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May. 1st, 2022 06:24 pmIn retrospect it is not a surprise that I devoured Severance with my whole heart and brain given my existing clone feelings, but I did not know to brace for that going in! What I knew about Severance: a.) corporate workplace sci-fi thriller that various people at my office have been enthusing over for the last month and b.) John Turturro and Christopher Walken have a poignant romance that I've seen in gifsets all over social media.
Severance, for the record, is not actually about clones; it's about a sinister corporation for which certain employees are required to undergo a procedure that separates off their memories of what they do at work from their memories of what they do outside of it, essentially creating a new personality whose only existence is getting off an elevator, working an eight-hour day at a desk job, getting on an elevator, and then immediately getting off the elevator again to work another eight-hour day at a desk job. This personality is called (in deliberately infantilizing terminology) the 'innie'. The 'outie,' meanwhile, lives a normal and completely disconnected life with no idea of what happens to them at work except occasional cheery little sticky notes informing them that unfortunately they got a paper cut today and here's a gift card to compensate for it.
The 'innie' lens of the show focuses on the Macrodata Refinement Team, whose job consists of staring at pages of numbers and sorting them based on mysterious criteria. (Some of the numbers are scary.) Over the course of nine episodes, the four members of the Macrodata Refinement team each undergo personal and collective journeys of radicalization around the revolutionary concept that they -- the contextless personalities who exist only inside the walls of Lumon -- are also human beings who are more than the sum of their labor and who deserve more than the lot they have been given by their creators and the various corporate brainwashing attempts by the company to constrain their lives and emotions, and are ready to take collective action to achieve it.
So you see where the clone stuff comes in ... same emotions ... like it's a logical follow-through of the concept but I didn't expect that to be the central focus of the show, and now I have a lot of feelings about Macrodata Refinement, the only 'work family' I respect. (The show also follows one of the Macrodata Refinement Team on the outside, as the weirdness of the whole Lumon situation gradually begins to break through the grief/depression fog that caused him to take a severed job in the first place -- on the principle that it might be nice to completely forget about his sorrows for eight hours a day! -- and causes him to start considering that perhaps Bad Things Might Be Up there. This part of the show is also good, and Mark's extremely believable and affectionate relationship with his completely normal sister who is trying so hard not to be judgmental about his bad choices at this time is my other favorite dynamic, but, you know, it's not clone feelings.)
Anyway, Severance is good for other reasons also -- first of all it simply is very good at being a corporate sci-fi thriller, and second it is also very good at a certain kind of like ... surrealism that is simultaneously very effectively funny and very effectively horrifying/uncomfortable? Which is a thing I occasionally crave and I think is easy to do in a way that's stylistically enjoyable but falls apart when looked at too closely (Legion was the last thing I watched that circled this territory for me) but Severance hits the nail exactly on the head. I think my favorite joke is ( spoilers )
Now there are also a LOT of Big Mysteries set up over the course of the show, many of which are not solved by the end of S1, and I do think it's entirely possible that the whole overarching complex plot web could unravel or be eventually unsatisfying in future seasons ... but either way it is probably not going to be less satisfying than the way the Star Wars extended universe has continued to idly toy with and then casually drop the big storylines about clone personhood and I'm still there, so I think I have to accept that I will also be here for the long haul as well.
Severance, for the record, is not actually about clones; it's about a sinister corporation for which certain employees are required to undergo a procedure that separates off their memories of what they do at work from their memories of what they do outside of it, essentially creating a new personality whose only existence is getting off an elevator, working an eight-hour day at a desk job, getting on an elevator, and then immediately getting off the elevator again to work another eight-hour day at a desk job. This personality is called (in deliberately infantilizing terminology) the 'innie'. The 'outie,' meanwhile, lives a normal and completely disconnected life with no idea of what happens to them at work except occasional cheery little sticky notes informing them that unfortunately they got a paper cut today and here's a gift card to compensate for it.
The 'innie' lens of the show focuses on the Macrodata Refinement Team, whose job consists of staring at pages of numbers and sorting them based on mysterious criteria. (Some of the numbers are scary.) Over the course of nine episodes, the four members of the Macrodata Refinement team each undergo personal and collective journeys of radicalization around the revolutionary concept that they -- the contextless personalities who exist only inside the walls of Lumon -- are also human beings who are more than the sum of their labor and who deserve more than the lot they have been given by their creators and the various corporate brainwashing attempts by the company to constrain their lives and emotions, and are ready to take collective action to achieve it.
So you see where the clone stuff comes in ... same emotions ... like it's a logical follow-through of the concept but I didn't expect that to be the central focus of the show, and now I have a lot of feelings about Macrodata Refinement, the only 'work family' I respect. (The show also follows one of the Macrodata Refinement Team on the outside, as the weirdness of the whole Lumon situation gradually begins to break through the grief/depression fog that caused him to take a severed job in the first place -- on the principle that it might be nice to completely forget about his sorrows for eight hours a day! -- and causes him to start considering that perhaps Bad Things Might Be Up there. This part of the show is also good, and Mark's extremely believable and affectionate relationship with his completely normal sister who is trying so hard not to be judgmental about his bad choices at this time is my other favorite dynamic, but, you know, it's not clone feelings.)
Anyway, Severance is good for other reasons also -- first of all it simply is very good at being a corporate sci-fi thriller, and second it is also very good at a certain kind of like ... surrealism that is simultaneously very effectively funny and very effectively horrifying/uncomfortable? Which is a thing I occasionally crave and I think is easy to do in a way that's stylistically enjoyable but falls apart when looked at too closely (Legion was the last thing I watched that circled this territory for me) but Severance hits the nail exactly on the head. I think my favorite joke is ( spoilers )
Now there are also a LOT of Big Mysteries set up over the course of the show, many of which are not solved by the end of S1, and I do think it's entirely possible that the whole overarching complex plot web could unravel or be eventually unsatisfying in future seasons ... but either way it is probably not going to be less satisfying than the way the Star Wars extended universe has continued to idly toy with and then casually drop the big storylines about clone personhood and I'm still there, so I think I have to accept that I will also be here for the long haul as well.
