Fictional History, Infantilization, and Nationalism in "Severance"
I know the show came out forever ago, but it's my newsletter
My boyfriend and I have been rewatching the show Severance. On re-watch, I was struck by two subtle elements of the show, paired motifs I hadn’t noticed before and yet had certainly contributed to its eerie power. The first of these elements was infantilization. The severed characters are childlike and live in a childlike setting. The second half was archaism. The cultural life of these characters is a pastiche of the past, an invented history. The combination of simulated history and infantilized present make the characters pliable and exploitable.
Spoilers ahead, obviously, but here’s a refresher on the general idea of the show. It’s about a powerful corporation whose workers elect to undergo a surgical procedure known as “severance.” Through this procedure, workers’ memories of work and home are split. When they leave the office, they forget their supposedly sensitive, confidential work. The show’s makers pursue the premise with mind-bending rigor, carrying its foundational “what-if” to the breaking point. The moment workers enter their oppressive, labyrinthine office, they forget all autobiographical information and must forge a fresh identity. They have never met a person who is not a coworker; they must be told their own name by a supervisor. This means that these beings, referred to colloquially as “innies,” effectively never leave work. The second they walk in at 9 am, their minds are wiped of anything they did in the outside world. As one innie explains to a disoriented new coworker, to quit would amount to suicide—you’d be killing off the work version of your consciousness. Even if the innie does elect to quit, it’s not that simple. The innie must send along a request for resignation to be reviewed by the home-self, the outie, who won’t remember writing it. If the home-self rejects the request, the innie is powerless—the outie is going to continue driving to work and walking into the building and reawakening the innie’s desperate, claustrophobic consciousness. No matter how many times you try to leave, they—that is, you— can just walk you right back in.
The innies live in an infantilized state. I don’t merely mean infantilized in the sense of without autonomy, although they are indeed without autonomy (in a sense, anyway—the show puts a great deal of pressure on the very notion of the auto, the self). I mean that they live among the trappings of childhood, even in their sleek corporate office. They are called by their first name and last initial: Mark S., Helly R., in a faint echo of elementary-school naming conventions. The innies engage in schoolyard-style sparring with members of other departments, swapping rumors about colleagues that essentially amount to they have cooties. They call their supervisors Mr. and Mrs. The terms innie and outie are themselves childlike, as one character explicitly notes: I’d only ever heard these words used by children to refer to different categories of belly button. And of course the innies are charmingly and yet disturbingly prudish, treating sex (or even holding hands) with a blushing juvenility. After all, a child is an individual who has not experienced, who lacks a personal past. This is precisely what defines the innies: their lack of a personal past, at least one they can remember.
Ok, fine, great. In a show about individuals exploited by a massive corporation, employees are infantilized at work, controlled like young children. The surreal sci-fi genre demands that this infantilization become exaggerated, exceeding the bounds of the metaphorical infantilization most of us have suffered in the workplace. This is not an especially groundbreaking idea, even if it’s a meticulously executed one. But it becomes far more interesting when paired with the show’s depiction of archaism and nostalgia.
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