"Severance" is scintillatingly melancholic
The "What if" and "Where do we go from here?" type shows to crop up on streaming giants in the past few months beg to be seen and talked about. Let's start with this goodie on Apple TV+.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Severance.
Severance on Apple TV+
What if you could compartmentalize your life in such a way that you literally “shut off” that part of your brain that thinks and feels anything work-related until your actual work 9-5 hours and similarly are unable to think about your personal life at all during work hours? That is the fundamental question at the heart of the newish Apple TV+ show, “Severance” directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle.
The premise may sound efficient and tidy, but of course, those who opt into this work experience, are also opting in for an irreversible brain operation which severs the part of the brain that connects their “innie” (work self) with their “outtie” (outside work self). To boot, the draw of the concept of severance, is that you can choose to spirit away from life’s traumatic moments like the death of a loved one, childbirth, etc.
For main character, Mark (Adam Scott from Parks & Recreation) who is trying to forcefully forget his now-deceased wife and avoid the pain of the aftermath of her tragic death, it’s a means to an end. Mark has suffered long enough and his daily plodding along provides no refuge from his pain, he is unable to “move on” so he decides to leave his more prestigious work in academia and join the ranks of the Lumen company as a lemming, pretty much, in exchange for receiving this severing operation and giving up memories of his former spouse Gemma, during the 9-5 hours.
Over two thousand years ago, the great stoic Greek philosopher, Epictetus, wrote about love and accepting its fleeting assistance and temporality. I’m struck by how prescient his words are in our current society where people avoid pain at all costs and live in fear and shame of having melancholic moments, which in any way counter the toxic positivity all around us.
From The Marginalian, Epictetus asserts:
At the times when you are delighted with a thing, place before yourself the contrary appearances. What harm is it while you are kissing your child to say with a lisping voice, “To-morrow you will die”; and to a friend also, “To-morrow you will go away or I shall, and never shall we see one another again”?
Thus the paradoxical nature of love - that it can be so joyful and exuberant and fleeting and gutting. We don’t have enough armor in the world to shield us from pain and to love means to lose and have to let go, but who among us wants to pay that cost? Who wouldn’t take a route that severed that memory or connection to something that is no longer?
At the crux of “Severance” is a longing for what was or is but may as well be was, for Mark and his cube mates, Dylan (Zach Cherry), Irving (John Turturro) and Helly (Britt Lower), for each character and notably Helly and Dylan struggle with reconciling their lack of consciousness when it comes to their “outtie” lives with their pointless data work and lack of connected self to anything outside of the Lumen walls.
By day, they look for ‘scary numbers’ on retro IBM computers. They have no knowledge of what the company does, what their work is for - only that the company they work for was founded by the Eagan family and that patriarch, Kier Eagan, was really drinking some strong cultish kool-aid which Patricia Arquette’s character, Harmony Cobel, still pledges allegiance to in weird, seemingly brainwashed, oddly robotic and sadistic ways.
Perhaps the show’s most tragic love story is that of Irving and Burt, played by a wonderful Christopher Walken, in a truly understated way. On the surface, Irving’s “innie” self presents as a loyal Lumon employee, never questioning authority and never “fraternizing” with any other LuluLemonites (sorry, couldn’t resist) because that’s the Eagan way. That is, until he meets Burt from the Optics & Design department and they bond over art and a painting that moves them both deeply.
It’s the best meet cute on TV I’ve witnessed in a while, mostly because Walken and Turturro are so damn good at their craft. You feel instantly Irving’s many years of repression and the glimmer of hope in his eyes when he meets someone he feels seen with and who gets him. From there on out, the drive he has to spend more time with Burt is inevitable. Similarly, you feel Burt’s loyalty and love for Irving in small moments, such as his taking Irving’s hand to hold it in the cataloging section, just a small simple gesture.
The season finale leaves us wanting to sever our emotional anguish at how many cliffhangers we have left but it also bodes well for a Season 2. It delivers on the the answer that the slow march of the season has arrived at - The ‘What if you reconciled these two halves of your existence and for a moment they come together?”
The 8 episodes that comprise the 1st season take a while to gain their momentum but I’d argue that this calculated move is to make us deeply feel the pain (i.e. slow pacing; murky, shadowy scenes; backdrop of snowy, bleak landscapes) that the shows’ main characters, and especially Mark are living with.
One of my favorite movies from high school was Four Weddings and a Funeral. The funeral scene in which John Hannah’s character buries his partner and recites the poem by way of eulogy, left me speechless because it was one the most beautiful poems I’ve ever heard, incidentally called, Funeral Blues. It’s a famous one by W.H Auden and, thru its visual medium, “Severance” by way of Mark’s grief over his wife very much achieves the effect of this poem. Similarly, Irving’s awareness of Burt’s existence in his “outtie” form, beckons this grief:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Films or shows to compare Severance to aka if you like Severance, watch these:
One can’t help but think of Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind with the similar theme of pain and heartbreak avoidance in which former couple Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet both undergo an operation to extract any memory of their previous love and life together.
What if you had another “you” that lived in another world and they were better, smarter, or just different in ways that were diametrically opposed to you? Counterpoint on Starz with JK Simmons asks this very question and plus it’s a spy thriller show. So good.