Apple TV's Severance: when work really blows your mind

"Work" is the poor, proletariat cousin to a fabled "career" and we spend the majority of our adult years demarcating between the ergonomic reality of nine-to-five and that precious other to be found in the sanctuary of our private hours.

We have work friends, we attend work functions, we drink work coffee, we wear work clothes, we drive work cars. The term is loaded with meaning, a qualifier for something valuable yet slightly inferior.

A work wife may be a wonderful woman but we never chose to grow old together.

The irony is, of course, we do.

So many decades are spent in those perennially poorly lit spaces, by the time we qualify for that gold watch and a kick out the door, we may be hard-pressed to differentiate between our "work" selves and our "real" selves.

In new series Severance, the two are defined as "innies" and "outies" and, literally, never the twain shall meet.

The Apple TV+ original takes the work-life balance debate to sinister new levels and its timing could not be more exquisite.

Written and created by Dan Erickson and directed with Charlie Kaufman sensibilities by Ben Stiller, Severance is premised on the disturbing concept of workers undergoing a surgical procedure which eliminates their ability to remember their private lives while at work and vice versa when off the clock.

This perverse encroachment of the corporate into the personal comes at a time when the Western world grapples with how the whole work thing informs our sense of fulfillment. The pandemic has drawn this new culture of complaint to the surface, as it manifests itself though such contemporaneous phenomenon as the Great Resignation, where employees are walking off the job en masse to find satisfaction elsewhere.

Just this week, a report issued by National Australia Bank indicates one in five Australians quit their jobs within the past year. The results of the survey of 2000 people suggest the movement could be attributed to people believing work was failing to provide a sense of purpose.

Precisely where the departmental dystopia of Severance comes in.

The very slick yet decidedly shady Lumon Industries seems to have hit upon the perfect method of removing such angst from at least some of their (consenting) employees by effectively splitting their lives in two. There's no Mondayitis on the eerily quiet floor where protagonist Mark (Adam Scott) and his colleagues toil for eight hours a day because, for them, the weekend never really happened. For them, work never really ends.

Mark's decision to undergo the controversial procedure (the insertion of a computer chip into the brain) seems prompted by the death of his wife in a car crash. His outie drinks to cope with the tragedy and the level of disdain for Lumon's unprecedented reach into the lives of its workers is played out when he goes to a dinner party at his sister's place. The woke attendees view the deluded soul with the suspicion and pity they might apply to an unfortunate of a 19th-century freak show.

And for all its encapsulation of modernity (stylistically, the series is a noirish meld of Frank Lloyd Wright and Gattaca), Severance harks back to that American era when corporations enjoyed a stranglehold over their indentured workforce. Mark, for example, lives in subsidised company housing, in a chilly company town where half the population are Lumon employees. They even use Lumon tokens to procure snacks from vending machines, as if buying vittles at a company store with company currency in coal-mining Kentucky circa 1870.

Mark's melancholia as an outie and his increasingly erratic performance as an innie (noticed coolly by his boss, played by Patricia Arquette) soon give way to good old intrigue, when his former (work) best friend, Petey, turns up on the lam after apparently ridding himself of the brain insert, a privilege thought impossible by Mark and his underwhelming team of data-retrieval misfits (its newest recruit finding her attempts to resign thwarted at every turn).

From here, we go down the Lumon rabbit hole, a rewarding journey thanks to Erickson's sharp script and Stiller's steady hand, the multi-talented entertainer having come a long way since his directorial debut with 1994's Reality Bites, itself a sort of takedown of corporate America's trespass into personal freedom and creativity.

It's also from here Severance explores just how much human real estate corporations/governments have been permitted to annexe. Those who have undergone the series' titular procedure have become little else than prisoners, their subjugation evoking the "freedom is slavery" mantra from Orwell's 1984 or even the cast-iron insult "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Works sets you free) on the gates of Auschwitz. Severance's biggest influence might even be Margaret Atwood's serialised e-novel of 2015, The Heart Goes Last, where economic refugees sign up to live one half of their existence in privatised jails and soon begin to fetishise the lives of their unknown "alternates".

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In this vein, Severance forms part of canon of pop culture content where the rights of the individual clash with those entities which require their labour to function. Billy Wilder summed it up in the famous shot of Jack Lemmon amid a sea of insurance firm desks in 1960's The Apartment and Mike Judge did it 40 years later when a hypnotised employee's newfound nihilism earned him multiple promotions in 1999's Office Space.

Notwithstanding a smattering of WFH or maybe even a lottery win (Powerball tonight, people!), it seems we're still at least a couple of generations away from excising ourselves from the office, so we can at least dull the pain with quality escapism such as Severance.

If nothing else, we can talk about it at work.