‘Severance’ and Subtle World Building
There’s a reason you’re constantly unsettled when watching this show.
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If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ll find something compelling about Severance1. Even if you don’t love puzzle-box shows with a side dish of deep weirdness, the corporate satire will amuse you, I promise. Corporations are bizarre, horrible places that infantilize their employees in various ways, and Severance gets that, combining a bit of cult-ish bullshit with familiar office bullshit to really nail the uncanny valley of cake in the conference room2 and the dead-eyed stares of your co-workers.
I enjoy Severance (though I still think it’s a mistake to veer away from the autonomy and identity material in favor of Lost-esque weirdness (goats, anyone? ANYONE?)), and one of the reasons is the atmosphere the show conjures up. Somehow it sells the silliness of that underground office and the batshit cult of Lumon, complete with scripture, branded everything, and songs3. One reasons it sells is because of the “Outie” scenes, which are set in a much more recognizable and realistic world. Sure, the “Innies” on the Severed Floor might get weirdly sexual Waffle Parties as rewards for hitting quota4, but out in the surface world folks just go out for dinner and clean their gutters just like always5. That gives the universe a dose of verisimilitude that helps us swallow the insanity down below.
There’s another reason the show pulls off its horror-movie weirdness vibe, though: Depopulation. The world of Severance is an empty, ominous one6.
The Work Is Mysterious and Important
It takes you a while to notice, but Severance might as well be taking place on the world’s largest sound stage. There are specific moments when there are a lot of people in a space, but so, so many scenes in this show take place in a vacuum. Mark Scout (Adam Scott) lives in a mostly-empty development, where his only neighbor for the first season is Mrs. Selvig (Patricia Arquette), who also (unbeknownst to Mark) happens to be Mark’s boss on the Severed Floor. Irving (John Tuturro) goes to a payphone to make mysterious calls and there’s no one around for miles. There are so many shots of people driving around on empty roads, with exactly zero evidence of a society around them.
It’s relatively subtle, but it adds up to a sense of creepy isolation. On the Severed Floor, it’s even worse—the offices are enormous, so large people need to create DIY maps to figure out how to get places—but there are no people. The Macrodata Refinement (MDR) offices are the size of a football field, but house just four unfortunate employees, their desks clumped together in the middle to emphasize how empty it all is. You get a serious Backrooms vibe from just about every scene in the show—including the scenes set outside, which is a real accomplishment.
Even when there are groups of people, they maintain this vibe through the establishing shots. Lumon’s office may be teeming with cultists/employees, but the building itself is in the middle of nowhere, with nothing nearby as far as the eye can see. Mark attends a party at his sister and brother-in-law’s house, and there are plenty of people there—but the house itself is isolated, hidden away in the woods. Restaurants are always half-full, parking lots are larger than they need to be by several orders of magnitude. The world of Severance is empty, and it’s an incredibly important aspect of why this show works as well as it does7.
Do You Know How To Make Your Eyes Kind?
The gloomy, haunted emptiness of Severance’s universe is complemented and reinforced by another trick the show plays with its set design. Just by looking at the show, it’s impossible to tell when it takes place. On the one hand, there is modern stuff like smartphones, and Lumon is clearly capable of some amazing technological feats, including the very sci-fi concept of severance in the first place. On the other hand, all the cars on the show are 1990s models or older, pay phone booths still exist, the Lumon offices use a lot of dot matrix printers, and the computers on the Severed floor resemble 1970s workstations8.
This mix of period details and technology not only gives the world of Severance a unique look and feel, it also destabilizes the viewer9. It’s very dream-like (or nightmare-like) in its discordant combination of details is subtly unsettling. You can’t ever get a firm grasp on where or when the characters are, which in turn makes it difficult to track how much time has passed on the show (and there are hints that the severed employees may not be completely certain how much time they’ve spent down below, either). Combined with the emptiness of the world you get a definite Silent Hill vibe in this show, which is essentially, a show about people stuck in a literal corporate hell, so it works10.
There is one good thing about Lumon Industries that no one talks about: No Power Point. No matter how bad the place might be, the absence of the worst invention of the modern age and its ability to drain all the life energy out of anything within its light cone is a positive11.
NEXT WEEK: Slow Horses and the shaky caper sequence.
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By ‘compelling’ I obviously mean “depressingly familiar.”
Unfortunately, in the context of awkward celebrations with people you spend every day with but know very little about, the cake is not a lie. It is real, it from a supermarket, and it is always 50% stale.
At least when I worked for a soulless corporation we weren’t forced to memorize songs.
All I ever got was a laurel and hearty handshake and an admonition to stop playing Doom during office hours.
Or, in my experience, ignore your gutters until a small lake forms on your roof and one day you’re sitting in the living room watching old Western movies and the roof caves in on top of you.
I’d like to officially request that Mysterious and Imporant be the title of my memoir. Thank you.
Does it make me a bad person that I find this emptiness attractive? A world where I don’t have to be trapped behind slow walkers every damn time I walk somewhere is a paradise.
There are apparently explanations for some of this in canonical ancillary materials, but I do not start watching TV shows in order to have homework, so I will never read them.
Even viewers like me, who frankly could not be any more unstable already.
Severance itself is ripe for abuse, of course, as the show clearly intends to explore. Someone on Reddit suggested that you could have severed bathroom stalls and create someone who’s entire existence is just going to the bathroom, and that is simultaneously hilarious, ridiculous, and a profound distallation of the horror at the core of this show.
When I am forced to create Power Point presentations I passive aggressively create slides that have a single word on them and then just talk over them like they don’t exist. I also usually forget to advance the slides. So far no one has complained.