"Severance" has no central mystery

The smash Apple TV show about double lives takes a darker turn.

“Office building lobby,” Carol M. Highsmith, between 1980 and 1990. (Library of Congress)

Note: Spoilers for Season 2 of Apple’s TV show “Severance” and some discussion of sexual assault are included below.

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Dreamers and dreams never meet. But sometimes dreams control the dreamers’ bodies for a while.

In James Thurber’s classic 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Mitty snaps in and out of reality as he runs errands around Waterbury, Conn. In his daydreams, he pilots an eight-engine Navy hydroplane through a deadly storm as his real physical body drives his very real wife into town. She chides him for driving too fast. Too fast? The brave pilot Mitty? “He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd.”

Later, Mitty the bumbling husband disappears into a chair in a hotel lobby while his wife goes to the hairdresser. Mitty the mental war hero takes control again, arming himself with a huge “Webley-Vickers automatic” to face an impossible Nazi barrage. “Something struck his shoulder. ‘I’ve been looking all over this hotel for you,’ said Mrs. Mitty. ‘Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?’ ‘Things close in,’ said Walter Mitty vaguely.”

Ben Stiller liberally adapted Thurber’s story into a 2013 film, and this theme of the strange other-lifeness within mild-mannered men returns with Stiller’s smash Apple TV+ series “Severance.” Adam Scott’s depressed and unheroic Mark Scout “severs” his conscience in two with a medical procedure; a new, untraumatized, amnesiac personality, Mark S., takes control of his body when at work inside the “severed” floor of the ominous Lumon corporation offices. Mark Scout returns once the workday ends. This Mitty also daydreams, but he forgets what he’s daydreaming about.

The show’s sumptuous aesthetics and barbs of irony keep the viewers and their Apple TV+ subscriptions going. I ache every time John Turturro isn’t on screen, enjoy the gentle menaces of Christopher Walken, and appreciate the eeriness of the breakout Tramell Tillman.

Yet “Severance” and its parable about double lives has become hard to watch. Season 1’s subtler commentary about workplace alienation has given way a far more brutally explicit Season 2 plot, which is still being told as a “Lost”-style mystery: What is Lumon up to? There is no mystery about what Lumon is up to. The answer is on the screen in front of you. “Severance” is a titillating luxury TV show about slavery.

Part of the novelty of “Severance” is that the enslaver and the enslaved can share a physical body. Helena Eagan is heir to the Lumon corporation, an upper-level manager, and therefore the captor of the innies whose consciousnesses can’t escape Lumon’s offices. Eagan poses as her innie, Hellie R., to creep among the enslaved innie workforce without their knowledge. Helena Eagan exploits Hellie R.’s budding romantic relationship with an unwitting Mark S. to sleep with him.

The sex scene is filmed sensually. But we were all watching something that would be felony rape in my home state of California under Penal Code 261:

(a) Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished under any of the following circumstances: … (5) If a person submits under the belief that the person committing the act is someone known to the victim other than the accused, and this belief is induced by artifice, pretense, or concealment practiced by the accused, with intent to induce the belief.

Nor can prisoners consent to sex with a captor under law. The only way the show’s “ORTBO” episode was not an on-screen sex crime is if Mark S. is not a “person.” I don’t raise the technicality ironically, given that the history of American rape laws are defined by whom they wouldn’t protect, in which many Americans lived without legal personhood whatsoever. “I am a person,” Helena Eagan tells Hellie R. in a videotaped rebuke of Hellie R.’s attempts to escape. “You are not.”

You may object that a straight reading of “Severance” as a slave story is overly literal and the show should be taken more metaphorically, more liberally, more… French? (The final frames of the Season Two finale are rather continental.) “Severance” is intentionally dislocating sci-fi, after all. There’s all that advanced science, but all those old cars, the mid-20th-century offices and that 19th-century cultish mumbo-jumbo. “Severance” explores the metaphorical boundaries between selfhood and alienation, the gap between our home selves and our work selves, and the possibilities and limitations of rebirth.

Except the plot of “Severance” itself doesn’t accept non-literal interpretations of the slavery factor. (Keep in mind the American streaming industry’s growing trend toward literalism to maintain the attentions of two-screen viewers.) In Season One, the outie Mark Scout berates the earnest leftist-coded protesters from the “Whole Mind Collective” who wear pins with broken manacles that say END THE MASS INCARCERATION NOW! The protesters are not metaphors. These people exist in the story, and they’re annoying.

The 20th century philosopher Alexandre Kojève, in his famous re-telling of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, said that the story of slavery goes in one direction. Masters are willing to kill and die to be masters, but their histories are dead ends; they’ll never be more than mere dominators. It’s their captives who keep the story moving, by growing, learning, and ultimately rejecting the artifice of subjugation. Their story only has one ending, and it’s the bloody path to equality. When the two Marks finally come face-to-face (via a video camera), they don’t strike a peace. Only one of the two men in the conversation really understands that for Mark S. to be free, Mark Scout, who condemned him to servitude, must die.

Though a metaphorical reading can end with a kind of ego-death, too: Mark S. is the dreamer who refuses to surrender to the cold, outside world (where his physical body’s lawful wife is from). “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” ends a little coldly and defiantly on the matrimonial front as well, with Mitty leaning against the wall outside a drugstore as his own wife runs inside. “He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.”