And I'm Hannah M. And this week, we are talking about the hit Apple TV Plus show, Severance, which is so hot right now. So hot. Right in the zeitgeist. Before we take a deep dive into Lumen Industries, Marcel. I want you to tell me about your experience working in corporate office culture. Have you worked in a cubicle?
The closest that I've come to working in a corporate office culture is working for the University of Alberta, which is not at all a corporate office, but is equally weird in terms of it's like... top-down, this is how we think about the work we do here kind of culture. For example, let me show you my University of Alberta mug that I brought. It says, leading with purpose.
And it ends with a period, which is so sinister. And it's an absolute nonsense statement, right? Like it means literally nothing. Absolutely nothing. How about you? I worked for one year for Rogers Wireless, which is the largest. cell phone carrier provider in Canada. I worked for their outgoing customer support team. Oh boy. So your whole job was to keep people. and specifically to call people.
And it was one of those call center jobs where you like... arrive and you log yourself into your phone and they are surveilling like every call that you make how long you take on the calls a manager can be listening at any point and then we'll just like Ooh, you finish a call and then all of a sudden a manager rolls up on a little wheelie chair and is like, let's have a little chat about how that went. Like very sort of. Sinister cubicle aesthetic, a manager named Mark who...
Is trying to get everybody to really like be on board with the team. There were absolutely team building outings, but they were all like hockey games. Is it because Rodgers owned the arena? Probably. And there were guys working there who were, like, career call center guys who... You know, absolutely had a bunch of weird little awards on their desk and like really nice cars.
Wow. Who were just like, this is your career. You are doing this. And I truly like they weren't going to fire me unless I did a crime because. There's like three weeks of paid. Okay. You know, the equivalent of basically having a brain procedure in terms of corporate investment in employees. They're like, we trained you for three weeks. That costs so much money.
we really don't want to lose you because it's expensive to onboard people. But man, every meeting with my manager, he was like, so can we convince you to care about this job? And I was like, nope. Absolutely not. I am in the second year of my undergraduate, and I will be out of here the second I can. Yeah. There's been very few environments in which I have fit less. You know what, though? I'm glad that that was like a low point as opposed to, and that was one of the better jobs. you
It's time for Why This, Why Now? The segment that asks the materialist question, what are or were the historical, ideological, and material conditions for our object of study to become zeitgeisty? To our listeners, this episode is going to be major spoiler free. So we're going to talk about the premise of the show. We'll discuss some particular scenes, but we're not going to spoil the first season. Okay. Because...
I want people to watch this show. Yeah. So we're going to talk about premise. We're going to talk about some like little sort of bits of the world, but we're not going to give away big plot points. Okay, deal. So, Severance, which is currently in its second season, debuted in February 2022. The first season was delayed by COVID, and the second season, which just started airing in January 2025, was delayed by, I think, two separate strikes.
So that's what accounts for that long gap between the two seasons. And I also think set some of the really vital context for the series around the sort of labor politics. that it's engaging with, but more on that in a moment. Severins was created by writer and showrunner Dan Erickson, and it's one of those classic, like, he'd written a pilot script and it was in a big... pile of other pilot scripts and then ben stiller read it and was like i like this show i want to make this show so
Ben Stiller is the executive producer, and he also is directing a lot of it. Like he directed, I think, like six of the first season episodes, something like that. The show stars Adam Scott as Mark Scout. So close. It's like they just gave him his name, but slightly to the left. Mark. often known as Mark S. in the show, is the leader of a small group of severed workers at this mysterious biotech corporation called Lumen Industries.
And the notion of being severed is pretty central to the series, as indicated by the... title of the series. So, hey, Hannah, can you tell us what it is? What does it mean to be severed? Yeah, I can. I sure can. So severed workers have voluntarily undergone a brain surgery that functionally creates two different personalities.
They're innie, which is the version of themselves who works at Lumen and has no knowledge or memories of the outside world or their real life. So they're kind of like children because they've only existed since. The severance procedure happened and they've only ever existed in this corporate environment. Babes in the woods. Babes in the Woods, and then there's the Audi, who exists only outside the walls of Lumen and has no knowledge or memory of what happens inside the company.
Marcelle, I know you're also a fan of Severance. So can you tell us a little bit about the rest of the cast? I would be delighted to. Okay, so Mark S., who you introduced already, played by Adam Scott, he is the head of what we are told is the Macro Data Refinement Division. This is a four-person team. And this team does incomprehensible computer work. It has birthed a million online theories.
take numbers, and put numbers in places. It's so weird. Yeah, they sort a screen full of numbers into four different folders. Based on vibe. So the rest of the team are Dylan G, played by Zach Cherry, who is obsessed with gaining as many of Lumen's infantilizing corporate perks as possible. Irving B., played by John Turturro, who treats the founders of Lumen with a religious zeal before his budding romance. with a co-worker, leads him to begin pushing back against Lumen's strict regulations.
And, of course, Helly R, played by Britt Lauer, who is a brand new Severed employee, and she is extremely, even violently resistant to being an innie. We also have Patricia Arquette playing Harmony Cobell, who is a manager of The Severed Floor. And Trammell Tillman as my personal favorite character. God, he's so good. So good. Seth Milchick. who is the supervisor of the severed floor, and he is responsible for delivering both rewards and punishment.
For example, a five-minute music dance experience. Oh, music dance experience. Sometimes I just pull up a video on YouTube and just watch Mr. Milchick dance. Breathtaking. So, severance is about a lot of things, but for me, I think most notably, it's...
A surrealist, sci-fi, tinge, sort of dystopian take on contemporary office culture and the concept of work-life balance, right? That's sort of what the concept of being... severed is like letting us play with is like, what if work-life balance looked like turning yourself into two different people, one who's at work and one who's at home?
So to understand what has made the show hit so hard, beyond the fact that it's just really good, it's just a really good show, I do think we need to talk about shifting work culture in the 2020s. And specifically, I want to talk about the rise of the anti-work or quiet quitting movement and the way COVID impacted white collar workers' relationship to their workplaces. So like work from home and how that shifted things.
Throughout this episode, I'm going to be drawing quite a lot on a fabulous edited collection that came out in 2024 called Reintegrating Severance, Interdisciplinary Insights on Apple TV's Dystopian Thriller. which is just like a collection of essays from a ton of different disciplinary perspectives, all talking about severance. It's very cool. The editors are Nora M. Isikoff, who's a cognitive scientist.
and Jennifer Dawes, who's an English professor, and they met on a Severance fan board. And we're like, hey, maybe we do a book about this because we're academics and that's the only way we know how to make friends. Their introduction gives us some of the context for what's happening in work culture in the 2020s. So, Marcel, could you read this quote from the intro? Quote, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered the way people work.
For example, one source reports that the percentage of workers in the United States who work from home has tripled since before the pandemic. with numbers much higher when looking exclusively at rates for office employees. This change is welcomed by some employees who appreciate the time saved by not commuting. the opportunity to complete chores during lunch breaks, or the possibility of being home with family members.
Other employees resent the reduced separation between work and life finding that there is an increased expectation to be available at all times and that the lack of a physical transition between work time and home time hinders the psychological transition. I feel like work from home has continued to be a really contentious subject in the wake of lockdowns as well, right? Yeah, for sure. So like there was the challenges around the lockdown era of the pandemic.
as people like navigated the complexity of work from home and the complex. like labor and class and race politics of who could work from home and who couldn't and the psychological impacts of working from home. But now a lot of workers who were given the opportunity to work from home are being asked to return to the office.
Some people are like really pushing back against it, right? Like they found that flexibility empowering. It contributed to work-life balance for people. Like you could just, you know, do a load of laundry between Zoom calls. Yeah. Or just like. reclaim the hours that you would normally spend commuting like lots of people have freaking nightmare commutes totally and like reclaimed hours and hours of their days by not commuting
At the same time, a lot of corporations responded to this sort of anxiety about people not being in the workplace by heightening the surveillance of their workers. They seemed to be convinced that like... Without the managed environment of an office, people would try to get away with working less. So, you know, she's like real, real cop shit. Yeah. So we get these like.
new technologies emerging for remote work that are all about like surveilling your employees' productivity. Like platforms like Microsoft Teams, like documenting keystrokes. That's fun. Yeah, yeah. It's very similar to the call center experience, right? It's like, we're going to use technology to surveil you so that we can ensure that you are working at all times. I got to ask you this question, though, Hannah.
Who actually even needs a dystopia when you have late capitalism? Like why make this show a dystopia when we could just make it like reality TV? It's so true. In fact, could you please read this Dan Erickson quote from a 2022 Hollywood Reporter piece that I think really gets at how Severance is just based in reality? Yes, yes, I would be delighted.
I joke that the great resignation, the phenomenon in which 47 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 alone, was my idea. But in reality, a lot of things were happening at the same time we were making severance. The pandemic forced people to reassess the necessity of a lot of things in their lives, to question in particular all of the conventions that we have associated with having a job.
Some people could do their jobs just as well by checking their email a couple of times a day without going into an office. There is no actual practical reason to give. half of a waking day to a job when one can be as productive at home without making that sort of puritanical sacrifice. Okay. Is this related to like anti-work and the concept of quiet quitting, which we also have like started to hear a lot about the last couple of years?
Yeah, for sure. It's all about this sort of major labor shift that's been happening in the past few years. right around the time that Severance is coming out. Essentially, for a lot of millennials and Gen Z workers, the promise of like leaning in has been demonstrably proven to be bullshit. Like we had, you know, the 2008 recession. And then the crushing weight of student debt and the mass layoffs and employment unpredictability that COVID introduced alongside.
You know, the existential threat of a pandemic and climate change and rising global fascism. They've all really combined to convince people that, like, maybe there's more important things in life than what you do for a job. So we get this, like... huge surge in resignations.
But we also, in general, get this shift towards people insisting that like you should do the opposite of leading in. You should do like as little work as possible for your job. Like do the absolute bare minimum to not get fired. This is like... a discourse that is circulating.
When people first started talking about quiet quitting, I would read these think pieces and be like, that's just doing your job and not doing any more. Why are we calling it quiet quitting? Well, one, because it's the internet, so everything needs a name. But also it's, you know, it's pushing back particularly against like hustle culture, right? Yes.
you should have your main job and then you should have five other side jobs and you should always be trying to turn your job into another job opportunity, right? This like entrepreneurial discourse, which people are really like rejecting. Totally. So this is the polar opposite of the workplace culture that we're seeing in severance. But like, to be clear, this is satire. Severance is a satire.
For the innies, the work is literally their entire life and their productivity is being surveilled and coerced and manipulated constantly. Yeah. So, like, there's no quiet quitting as an innie. You literally, your life is your job. You have only ever existed in this corporate environment. It's the only world you know. Yeah.
And that certainly gives a really creepy slant to the fact that right now, big tech companies are pushing hard for employees to return to the office. I listened to a really interesting episode of the podcast, Uncanny Valley. which is about Silicon Valley. It's produced by Wired Magazine, hosted by Michael Colore, Lauren Good, and Zoe Schiffer. They have an episode called Big Tech Wants You Back in the Office. And it's essentially a discussion of like why all of these big tech CEOs.
Even if companies who literally make remote working software, literally the CEOs who own the company that makes Slack are like, we actually need everybody doing in-person work. Is it sinister? It's pretty sinister, yeah. So the podcast hosts point out that these companies are consistently failing to actually offer any concrete reasons why they want people back at work. There isn't like productivity fell by this amount or like we did a study and worker satisfaction is lower.
They're just like making these vague claims about the importance of building an office culture, which is like, what does that mean? There's definitely a lot of people who are... arguing that a back-to-work mandate is essentially a backdoor form of layoffs. Oh, interesting. Because all of these tech companies hired huge numbers of people.
during the lockdown period and then, you know, need to be getting rid of people because there isn't the same sort of mass demand for these technologies. So it's like... Create a new arbitrary rule that a lot of people are going to hate and then they're going to quit and then you've downsized without actually having to downsize. But like we don't actually know if that's the case because like none of these fucking tech CEOs are telling us why they're doing anything.
They also, in the Uncanny Valley episode, point out that in practice, These return to office mandates are probably enforced really unevenly. Okay. So like you make a rule that you can then use to punish.
particular people if you want, but like, it's never going to apply to the people who are in positions of power and don't want to do it. Okay. So do the podcast hosts, like, do they have their own theories or do they, are they also saying that they think it's like about a backdoor way to do layout? They're skeptical about the layoffs theory. I think, again, just because there's no actual... evidence for it, ultimately they argue that it's about power.
So working from home coincided with a rise in workers' rights movement. And that relationship... isn't necessarily causal, like working from home made people more radical. Like it might be that COVID was a root cause for both of them or that like work from home. exacerbated existing low-level dissatisfactions with corporate work culture.
It's really hard to say with so little historical distance. Yeah. Like we're right in the middle of this moment. So it's really hard to actually take a step back and be like. This was the thing, but like we know this whole cluster of stuff is happening. Rises in unionization, critique of those in power, a willingness to quit or to leave your job, a sort of...
massive movement away from any sense of like loyalty to a particular employer, all of this stuff. In general, what we can say is that movements like Quiet Quitting and the Great Resignation and workers' rights movements, like unionization drives. All of those sort of undermine the authority of these big tech companies and their like hierarchical structures. And the mandate that workers return to the office...
the Uncanny Valley hosts are arguing this, is that essentially that mandate is a way to exert control and reestablish old hierarchies. I get to tell you where your body is going to be. Okay. So I know earlier I insisted that severance was a satire. It was satirized in this culture, but...
barely seems satirical, right? It's like, it somehow manages as a show to get closer to the actual experience of working for a big corporation in the 20th century than something as like goofy and lighthearted as The Office did. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And you know who would agree with you, Marcel? Who? Franz Kafka. Franz Kafka? Oh, man. Hannah, I have never read any Kafka. I didn't get the homework. You know what? Don't worry about it. I'm going to explain in the next segment.
This segment is called The Theory We Need, and today I'm going to be doing you all a huge favor. by teaching you how to correctly use the term Kafkaesque. Oh, finally. Because, man, I just say it anytime something is weird. And that's wrong. And by the end of this episode, you'll be able to use it correctly. Okay, good, good. That's all I want.
So specifically, what I'm going to try to unpack for you all here today is the way the concept of the Kafka S. connects surrealism, absurdism, alienation, and anti-capitalism all sort of entangled in the idea of a nightmarish bureaucratic machine. Okay, sounds complicated, but also recognizable. We are going to start with Mayank Kedgerwal, author of An Investigation of Marxist Alienation in the Postmodern Workplace in Apple TV's Severance. Wow.
is a contribution in the aforementioned collection Reintegrating Severance. So the collection is Proudly interdisciplinary, and Kedrawal is, in fact, a computer scientist by training. His article focuses on the, quote, unfeeling mathematics, end quote, of capitalist optimization in the workplace. and how that contributes to worker alienation.
So we're going to start with this concept of alienation because he provides us with a lovely definition. And we all know I hate actually reading Marx. Marcel, will you read this quote for me? In his Critiques of Capitalism, Karl Marx theorized about workers, and more generally, human, alienation that is the inevitable consequence of a capitalist organization of labor. and that arises from both the product and process of labor.
The former refers to the incapacity of the worker to own the products of their own labor. while the latter refers to the incapacity of the worker to direct their own actions and consequently to freely develop their physical and mental energies. Alienation today has a legacy dating back to the industrial revolution, evoked by factory floors and office cubicles that render a worker as a disposable and proverbial cog in a machine.
Apple's hit TV show Severance, where a procedure can be used to separate a worker's memories of their workplace from all else. End quote. End quote. End quote. End quote. Okay, does that all make sense? Like alienation from the product of your labor and the process of your labor?
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right that this is a really helpful explanation of what Marx is talking about when he writes about alienation, because I think it's one of those terms that gets used a lot without people necessarily like... getting into, like, what are you being alienated from? And it is yourself. Yes, yourself and the products of your work. So like...
Compared to pre-industrial capitalism, you make a thing and then that thing that you made is your thing that you can then use or sell or give away. Industrial era capitalism means that like you are employed, you are spending your day making a thing. That thing does not belong to you. That thing belongs to somebody else. You might not even be able to access that thing. You might not be able to afford that thing.
You also don't own your own physical labor or your mental energy, your physical energy. All of that is in the service of. the production that you're involved in. Exactly. So somebody else gets to tell you, there is a time we've all agreed upon that is 9am, that is the time that you have to be here. And if you are not here at that time...
you will lose your job. Like that's a new construction of time and the relation of like the autonomous self to the world. Also, particularly this becomes the case with like... you know, as Henry Ford invents the assembly line, like you're only doing one small isolated task. And so you often won't even understand how the work that you're doing. fits in to the larger scheme. Yes. So that becomes a further level of alienation.
hypothetically I'm making something, but I would never be able to make this whole thing myself. Right. I just do this one task over and over again. Yeah. But also like a lot of people, particularly in sort of like white collar jobs. Or like, yeah, I do this thing. I'm not quite sure how it fits into the rest of what this company does. I just know that.
It's my job to do this thing. Totally. I sort numbers based on vibe and put them in a folder. So Kedrawal goes on to compare severance in the sense of like... being, you know, about alienation, to the works of Kafka as well as Albert Camus, both of whom were absurdist, surrealist, in the sense that they were also creating like
absurdist, surrealist dramatizations of Marxist alienation. But that's where he leaves things. He's like, this is kind of like Kafka. And then he says absolutely nothing else about it. So that you too, as the reader, can go, ah, yes, Kafka. Ah, yes, Kafka. In his defense, he's not a literature scholar, but we are. Yeah. So.
We're going to take this comparison a little further and unpack the implications of connecting Severance to Kafka and ultimately of calling the show Kafkaesque. So now everybody will be able to walk around and be like, Severance, extremely Kafkaesque. And you'll be able to explain why that's true. Good. Thank goodness. So, Marcel, what do you know about Kafka? Okay. I know that... He wrote a novel. Was it a novel? A couple. About...
A man who turns into a cockroach? Yeah. But I don't know why the man turns into a cockroach. Neither does the man. And I don't know if he remains a cockroach forever. So honestly, let's assume that we're starting from zero. Okay. A few more important Kafka facts. Yeah. He was born in Prague in 1883 when Prague was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Even though he died young at 40, he lived through World War I and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So he saw some shit. He was a German-speaking Jewish socialist. But his work is associated generally with sort of experimental modernism and surrealism, both of which were, and I'm speaking very broadly here.
like responses to the upheaval of World War I and the drive to come up with new aesthetic modes that could respond to this new world. Okay, okay. Pop quiz, Marcel, do you remember which modernist poet famously coined the phrase make it new as a slogan for modernist innovation and disruption? He was a Nazi sympathizer. I... can tell you that it was Ezra Pound and he can go straight to hell.
He can go. He's already there. He better be. He better be. So, you know, Kafka's part of this make it new moment for sure. But he also stands out in the modernist landscape for his fixation. on the operations of bureaucracy. His books are all about bureaucracy. And that's an obsession that has often been linked by historians and literary. scholars to the fact that he spent most of his adult life working in insurance.
Oh, he was an insurance officer. And so, you know, as an industry, that's like probably the most egregious example of reducing human life to bureaucratic processes and arbitrary rules. I mean, well. He did write a book about turning into a giant bug. Talk to me about that. How does this relate? So we're not going to talk about the metamorphosis in particular, but... Kafka's work was all about using absurdism and surrealism to articulate the modern condition.
So according to literary critic Roman Karst, quote, the office is Kafka's nightmare, end quote. But he evokes that nightmare through a very specific kind of stylistic mood, which is about... bringing together sort of the banal and realist day-to-day world with a nightmarish surrealist world. Mm-hmm.
importantly, allowing no one within the text to comment on the surrealism. Like, when the guy turns into a cockroach, nobody's like, how did that happen? At no point is that the question. It's just like... You're a cockroach now. How are you going to go to your job? Okay. Because you're a cockroach now, but you still have to pay your rent. Just you're a cockroach now. And your landlord isn't like, I don't allow cockroaches to rent from me. The landlord is just like, where's your rent?
Or the landlord might say, I don't allow cockroaches to rent from me. And you could say like, well, but I'm still me. And he's like, I don't care. The rules are no cockroaches. Right? So it's like, it's not that people don't notice the surreal thing. It's that they don't. Comment on it surrealism. Okay. Get the vibe, Marcel. Why don't you just read the opening line of The Metamorphosis? Okay. Quote.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect, end quote. It's just a fact. It's just a fact. Okay. Like, he has to navigate the fact that, like, he is terrified and horrifying to the people in his life now. Okay. But at no point is anybody like, what, how? Right. okay that's not the point okay the point is
How something completely out of your control can happen to you and you still have to keep trying to have a job. Okay. So the real world remains real. We, the reader, perceive it as surreal. The people in the text do not perceive it as surreal. Yeah, exactly. I think I got it. So in... I think maybe his only actual completed full-length novel is The Trial. And in that one, a man is arrested for a crime. No one will tell him what the crime is or what the body is.
has the right to arrest him and put him on trial, but also nobody questions. The fact that this organization and these agents are allowed to arrest him and put him on trial. He's summoned to trial, but they won't tell him the location or time. He has to find it himself. And it's in like.
a tenement building in like an attic above a washerwoman's apartment. And then when he arrives, they reprimand him for not being on time. Yeah. It's like a stress dream. Yeah. This, this makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But then like. In the midst of the surrealist nightmare, his day-to-day life is allowed to continue. Right. Like, he's told that he's under arrest, but he's also very specifically told that he will not be prevented from leading his ordinary life.
He can still go about his day-to-day life. He just also is under arrest and on trial. So does... surrealism require the continuation of real life? Is that sort of like fundamental to it? Not inherently. I think it's the unique flavor of Kafka's surrealism.
Okay. Yeah. Like other forms of surrealism truly like exit from reality. Right. And are like, we're going to move into the realm of like the subconscious or the dreamscape. But Kafka is really doing this thing where like the surreal and the banal.
live side by side and that juxtaposition of like the banal day-to-day with surrealism and absurdism like, whether that's a, you know, mysterious trial or becoming a bug, creates a kind of conceptual vertigo that makes the day-to-day, like, really banal things the characters are doing.
also feel increasingly surreal and dreamlike. Okay, and so this we can see in Severance, right, with the contrast of the innies world and the outies world. Yeah, it's like the outies world is... a pretty realist normal world, but it... starts to become surreal feeling because it's living alongside the intense surrealism of what happens in the office. Right. The other notable feature of Kafka's work, and again, I'm drawing on Roman Karst here, is that his protagonist...
don't reject the arbitrary bureaucratic systems they're entangled in, despite their clear absurdity. So Kafka's protagonist... believe that they have to entangle themselves in these systems in order to achieve happiness. Like opting out is not an option. So in The Castle, which is my personal favorite Kafka, which is the novel he was writing when he died, that was never completed. And so like... The surrealism is really amped up by the fact that it just ends.
It just ends right in the middle of things. It's just like now it's done. So in the castle, the protagonist, who's known only as Kay. Wow, somebody known only as a letter. Wow, it's almost like it might be like a reference in the show. O-M-F-G. Wow. Kay is summoned to a village overseen by a mysterious castle full of mysterious officials who exercise their power through a series of arbitrary bureaucratic processes.
And a lot like the mysterious and never seen board in Severance, you can't actually gain access to the officials. You're not allowed in the castle and you can't talk to them face to face. But... As Karst writes, quote, the paradox of the castle is based on the fact that Kay takes up his fight with the administration in order to ally himself with it. He wants to settle down in the village and be reconciled with its occupants. He would like to get a post in the administration and work with it.
Oh, this is hard for me to understand. This guy gets summoned. He's told. In order to have the right to live in this town, you have to get permission from the officials. And he's like, cool. Does he know about the town before he's summoned there? No. Okay, so he arrives and he's like, I like this and I want this. He wants it because it's what he's been told to want by the administration. Oh.
Right? So this is really key, that even as Kafka's protagonist's lives are destroyed by these arbitrary, meaningless systems that exert power over them, they also can't conceive of a life outside of the system. This is, I think, one of the features that make Kafka's work such a powerful evocation of alienation in particular. Yeah. Is that under capitalism, we are at once.
profoundly alienated from the systems and structures that govern our lives, and at the same time convinced that access to the good life can be achieved. only by engaging more fully with them. Yes. If I work harder, I will get promoted and then I can be a manager and then I will be secure. Yeah, 100%. Okay. I'm getting a sense from you that calling something Kafka-esque
isn't just about calling it absurd or unnecessarily complicated, but can you help me through it just a little bit more? I really want to make sure I use it correctly next time I accuse something of being Kafkaesque. Yeah. The Kafkaesque is an encounter with a nightmarish, illogical, even surreal bureaucratic structure. But importantly, it's a structure that you can't simply walk away from. Because something about that bureaucracy is something that you are drawn into. So maybe it's the source of.
something that you need, right? Like your job. Like it's the source of the things that allow you to stay alive. Or maybe it's an educational institution. So it's like the source of truth and knowledge or it's the legal system so it's the source of like social stability yeah right the sense that like Even though this system is a tangled nightmare, it's also the source.
of truth and justice and knowledge. And you have a faith in that system that maybe even verges on the religious. But to move towards it. you have to deal with this bureaucracy, this nightmare bureaucracy. Then this means, if I'm understanding you right, that it is still correct to call severance Kafka. Right? I mean, so, so correct, I think. I wrote a whole thesis about it. Oh, good. All right, Hannah, I'm ready for my thesis. Severance is fundamentally a show about alienation.
The alienation of workers from the means of production and the products of their labor. Our alienation from our whole selves in an optimization fixated work culture. Our alienation from our emotions through the repression of grief. That alienation is articulated through a combination of comic absurdity, say employees being rewarded for their hard work with an egg bar, And sinister surrealism, say disobedient employees being punished by repeating a statement of contrition thousands of times.
In bringing together absurdism and surrealism as aesthetic modes, with commentary on the alienating experience of the arbitrariness of bureaucratic and state power, Severance is distinctly Kafkaesque. Connecting Severance to the work of an early 20th century writer helps us to better understand the aesthetic and political project of the show and its zeitgeistiness.
by placing it within a longer history of art that moves away from realism in order to evoke something profoundly true about the modern condition. A truth that realism, despite its claim to hew more closely to reality, often fails to express. In this essay, I will... Can we talk about the...
five-minute music dance experience though because I gotta say I think I'd work a lot harder if I were to be rewarded with a five-minute music dance experience. The system of awards is so interesting because It is like we are simultaneously as viewers invited to see that the rewards are like infantilizing, absurd.
It's so surreal, right, to just have these people in this, like, windowless, low-ceilinged room all just standing around, like, eating a little deviled egg. Also, the severed employees... are like, this is weird. I kind of love it. Right? Yeah. There's this five-minute dance experience. Heliar earns by, what does she do to earn? Is she like some 76% something? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She hits a high percentage on vibing numbers. You know, and she gets to choose.
a single musical instrument and a genre of music she chooses, of course. Defiant Jess. And all of that, right, should lead us into, like, if we were watching The Office.
all of that would lead into a kind of moment of deflation, right? Where it's like, this is stupid and nobody's having a good time. And lots of like side eyes to the camera. Like, you see this, right? Right. But instead... it leads to this moment of like, intensity and immersion in which everybody gets pretty fucking into the dance experience yeah yeah including milkshake Including Milchak. Supervisor. Yeah. Yeah.
I love him. He's awful. He's so good. He's awful and he's terrifying and he's charismatic. Like that's what feels so sort of Kafka-esque about the series to me is that like... This is totally bonkers. And you know it, but nobody's going to comment on it. In fact, people are going to defend it, right? Dylan is constantly defending. And, like, categorizing, like, what the good rewards are. Yeah, definitely. The egg bar is elite. Oh, yeah. And even when we're in the Audi world.
Like Mark is a defender of the severance process. Yeah, that's right. He was not made to do this. He opted into it. And he supports it. He believes that it is making his life better. What I'm really drawn to in talking about the show is like...
Less the sort of puzzle box of it all, right? The like, what's really going on? I mean, I find that interesting, but I'm a lot more interested in the aesthetics. Okay, okay. Because I really am fascinated by... the sort of aesthetic project of the show as a whole, how they are using surrealism as a narrative device, but also as... a sort of mood as a way of like creating shots and environment.
and how surrealism becomes the aesthetic representation of, like, capitalism par excellence. Okay. Right? So, like, how are they actually evoking that? That's the question that really... excites me and that made me want to take this conversation in the direction of like the Kafkaesque aesthetic of it. Before we started recording, we talked a little bit about the white paint for the walls, right? Provide me with some textual evidence, please. Happily.
So one of the ones that I find the most interesting is the aesthetics of the severed floor. We spend a lot of time here in the show. It's the place where the severed employees work. And the severed floor... is a primarily a series of empty white hallways. The first episode... I mean, it opens with Marques crying in his car. Nothing hooks me quite like seeing a man cry. Just an ugly cry. Like, it's such a powerful opening. Yeah.
And then he like gets into the elevator and we get the little ding that is him switching from his outie to his innie. And then we watch his innie walk with purpose and satisfaction through empty hallways for... I don't know how long that shot is, but it feels like multiple minutes of just watching him walk through hallways, and those hallways are empty.
And this is a soundstage that they built for this, right? The whole severed floor is on a soundstage. And they were, like, so deliberate about, like... how narrow the hallways are, how low the ceilings are, the shade of white paint that they used that would get it to read as this kind of... sinister space, right? The macro data refinement room is
a really big room, but it has really low ceilings. And the carpet is this green that kind of evokes like astroturf or fake grass so that it feels both like... the worst, most oppressive windowless office you've ever worked in, but also a little bit like a daycare. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the, when I was sort of looking up the like aesthetic inspirations for the show.
I came across this concept that I had never heard of before, but that like immediately clicked for me, which is something referred to as the liminal space aesthetic. Okay. Tell me about that. It's a particular like internet. aesthetic that originated from, I think, a 4chan post about something called The Back Room.
Are you familiar with creepypasta? No. It's like an internet subculture about writing... scary stories as though they're true oh okay yeah it's like urban legendy kind of stories that like keep circulating or just like invented by somebody on as a creepypasta. So the back rooms is an example of this and it's basically like a photo that somebody found of an abandoned office building.
And like posted a picture of it and then like told a story, like a creepy story about it. But this then led to this sort of proliferation of images associated with the liminal space aesthetic. which is essentially images of purpose-built environments that are meant for humans to be doing specific things in them, but those environments are empty.
Okay. Google liminal space aesthetic right now because you're going to see these pictures and you're going to be like, oh, yeah. Whoa. Okay, okay, okay. I get it. Yeah. I get it. Everybody listening right now, also Google liminal space aesthetic. And you're going to see so many. creepy pictures of empty rooms but part of what makes them creepy is that very clear sense that like This room was built for people to do something in it. Yeah. And there's nobody there. Yeah. And you don't know.
specifically what they were going to do there. But maybe the people who were doing the thing there also didn't know what they were doing there. Maybe they also didn't know what they were doing there. This is making me think about the computer technology that they use, right? Because like...
Remember when we did the watch along and we were talking about whether or not Elf was a period piece? Because everything about it was like, is this the 80s? Is this the 80s? But then there was a cell phone. So it wasn't. specifically the 80s, but it also wasn't not the 80s. And so I feel like there's so much about the show when they're in their workplace, when they're on the severed floor. It's like, when is this? When is this happening?
Yeah. It's got kind of a 60s aesthetic. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. When they're on the severed floor, but then also kind of a 90s aesthetic, like the computers feel. Kind of early 90s. Totally. The clothes and the color scheme feels kind of 60s. Yeah. Like there's not a lot of other technology that you see. And you can think about like. If we know that these images of a purpose-built space empty, cause a kind of... Disorientation and creeping horror. Right?
We can both, and this is, Coach has pointed this out in the chat, that like, this is also a very powerful pandemic experience. Like, I remember the first time going into my office. to get something and walking in to an office that had previously been in five days a week, but had not set foot in in two years. And walking in and like everything was where we'd left it. Yeah. It felt like I was excavating the ruin of a terrible disaster. Yeah.
I think we can think simultaneously about what the... creators of the show have done to create a sinister and unnerving environment. But we can also think about the fact that the severed floor is a purpose-built environment for those workers. Right? So it's like, actually, somebody made it like this for them on purpose. is part of the function of the severed floor. So if the inability to locate the technology or the aesthetic in space or time is an impact on you, the viewer,
It's also an impact on them, the severed employees. Totally. Right. That it turns the severed floor into a space. that is actually outside of time. Right, right. Because in their... job interviews that I guess they have with a weird speaker when they wake up on the big table. Which I think it's like a series of questions, I think, to check if the Sever and the Severine...
procedure has worked correctly. Yeah. It reveals to us, the viewers, that they don't know where they are. They don't know when they are. They don't know what is happening in the world. All they know is that they're in a place and it's kind of fucked up. Yeah, this is episode one for folks who haven't watched it yet.
That we see, you know, Heli Arbin asked questions and it's like, you know, what is your name? She doesn't know. Like, what is a memory you have from your own life? Absolutely nothing. Who is the current president? No clue.
She's asked to name a state and she can name a state, no problem. Yeah, but just one, right? So like there's... a baseline of functional knowledge about how the world works, which you need to maintain because people need to be able to... do a job, but all specificity that would actually let you sort of locate yourself in a context has been stripped away really deliberately.
And that's also how office spaces are designed. Yeah. Again, that contextlessness, right? That disorientation that comes from being in this. surreal purpose-built space is, again, a form of alienation, right? It's an alienation from your relationship to the space that you're in this is not your space you do not get to make it your own you do not get to understand it they're not allowed to draw maps They're not allowed to know where they are. But it's also an alienation from...
anything, any context you bring in, right? All of the stuff you bring into your experience of a workplace. It's like, leave all that at home. It's being forcibly. Divided off. But then we have the wellness checks. The wellness checks. I feel like we got to talk a little bit about the wellness checks. So for folks who haven't yet watched. For reasons that are never entirely clear to us, the viewer, every now and again, the manager will decide that a particular employee needs.
a wellness check. And so they are then taken, they are escorted into... I love this. I love it as a critique of like corporate wellness culture. Yeah. They're taken into this... weird cold spa-like room, which with somebody who is also unclear, like she's the wellness coordinator, I think. And she sits in this room. She's not warm.
the worker with a list of qualities about their Audi. Oh, I love it so much. And they're not allowed to respond. They're not allowed to respond. They can't ask questions. Just listen. It's called a wellness check, but because of how creepy and sinister the process is. It's not clear if this is designed to reassure them or to frighten them or to like motivate them. It's very strange. And so some of those things will be like, your Audi is kind.
Your Audi is an attentive lover. Your Audi shops at local grocery stores. Like it's just like the wildest combination of things. Yeah. On one level. It's like a recognition that the total denial of context... too distressing it's fucking with people yeah and so they're like titrated tiny little pieces of controlled context right a sort of like
Corporations have realized that demanding that people just be robots doesn't work because they have nervous breakdowns. And so you've got to give people like... the right to like have a picture of their kids on their desks or like take a mental health date now and again. Right. It's like, we're going to let you have a little bit more.
But that has to be extremely controlled. Right? The limits of that still have to fall within the designated corporate culture because an uncontrolled... undermine right it's like this is part of the anxiety about people working from home yeah It's like, oh, you have too much context to remind you that you're a human. And that's no good because we don't want you to remember that. But you can't take it away entirely. And it's such an interesting through line of the show.
is the ways that they are figuring out. How to manage. such that they continue to understand themselves as doing work that is good and valuable and contributing to the betterment of the world. isn't exactly the same for everybody, right? Different things work on different employees, but all of them are these like highly managed, highly controlled experiences.
That like just give you like a little bit, little something to keep you going. Earlier you said that you weren't so much interested in the puzzle box of the show. And because I haven't read Kafka. I'm wondering if solving the puzzle box Is that maybe not the point? Like, I feel like the way that the show has been introducing increasingly cuckoo bananas shit, like the goat. None of these new pieces of information and introductions seem to be helping us.
solve the puzzle. It makes it weirder. Exactly. It's taking the absurdity and amplifying it every time we get additional pieces of information. And so part of me is curious, like, is this part of what makes it Kafkaesque? Is Kafka like... And now you're a cockroach. There's no point in trying to solve this mystery. A hundred percent, right? Like that there are problems that characters are trying to solve.
they're not actually yet. They're not actually like, what are we really doing here? Right? Like that sort of... Like, what's the actual truth? Like, that's not what people are drawn towards within the logic of the show. Certainly this is the case with Kafka. Like, it is about figuring out how to work within the system, essentially. Like, this is the situation you're in now, so figure out how to make it work for yourself.
Rather than trying to be like, well, but like, why am I a bug? It just doesn't fucking matter. You woke up and you're a bug now. With the exception, I think, and you know, this is part of the important narrative force that Helyar brings, is that she's sort of, in many ways, the audience surrogate who's like pushing back against and questioning things. But like most of our protagonists are like,
They're just like, no, I'm a bug. Yeah. Like, I'm not asking why I'm a bug. I just am a bug. Hey, and if you do bug good enough, you get these finger traps. If you do bug good enough, you get finger traps or maybe. Deviled eggs. The other thing that I find really... evocative, right? So we've talked about the surrealism of the severed floor, the sense that it's sort of outside of time.
But that also filters out into the Audi world. So the Audi world is like based much more in a kind of realist aesthetic. It's like identifiable outside spaces that feel like banal and unremarkable compared to the severed floor, which is like... It's remarkable. It's really weird. But there's this way that like that surrealism and disorientation creeps out.
into the day-to-day world and like more and more like infiltrates it you know which is both sort of doing something with the idea of like the subconscious and like the knowledge that our bodies have and the impossibility of total alienation. Right. But like, actually it's still the same body. So knowledge is transferring back and forth across this barrier, despite how much Lumen would like it not to. But there's also this way that like.
The surrealism of the fact of this company creeps out into the rest of the world and sort of... infects it in a way. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Like the show isn't only surreal on the severed floor. The show also increasingly, with each episode, becomes increasingly surreal and absurd. in the so-called real world, for sure. Yeah, 100%. And it's like, you know, part of that for me is this recognition that like... alienation itself as an attempt to divide off the work self from the home self is
going to infect the home self with the experience of alienation as well, right? Like, the way we see Mark as this completely unmoored. character who like he's got a job he has no fucking clue what it is and so he just kind of wanders aesthetically again it's like there's cars from lots of different time periods so that you can never like quite
put your finger on when or where we are. It's like always winter. It's always winter. It's always winter. Part of me is wondering too, like, Okay, so if the show is invested in exploring the alienation of labor and the way that the alienation of labor in our contemporary society has, like, gone... It makes sense then that...
our whole lives. Because capitalism isn't just about work anymore, right? Capitalism has infiltrated the entire way that we live our lives. Yeah. It's fundamentally changed how your brain works. Yeah. And so like... for this series to be exploring alienation. and the alienation of capitalism, they can't just focus on work. They also have to point out the ways in which the real world is a world in which we are entirely alienated from ourselves. I keep thinking about...
When Mark S's sister has her baby in this like cabin, they like rent cabins to give birth. And it's like you can then introduce your child to nature by giving birth in this cabin. And it's like you have trees outside your house. Yeah. Yeah. It's so weird. Like when we first meet. Mark's sister, Devin, and his brother-in-law, Rickon, who is this like sort of new agey self-help guy. It's at a foodless dinner party where everybody's talking about how like actually.
It's like we nourish ourselves more by not having food. I forgot about that. That is also about alienation. Yes. Right? Yes. That's also like what... what has happened to us. Yeah, absolutely. We are so alienated from our bodies and the way that we produce food to nourish our bodies that we will have serious... conversations about wellness and how nourishing not eating is. Yeah, it's like an alienation from the basic fact of like you need food to live.
And like the way in which food is produced and cooked and prepared and shared, right? Alienation from all of these things. We see so much more food on the severed floor than we see anywhere else. Oh, that's so interesting. In the show. And the food is always managed, packaged.
highly aesthetic, part of a reward system. There's one moment, which is after that dinner party, his sister makes him a sandwich. Mark's sister makes him a sandwich. And it's this like... moment of like somebody you care for feeding you yeah that's like kind of there to stand in contrast to like everything else which is so consistently and powerfully alienating and like that relationship right is one of the only through lines of a relationship that is like context rich yeah
Like, they have history. And the show evokes that constantly. They've got nicknames and inside jokes and references and little bits. And it's like... That's because you have deep history with each other. Yeah. And almost nobody else anywhere has history with each other in this world. Oh my gosh. What a show. I could go on and on. I could talk about Rickon for another hour. Are you going to buy his book? I'm absolutely going to buy his book, my God.
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