Spoilery, but only minorly. I give away nothing major about the plot that was instrumental to my enjoyment. The one really specific detail has been spoilertexted.
The show qua story: 5/10
Characters 4/10, plot 3/10, setting 7/10. I was entertained by this show but would not go so far as to recommend it qua story unless you really enjoy mood (as opposed to compelling, complex characters or satisfactory resolutions to mysteries).
It’s probably about good vs evil in some way
…just because the popular storytelling formula in the modern West demands it. I find this tiresome because creators usually won’t get into where actual, relevant evil comes from out of a valid fear it’ll alienate some of their audience. (Relevance and interestingness of real evil is correlated with how common it is in the general population.) So in most stories I consume, evil ultimately springs from individual sadism – one of the most boring, least solvable, and less common sources of evil.
So I felt a bit of anticipation when I started Severance, which I knew was set in an office environment with worker exploitation, and somewhat expected to be about capitalism. I’m overall a big fan of capitalism, but it is patently one of the most common sources of evil in modern people’s day to day lives – same with massive scale bureaucracies.
I’m always wistful to consume media about the evils of capitalism. By which I don’t mean “cartoonishly evil bosses” or “insufficient-feeling compensation” or “feeling trapped and unable to switch where you work” (problems that predate, and in my opinion were significantly worse prior to, capitalism) – I mean large groups of normal people causing evil outcomes because they can’t keep track of the 100 different aspects of the factories that make the 100 products they use per day (demand end), or because it’s too easy to cheat or cut corners a little to get through your workday, and besides everyone is doing it and you have to make a living (supply end). Fiction that turns its attention to these things as a source of evil would be very powerful, so when a piece of media seems like it might do that even a bit, I perk up. I like capitalism, so I want criticisms of capitalism that are criticisms of capitalism, not criticisms of hierarchies, or the existence of material scarcity, or the fact that people won’t give you stuff for free.
But it’s not about capitalism
Of course, Severance disappointed me by not being about capitalism. It was indeed a good vs evil story about cartoonishly evil bosses and being unable to leave your workplace. No one seems to be making money at any point. “This can’t possibly be maximizing shareholder value,” I mumbled as I watched the admittedly very sexy, interesting, and expensive-looking bespoke employee tortures mid-season.
The show isn’t even wearing the hide of something pretending to criticize capitalism. It’s not interested in that project at all. But it’s got oodles of evil in it. From what source does it spring? What, if anything, coherent does it have to say about evil? Initially it looked like “nothing, probably” – the villainous megacorporation, Lumon, is run by a cult with unclear motives, not a group of people who are trying to make money. The bosses aren’t trying to get through the day with a minimum of cognitive effort spent on registering the subject-hood of their employees, they are specifically out to get their employees by stalking their families and haranguing them about their garbage bins.
The eponymous technology where you spin up a new amnesiac fork of someone who timeshares your body is definitely not used to maximize profits. It is initially presented as having some practical corporate application: the protagonist nominally needed the procedure to deal with classified material. That sounds kind of reasonable. And as of the middle of S2 we will don’t know what the megacorporation actually does, so it’s still plausible. But so far severance is not used to gate any knowledge from the outside world except for how terrible the conditions are for employees. Even the employee forks of the severed protagonists don’t know what the work they’re doing even is.
The one sorta-realistic seeming application of severance is shown in a woman who undergoes it to avoid dealing with late stage pregnancy and childbirth.
The CEO of Lumon says he dreams of a world where everyone is severed. What would that even mean? What for? There’s no practical way this makes sense.
And it’s not about any realistic social orientation towards a new technology…
Furthermore, no one in the show’s audience thinks that dividing your brain up and spinning up a version of yourself with no memory really creates a different person. If you were severed you would subsequently live two different lives, and have some personality divergences, but a normal person’s intuition is that you two are kind of the same people, since they emerging from the same neural connections you’ve been building up all your life that constitute you.
if you offered me severance to avoid the pain of childbirth I’d say no, because it’s the same thing as just going through with it (but extra confused) and having my memory wiped. I’ve read about insufficiently anesthetized people who wake up screaming in horrible pain mid-surgery but don’t remember the incident afterwards. This sounds like a pretty bad outcome. I would not consent to surgery where I knew I would be in horrible pain but not remember it afterwards, because the important part is “being in horrible pain vs not”, not “remembering it or not”. I think most people share my intuition. The one clear, semi-reasonable application of severance in the show is one that most people would not find sensical as a way to truly avoid pain.
So what on earth is the point of setting up this universe where everyone takes this bizarre-to-us premise as granted, that severed individuals are different people whom we can treat as we wish?
The only way this makes sense to me is as a metaphor for open individualism.
Open individualism
Open individualism is the metaphysical claim (so, a claim that cannot have a truth value) that there is only one subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future. The story that there is only soul that gets reincarnated into all lives is an open individualist story. The story that the universe was created as a playground by a bored lonely god to to play out conflict against herself is another one.
I have a confession: I like open individualism a lot. I wouldn’t it be seeing it in a random TV show and writing a review justifying this absurd reach if I didn’t. Open individualism just feels right to me. I don’t think I literally believe it’s true – and/or I don’t know what it would mean to believe it, since a metaphysical belief definitionally does not have physical implications, and I think beliefs are for dealing with the physical world.
But when I first heard about it I suddenly understood the moral draw some people feel to Christianity, which is a religion that has never stirred me. I’ve never felt attracted to the metaphysical belief in a Great Policeman Who Makes All The Consequences Once You’re Dead. My feelings mirror Frans de Waal’s:
I have heard people echo Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, exclaiming, “If there is no God, I am free to rape my neighbor!”
Perhaps it’s just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for a livable society, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal?
But in open individualism I found a metaphysical belief that sort of made my preexisting moral intuitions sort of snap into place, like it was something that was natural to be true for me to feel about the world as I did. It turns out I’m not so different from people who find it easier to be nice if they think some nondisprovable god is going to punish them after death if they aren’t nice: I find it easier to be nice if I think that in some nondisprovable way I am dealing with myself.
When I think of what kind of media one might end up generating about open individualism (even if it’s not overt), “there’s a new procedure that spins up a version of yourself, and for some reason everyone in-universe thinks that version is totally different and can be mistreated/exploited/ignored” would be one on-the-nose way to do it.
The show says:
“Isn’t it ridiculous/evil that the protagonists think that the person they want to offload their dirty work, or their public image, or their emotional problems to is a different person?”
And this is a less dumb, boring question once you take the open individualist lens.