Dalya Eichler, Photographer and Staff Writer
Season two of Apple TV’s Severance just aired and the media is wholly captivated by it. And why wouldn’t they be? Can you imagine living in a world where your consciousness is split? Where your day to day experience is only partially remembered? Severance does just that.
The show follows four characters who are all employees at the same company and have undergone a surgery to split their consciousness between their job and personal life. In doing so, they completely separate their work life, which is set at Lumon Industries, and home life. When at work, all the characters know one another, but once they leave, they do not remember anything from their work space, and vice versa.
Although the show is framed as a dystopian society, while watching it, I wondered how far off it may actually be from an approaching reality?
Recently, there was an ad campaign in Grand Central Station promoting the release of the second season. The campaign portrayed the characters’ ‘innies,’ or work selves, in a clear encasing, acting as they would at their office – at their cubicles doing work and chatting. Anyone at the station could approach the glass, but the actors ignored the presence of the audience. The contrast of innies and outies, cast and crowd, was a brilliant way of bringing the show to real life.
That’s because the campaign brought the two halves to interact without the innies’ awareness of the outside world, which is a huge plot point in the show. Watching the show is essentially watching the inside and outside lives of the main characters, without much interaction of the two. The campaign brought this lifestyle closer to reality, dropping it in the center of real time happenings.
This split conscious theme from the show can also be seen on social media nowadays. “My 5-9 after my 9-5” is a current trend online, depicting the two sides of someone’s day to day work and home life. People showcase their work lives online, including what they wear, eat and do. They then show this in contrast with their home, changing out of work clothes, modifying their mentality and shifting the energy through the switch in space.
The idea of a work voice is also seen in Severance, and is posed in an eerie manner. Watching the voices of the actors differ slightly when they were at work versus when they were out was similar to that of the typical customer service voice. There are many jobs, such as those in customer service or even news reporters, where people naturally shift their voice slightly, whether it is to captivate consumers or sound more friendly.
The show takes on an unsettling tone. With its minimalist design, two faced bosses and themes of grief and sadness, it does not make this kind of life seem ideal. Although the show depicts the dangers of what this split consciousness can cause, I can’t help but wonder if people would still want to live such a life: balancing the heaviness one deals with at home because of work thoughts yet the distraction one has at work because of what may be happening at home.
Still, the show has captivated thousands of viewers; as much as it may be disturbing, watchers cannot seem to get enough. That may be because there is a lot to say about dystopian stories. Are they attainable scenarios? Is the world on its way to a dystopian-like future? Are they a bunch of conspiracy theorists raving about what will never happen?
How do you reflect when seeing a world such as the one depicted in Severance? What is its purpose? Why are people writing a story such as this one? For now there is no single correct answer as to the show’s purpose, but it does leave an impact on the watcher, making them consider how they interact with the different faculties of life.