IBanalysis

By John Ferrandino

Characters: Mark Scout, Helly R, Irving, Dylan, Casey, Burt, Milchick, and Harmony Cobel

Plot: Lumen is a multinational biotech corporation that puts their employees into a surgical procedure known as severance. A chip is planted that splits the brain’s consciousness into an outie, non-work mind, and an innie, work mind. Same person, but the two minds have no memory of each other. Mark, Irving, Dylan, and newcomer Helly are severed workers of the macro data refinement. Organizing numbers to go into the trash. They have lives outside of the severed floor, but work is the only life they know.

Inspirations: Plato’s The Cave, Mormonism, technocracy, Ford’s assembly line, cult of corporation; Amazon, Disney, Apple, and Ford Motors, 60’s sci-fi aesthetic, Junji Ito levels of surreal horror, occultism, and fascism

Plato’s The Cave is a allegorical passage in Plato’s Republic about a group of prisoners chained to the inner wall of a cave. On the other side of the wall are their captor’s cooking fire, casting shadows on the outer cave wall in front of the prisoners, which they never see the source of, so they think its real. The severed workers know they are shadows, imitations of a real thing.

The Lumen corporation is owned by the Egan family, who portray themselves as prophets, leaving behind volumes of rules that are treated as sacred texts by the innies. It gives methodical work instructions and encourage Egan reverance.

This organization and its proselytizing doctrine is most similar to Mormonism, which is prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, where the show most likely takes place. The Egans are of Scandinavian descent, which possibly gives them a connection to 19th century esoteric occultism popular in Germany and spread to Scandinavia along with fascism. Lumen practices animal sacrifice similar to Nordic rituals that esoteric occultists from Scandinavia revived for nationalist ideology. Another similarity between Lumen and Germanic esoteric occultism is eugenics. As of season two, Casey, Mark’s wife is the subject of some sort of breeding program by Lumen to create multiple innie personas in one outie body.

A cult of corporation is where the head of a company is seen with reverence and dissent of opinion is put down. Real life examples include Amazon, Disney, Apple, and Ford Motor.

Junji Ito is a horror mangaka, who brings out the horror in the surreal and uses labyrinth jump scares, similar to the labyrinth architecture of the severed floor and the opening titles are similar to Junji Ito imagery, specifically the balloon heads.

Severance is not horror, because its tone is a cooky, psychological thriller. Some scenes feel right of Monty Python, while others look like The Office if directed by Stanley Kubrick or Ridley Scott.

Motifs: Labyrinth architecture like a maze, socialist realism propaganda, melons, numbers, the color white, black paint, office, goats, doors, and sterility.

The severed floor are built underground, no windows, and connected by only elevator, which is where the severance transfer happens. The outie and innie transfer in the elevator is filmed like waking up. The innie and outie are made to be two different people. When its the innie’s pov, their exit from the severed floor is a blackout, their next conscious moment is them waking up and stepping out of the elevator to begin work.

MDR refines numbers, which turn out to be out consciousness bleeding into the innie’s consciousness. Lumen’s goal is to reduce the post-op freak out of a innie beginning life in a waiting room. The severance is activated by remote signal at Lumen, which switches the consciousness in the elevator.

There are very few amenities on the severed floor, only company provided food is consumed and rewards are the same for everyone, a melon party, waffle party, or office supplies. This keeps the severed floor in control, because if the rewards are known and small scale, this prevents ambition that can challenge management. The only decorations are provided by the optics and design department, which are oil paintings which serve to revere Kier Egan and keep the departments divided by creating false history of violence between them.

Irving sees black paint floods, which is his outie’s consciousness. Black is free because it is all of the colors combined, diverse memories and free choice, covers up the white of Lumen office space, which is sterile and controlled. The floor manager, Cobel, has white hair, the halls are white, and the outside is always snowy, so the audience, like the severed, associate white with Lumen. Irving’s outie is always painting a black hallway with a red light over a door. This is revealed to be the exports hall, which leads to the lab where the innie consciousness is manufactured. The snow makes the location vague, so that the story can apply anywhere. Unofficially, Cobel keeps surveillance on Mark by disguising herself as his neighbor.

The goats are used as sacrifices to Kier Egan when a new innie persona is created.

If the MDR department’s purpose is to refine data that represents the outie’s consciousness, then the numbers that they dispose of are memories. The orientation of new innies explains that MDR filters out numbers that appear ‘disturbing’, makes the innie worker feel negative. These filtered numbers could be the parts of the brain that deal with memory. It would explain how these numbers create a new innie persona. These numbers are neurological data of neural cells in the brain, or a copy of the outie’s brain, edited through MDR to create the innie’s brain.

Conflicts: challenges to individualism, control culture, nurture vs nature, nurture vs nurture, cultish dogma, identity, surveillance, behaviorism, abnormal psychology, isolation, and depression

The innie’s first moments are of no control. They don’t know who they are and their outie leaves a recording that they are there voluntarily. The innie can request resignation, but its up to the outie to accept resignation. The innies have no consent on their life, never have seen a sun, never took a nap, never been outside, only are conscious for less than 12 hours, and have no contact besides their co-workers in their department. Being fired is equal to suicide. Effectively slaves.

Its confirmed that most volunteer severed workers separate their consciousness in order to avoid trauma. Mark chooses severance in order to work without thinking about his dead wife. Helly on the other hand is the most ironic, being a propaganda piece for Lumen in order to make severance more widespread. Her outie is Helena Egan, a top Lumen executive. Both have free will, same body, but Helly is against her existence and Lumen, while Helena wants to further its goals.

Resistance to Lumen comes from Irving’s outie, who is a solo investigator into Lumen, Burt, who helps Irving escape from Lumen, and an organization that surgically integrates the innie and outie consciousness. When Mark is integrated, he uses phone recordings to communicate with his innie and the two of them have different goals, outie Mark wants to rescue his wife Casey, while innie Mark wants to rescue Helly.

Dylan’s innie has an affair with his outie’s wife, if that can make sense.

The innie and outie are effectively a case of doppelgänger syndrome. A new soul free of sin after a baptism. An entirely separate person. The shadows in Plato’s cave that know they are shadows.

While the innie’s show reverence to Kier Egan, non-severed employees such as Milchick and Cobel behave like they’re in a cult. When Cobel is fired, her meltdown is that in vein with a conflict of faith, destroying her Egan alter and deciding to help Mark rescue his wife.

This cult mentality is seen at Amazon, Apple, and Disney, where different opinions are shut down and the ceos are the absolute authority.

“They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it.”

“If you want a hug, go to hell and find your mother.”

“The best way to tame a prisoner is to let him believe he is free.”

“Quitting would effectively end your life.”

Themes: Marxism, cult’s preservation of power, authoritarianism, the desire for freedom, exploitation, treating human consciousness like its a computer program, identity is determined by memory, running from grief, repressed memories and emotions, and illusion of choice.

Two season out so far, expect more.