Severance, on Apple Plus (2022, 2025), begins with Mark (Adam Scott) sitting in his car outside the Lumen Corporation, crying. I can relate -- during my office job, a horrible nine months at the Getty Consternation Institute, I cried a lot -- before work, after work, during lunch, while sitting at my desk. But this job takes the humiliation and dehumanization, and takes it to a new level:
Mark has been severed, split into work and life selves. The two selves, his innie and his outtie, have no memory of each other. So he has no idea what goes on in that dark, sinister building. But we do.
He takes an elevator to the sub-basement, the severance wing, endless corridors, painted white with no signs and no decor except for an occasional painting of Company Founder/Messiah Kier performing miracles or punishing sinners.
You're not supposed to wander around anyway, and trying to make a map is strictly forbidden. Innies do not remember anything about their life outside, so from their point of view, the work day ends, they step into the elevator, and immediately step out again for the next work day.
From the innies' point of view, they never leave. Their lives consist entirely of endless white-walled corridors and harsh fluorescent lights. They never see or hear anything about the outside world. This is only a slight exaggeration of the real corporate world, where you aren't supposed to talk about or think about your life outside the office.
They eat Lumen-brand snacks from Lumen vending machines, paid for with Lumen tokens.
They have nothing to read except the multi-volume handbook, where the rules are written as Bible verses:
No outside reading material: "Be content in my words, and dally not in the scholastic pursuits of lesser men."
No sleeping on the job: "No workplace shall be repurposed for slumber."
Their purpose in life: "And I shall whisper to ye dutiful through the ages. In your noblest thoughts and epiphanies shall be my voice. You are my mouth, and through ye, I will whisper on when I am 10 centuries demised."
The outside world is no paradise, either. It's always a gray, cloudy, drizzly late winter. Mark's house, provided by Lumen, is nearly empty, with only a few pieces of furniture and no decorations of any type. He might as well be at work.
The job of the Macrodata Refinement Department is seemingly meaningless: rows of numbers slide by on a screen. You must capture and dispose of those that produce emotions like disgust and fear. Workers have no idea what this is doing; finding errors in computer code, rating movies, murdering people?
But they don't do a lot of searching anyway. They spend most of their time gossiping about office politics, receiving minor perks like finger-traps and waffles, going to the Wellness Center to be psychoanalyzed, or being sent to the Break Room to be broken by repeating a formal apology a thousand times.
More after the break
