“It’s an unnatural state for a person to have no history,” says Irving B to Helly R in the first series of Apple TV’s dystopian hit Severance. “History makes us someone. Gives us a context. Shape.”
Severance, which today aired the final episode of its expansive, jolting andat times frustratingly mysterious second series, is a very modern thriller. On its surface, it is an indictment of the sinister motives of Big Tech, a warning against giving our lives to meaningless work, and a deft portrayal of the grim ways in which corporations wield power over their workers. Irving (John Turturro) and Helly (Britt Lower) are two of four workers in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department at Lumon, where they have undergone the “severance procedure”, in which a chip is inserted into a person’s brain to divide their work life from their personal life. It ensures that when the person is either at work or at home, they have no memory of their alternate world.
Lumon’s high-ups are masters of gaslighting and control, and Severance is full of uncanny imagery and cultish rituals that make it clear this isn’t a normal company. It brilliantly satirises Silicon Valley’s culture of “perks” (perhaps ironically, since it’s made by Apple), with workers rewarded for their efforts by absurdities like the “music dance experience” or an “egg bar” buffet (“coveted as fuck,” Dylan G, as portrayed byZach Cherry, informs us). Yet while all this is powerful, Severance is more deeply philosophical. Its central idea is the self: what it is, what happens when you divide it in two – and whether it really exists.
“Having no history” is, of course, the core appeal of severing: Lumon frames the idea as an extreme version of work/life balance, in which neither context need trouble you when you are focusing on the other. You work better without worrying about what’s going on at home; you enjoy life more when you’re not worrying about work. But being contextless is also a key idea in the quest to find the authentic self. To be without history is unnatural, yes, but also undeniably seductive. Who among us hasn’t fantasised about scrubbing the slate clean, existing in a new way, being whittled to our essence and living in truth without our problems coming with us?
Sometimes it feels not only seductive but necessary. At the centre of the story is Mark S (Adam Scott), who has undergone the severance procedure to deal with the death of his wife, Gemma (though, as we later discover, “She’s alive!”, hidden in plain sight at Lumon: her plight is the core mystery of series two). As in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mark would rather forget Gemma existed than deal with the pain of her absence (at least for half the time). As an outie Mark is cynical, jaded by grief – but as an innie he is, at least initially, peppy and unquestioning. His MDR colleagues are similarly trying to escape something: we infer that Irving has a traumatic military past; Dylan never found his calling and feels worthless. Trapped as their innies on the “severed floor”, a windowless basement with a maze of identical narrow corridors and bright white walls, their existence also represents freedom from a self they no longer want to be.
Helly, though, is different: her outie is the granddaughter of Lumon’s founder Kier and the daughter of its current company chief. It appears she has severed as a publicity stunt. But her innie – who is kind, playful, charismatic – puts up more resistance than any of the others to her state of entrapment. She tries to resign – a request that has to be granted by her outie – and her outie responds by telling her she is not a person. Helly, unable to reckon with the prospect of eternal existence as a corporate drone, tries to hang herself in the lift. It’s an act of desperation, but it also sends a strong message to her outie that speaks to a self deeply conflicted: if you force me to exist, I will force you not to.
The idea of a split or conflicted self is fundamental to Western psychology. During a creepy corporate retreat to the woods, the severed employees’ manager Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman) regales them with Lumon folklore: the god-like founder Kier came here with his a twin brother, Dieter. Caught masturbating by Kier, Dieter is turned into a tree. The twins could be read as a Freudian ego and id, Dieter representing a darker part of Kier, repressed in favour of the “virtues” that Lumon now espouses.
But Severance isn’t grappling with pure Freud, nor later developments of his ideas, such as psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “false self”, a state to be deconstructed so as to inhabit the authentic one. Because, despite the aesthetic purity of the severed floor and the deletion of trauma from their memories, innies can’t be fully “authentic”. In fact, that’s what is so sinister about their creation. “Waking up on that table, I was shapeless,” Irving continues as he tries to counsel Helly. “But then I learned that I work for a company that has been actively caring for mankind since 1866 […] my point is: you’re part of a history now.”
It’s chilling that the innies are designed to be institutionalised – but that they exist only under this regime also makes them fully separate from their outies. That they are, in fact, different people is cleanly illustrated by the stark difference in Helly’s two personalities. Though they share a body, both her innie and outie are adamant that they are not the same person. When Helena, posing as Helly, sleeps with Mark S, Helly is aghast that Helena has been “stealing my fucking body”. Similarly, when Dylan’s innie is granted visits from his outie’s wife by Lumon, they kiss – and his outie accuses her of cheating on him.
It’s clear, then, that the self is not the same as the body. But what is it? In the finale, we witness Mark’s innie and outie having a heated argument via video messages as they compete for their conflicting needs. This conflict – like Helly’s – is deeply existential. Outie Mark feels he has given away a part of himself that he would like back. But innie Mark wants to continue to exist. This, of course, is where Lumon has ultimate power: without Lumon, they could not exist. “We can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which ‘our’ world will die with us, although ‘the’ world will go on without us,” wrote the psychiatrist RD Laing in The Divided Self, his 1960 study of schizophrenia. The self is the world it inhabits.In an age when we craft versions of ourselves online, the sense of being bound to companies who are refining our macrodata feels all too apposite.
The redemption arc in many modern stories is a character finding themselves; there is no such neatness here. Severance shows us that if there is a true self, it is elusive, fleeting, transformed before you can grab it, and present only in frustrating contradictions. Rather, what is tangible is circumstance, doctrine, history. Nobody is fully trapped, and nobody is fully free: the innies are held captive in the basement and pumped with Lumon ideology, but they are psychologically released from what restrains them on the outside. Outies are free in the more obvious sense – but they are trapped by narrative, by their self-perception and the perception of others (even the fact that they are severed carries stigma in the outside world).
Mark’s brother-in-law, Ricken Hale, has published a self-help book called The You You Are. It’s full of pseudo-intellectual nonsense – “bullies are nothing but ‘bull’ and ‘lies’”, he writes – but, when it finds its way into the Lumon office, it provides the innies with perspective. Designed to encourage the reader to uncover their true essence, Ricken writes: “a good person follows a leader. A great person follows himself”. Severance asks: which self, and to where?
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