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What do we think of Severance? I only just started watching it because I figured it was normieslop, but I find the theme pretty intelligent. I love that all the ambient media and conversations in the show are tangential to the topic of memory. The show is thoughtfully made imo, but I’m only on episode 3.
The idea of your “laboring identity” being totally cut off from your holistic identity, and what that means for the You in workmode, is fascinating as a thought experiment in how humans construe motivation. If you were really in severance, in the show, of course you would have no motivation to work, because you don’t have the experience of reaping what you sowing, only the annoying sowing. It’s like the Homer Simpson quote, when he does something stupid for short term gratification he says “that’s a problem for future Homer”; he doesn’t know who future Homer is, and future Homer doesn’t know who past Homer is. If your identity between sowing and reaping, future and past is severed, morale / motivation suffers; the greater memory we have of joy when we work, the greater we are able to bear the annoyances of working.
So I find severance vs integration interesting because its at play in a lot of human dysfunction: delayed gratification, procrastination, low vs high time preference, work-life balance, counterfactual thinking about future events. Probably every human requires the practice of greater integration in order to increase their wellbeing, because we are imperfect forecasters and rememberers. You can even see how drug culture worsens quality of life, because so much joy is just not remembered.
I simply can't wrap my head around the Hally character, mostly her origins. She is a daughter of a Lumon CEO and is portrayed in season 2 as very ruthless and calculating individual all in on their creepy cult business and secrets, so why is she there? Just to provide a PR face to their Severance project? Can't she fake it? And nobody(including herself) gives a shit about the suicide attempt? Like we are hiding that this project almost killed the daughter of CEO and everyone is cool with it.
The second season generally seems to be pretty aimless. People do stuff without any obvious motive, there's so much secrecy and mystery but I get the feeling that it's a kind of potemkin village of a plot where there's nothing actually behind any of those secrets.
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