(no subject)

[skygiants]

In 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 the fact that innie Mark's radical awakening is set off by the terrible cliche-laden self-published self-help book written by his brother-in-law that outie Mark refuses to even read because he knows it will be cringe, and indeed every sentence we hear out loud is devastatingly cringe and yet still revolutionary for innie Mark who has literally never read a book besides the employee handbook!!! Simultaneously the funniest AND most horrifying AND weirdly most poignant way for this to happen, incredible work by the writing team.)

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.

Comments

[sovay]

I think my favorite joke is the fact that innie Mark's radical awakening is set off by the terrible cliche-laden self-published self-help book written by his brother-in-law that outie Mark refuses to even read because he knows it will be cringe, and indeed every sentence we hear out loud is devastatingly cringe and yet still revolutionary for innie Mark who has literally never read a book besides the employee handbook!!!

No, that's wonderful.

(I had not heard of this show! I do not know if I will watch it, having just maxed out my minimal television tolerance with the first season of Slow Horses, but it does sound good.)

[edit] I can't remember: did you watch Homecoming (2018)? I only ever saw the first season, which was a self-contained miniseries, but it also did weird sfnal dystopian-corporate personhood well, although in a slightly different key from what Severance sounds like.

[osprey_archer]

Agreed, the cliche-ridden self-help-book awakening sounds incredible. It's not a cliche to someone who's never heard it before!

[skygiants]

"BULLIES are nothing but BULL and LIES." Mark's mind absolutely blown!

[skygiants]

(I think you would like it if you ever do get around to watching it! And I'd be very interested in your thoughts if you do, but I assume Slow Horses was also an extremely good way to spend your television budget although I know very little about it.)

I did not watch Homecoming nor have I heard of that either! What was the premise?

[sovay]

(I think you would like it if you ever do get around to watching it! And I'd be very interested in your thoughts if you do, but I assume Slow Horses was also an extremely good way to spend your television budget although I know very little about it.)

Thank you! I do not object to the recommendation or the interest; I just seem to watch about one or two pieces of television a year and usually miniseries rather than open-ended shows. I am not sure why television is so much harder for me than movies, but it really is.

(I may or may not combobulate enough to write properly about Slow Horses, but it is a non-spoof about disaster spies, wickedly funny with appropriate stakes and a cleverly visible descent from le Carré and Len Deighton. I watched it week by week as it aired with my mother. It was one of the few things I was able to do last month.)

I did not watch Homecoming nor have I heard of that either! What was the premise?

Please accept that the premise has been slightly overtaken by history; it happens to the best science fiction; the show was filmed in 2018 and half set in 2022 and in any case appears to take place in a mild AU with deliberately mid-century aesthetics such as caused me to exclaim to spatch in the opening scenes, "What is this, desaturated Douglas Sirk?" On one side of the central mystery of the plot, the protagonist is a counselor employed at a couple of sub-contracted removes to work with veterans of multiple tours of duty in America's forever wars. On the other, she waitresses at a crab shack and lives with her mother. Her co-protagonists are her last patient and, four years later, an investigator at the Department of Defense reopening a long-shelved complaint that said patient may have been mistreated at the residential facility. I found it extraordinarily good at a kind of low-grade skin-crawling creepiness which nonetheless manages to avoid all clichés of evil shrinks—while leaning gleefully into all clichés about evil corporations, including the banality of the tech bro—and runs in tandem with a really goofy sense of humor played bone-dry straight. One of the most important lines in the entire ten episodes is delivered by a man who has just wiped out into a rack of bicycles like Harold Lloyd. (He also tries, with exquisite unsuccess, to take a seat on one of those overstuffed artificial leather chairs in modern offices that should be classified as hostile architecture. He is my favorite character. I figured it was obvious.) It is not impossible to discern from early on where the general drift of the sfnal creepiness is going, but the narrative uses its multiple strands for more than just dazzle camouflage: there's a lovely stretch in the mid-season where the investigator looks to the protagonist like the government hunting her down and she looks to him like the linchpin of a cover-up and each of them is in their own separate conspiracy thriller and the audience can see it's more complicated and also kind of can't disagree. It was adapted from a podcast that I have never listened to and therefore cannot rate any fidelity to, but I was impressed by the show and mildly puzzled it got no look-in at the Hugos, even if it would inevitably have lost to The Good Place like everything else. Starring Julia Roberts, Stephan James, and Shea Whigham, with memorable support from Bobby Cannavale, Sissy Spacek, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. There is also a pelican. And in-jokes in the cinematography. I also agree with moon_custafer who got me into the show in 2020 that two out of three of its protagonists can and perhaps should be read as autistic, in which case it is a show which places autistic people caring at its front and center. There's a lot of pattern recognition in it and it isn't cold. Avoid, however, if you don't like dolly zooms.

[edit] I realize I may have described the show without answering your question, rot13 on if indifferent to conceptual spoilers: gur fsany perrcvarff erfgf ba gur rkvfgrapr bs n qeht gung pna or hfrq gb renfr be fhccerff zrzbevrf, zrnavat gung gur fubj orpbzrf va znal jnlf n zrqvgngvba ba ubj zhpu bs jub jr ner vf jung jr erzrzore naq hayvxr fbzr inevngvbaf V unir frra ba guvf gurzr, vg vf pnershy abg gb gerng zrzbevrf nf qvfpergr svyrf gung pna or qryrgrq be erfgberq jvgubhg rssrpg ba gur birenyy crefba; vg cynlf snve jvgu vgf zhygvinyrag zrgncube, juvpu qenjf ng qvssrerag gvzrf ba genhzn be qrzragvn be qvffbpvngvba, urapr orvat erzvaqrq bs vg va guvf pbagrkg, rira jvgubhg gur trareny ivor bs funqbjl pbecbengvbaf sbe juvpu vg vf yvgrenyyl vzcbffvoyr gb erzrzore gur jbex lbh qvq. Cneg bs gur ernfba V qvqa'g jngpu gur frpbaq frnfba bs Ubzrpbzvat vf gung V urneq vg jnf zber sbphfrq ba gur vaare jbexvatf bs gur pbecbengvba naq bar bs gur guvatf V unq yvxrq nobhg gur svefg frnfba jnf ubj zhpu vg ernyyl qvqa'g pner nobhg gur xvaq bs crbcyr gung qrirybc zrzbel-fhccerffvat qehtf naq trg gur tbireazrag gb fhofvqvmr gurve sevatr fpvrapr ubeebe cebbs bs pbaprcg—gur Fnpxyref tb ZXHygen—ohg Frirenapr va fbzr jnlf fbhaqf yvxr gur irefvba bs gung fgbel gung V jbhyq jnag. V jbhyq or phevbhf gb xabj vs gurl ernyyl qb cynl jryy gbtrgure.

[china_shop]

It's so good and soooo creepy! (I also love the horrifying "break room". Youch!)

[skygiants]

(I can't believe how long it took me to get the awful pun embedded in 'break room', much as it took me far too long to get the horrible pun in 'severance' itself ...)

[maplemood]

b.) John Turturro and Christopher Walken have a poignant romance that I've seen in gifsets all over social media.

Somehow I wasn't aware of this AT ALL and now I'm 100% more interested in the show--which looked pretty good to begin with.

[skygiants]

They fall in love over corporate propaganda art because it's the only art they have access to! It's deeply sad and weird and sweet!

[alias_sqbr]

Oh this sounds fascinating thank you!

[skygiants]

Hope you enjoy it if you watch it, I had an extremely good time!

[alias_sqbr]

We've started and it's great, thanks for the rec!

[genarti]

As you know, I had not heard of this show at all until you mentioned that you were halfway through watching it! And I'm fascinated, because I don't think I've seen a single one of those gifsets you've seen all over social media? But anyway, now I really want to watch this based on the self-help book joke and your review overall, but I also still can't tell if I would enjoy it or not!

[sovay]

And I'm fascinated, because I don't think I've seen a single one of those gifsets you've seen all over social media?

Me, neither. I feel let down.

[skygiants]

Whether or not you ever watch the show I hope you very much enjoy this series of tender images of Christopher Walken and John Turturro falling in love.

[sovay]

this series of tender images of Christopher Walken and John Turturro falling in love.

I JUST WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY.

[skygiants]

I'm excited that we're going to find out! <3333

[asakiyume]

Ooh, wow--this sounds like it could very much be my cup of tea; thank you for the recommendation. (I say this without having clicked yet on spoilers... but I'm sore tempted.)

[skygiants]

I hope you enjoy it if you watch it! (The spoiler is not at all a series-destroying spoiler but it is a plot development that it delighted me to discover organically as it happened.)

[asakiyume]

We saw the first episode tonight and really liked it! Excited to have a good SF show to watch.

(And yeah, I checked out the spoiler but (a) have already forgotten it but do recall that (b) I realized right away that it was not a plot-crucial reveal)

[superborb]

I SO want to watch this (while I still have apple tv even!) but ending with so many mysteries unsolved / cliffhanger has been discouraging me...

[skygiants]

For the record, the last episode is definitely a cliffhanger ending but in a way that I did find satisfying in a, like -- several big drastic changes to the status quo kind of way, rather than hanging on 'will the status quo change or won't it'? But of course the kind of cliffhanger that's like 'what will happen now the status quo has changed' may well be the worst kind for you!

[sophia_sol]

This sounds really excellent, and I enjoyed reading your thoughts about it! And I'm delighted by the terrible self-published self-help book being genuinely useful to a person whose life is constrained enough that he doesn't realize how cliche it is.

[skygiants]

It's really in a way very sweet! To every book its reader!!