How the acclaimed series adapts an 18th-century literary form.
How the acclaimed series adapts an 18th-century literary form
T he AppleTV+ series Severance, which recently concluded its second season, is one of the most thought-provoking prestige dramas of the decade. In case your work/life balance has been too distorted to catch the show: Created by Dan Erickson, the series follows a group of employees at a mysterious company named Lumon Industries who volunteered to “sever” their workaday selves (called “innies”) from their out-of-office selves (“outies”). A chip implanted in their brains activates when they step in and out of the office elevator, segregating the memories of what goes on at work and what goes on outside. Adam Scott, starring in a very different role from the one he had on the sitcom Parks and Recreation, leads the outstanding cast as the innie Mark S., who falls in love with his colleague Helen R. (Britt Lower) — but whose outie, Mark Scout, took the job at Lumon out of grief for his dead wife (Gemma, played by Dichen Lachman).
The show’s depiction of corporate life is a rich vein to mine for larger meanings. One critic calls it “a tidy allegory for the misery of the modern office drone”; Michael M. Rosen and Danya Rosen argue that it “highlights the fundamental difficulty we encounter in truly understanding and empathizing with those who are different from us”; Ross Douthat suggests that it is “a dreamlike reckoning with WASP power and its disappearance.” Whichever of these, or other, intriguing interpretations you prefer, the show renders such modern-day concerns so effectively, and so hypnotically, by resurrecting conventions from the 18th-century genre of gothic fiction. Severance is developing a sub-genre you might call the corporate gothic.
A crash course in literary history: The gothic novel arose in Britain during the late 18th century, starting with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and peaking with works by Matthew Lewis (The Monk, 1796) and Ann Radcliffe (especially The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794). These novels captured readers’ imaginations with medieval settings that appealed to the superstitious, supernatural, and irrational. The action often took place in a continental castle or abbey, with a villainous monk or priest threatening an innocent young woman (think of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, minus the melanin mutations). They also featured mysterious events, objects, or apparitions: Walpole’s readers wondered why an enormous helmet dropped from the sky. Radcliffe’s were transfixed by the mystery of a black veil, and Lewis’s with a bleeding nun who haunted a castle. Nineteenth-century gothic novelists often refreshed the genre by modernizing the settings and incorporating the scientific rather than the supernatural: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is the best-known example. Later that century saw more evolution, but familiar themes, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), not to mention the American innovations of Edgar Allan Poe. Today, the gothic tradition continues through adaptations of old novels and modern variations like The Da Vinci Code, as well as in movies (Nosferatu) and television shows (Stranger Things).
Severance initially seems far removed from the gothic tradition, in large part because of its corporate and modern setting. But in fact, that setting adapts gothic conventions to great effect, transplanting the action from what the literary scholar M. H. Abrams called a “gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels” to characterless corporate headquarters that are still somehow castle-like: enormous and isolated with mazelike hallways and secret rooms. A mysterious corridor looms large. And while sliding panels aren’t important, sliding elevator doors are. Adding to the creepiness of the office building is that, in a variation of the early gothic depiction of Catholicism, Lumon Industries is run by a cult. Severance switches out monks and nuns for a bizarre cult figure named Kier Eagan and an elaborate but obscure mythology that undergirds Lumon’s corporate enterprise and keeps innies obedient, at least most of the time.
What about that damsel in distress, an innocent heroine who endures what Abrams calls “sufferings imposed by . . . a cruel and lustful villain”? She arrives in season two in the character of Gemma; viewers had believed she was dead but, it turns out, Lumon is subjecting her to devious (if not lustful) experiments and psychological torture. Nor is the mystery associated with the gothic missing from Severance — if anything there are too many mysteries. What exactly is Lumon, anyway, and what went on in the ruined factory town we see for one episode of season two? What does the diabolical doctor mean when he warns Mark Scout, “You will kill them all”? And what’s going on with those goats? The abundance of mysteries is why Jonah Goldberg expressed his concern that “Severance has a Lost problem,” a reference to the many unresolved mysteries of the early-’00s ABC series. Yet even that possible shortcoming connects to the gothic tradition: the failure to resolve mysteries convincingly was a common complaint about Ann Radcliffe’s novels.
The most compelling way Severance adapts the gothic is its central concern with identity. The very idea of severing one’s work and free-time self is a clever variation of a classic gothic theme: the doubling of identities. This doubling can refer to “when two or more characters parallel each other in action or personality” as well as “internal doubling, or division within the self to exhibit a duality of character.” In countless gothic novels, characters encounter sinister or ghostly versions or variations of themselves. Dr. Jekyll tries to isolate his evil nature but winds up entirely transformed. James Hogg’s less famous novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), explores this duality through the lens of Protestant theology rather than scientific experimentation, and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be read as the architectural manifestation of this unsustainable division.
The very title of Severance refers to the doubling that the show is all about and which it explores through the emerging conflict between innies and outies. In a recent episode of the podcast Critics at Large, a co-host explained that Severance considers “what it might mean to become two different people who start to develop two different experiences.” The show is so fascinating, though, because that’s not quite right: the innie and the outie are not “two different people.” They are the same person with separate identities and consciousnesses and, therefore, competing desires. They share a body but little else. In season one, the innies act on their fairly basic desire to know more about their outies. They wonder, what kind of a person would sever himself? What do they do when they’re not under the glow of fluorescent lights? The show’s interest in doubling took a complex turn this past season as the separate identities became jealous of each other. This raised bewildering questions, like: If the spouse of a severed employee kisses her husband’s innie, is she cheating on the outie? Innies initially want to break out of their corporate prison — until they realize this would mean the end of existence as they know it. This conflict undergirds the remarkable climax of the season finale, when Mark S. has the chance to fulfill his outie’s happiness, but chooses his own.
It is a testament to Erickson’s achievement that while Severance uses so many gothic conventions and explores a central gothic theme, nobody would accuse the show of being slavishly derivative. The show works because it uses a classic literary foundation to build its own identity.