The innies in the show walk and talk differently to their outies; they feel like different people. The innies, unburdened, more cheerful and somehow naive, the outies, world-weary, exhausted and unmotivated. Hellie, the rebellious, authentic-seeming innie of one severed female rages against her sleek, controlling, sinister outie Helena.
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It’s a neat satire of a world where HR consultants advise people to, horrifyingly, “bring their full selves to work”, a term that has slipped from meaning “be real” to collapsing the necessary boundaries between a public and private life. It warns of giving everything to work, of devotion to distant, profit-making overlords who don’t care about employees. When Mark tells his boss, Mr Milchick, that he wants the day off because “it’s just work”, it seems a shocking, raw moment.
The show is also a satire of a planet where, increasingly, people feel the daily burden of comprehending a warming, rapidly changing world where carnage and genocides are somehow tolerated, public figures are openly doing Nazi salutes and antisemitism is resurging. It has become, so often, too much. We grow anxious and try to switch off. We burrow into our homes, going out less, we bury ourselves in our couches and beds, we switch off the news – but what if we could turn it all off completely, for half a day, or half a life?
As the world narrows and crackles, is it ourselves we will flee from? Our capacity to feel? Is it coincidence that the drug ketamine, currently booming in usage in the US and Australia, is known for its ability to distance our minds from our lives? According to The Atlantic, in a piece analysing Elon Musk’s use of the drug, “ketamine’s great strength has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them”: “[it] is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time”. This makes it useful for treating depression, but dangerous when used recreationally, even fatally as Matthew Perry found. In 2019, Donald Trump ordered “a lot” of a ketamine derivative for depressed veterans.
If the world is a bin fire, what do we do with our heads? How do we protect our mental health?
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If we are anxious, depressed, prone to self-loathing, how can we disconnect from ourselves, inure ourselves from the pain? Denver International Airport played on the Severance theme by posting a picture of a plane climbing the air with the words: “This is a sign for your innie to book your outie a vacay. You both deserve it.”
It’s a clever pitch, aimed at those craving escape but feeling stuck, wondering if they are just a drug, a job or a plane ride away from another life, another self.
Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.
