“They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it.”
Helly R., a beloved character of Apple TV’s hit television series “Severance” gave an inspiring speech in season two’s recently released finale to some of her fellow “innies,” urging them not to trust a company that treats them as “machines.” This call to action bleeds out of the show and shakes the audience awake from our “work-life balance” as well.
The show revolves around the premise that a person can sever their brains into two — your work self (innie) and your home self (outie). The outies have no memory of work and no idea how the company they work for (Lumon) treats their innies, and their innies never get to see the outside world or have families. The innies don’t know anything about their pasts and have no identity outside of work. The season two finale presents a major climax for the show, and its revelations (and revolutions) employ some Marxist theories and turn them on their head. It asks us to explore our own relationship with labor and the time we spend at work.
While Lumon Industries is a prison for the innies, it also birthed them. Helly R. would not exist if her outie, Helena, hadn’t decided to put her there. For Marx, labor is the real essence of the human collective. The relationships Helly R. has at work wouldn’t be possible if she wasn’t working — and she seems to have more authentic connections than her outie is either allowed or capable of having.
Essentially, are the innies more human than their outie counterparts? They’re not bombarded with the outward modalities of liberalism. They can’t spend any of the money they make or engage in consumerism in any form. Instead, they are pure production. And, as Marx says, material production is where the human being produces themself as something tangible and real.
Are we happier when we’re being productive? That’s what Lumon Industries would seem to say. Without the burden of a home life, the innies can be more focused and more useful. Is that not what we’re asked to do as well? To leave our traumas, our childhoods, our conflicts at the door in order to increase efficiency for the companies we work for? Of course, this is antithetical to Marx’s point, as the “severance” procedure allows the outies to participate in commodity exchange without having to labor at all. The outies get to assume that their innies are satisfied as bodies perpetually sorting numbers for the work that is “mysterious and important,” according to Mark, the main character of the show.
Louis Althusser, a Marxist philosopher, said that one of the most dangerous bourgeois seductions was the idea of being human at all, a person with a soul and not just a material body. The “innies” are thought of as pure material bodies, and it’s horrifying. They are people too, so if outies get to have a soul, then, as an audience, we’re disgusted at the thought that innies do not. They’ve been stripped of their attributes. In season one of “Severance,” when deemed necessary by their supervisor, the innies get to visit the wellness center. They are then told of characteristics their outies have (“Your outie is generous. Your outie owns many records.”) Having uniqueness, having personhood is seen as a gift that can be bestowed upon an innie, not something that they have the right to possess. They, therefore, are forced to develop this universality based on their common suffering. It is the only experience they know. Similarly, we often have to leave our uniqueness at the door when we go to work and relate to our coworkers on the grounds of mutual struggle.
In “The Holy Family,” Marx writes about “dehumanization conscious of its dehumanization and thus transcending itself.” The finale of season two might be the start of the innies’ transcendence. They’ve become more aware, mostly thanks to the jostling resistance of Helly R. from the beginning of her tenure at Lumon, that they’re only living half a life. They want out of their imprisonment — but they don’t necessarily want out of Lumon.
“Whatever this life is, it’s all we have. And we don’t want it to end,” Mark says.
You don’t plan a revolution, Marx would say. It comes not from conscious intention, but from an acceleration of contradictions between capital and labor. The sharpest contradiction possible, it would seem, is between an innie who is pure labor and an outie who gets to experience capital without the pains of labor.
It seems unfathomable to imagine a world in which the 9–5 doesn’t exist; we don’t want our way of life to end, either. We like being productive and feeling satisfied with a hard day’s work. So, what makes it worth it for us? What are the innies missing that would truly make them more human?
What the innies lack most is the ability to touch. They have no relationality to an outside; there is no sky, no grass, no trees. The only otherness they experience is with each other, and the majority of the time, there are only four of them in a room. They don’t get to experience the multiplicity of life. This is why we feel so much pity for them. As an innie, there is no sense of uncertainty. Every day is the same. They do attempt to position themselves differently against their coworkers, but the activities they can do are limited and they don’t have a cache of memories to share because they don’t have full lives. From a Nancian perspective, the innies are not experiencing existence at all without being able to touch the other, which is why any moments of connection within Lumon feel so electrifying. The innies are pure material bodies, but they can’t experience the body as they should.
Productivity isn’t enough to satisfy us, and “Severance” demonstrates that to the fullest extent. Being with each other outside of labor is a necessity. We can’t simply be moneymaking machines; we can’t dissolve into process, or we lose what makes us human. The innies have received a taste into the relations that exist on the outside, and it’s driven them to revolution. However, is experiencing the joys of labor without doing the laboring itself contradictory to the human experience as well? Perhaps we must begin to see ourselves as more than what we produce and find a better way to exist without severing ourselves between work and home so violently.
Contact Ava Lalonde at lalonde@oxy.edu
