severance season 1 appreciation post

Dear Outties,

[Season spoilers ahead]

Have you watched Severance yet? I'm late, per usual. But also: let's stop keeping up with everything. Maybe just be in your time.

"The hour is yours." ~Ricken, giving Eckhart Tolle a run for his self-help money.

I was afraid to watch the show once the trailer hit because I thought it would bring up every feeling that has made me run out of at least four solid, cubicle-based jobs. I had dental and everything. Good dental. $12-per-cavity-filling dental. And yet--

There's a fear-based ferret in my soul that, as soon as I find myself sitting in a comfy, multi-adjustable office chair, starts biting at my ankles. The ferret is anxious to get me to [redacted: cliched, art-school crap] instead of 'just be at a desk'. It hisses at me: You cannot be this. You are [art-school, eye-roll aspiration].

"Who are you? ...Sorry, I forgot the preamble."

For me, there's too heavy an identity complex that comes with a job. I always want to shake it off like a bad rash. That's my junk. But that's an identity issue, not a practical one. Practically speaking, everyone fucking hates work.

*

At some level in 2022, the jig is up on 9-to-5s. The shape of our mass existential crisis keeps bending and morphing into ill-fitting, container-sized concepts: Quiet Quitting, Mass Resignation, Work From Home. They're butterfly nets that can't catch the whole thing. 

The whole thing is the anxiety that is rolling around, caught in the shadow of the real clocks that are crumbling around us. Real towers of time that are falling down: our climate, political institutions, social institutions, world stability. How can a 9-to-5 possibly measure in the face of the once was eternal,  the 'how it's always been's, falling down? 

It seems the answer everyone is really trying to capture with these butterfly nets is: why do we work in the first place?

*

Severance, like a good allegory, isn't about one thing. The Macrodata Refinement Department (MDR) is in charge of cataloguing 'scary numbers'. Why? No one knows. 

"It's meaningful and important work."

I was surprised by the fact the show wasn't primarily a commentary on office culture or work-life balance (although its premise is invested in the split work-life self). I was expecting a Black Mirror meets The Office kind of show. A dark, modern workplace comedy. Something goofy, meta, Millennial. Bleak but deflated by its own cynicism before it can land any gut punch.

But a lovely surprise was (to me) the fierce optimism rooted under its existential dramedy. Mark Scout chooses to go through the severance procedure (an 'irreversible' surgery that implants a neurological chip that bifurcates a person's memory; those memories are spatially dictated, as a incredulous Helly R. watches her Outtie self explain to her severed Innie self in her consent video). 

Mark chooses to do so because he cannot cope with his grief from the loss of his wife. He seems almost willfully limited: not going to the grief counselour his sister asks about, drinking enough booze to have the shakes throughout the season (played with tragic simplicity by Adam Scott). Even if the Eagan family empire fell and Lumon de-severed every Innie--if Mark was awarded a real severance to spend the rest of his days as he wished--he'd still have to contend with his incalculable grief. 

The resolution of Severance's outer world cannot resolve the inner world of these characters. The powerful internal engine of the show isn't about taking down corporate America--it's how we strive, in the face of our deepest wounds, to become whole.

I love what Erin Qualey observed in her Vulture recap of Episode 1:

In his note, Petey wonders whether he and his other severed brethren are monsters for choosing to undergo such a process. In the end, he concludes, “We’re not monsters, Mark. Not real ones.” And he’s right. Sometimes we make poor choices based on trying to protect a vulnerable part of ourselves, but this doesn’t make us bad people.

Vulnerability. Vulnerability is why we sever ourselves--casually, stoically, quietly--to keep on getting by. And it doesn't make us bad people, but it does make us people--and that's always the problem. 

It makes me itch with ferret-bite induced rashes about leaving jobs, being more 'important' things, avoiding dental care for lack of good insurance. 

It would be so much easier to sequester the parts of ourselves we cannot run from in a green-and-white basement floor and trust they were doing important and meaningful work without paying them mind. Paying them mind. 

*

[***Finale spoiler ahead***]

So much of Lumon's ethos is about having an ethos. Goddamn I had to look up probity to keep up with the Eagan leader's list of morals (redundantly: the quality of having strong moral principles; honesty and decency). The implication from their hallowed, freak-filled halls is that there's a definitive binary to becoming a good or bad person:

Vision Verve Wit Cheer Humility Benevolence Nimbleness Probity Wiles

But becoming whole means a rejection of any label, any category. 

I think it's why, during the final sequence of the brilliant, tense-as-a-panic-room season finale, when we see our three Innies in their Outtie worlds, piecing together the key pieces of their Outtie selves that have led them to sever in the first place, I was thunderstruck by Scott's portrayal of Mark's revelation of his wife being alive. It was the sound he made as he shouted, despite himself, "She's alive!"

It was the sound of fury, love, hope, betrayal and rage at once. It was a cry from his wholeness, holding the pain of both his selves for the first time together. It was the heartbreaking sound of how the truth sets you free: not gently, but with great, undeniable force.

To me, it sounded like hope breaking through the lies we tell ourselves to get by.

*

I'll gladly wait however long Season 2 needs to take. Severance knows what it's doing. Praise Kier. 

First image of series: A green-and-blue chip

Woe, Frolic, Dread, Malice

Lumon Recycles: Workers?! What's in the lab, Milchick!

Theory: Helena (Outtie) is first seen holding white roses. "White roses symbolize purity, youthfulness, and innocence," thanks, Google. All I know is this is a mirror image of the red rose seen in the bathroom mirror during the Ep 9 finale. She's gone from 'innocent' to aware of her responsibilities in this Luluhell.

Fun catch: Helena's car is red and a vintage ($$$) model:

Red fish in a tank with his blue buddy. MDR in a metaphor.

Time to go to the red table.

Loving sandwiches was red.

a thrown boomerang you've been waiting to come back for years

Dear Self,

I'm proud that you hosted a show tonight, despite not preparing for it. Despite having mild diarrhea beforehand. Despite being shaky on stage and stuttering like you do when you're underfed, underprepared, and haven't been up for a while.

I'm disappointed you've never, not fully ever, committed to doing this. Is it a hobby? A pastime? A pursuit? Why does it need to be in any shape the boys make it into--why does it need to be the only thing at all?

You're worried you're using a pursuit of comedy as a replacement for a pursuit of family. Family--as your subconscious understands it--means: order, security, meaning, purpose, love, roots, groundedness, a big vat of human cement that will fill in that amorphous, ever-shifting hole in your soul-pocket. 

You imagine coming home to a home. You imagine walking into an abode* (*housing that involves at least two bedrooms; a real bath with a real tub; windows) that has a fellow human, sadly male (despite hoping that's not the only option for your predilections; maybe there's still hope, but it's late), who is kind and warm and loving.

Who is happy to see you. Who has made a fellow tiny human with you, maybe two, and this idea makes you tear up because wouldn't it be nice to redo everything? To stitch together what you had and also what you didn't have--a family--with new thread, spun out of the good chances you took, the brave commitments you made, to life and love and the pursuit of all that?

'Family'; making a family sits on top of your heart like an elephant. Like punishment and also yearning, perpetual yearning, to get out from under it and on top of it and finally have some success with this goddamn heart complex. 

You stare at babies and never quite think I want one, but that I am one. You miss being a child like you miss a dead friend.

You stopped at the cafe tonight and interrogated the uncle holding his seven-week-new niece. You thought, "Look at how much wonder is in her eyes! Look at how her only job here is noticing!" You felt that feeling in your chest--the one that's like a thrown boomerang you've been waiting to come back for years--and stood there too long, almost waiting for the uncle to go, "Here, yes--take her. She's yours."

*

More often now, you're onstage aware of this lack. When you started, you got up with the firm belief that this was doing something. You were chasing some sort of importance, stature, clout, affirmation to make up for all your lost time. For all the regretted friendships and youthships you broke. But now, you get up and you know there's no punchline in the world that can make up for missing out on anything.

You handled the drunk in the corner okay. You encouraged him a little too much, when the bartender was trying to shut him down. He kept making the show about him. He moaned, he interjected. He spoke like it was a two-way conversation. The audience was annoyed by him, but you know there are worse sorts. He was harmless, you felt. You were grateful you weren't the only one talking.

All you know is that your job is to turn him into a joke. So you did, because that's your job. But you only did it because you had to and not because you wanted to. When you tried to soft shoe some material before bringing up the headliner, he kept negating your premise and repeating: you're beautiful!

There's nothing beautiful about needing things so much, you felt. 

There's a certain--

No, that's enough for now. 

*

It's good to write to you from over here--the weather is placid and fair. Time sits around like a dog after a run, panting and smiling from exercise, its boundless joy making its tongue hang heavy, happy to go nowhere, slobbering and sunbaked. 

You teared up when I mentioned missing your childhood. You're not sure of it but you may be right: the love you feel you're missing out on could be mended by fixing the broken bridge between your now and your past. Like your heart needs a path to walk back into itself again.

Or maybe it's not having a child and all that shit by now. Maybe the primordial fairy tales are right.

If you can reset the dominoes, maybe it doesn't matter if you do comedy or not. Just like, in a real way, it wouldn't matter if you were a doctor, a librarian, a therapist, a teacher, a lawyer, a celebrity, an aeronaut. How loneliness--incompleteness--hangs around with the disregard of vape smoke. Even when you can hang 'wife' and 'mother' on the hook of your name.

Also remember: diarrhea comes and goes. 

All my love, 

The Soup

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