“Severance”: Apple’s warped satire of… Apple?
Warning: abundant spoilers for the first season (and speculation about the second season) of Severance follow.
Warning: abundant spoilers for the first season (and speculation about the second season) of Severance follow.
When Steve Jobs introduced the Apple II in 1977, even the visionary founder himself might have been surprised to learn that 45 years later, the same company would not only have miniaturised its digital devices to an improbable degree, but would also have its own TV channel. Entertainment is just the latest in a wide array of domains, from health to finance, into which ostensible “technology” companies like Apple have inserted themselves, and this horizontal integration raises important political and ethical questions. But what makes the entry of Big Tech into the arts (after two decades of peak TV, no one would dare dispute the artistic nature of the medium) especially intriguing is the possibility it allows for self-funded self-parody. “Severance” may, in fact, be the most accomplished example yet of a mirror for the new princes of the digital world. And much like a speculum regulum of old, Severance is, more than anything, a cautionary tale.
We join this near-future dystopia from the perspective of Helly, a new employee dragged kicking and screaming into a rather unusual induction programme. Seeming not to know who or where she is, Helly is asked a short series of questions, the answers to which demonstrate to her, and us, that she has no concept of self: no memories, no prior frame of reference, and no social relationships. It transpires that this is by design: Helly (or her outside self) has evidently agreed to be “severed”, with her memories inaccessible to her as soon as she enters the offices of the mysterious Lumon corporation. One small silver lining to make up for this geo-fenced ego-death is that Helly works alongside three other severed employees, each of whom also have separate selves inside and outside the office.
It’s a smart premise, and is sustained throughout the season by drip-fed revelations about the how, what and why of Lumon’s novel approach to HR—mirroring the paltry perks handed out to the severed employees for paying attention and keeping pace. By the season’s end, we know a satisfying amount more about the outside lives and inner turmoil of the four severed employees, but bigger questions remain tantalisingly unanswered: why is apparently mundane “macro data refinement” work important enough to justify a neurological non-disclosure agreement? How did Mark’s supposedly deceased wife end up working in the building, and to which storey of hell has she now been condemned? And does this cheating of death have something to do with the “revolving” alluded to by Helly’s father and Lumon CEO?
The second season will presumably have answers to these and other questions, while hopefully maintaining the show’s watertight world-building and well-paced plot. However, judged solely on its own terms, the first season makes for a razor-sharp satire of both Big Tech itself and the version of modernity that it has helped give rise to. Most obviously, severance (the idea) is a clever inversion of the white-collar “work from home” culture imposed on many of us by the pandemic. (In this, more credit is perhaps due to good luck than foresight: Severance was already supposed to start production in March 2020.) On the severed floor of Lumon, instead of never leaving home, you never leave work—but when the Venn overlap between home and work is large enough, it doesn’t really matter whether you work from home or live at work. The growing expectation, even before the pandemic, that we should take our work home with us and be always accessible to the whims of our employers relies on the rise of home broadband and the popularity of always-on devices.
Nonetheless, just like us, the severed employees retain an outside persona: an “outie”, in their jargon, but what we might call our “social media selves”. Severed employees occasionally have their morale boosted by a “wellness session”, in which the accomplishments and qualities of their outies are recited back to them amidst calming music and dimmed lights—a decidedly Instagram aesthetic. This discomfiting gulf between interior experience and exterior presentation may feel familiar to many. Meanwhile, the drudgery of the work itself—looking for “bad” clusters of numbers—may strike a chord with anyone who has questioned the value of their work, and is reinforced by the unpalatably monochromic palette. Actual colour—besides that cynically deployed as part of employee perks, such as the instantly classic “defiant jazz” scene—is noticeable only in the irises of the employees’ eyes, which insist upon their humanity.
But it is only in the final stretch of the season that Severance’s satire—which, until that point, could be thought of as lampooning any modern employer staging “morning raves” or “wellness retreats”—begins to more directly parody its paymaster. As we glimpse more of the corporate self that Lumon presents to the world, rather than just the interior experience of its underground human resources, one company above all comes into view. Among the Big Tech companies, if Amazon’s brand is efficiency, Google’s brand is accuracy, and Facebook’s brand is connectivity, then Apple’s is surely luxury. Expensive products need expansive marketing, and in the final episode we find the “innie” Helly has escaped to attend a glitzy gala in which Lumon will unveil its latest product: her. Everything at this launch event, from the sans serif fonts (Hellyvetica?) and “candid” black-and-white snaps, redolent of Apple TV+’s own launch (see below) brought one company, above all, to mind.
And though I later learned that the R&D complex of Bell Labs, an earlier Big Tech incumbent, was used as a stand-in for Lumon’s headquarters, it bears a striking similarity to Apple’s own HQ (and is something of a call-back to Dave Eggers’ own sharp satire of Silicon Valley, The Circle):
Much of this may be merely coincidental, and having already greenlit a second season, Apple doubtless cares much more about whether Severance drives as many subscriptions to its TV service as its lighter hit Ted Lasso. But as Big Tech companies like Apple edge ever more deeply into ever more corners of society—their devices capturing more and more hours of, and data from, our waking lives—we should hope and expect to see other efforts that engage with this powerful role through mainstream entertainment. Not bad for just another Music Dance Experience.