Severance review for everyone and Zoom invite for tomorrow for paid subscribers

We will be talking about Andrew DeWaard's Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture

Apple is advertising a Lumon Terminal on its website. Great marketing ploy for the series: no, you can’t buy the Terminal itself, but you can watch the show.

Ben Stiller’s Severance criticizes corporate America or Lumon and from the perch of a streaming platform, or critical mirror, AppleTV. Although Apple can also trace its origins to one founder, the turtleneck wearing Steve Jobs, Lumon’s patriarch Kier Eagan hails from grimmer, colder climes. His minions continue his legacy by memorializing him in wax and oil paint, while Apple pays homage to Jobs in great industrial design and 1s and 0s.

Stiller’s directorial career, eclipsed by his acting achievements has almost always focused on alienation in the film industry. From Reality Bites, to The Cable Guy, to Tropic Thunder, to Zoolander, Stiller has tried to spin comic gold from the struggles of people trying to deal with the difference between images and experiences, between simulations and aspirations.

My favorite moment in Zoolander is then scene when Stiller as male model Zoolander is presented with a miniature model of a school for underprivileged students that he will be financing and he looks at it in disgust and disbelief and says, “What is this? A school — for ants?”

Severance is the magnum opus of alienation. After a long career in the culture industry, Stiller is ready to take on the futile nature of white collar work in corporate America, but he may actually not be the best kind of worker to do so. Lumon is more cult than corporation. The cult of its founder and his wisdom is oddly industrial: Eagan is said to have made his wealth in extractive industries. The museum to his accomplishments is reminiscent of Henry Ford’s Fordlandia and is memorialization of the 20th century industrialists dynamic management of the rationalized production processes. Ford Model T’s maximized efficiency in production, making them affordable for the workers who made them, but also deskilling those very workers whose labor and knowledge were fragmented across the assembly line.

One struggles to understand how a giant multi-national is so meagerly staffed, but the employees we do meet are so vivid against the backdrop of the sleek 2001: A Space Odyssey interiors that we might want to forgive him for simplifying the hierarchical, nonsensical world of Lumon’s practices and purposes. Kubrick’s influence comes full circle because the mise en scene of 2001 was said to have inspired all of Apple’s designs, from the sleek white mice to the aspect ratio of the Iphone itself, modeled after the mysterious slabs that appear to human beings during moments of sudden technological progress.

So far so good. Severance is a process whereby white collar workers can separate their work selves from their leisure selves: it is a technocratic science fiction innovation made to make employees more docile and productive.

A few problems arise for me in this allegory of white collar alienation:

1. the severed workers don’t seem to work that much. Mark S.’s productivity is tightly tracked, but everyone else seems to have a lot of extra time on their hands to wander the white hallways, solving riddles and falling in love and building worker solidarity because macrodata refining doesn’t actually seem that demanding. And there is no surveillance of how their time at work is spent.

2. the series proposes an employer friendly thesis: the innies are better people than their outies. They’re more passionate, more innocent, more emotionally authentic and more ethical. Take the case of Helly R./Helena Eagan. Helly is an ingenue who learns to rebel against the order of labor. Helena is a cool composed boss lady, who is as deceptive as she is cold blooded.

3. the ideal of work, which Mark Strong enjoyed before he lost his wife Gemma was academic. Rather than the sterile, cookie cutter home of his Lumon days, Mark Strong lived in a house full of plants and books. Gemma and his failed attempts to conceive is what drives them to numbness and despair, not the actual conditions of their labor.

Corporate white collar work demands absolute submission to authority that Severance simplifies as physical and psychological separation. Unfortunately, for Stiller, corporate authoritarianism is completely internalized for its most successful members. We all take our work home. Few workers are able to clock out a 5 pm on the dot. Those who did are being DOGED.

As for the idealization of academic life and Mark Strong’s fall from grace in it, we can see how the hollowness of the academic institutions we once revered (and Stiller still does) is rotten with fear as well. Fear of the loss of funding and prestige, fear of the government, fear of powerful donors, fear of each other, fear of one’s peers, fear of management and administration that has grown and expanded like a parasite that is consuming its host. The most highly paid employees of an institution of higher learning spend the least amount of time in classrooms. The boards of our universities and colleges are easily disciplined by donors because the logic of the university is the logic of fundraising and endowment and prestige protection.

Yes, some of us might still work in plant and book filled offices, but the corporate logic that dominates our lives came for our work in many forms, both reactionary and liberal. Academic freedom has never been more compromised.

To project a life free of alienation ruined by infertility is Stiller’s own fantasy of an academic’s life. Stiller needs to think that there is an escape from the logic of the culture industry in which he is embedded. AppleTV may be an alternative to Paramount, Universal, Sony, MGM, etc., but its platform logic only allows for another kind of infantilization, so beautifully scripted by the waffle celebrations and the spectacular marching band led by the extraordinary Mr. Milchick. If only our managers had Milchick’s powers of entertainment.

I live in a company town: the Irvine Company owns everything as far as my eye can see. The repressiveness of residential built environment has no corporate counterpoint in mid-century Bell Labs headquarters where Severance was filmed. The Irvine Company’s logic is not physical: it is spatial. Every inch of this expensive real estate work has been calculated to maximize profit. I’ve heard that people have appreciated Severance for its dramatization of white collar alienation: in fact by anthropomorphizing the forces of capital as Kier Eagan, it makes our submission to it a puzzle that work buddies, a few good friends, an office romance can solve. This is one of the shows greatest attractions. Also, its wintry visual beauty. The series is as beautiful as any Apple product.

Zoom invite to tomorrow’s discussion. I’m a little crazed for time, so chill if you haven’t done all the reading. Neither have I. We will be discussing Andrew DeWaard’s Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture