The shift from the outward-facing politics of severance to the intrapersonal desires of the severed is the political problem of season two in a nutshell.
In a climactic, chaotic moment from the season two finale of Apple TV+’s Severance, Helly R. (Britt Lower) climbs onto a desk and attempts to rally the newly introduced Choreography and Merriment team to her side, calling out: “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it!” It is a beautiful line. It is also exactly how the show’s seemingly radical labor politics cave in on themselves.
For those unfamiliar with Severance’s premise, the title refers to a neurosurgical procedure by which individuals have their psyches split, creating a separate, memory-less self who exists only to labor on the severed floors of Lumon Industries, a mysterious biotech corporation founded by Kier Eagan in 1865 (and yes, that date should make you pause). Severed individuals thus contain within themselves both their “innie” and “outie,” whose memories are held separate even as aspects of their personalities and their romantic and erotic attachments seem to bleed across severed lines—a possibility that animates much of the second season’s investment in natural and surgical reintegration as a means of reconciling these two divided selves. Over the course of season two, it is revealed that Lumon is experimenting with expanded possibilities for severance, outsourcing all of life’s less pleasant obligations and experiences to an innie whose pain, grief, and exhaustion need never be acknowledged or experienced as real. In Lumon’s dream world, man is not simply alienated from his labor, but so too, they promise, can man be severed from root canals, pregnancy, airplane rides, and more—with just a bit of casual brain surgery!
While the project of creating a population designed for little but labor and pain should stop audiences in their tracks on its own terms, so too should it mark and amplify the significance of Lumon’s founding in 1865, which marked the end of the American Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet for the everyday viewer, the date of Lumon’s founding was easy to miss—a passing detail dropped early in the first season’s dizzying worldbuilding. Indeed, this “raise and retreat” style of narration characterizes much of the show’s politics, and I argue that it becomes particularly striking in the generic shift between Severance’s two seasons, as season one’s vision of a more radical labor politics is forsaken in favor of a redemptive romance arc that prioritizes the white, straight couple over the multiracial, queer collective.
As the grand-scale worldbuilding and thought-provoking possibilities of science fiction as a genre narrow to focus on the individual and the couple in season two, viewers are left wondering to what extent the radicalism was ever really “in there.” As one Tumblr user mockingly put it, did people really believe there was “a revolutionary Marxist commentary on apple tv+ (lmao)?” As the Marx I will deploy shortly reveals, I find myself guilty (yet shameless) as charged, and I hardly think myself a naïve viewer for following the tantalizing ethical questions season one raised to their seemingly logical conclusions. But the corporate crossovers that cropped up around the show’s long-awaited second season release—from ZipRecruiter’s and State Farm’s Severance-themed commercials to IKEA’s marketing of its Mittzon office furniture through a recreation of the Lumon offices—suggest that the quoted Tumblr user was right in some ways. The show’s politics are tentative enough to leave Severance as a cultural object compatible enough with capitalist culture to be redeployed for its own ends.
The tentativeness of the show’s narration is nowhere more obvious than in its tepid handling of the imbrication of race and labor at the level of both corporation and character. From Lumon’s 1865 founding, the biotech company became the fortress from which Kier waged his “eternal war against pain,” in large part through the balancing of man’s Four Tempers—rhetoric and ideology that recall the long history of American eugenics. By the time of the show, Lumon seems poised to declare victory through its perfection of a procedure that would see all pain and labor foisted onto an underclass of those deemed less-than-human—“fucking animals,” in the words of the Lumon heiress, Helena Eagan. Yet when the violently anti-Black American histories these dynamics invoke threaten to surface in the narrative, the show hesitates, pauses, pulls back just enough to keep the white viewer comfortable.
In season one, for instance, a Black worker’s celebration for good work requires him to don a mask of Kier’s white face to conquer the tempers, but the implications of this enforced racial crossing are drowned out in the sensationalized absurdism of the “waffle party” ritual. In season two, the unsevered Black manager of the severed floor, Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is subjected to a litany of humiliations, beginning with a “gift” of the Kier series paintings rendered in blackface—or, in the words of the Board, “inclusively re-canonicalized paintings intended to help you see yourself in Kier.” The scene that follows is beautifully, subtly performed by Tillman and his oft-inscrutable scene partner Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander), but in its quietness, it allows the showrunners to sidestep the responsibility of follow-through, leaving the implications to the viewer’s interpretation. Without negating the value of interpretive work writ large, I suggest that, especially by season two, the show’s “raise and retreat” narration functions less as an invitation to the pedagogically productive work of analysis than as a tactic of political neutrality.
In the more narratively and generically experimental world of season one, the horrifying implications of what it might mean to literalize Marx’s oft-cited (sometimes even accurately) critiques of the objectification and estrangement of man-as-worker under modern capitalism are front and center. Viewers are shaken when they realize that Mark Scout (Adam Scott) is under constant surveillance by the unsevered director of the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) floor and inventor of the severance procedure, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). Where his innie knows Harmony as his supervisor, Mark’s outie has been fed a different story, and the implications of this knowledge imbalance are chilling. Rather than hesitating or pulling back before questions can coalesce into critique, here the show explores its own world, revealing the intricate and myriad mechanisms in place at Lumon to prevent severed workers from communicating with the outside world, keeping them isolated and vulnerable.
Yet what those isolated innies do have is each other, and season one tracks how a newfound sense of solidarity, community, and even love (both platonic and romantic) between innies culminates in the MDR worker rebellion. Specifically, the burgeoning relationship between macrodata refiner Irving B. (John Turturro) and Optics and Design worker Burt G. (Christopher Walken) is the catalyst for something like cross-departmental class consciousness to emerge. Irving’s queer sexual awakening—his halting but determined questioning of the presumptive self-evidence of his own heterosexuality—mirrors the journey he and the other severed workers follow to interrogate the Lumon narratives they have been fed. Once a true believer in the cult-like gospel of Kier that keeps severed workers obedient, Irving begins to doubt, much as Burt and his O&D colleagues are forced to question the rumors they had been fed about the inhumanity of MDR workers. Love sparks worker solidarity. Importantly, though, the proffered vision of love in season one is a capaciously queer one—one that includes the couple, yes, but that also seeps outward, allowing viewers to recognize the willingness of Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) to put his body on the line for his MDR coworkers and sacrifice a second chance to see his wife and child in the outside world for what it is: an act of love.
In the second season, however, the sexual (and specifically heterosexual) relationship between Mark S. and Helly shifts the narrative away from earlier visions of love’s communitarian possibilities and into the individualizing register of neoliberalism. This pivot illuminates the complex humanity of the severed characters, but only at the expense of the show’s more radical labor politics. The class and the community give way to the couple and collectivism to jealous individualism—raise then retreat. Helly/Helena find themselves battling over a shared body and a shared enthrallment with Mark, who is at war with himself. His innie is romantically committed to Helly/Helena, while his outie fights to destroy Lumon to save his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), whom he and the viewers learn is not actually dead as Mark believed, but has instead been imprisoned and tortured at Lumon for years.
Throughout season two, fans speculated wildly about innie and outie attachments and waged wars over “ships” (preferred romantic pairings)—a practice encouraged by cast, crew, and narrative alike. While the drama and triangulations caused by Mark and Helly’s romance—a narrative arc that was, interestingly, only added to the script later based on the chemistry between Scott and Lower—allowed the writers to ask interesting questions about what transcends severance, the muddled, often self-contradictory answers proposed fail to satisfy.
For the first several episodes of season two, outie Helena infiltrates the severed floor, posing as innie Helly to surveil the severed workers after their attempted rebellion. Helena’s arc culminates in her rape of the unsuspecting Mark S. during a Lumon-sponsored camping trip in “Woe’s Hollow,” followed by her unmasking as Helena by Irving. The fact that the sexual act is rape, however, goes largely unacknowledged. Sure, there is a brief mention of the way Mark, Irving, and Dylan were all victims of Helena’s deception, but it is Helly and only Helly who can give voice to her disgust at the violations of her bodily autonomy.
This shift from the outward-facing politics of severance to the intrapersonal desires of the severed is the political problem of season two in a nutshell. Severance provides a particularly striking illustration of this shift, but the season two problem might also be thought of as the problem of streaming success: while a first season, often conceptualized and drafted outside of the constraints of the platform or network’s oversight, might take greater risks in the kinds of questions and possibilities it raises, its success threatens to doom its future. Having proved itself capable of moving beyond a niche audience, Severance earned itself greater investment from Apple—complete with promotional events, influencer swag, and fan outreach across social media—but that buy-in demands its own return on the investment. The interesting questions of season one are resolved into politically neutral, widely palatable answers. Thus, the white, heterosexual couple replaces the laboring class as the locus of narrative investment, and philosophical musings on what it means to be severed supersede the radical aim of destroying the means of doing this to future workers. It could have been an interesting moment to explore in-world political ambivalence. Instead, the showrunners try to have it both ways—to claim Helly’s ardent defense of innie existence as a moment of radical critique without acknowledging that the continued existence of innies necessitates the continued existence of Lumon as corporation, of severance as a procedure, and of the horrifying abuses inherent in the system (including the kind her own outie perpetrated).
Let us return to Helly’s rallying cry: “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it!” Here we see the consequences of a sci-fi world that literalizes Marx’s claims that “in the very act of production [the worker] was estranging himself from himself,” that “he feels at home [only] when he is not working” and that his labor is “therefore not voluntary, but coerced.” Insofar as this world can create neurosurgically split selves, it has written itself into a political corner as the generic stakes and expectations shift from the questions raised in season one to the romantic (ir)resolutions of season two. To affirm the dignity and fullness of the lives of the severed is, in Helly’s articulation, to fight for their continued existence—part-time as it may be. Whereas the metaphorically split worker might be reconciled through revolution, reclaiming his relationship to his labor and its products, to himself, and to his full species-being, what happens to a surgically split one?
The process of reintegration holds open the possibility of merging memories and consciousness, but the narrative’s newly centralized love triangle refuses the affective sufficiency of such reconciliation. To restore Mark’s wholeness would be to throw the separate erotic entanglements of his innie and outie into queer crisis. And in a season that has staked its politics of humanization on love and desire, a revolutionary politics that elevates the collective over the couple simply…falls to the wayside, left to the crowds of mostly Black workers from Choreography and Merriment who exist only to be swayed by Helly R. to hold the floor as she and Mark run off hand-in-hand into the metaphorical sunset, heist movie music drowning out the screams of the long-imprisoned woman of color abandoned to a freedom that looks like anything but.
Emily Coccia is the Robert A. Oden, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at Carleton College. Focusing on nineteenth-century genres of working-class and mass-popular literature, her first book project considers how American working women’s fannish reception practices allowed them to envision queer futures and cultivate spaces for pleasure and intimacy. In her free time, she can be found walking her dog or searching for new TV shows featuring strong female leads and homoerotic subtext.
Thumbnail photo curtesy of Apple TV+