This article contains minor spoilers for season one of Severance.
I am a proud contributor to the three billion minutes of streaming time that Severance has accumulated since its debut. To the delight of many of my friends, I started watching the show from the beginning about a month ago and caught up in time to watch live the groundbreaking second season finale on Friday, March 21. Since then, I have been unable to consume media like a normal person. Everything reminds me of the show, and I have been left turning over and over in my mind the question of just exactly what made the show so brilliant.
Undoubtedly, the innovative premise, incredible acting, and deadpan, campy humor all play a role. But I think I’ve finally zeroed in on it. What I love most about Severance is its commentary on trauma and grief and the many metaphors that the world of outies and innies lends to describing the human experience.
To sever or not to sever?
One of the most pressing issues explored by the show is the ethical concern over a person’s bodily autonomy and capitalistic commentary on the state of workers’ rights. The procedure of severance, pioneered by mega-company Lumon, splits the consciousness of a person in two, yielding an innie and an outie. The outies go about their lives as usual outside of work and have no memory of what their innie’s alternate consciousness experiences during the 9-5 workday inside of Lumon. The innies have no knowledge of what the outside world is like, who they are, or where they come from, and their entire existences are confined to eight-hour stretches of “mysterious and important” work. Sounds f*cked.
So, why would someone voluntarily undergo the controversial severance procedure, which is stated to be permanent and irreversible? To have an escape is why.
We learn early on in season one that outie Mark suffers tremendously with the grief of losing his wife, Gemma, in a car crash several years prior. He had to leave his previous job due to becoming so dysfunctional, and continues to suffer from alcoholism and depression throughout his two years at Lumon. Several characters, most notably his sister Devon, tell him that his coping mechanism of taking a job that lets him forget about Gemma for eight hours a day is not the best healing strategy. Yet Mark insists that Lumon is good for him, despite not making any notable progress in his grieving journey.
What Mark doesn’t know is that his innie is not as spared from this trauma as he assumed he would be. In episode three of season one, Petey tells Mark, “Down there, you carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don’t know what it is.” Mark is described as consistently coming into work with red eyes, looking ill and hungover. As the audience, we know this is from outie Mark’s persistent grieving, crying, and alcohol abuse. Yet, innie Mark has no knowledge of why he physically feels this way; in fact, he’s never known any differently. This is his baseline normal, as his entire existence began after the loss of Gemma.
Does grief transcend severance?
This leads the audience to the question of “does grief transcend severance?” To help theorize about this, I found myself thinking back to the pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, which has made its rounds through the BookTok community over the past several years. In this work, Dr. van der Kolk describes how traumatic experiences inherently change the structure and function of our brains and bodies. Further, he argues that in order to heal trauma, one must assess how it is stored in the body and engage in somatically-based therapies to rewire trauma responses.
While the book is not without critique, the main ones being that it makes pseudoscientific claims and lacks nuance, it has served as an important stepping stone for an expansive and continuing discussion on how we as a society view and treat trauma. That our minds and our bodies are holistically intertwined and we must take care of both in order to be well individuals.
Once I thought of the connection between innies keeping their outies’ scores, I fell even more enamored with all of the layers and thought put into Severance. I would imagine that if given the chance, much of the population would opt for the same choice Mark made, to soothe the pain by forgetting the cause of it entirely.
In fact, there is another highly popular body of work currently circulating the media that explores the same topic: Ariana Grande’s most recent studio album, Eternal Sunshine. Specifically, in the music video “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait For Your Love),” which pays homage to the movie that inspired the album’s name, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ariana undergoes the Lucan procedure to wipe her memory of all instances of an ex-boyfriend after a painful breakup. This past Friday, on March 28th, Grande debuted the album’s deluxe edition, along with a Brighter Days Ahead short film depicting the same character undergoing a memory restoration procedure. Clearly, these characters are not alone in their desire to forget and move on.
Trauma is as much a part of us as our innies are
When we experience trauma, we also often experience derealization, our bodies become not entirely our own, we are no longer fully autonomous individuals, much like the innies. So would wiping one’s memory fix this issue? I believe Severance argues towards no, that in fact the body does keep the score.
Through the characters’ experiences, we see that it’s impossible to erase trauma through severance and that the body and the mind are two inseparable things. Grief must be felt, and pain demands to be felt, and they’ll come to the surface one way or another.
The much-contended season two finale showed us that despite what we think is best, the innies are their own autonomous people who deserve to live and make their own decisions as well. In the same way, we can not underestimate our own grief and trauma as a full-fledged entity, capable of taking up space and making us who we are. While these parts of us may wage against each other, one does not truly exist without the other.
If you have yet to watch Severance, you can do so on Apple TV and join the millions of fans like me who can’t stop thinking, talking, and breathing the brilliance that is this show.
Remember you are very far from alone, and if you or someone you know needs extra support in dealing with trauma, there is a PTSD hotline and resources available to you 24/7.