Exploitation Isn’t a Plot Twist

On where Severance Season 2 goes wrong

I finally finished watching the second half of Severance season 2. I loved the first season, with its brilliant vision of the workplace as an alienating zone of bizarre and pointless oppression. I was less taken with the first six episodes of the second season, which moved away from the office and from what made the show unique.

The last four episodes of the second season continued on the downward trajectory. They also, I think, inadvertently demonstrate how progressive politics and analysis can be hijacked by, and undermined by, conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking.

(There’s going to be spoilers if you care about that sort of thing.)

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Work vs. narrative

The original high concept of Severance has a Black Mirror simplicity; big tech company Lumen has developed a process that creates what is essentially induced multiple personal disorder. They split your consciousness, so the one half of you literally doesn’t know what the other half is doing. The process is used to create a captive workforce; supposedly for security reasons, workers at Lumen are severed into innies and outies. The first exist only on the job, and know nothing outside of it. When they go down the elevator to the outside, they become “outies”, who remember nothing of what happened at work.

Innies, when they first “wake up” on the job, are essentially innocent amnesiac children. They are infantilized and radically disempowered. They can’t communicate with the outside world, and have no access to books or news or anything except company marketing materials and what their bosses tell them.

It’s a situation designed for exploitation, and they are duly exploited. Their bosses condescend to them and bully them. They can’t quit; if they try, their outies just march them back into the office, and they’re trapped again. It’s a stunning metaphor for the way that workers contract to enslave and imprison themselves for eight hours a day (or more), and how this supposedly freely chosen unfreedom is still grossly unfree.

Part of the brilliance of the show is that it captures the way that part of the horror of work is its grinding blandness; the innies are always, eternally stuck in the same windowless cubicle farm, staring a screens, performing meaningless tasks. Sometimes they wander through the halls to another department; sometimes they get little parties; sometimes they are offered extra pencils. They read company propaganda for entertainment; they narc on each other for sterile, meaningless advantage. The oppression is in part that nothing happens. Innies have no life. Work, and oppression, is all they are.

Severance’s first season feels original and weird and funny and ominous in part because the static anti narrative of prison/oppression subvert and undermine the demands of narrative which usually drive television drama. The innies have been robbed of narrative; time inside loops rather than moving forward. It’s up to the outies to have adventures, to discover plots, to try to figure out where the series is supposed to go. The innies do not have enough power over their own lives to make those lives go anywhere.

Break out to conspiracy

Through solidarity the innies do manage—in the spectacular season 1 closing episode—to form a resistance and to break out. They take over their outies’ bodies/consciousnesses and seize, thereby, the narrative of their own selves.

In some sense, the series should have ended there, with a cliff hanger and a question mark. Severance was about the oppression and alienation of work; the innie’s, in staging a revolution, overthrow the old order, and break out of the office, which is also breaking out of the bounds of the series and the non narrative they’ve been given. What comes next is not interpretable or imaginable in the terms of their former lives; they have moved into a new paradigm, and to explore it, they would need a new show.

That’s sort of what they get—though the new show is a lot more familiar than the old one was.

The second season spends more and more time out of the office, pursuing the less static (and yet more tedious) pathways of conspiracy. Mark (Adam Scott) is not just a random cubicle worker whose wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman) died in a car crash. Instead, Gemma was abducted by Lumen, and the entire office set up is an elaborate effort to use them to test the limits of Lumen severance technology. Similarly their boss Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) is not just a minor-functionary-from-hell; she’s a scientific genius who developed the Lumen severance process. Everything means something; even the goats wandering around the Lumen offices are implicated in nefarious plans.

The problem here isn’t that corporations are portrayed as bad and secretive actors; obviously corporations are bad and secretive actors in many cases. The problem instead is that the steady drumbeat of plot, the endlessly elaborated question of who did what to whom and how and for which nefarious motives, throws up so much narrative dust that you start to lose track of the actually important thing—which is the experience of the oppressed. The machinations of the powerful become the focus of interest and ultimately of pleasure, while the people who are hurt become almost an afterthought.

Sexual exploitation or plot twist

The clearest illustration of the problem I think involves a romantic and sexual subplot in the first half of the second season. Innie Mark through the first season is slowly falling in love with new hire and determined rebel Helly R. (Britt Lower.) Helly’s outie, it turns out, is the daughter of the Luman CEO Jame Eagan; she became an innie in order to publicize and legitimize the process ot the public and investors.

In the early part of season 2, we eventually learn, outie Helly replaces innie Helly in order to spy on the rebel innies and subvert their efforts to gain freedom and dignity. In the course of her espionage, outie Helly sleeps with innie Mark, who thinks that she’s innie Helly.

Outie Helly’s actions are condemned; she’s a bad guy and is seen as a traitor and a betrayer. She isn’t, though, really presented as a rapist. Mark is a bit rueful about having slept with the wrong Helly (and he apologizes to inner Helly), but he’s not traumatized, and no one seems to think he might be traumatized. This despite the fact that he’s been coerced into sex under false pretences without his consent. Which is rape.

This is in part an instance of Hollywood having trouble acknowledging or imagining that men can be raped, especially by women. But it’s enabled by the fact that the second season is much more interested in the next plot twist and the next conspiracy revelation than it is in the exploitation and oppression of its characters.

Workplace sexual harassment and violence is a pervasive and ugly problem precisely because workers are systematically disempowered; bosses have great power to control workers’ bodies, their time, their livelihood. When your boss targets you, you often can’t just walk away; nor can you necessarily report them. You rely on them for income, and you are supposed to be obedient. That makes it extremely difficult to fight back if your “superiors” harass, assault, or rape you.

The innies in Severance should be especially vulnerable; again, they have little experience, no way to communicate with the outside world, no way to escape. An unscrupulous supervisor could assault an innie and no one would ever know. A plotline like that would be a terrifying way to illustrate, and highlight, a terrifying reality.

Instead, though, the show treats sexual assault as a cute bed trick plot point in part of the complicated love pentangle involving innie Mark, outie Mark, innie Helly, outie Helly, and Gemma. The entertaining narrative contrivances of revelation, conspiracy, and soap opera overwrite the brute dynamics of coercion, disempowerment, and violence. The show weaves a tangled web involving kidnapping and sexual dynamics—Gemma is imprisoned in part to take advantage of and manipulate her relationship with Mark. But the tangled web is designed to obscure the most obvious, brutal aspects of the relationship between disempowerment and sex. The real implications of coercion dissolve in a fog of detail.

The pleasure of knowing vs. the power of resisting

You can see a similar confusion/displacement in the series’ last episode. There is an extended sequence in which Helly appeals to other workers to stand with her against their supervisor; “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it!” It’s a rabble-rousing, pro union call for solidarity—and should by rights be the emotional high point and resolution of the series. But it takes place almost off to the side; the main action is Mark (innie and outie) attempting to find and free Gemma, and the series of revelations and twists that enable or follow from that (including what the goats or for and what Mark is doing all day when he selects different sets of numbers on the video screen.) Hidden agendas and revelations and twisty plot pleasures push the plight of workers, and the resistance of workers, off to the side.

That dynamic is a problem for actual worker’s resistance movements as well. Exposing and analyzing the (often hidden!) tactics of those in power is an important part of left politics and left strategy. This can make conspiracy theories feel appealing, or make them seem like part of the path to liberation. But conspiracy theories have their own logic and their own pleasures, and those pleasures—the sensation of being in the know, the rush of being the only one who understands truly How Bad Things Are—can end up erasing the actual experiences of the oppressed, and can erode the solidarity needed to address it.

Severance started out as a unique, weird, funny, and affecting way to think about the disempowerment and misery of work—a misery that is inseparable from tedium. But tedium (by definition!) doesn’t have much of a narrative arc. Drama serials under capitalism demand plot, event, romance, adventure; stuff has to happen. Eventually, the show bowed to the default consensus that labor exploitation is not all that fun to watch day in day out, week after week, in part because most of us get enough of it on the job.