WFH (WORKING FROM HELL

WFH (WORKING FROM HELL)

Severance and the Horrors of Work-Life Balance

Apple TV’s Severance opens on a bird’s-eye shot of a disoriented Helly R. (Britt Lower) lying facedown on a conference table. An unknown voice comes through the room’s speaker, asking, “Who are you?” The voice is cool, slightly upbeat, verging on automated.

Helly looks around and scoffs: “That’s the first question?” Then she goes silent. She can’t answer it. This realization is as unsettling for us as viewers as it is for Helly. We don’t know who she is, or where she is, much less why she’s waking up on top of a conference table. She starts banging on what seems to be the room’s only door. The voice remains steady, ignoring her cries by moving through the rest of the questions––such as, “What is, or was, the color of your mother’s eyes?”––none of which Helly can answer. The show’s lead, Mark S. (Adam Scott), comes out from behind the door after the last question.

“That’s a perfect score,” he says.

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Severance first aired in February of this year, quickly becoming the number-one moststreamed series in March. Throughout the spring semester, friends and relatives couldn’t stop referencing the show, which gained popularity just as employees began expressing a desire to continue working from home, rather than returning to the workplace. Severance, then, seemed to capture this cultural push toward finding ways to maintain personal autonomy in the context of our work.

As Mark begins to explain what he calls the surgical “severance procedure” to Helly, we learn that the conference room belongs to Lumon Industries. Anyone who chooses to work at Lumon agrees to be “severed,” a process through which their perceptual chronologies are split. This splitting ultimately separates the “work” and “life” versions of each employee: A person’s “innie,” or work-self, has no memory of their outside life, while their “outie” has no memory of the workplace. Helly, then, has just been severed.

The gravity of Mark’s explanation––that Helly’s innie will experience life as a perpetual series of workdays––seems to hit her exactly as it hits us. Beyond the questions we have about the procedure, this moment endows Severance with a sudden sense of grief––an immediate and all-consuming sadness for innie-Helly’s loss of self (or at least, her emotional access to her outie’s self). It’s a feeling that lingers throughout the rest of the season, structuring the series around the question of how we might be able to grieve for parts of ourselves we’ll never know. Ultimately, the show’s horror is wrapped up in these pendulum swings between self and other, and the losses we face when we exclude ourselves from our own minds.

Mark, oblivious, drones on about “the work-life balance.”

“To start, imagine yourself as a seesaw—” Helly throws a speaker at his forehead.

She asks Mark if she has the option to leave this new job at Lumon.

“Well, every time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back,” Mark says, raising the issue that seems to orbit the rest of the series: The “you” who finds herself in the office and the “you” who chooses to return each day represent two versions of Helly (her innie and her outie). By nature of the severance procedure, each “self” has no knowledge of the other, and thus, Mark’s instinct to conflate the two suddenly feels wrong. The question of what constitutes “Helly” and what constitutes “not Helly” is surprisingly complicated, as her two selves are distinct, yet unified within a single body.

Halfway through the first episode, for example, Helly asks to leave Lumon. She walks toward the door quickly at first, then pauses to stare through its window into the stairwell. The camera shifts to watch her face through the window, and then again to show us her view of the stairs. This back-and-forth of the camera seems to mimic the feeling of separation between Helly’s selves. We see her innie still stuck inside Lumon, and then the empty stairway––where we expect her outie to be as soon as she opens the door. Yet, her outie isn’t there. In the same way that Helly can’t access this other piece of herself as an innie, the camera refuses to give us access to it, too.

This is exemplified when Helly does walk out the door, only to end up back in the same hallway. This happens again and again, even as she runs at the door, attempting to fling herself through it. The disruption of space seems to intensify the mental fracturing between Helly’s innie and outie: As the inside of Lumon starts to feel more like a self-perpetuating maze than any kind of reality, it mimics the way in which innie-Helly is trapped in an endless interiority, never finding the door to the outside world.

“Am I dead?” she says to Mark. “This isn’t like, hell or something?”

“No,” Mark says.

“Then why can’t I leave?”

“Well you did leave, just now. Out into the stairwell at least. You left, but you came back,” Mark says.

This, of course, only confuses Helly more. In conjunction with her face-down introduction at the beginning of the episode, this moment shows us how little control Helly seems to have over her own body, much less her mind.

This is not only the case for Helly, but every character in the show. At the end of the episode, Mark’s outie walks to his car to drive home. He finds a note and gift card reward on his dashboard saying he slipped and cut his forehead at work. Yet, we already know the cut is from Helly, and the note makes us wonder how often an innie’s narratives are erased to fit the structure of Lumon’s world. Mark simply touches the blue bandaid on his forehead.

In this sense, Mark’s initial “seesaw” reference is partially realized––each end of the seesaw is connected to the other by the same pole, but from wherever we sit, we can’t reach the other side. If an innie is on one side and her outie is on the other, each self is connected by a singular body––injuries sustained by the innie are still felt by the outie. And yet, despite this connective tissue, they come to feel completely discordant.

Not only is Helly separated from herself on a cognitive level, but also a physical one: things as simple as the effects of rest or relaxation become tasks for her innie to imagine, rather than experience. In one episode of the show, for example, Helly’s innie asks Mark how he deals with the inherent loss of experience that comes with being an innie––things like sleep, or weekends.

Mark responds, “I find it helps to focus on the effects of sleep since we don’t get to experience it.”

This moment reminded me of Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel argues that we are more than just our neural and physical processes, and that all organisms have some subjective conscious experience separate from their actions. He writes that, if we assume bats, for example, have experiences, we inherently assume there “is something that it is like to be a bat.” There are qualia, or properties of experience, we can imagine about bats––what it might be like to fly, or echolocate––but we will never completely understand their experience of simply being. This may seem obvious, but it comes to feel terrifying in the context of Severance, where the real horror lies in each character’s struggle not just to understand other organisms, but to know what it is like to truly have access to themselves (even basic actions, like sleep). Thus, on an even more essential level than understanding themselves, characters yearn to be––to simply experience life without daily interruptions to their own existence.

In this sense, Mark’s comment about “the effects of sleep” reminds us of the grief present within this disconnection from one’s own mind, body, and self-experience: for lost time, lost agency, and knowledge of the self. The remainder of the show stays laden with this loss; as Severance progresses, we learn that Mark initially opted to undergo the severance procedure as a means of avoiding coping with the death of his wife. While Mark’s innie has no knowledge of this, we as viewers associate the workplace itself with his unprocessed grief. Just as Nagel reminds us that we inherently lack a full understanding of another organism’s experience, we are always aware that Mark himself lacks a complete understanding of his own mind.

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In Severance, rather than holding two opposing beliefs, characters hold two versions of the same self within one mind and body. The result is a constant maintenance of two states of being. It’s exhausting, both for the characters and for us as viewers, as we’re forced to hold the doubling of each character within our own bodies, constantly fighting our inherent human instinct to unify them.

In one scene, Lumon’s therapist, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), offers an employee, Irving (John Turturro), a wellness session. As they sit in the wellness room, Ms. Casey turns up the volume on the bird songs playing in the background. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath through her nose, as if to say, “Settle in.”

Each time I’ve rewatched this scene, I’ve unconsciously taken a breath as soon as Ms. Casey does––it’s almost reflective, like a yawn, signaling to my own body that it might get some rest from the tension which saturates the rest of the show.

Ms. Casey tells Irving that outside of work, he is “an exemplary person,” and that she’s going to give him more information about his outie.

“These facts are not to be shared outside this room,” she says. “But for now, they’re yours to enjoy.”

And with that, our rest is over. The scene reminds us that while Ms. Casey is technically presenting Irving with facts about himself, they seem more like facts about a complete stranger. This concept of a split-self seems to literalize the term “cognitive dissonance,” or the psychological conflict when one simultaneously holds two opposing beliefs. As human beings, we seek consistency within ourselves and others. Thus, when we hold dissonance within our minds, we often come to feel stressed, anxious, uncomfortable, and depressed. This stress often appears as physical discomfort––an anxiety that insists upon making itself known through and within the body.

This discomfort is emphasized when Irving smiles and laughs in response to one of his outie’s traits.

“That’s ten points off. You have ninety points remaining,” Ms. Casey says. “Please don’t speak.”

She tells Irving he should not show preference for one fact over another. His expression twists into confusion, but his body remains relatively motionless throughout this moment and the rest of the scene. He sits in his chair with his hands on his knees, his body seeming to tense up with each fact, working hard not to react. Thus, even given information about themselves, each piece of the self must resist humanizing the other. We can almost feel the effort it takes for Irving to remain still, the desire to know himself oozing from every one of his pores. Yet, as Ms. Casey reminds him, he must maintain this dissonance, this separation between his two selves.

In this scene, Ms. Casey presents Irving with a slight gesture toward autonomy, but takes it back just as quickly as it arrived. The moment forces Irving’s innie to work hard to maintain his composure, a brief unbalancing of the metaphorical work-life balance seesaw Mark referenced in the beginning of the series.

Even Ms. Casey’s office seems to mimic this perpetual balancing act between inside and outside worlds, with its fake trees and background chirps of bird songs. The rest of the Lumon offices are characterized by fluorescent lighting, maze-like hallways, and carpets that look like fake grass, again highlighting the ways in which innies are constantly presented with the illusion of outside experience, only to be reminded that they will never actually understand it. The lights offer an image of sunlight, the fake grass a gesture toward realness that will never be felt. In fact, the interior of the Lumon offices seem more bright and lively than the outside world––the “real world”––in the show, which is most often shown in wintery colors and dark lighting. For viewers, this effect confuses the boundaries between work and life, a gnarling together of spaces which only heightens the stomach-churning horror of each innie’s loss of the world.

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Throughout Severance, it’s difficult not to see the workplace as a site of loss. Characters become increasingly fed up with their experience of dissonance as the season progresses. Moments like Irving’s wellness session, in which he is directly confronted with his loss of self, seem to push characters toward the question of whether severance was ever in their best interest. Even outies start wondering about the lives of their innies––Mark begins trying to leave his innie warnings about Lumon, which his innie can’t decipher. In this way, one version of each character becomes more like a caricature of the other than an autonomous being. In fact, in the show’s second episode, one employee (played by Zach Cherry) gleefully lists the rewards Lumon offers innies when they reach certain benchmark goals. Finger traps, erasers, caricature drawings of themselves. By the end of the show, this last example feels more horrific than anything else––a reminder of the sense that each innie’s mind is being slowly pulled out from within them. Eventually, it comes to feel like all they’ll be left with is an image of themselves, a haunting sense of deja vu for a piece of their lives they have no way of knowing.

Severance’s horror in the idea of making work into one’s life is also reproduced for the show’s audiences. While episodes blend seamlessly into one another, the very nature of a weekly-release television series disrupts formal continuity––a reflection of the internal dissonance characters experience throughout the season. The screen and camera themselves seem to enhance this disruption, always highlighting our distance from each character. At the same time, in watching the show, we’re inviting the workplace (even if it isn’t our own) into our lives. Thus, we simultaneously experience a distance from the show via the constructed lens of the camera, and effectively erase any separation from the idea of work-life balance we might have otherwise had. The horror of the show, then, comes when we realize that we’ve been trapped in the same cycle as the characters in the show: one in which we want to separate ourselves from our actions or work, but come to find it impossible to compartmentalize work and life. Even if we could, Severance makes us question whether we’d really want to do so at all. In this sense, we experience a grief of our own, wrapped up in the complexities of trying to distinguish who we are from what we do.

RACHEL CARLSON B'23 is definitely watching TV.