictatorial government? But I would like to focus on a different aspect – how is it that we relate to our work selves?
The metaphoric space allows for the depiction of two parts
of ourself – the “real” self and the work self.
Helly R. (as her work self), during her first day of work, appeals to
her outie (her real self) to free her from the dismal and abusive workplace. Her outie, through a recorded message, refuses
her request and encourages her to continue on doing the work. And don’t we do this to ourselves – we fail
to empathize with just how difficult the work is for us to do – as we drag
ourselves out of bed to return to the work – and linger in the evenings (perhaps
binge-watching Severance) to extend the time of our freedom – even if that will
make it harder to get up in the morning?
Isn’t the hope of releasing ourselves from this miserable cycle part of
what lies behind the
Great Resignation?
From the view of this metaphoric space, though, we not only
fail to empathize, we disown and despise – indeed we might even feel disdain
for – our working selves. They do stuff
that is not worth doing and they do it in a hermetically sealed environment
that is severed from our “real” lives.
Even though our “real” lives may be bleak, or shallow, or filled with
pain, they are real and this allows us to value them more highly than our work
selves. Certainly, our partners or our
children can do this – I despised my father’s work – I devalued it – and did
not want to emulate his life – one of apparent drudgery where he went off to
provide for us. He also seemed to resent
it – complaining that we constantly demanded more stuff so that he was forced
to work harder – but I think I questioned whether he was actually working for
us or whether he was more drawn to the work than to being with us. Perhaps our shared disdain was directed
towards his love of working (and my wish to avoid emulating him was a way of
acknowledging that I, too, could be drawn into that seemingly hateful but
apparently very attractive vortex).
All of this gets encapsulated in the ways that work becomes
a sort of religion for us. It is what
gives our lives meaning. We are
accomplishing something at work that helps us matter. When Helly R. finishes an assignment, the 1870s
founder of Lumos, Kier Egan (voiced by director Ben Stiller), visits Helly, in one of those cheesy 1980s video representations, as a bird who lets her know
that she is loved by him before he flies off to give good wishes to other Lumos
workers. Helly and the other three members
of the department stare at him with rapt attention. They have been visited by the founder!
This, of course, would allow us to enter the series as a
commentary on religion, which I think it is, but if we stay in the work/life
vein, we can see that it is commenting that work has taken on the role of
religion in our lives. It provides a
sense of purpose, of being part of something greater, and of contributing to
something that will live on after us – the corporate – the embodied – being that
is representative of us collectively and individually.
Of course there are problems with this formulation, but the
central problem is that we are going to die no matter what we do. Being angry at ourselves for having wasted the
better parts of our lives is a way of managing the anger that we feel about having
been given this tremendous gift of life, but with the caveat that we only get to
enjoy it for a limited and indeterminant amount of time.
Poignantly, when a Lumon employee is fired, quits, or
retires, they disappear. When they go up
that elevator for the last time, their work lives and all that life contained
(in the case of Burt, his love for Irving) disappears. As I approach my retirement(s) (one from
teaching at the University, the other from clinical practice) the question of
how to bring a career (I never wanted to have a career) to a close is a
complicated one. What will happen to the
work relationships – the relationships with other faculty and staff, with students,
and with patients? I have friendships
with fellow faculty and staff that I trust will survive. I expect that we will, ironically, largely
talk about our families. Will we continue
to care about the issues that have fueled our professional lives? How can we not? How can we continue to? Will the work of our lives die with our
retirement?
My mother has recently put all of the old family movies,
slides and photos into electronic form.
This is a tremendous gift. I can
remember – or remember for the first time – moments of intimacy with my
grandfather, who died when I was youngster but whom I have carried with me
through my entire life. I can see interactions
with and between my family members with new eyes. I have memories, but they are from my
perspective – not through the objective lens of the camera. What will be the record of my work life? My resume – or, as we call it in academia –
my curriculum vita? What kind of record
is that?
The grim view presented in this gripping series is that we
will have no relevant memories of our working lives. We will struggle to integrate our work life
with our personal life – and perhaps in coming seasons we will see whether this
is a triumphant vision or a more tragic one.
I think it should be clear by now that I believe the tragic vision is
not written into the bylaws of the corporation, but into the very joints of the
natural world. It is our task to knit together
an existence that, what? Allows us to
traverse the span our existence with some sense of style and grace – to join
with others in a revolution against something that is inevitable, but also
cruel, and to try to wring some sense of joy and genuine purpose out of a life
that is replete with the eerie specters that would pass as providing real meaning.
I fear that I am leaving those of you who haven't seen it with a bad impression of this series. It is gripping theater. The striving against the oppressive corporate forces leads to a tremendous denouement that I don't want to spoil for you - and one that is open enough for us to sit on our seats for a season and wait for it's resolution when the next season drops. In the meantime we will continue to toil, in our own disparate ways, to fight off the oppressors! Good luck to us all as we do.
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