Severance & the dissolving self
So the most prestigious thing on TV is—as you expect—not quite TV, it’s online TV, it’s AppleTV, it’s a show called Severance, which has the much-sought for quality of being better than the Oscars & the Oscar movies. Why is it so successful? My best guess is that the remarkable thing about it is that it gives liberals what they most want out of morality: To be able to play the slave. In Severance, people sign their bodies into indentured servitude to a corporation, severing connection from their work by brain-chip implants. They can then revolt against this injustice of systemic slavery.
Of course, this is an opportunity for the therapeutic wing of liberalism to make use of the left-wing rhetoric of exploitation & revolution in order to indict ordinary liberals for being “in denial.” The remarkable aspect of the story is precisely the insistence that liberals are damaged & they’d have to become stronger.
I reviewed the second season, & the show as a whole, for Acton:
One of the topics of the times is work-life balance. Should you work all the time, like Elon Musk? Should you embrace the workless life of social media influencers? To be middle class is a mix of the two. One has to work, to earn independence (& property), & also mind one’s life, make good use of that independence. It’s to be neither poor nor rich, but to be somehow both. Yet it might also mean to be divided, at cross-purposes with oneself, pulled by technology one way, to work; & by mortality in another, to live.
As with many other things, we have lost the paradise of the ’50s, in which work & family, home & community, private life & American greatness all seemed to go together. In 21st c. America, there are far fewer marriages & therefore families; far fewer children, too. But there are also now all sorts of worries about jobs & careers, falling labor participation rates, & an anxiety about the gig economy & the problem of automation.
This is the world of the AppleTV+ show Severance, now in its second season. Disguising sociological observation, as is customary, in the form of science fiction, Severance encourages us to worry over our loss of identity. Work-life balance, for example, implies a deeper common ground disputed by those activities and requires a higher standard by which to judge how to act. The old-fashioned word for that is soul. The state-of-the-art jargon is identity, or rather identities.
My friend Spencer Klavan has also written with incredible affection about the show:
