Issue #363: Severance Has the Secret to Being Happy at Work
Writing about Severance is undignified. There’s nothing about the show itself that makes it that way. Excluding these examples, I had to write the word “outie” eleven times and “innie” seventeen times to discuss the show in its own vernacular. I find this profoundly irritating and, if I write about Severance again, will need to come up with some better solution than using the show’s intentionally obnoxious vocabulary. It is effective, though, in capturing just how appalling some corporate nomenclature can be.
Over this past week, I was also lucky enough to catch an early screening of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence (2025). It’s a haunted house movie with a restrictive conceit, another “bottle episode” style feature. I thought the results were fantastic and hope to write about it in more detail next week, although you can read my early thoughts complete with spoilers here.
What else? This week, I have a tribute to Lynch and a spotlight on a few recent albums.
Will Writing About Severance Spike My Newsletter Views This Week?
Severance (2022), the “weird fiction” prestige TV darling and crown jewel in Apple’s streaming library is back this week. I am not a super fan of Severance, but it is a decent show and the first episode of the second season, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” has a lot to like.
What really draws me into Severance is its aesthetic, within that umbrella of “weird fiction,” channeling bits of The Twilight Zone (1959), the Backrooms creepypasta, Control (2019), and the SCP Foundation writings. It is austere, retro-futuristic, and involves bizarre, intentionally confusing plot elements that cast seemingly innocuous activity as potentially sinister and scary. It is not too dissimilar to From (2022), both in terms of the aesthetic principles and storytelling form.
But Severance also satirizes and deconstructs the office comedy sitcom. Adam Scott is the rare performer who has worked in every version of that genre, the earnest Parks and Recreation (2009), the irreverent and nihilistic Party Down (2009), and now the postmodern Severance. The essence of the show is a thought experiment. Would we condemn some other, derived but fundamentally disconnected, version of ourselves to a lifetime of endless rote and disquieting servitude if it meant never experiencing the banality of wage labor ourselves? Characters in Severance are separated into “outies,” the legal subject-being-consciousness that exists in every setting other than the “severed” floor of the Lumon corporate office buildings, and their “innie,” the emergent subject who only comes to exist when entering the aforementioned severed floor. This triggers surgically-implanted futuristic technology that transforms the “outie” into the “innie.” The “innie” retains no knowledge or memories of the existence of their “outie,” and the relationship between the two forms of subjectivity is highly varied. Some of the shows’ characters, like Adam Scott’s Mark, appear to have a similar personality and similar values in both incarnations. Helly Riggs (Britt Lower) and Irving Bailif (John Turturro) appear to have an “outie” and an “innie” that are highly distinct, and even potentially hostile to one another. Bailif, for instance, has a relationship with another employee, Burt Goodman (Christopher Walken), who at least appears to have an “innie” and an “outie” with different sexual orientations.
The childish descriptions of the two versions of one’s self as “innie” and “outie” appear more for the benefit of the “innies,” suggesting a reciprocity — a difference of kind, not value. Ostensibly, from the perspective of inside the sequestered severed floor, “innies” and “outies” are separate but equal. However, this logic doesn’t apply in the outside world. “Innies” are subordinate, even enslaved, by their “outies,” brought into existence, their very consciousness manifested, exclusively for the purpose of labor. The allusions and connections to the U.S.’s history of chattel slavery are obvious, and unlikely to be accidental. But this week’s episode sidesteps both questions of nature vs. nurture, as with Burt’s sexuality, and real life corollaries for the “innie,” instead asking an existential question facilitated by the sci-fi setup. What kind of being is the “innie”? In “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” Mark returns to work horrified to see his coworkers Helly, Irving, and Dylan (Zach Cherry) replaced. What becomes immediately clear is Mark’s horror and grief is a response to a potential death. If his coworkers no longer work on Lumon’s severed floor, they no longer work anywhere — they no longer exist.
When Mark attempts to plead to the anonymous board of Lumon, he is pleading for their very lives. Mark’s pleading works. When he next comes into consciousness, an indeterminate length of time from his appeal to the board, he finds Helly, Irving, and Dylan all coming back into consciousness for the first time since the conclusion of the first season. Dylan prods Mark about his actions and what it means for his other coworkers, Mark W. (Bob Balaban), Gwendolyn Y. (Alia Shawkat), and Dario R. (Stefano Carannante). He says, “I don’t think you should feel bad at all … for ending their lives. Fuck ‘em.”




Mark appears confused at Dylan’s encouragement, but it can’t be lost on him what it means that his new coworkers are now displaced by his old ones. At Lumon, a layoff is somewhere between assassination and ritual sacrifice if we take the show’s premise seriously, that an “innie” is a life as valuable as any other.
“Hello, Ms. Cobel” also deals with the idea of “recuperation.” In this case, the insurgent actions by Mark and his coworkers, triggering their “innie” consciousness outside of the severed floor, is named and transformed into something of value for Lumon. Lumon is able to resignify an action taken against their interests and assimilate it into a justification for “reform,” failing to transform the status quo of forced, indentured “innie” labor Mark and his friends were resisting in the first place.
What Lumon does in response to the so-called “Macrodat Uprising” is a conventional maneuver of any repressive system or society. In addition to the recuperation of the action itself, Lumon also scapegoats a particular employee — the titular Ms. Cobel.









Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), another Lumon employee, gives a totally unconvincing and absurd explanation for the surprising proximity of Cobel to Mark. They lived next door to one another, “outie” Mark having no idea that Cobel was also a Lumon employee, “unsevered,” who managed his “innie.” All of the wrongdoing of the corporation as a whole, indeed, the unconscionable idea of the entire program of “severance” gets assigned to a single individual who can be explained as particularly perverse, as it’s no accident Cobel’s actions are associated with an “erotic fixation.”
Severance does a lot with a little here. Even as it runs the audience through some of the ideological program of capitalism, there is enough going on in the episode to make it feel like a complex text. While so many streaming dramas suffer from what I call “long movie syndrome,” Severance’s second season seems to understand better than most that it is a TV show, and each episode should stand on its own.
Along with the new colleagues who disappear at the episode’s halfway point, Mark also meets a new manager, Miss Huang (Sarah Bock). She appears to be a child, but is the supervisor of Mark and his team.


In one of the episode’s most gripping moments, Mark is subjected to an ice breaker that takes place, to his consciousness, only a brief time after he experiences a profound shock about his “outie”’s wife, who Mark’s “innie” knows as the Lumon therapist, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Mark struggles to come up with a fun fact, and finally says “I am lucky enough to have made four new friends today,” as the audience sees flashes of photos of Mark and his wife. Huang corrects him, “I have to remind you that I’m a supervisor, not a friend.” In silence, Mark’s face distorts, as if he is about to turn into Michael Douglas in Falling Down (1993), before he finally corrects himself, “three new friends.”





Mark is not that different from any man on the brink, close to going “postal,” as he frames Mark W. (an older colleague who just happens to share a first name with Mark) in a plot to publicly embarrass Lumon.
Or, indeed, a plot to commit a suicide bombing. The idea of suicide is always a critical dimension of the “innie” existence, with Helly’s endless attempts to quit her job at Lumon in the first half of the first season now recast as suicide attempts. She would rather not exist than do the strange, unexplained work they do.
With the episode reuniting the last season’s four principal characters, including Helly, Severance can’t evade the ideology that the show itself is recuperated into. The show as a whole is critical of a work culture and suggests that subjecting one’s creation to bizarre torture is preferable to the subjective experience of quotidian office labor. However, Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan have found lives worth living that are nothing but that quotidian office labor, that their Others1 went under the knife to avoid. Party Down had the same complex relationship with work, that showed its characters as humiliated and beleaguered by their catering job but ultimately enriched by their encounters with their coworkers. In this way, Severance may sustain criticism for the same reason Truffaut is suspicious of war movies. It is difficult to put something on camera without ennobling it.
Thus, Severance, Party Down, and The Office (2005) (or Parks and Rec) have more in common than one might think as works in service of propping up the ideological work culture of the United States. But Severance does the most among these works to disrupt such a framework, because the alternative to work is death — a path any among the severed might freely choose if there is truly no escape.
Durkalini Released the Album of the Year
Valued friend of the letter Durkalini released his new album, stylized in all caps, FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD (2025). It is nothing short of incredible. Durkalini is deserving of tremendous praise, as an independent artist self-releasing his material on his record label, Pyro Pillionaire Records. Hopefully I’ll find some time to write more about it, but right now it’s available wherever you listen to music.
David Lynch and Late Style
Over 2024, I wrote about the idea of “late style” a couple of times. Once about Jean-Pierre Melville and the second time about Coppola.
Of course, there is a singular film auteur with a style later than most, in many ways the latest style, the late David Lynch. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which is sourced from a number of etymological texts, gives a wholly unsatisfying history of the use of “late” as in “dead”: it began being used this way in the early 15th century and specifically refers to the recently deceased. But one can read a more coherent trajectory between the two meanings, as one’s lateness in relation to time means they have transgressed a specific temporal point. Just as one arriving late means to be somewhere beyond an appointed time, one’s death means they have exceeded a final point of life.
But being the latest also means being current. Or, perhaps, distant from a temporal point because they are before it, ahead of the arrival of a given style or form to the zeitgeist. That is Lynch. He is an untimely filmmaker, out of season, in the sense that Nietzsche used the term titling Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1876).
This is no more obvious in David Lynch’s Dune (1984), both derived from and substituted for Lynch’s unmade, purely hypothetical version of Return of the Jedi (1983). Lynch follows the mold of Star Wars with Dune, borrowing scenes wholesale, but is also ahead of it in bringing something to the screen that, for me, is memorable in ways Star Wars can never be. I am, of course, on record as being a fan of Lynch’s Dune having watched it for the first time after Villeneuve’s version released.
Even so, Dune is likely the least worthy of thought among Lynch’s filmography. The one most worth of thought, for me, is Mulholland Drive (2001). This brings me back to the question of late style in the sense I used it talking about Melville and Coppola. There is no question Mulholland Drive is the work of a mature filmmaker. It is twenty-four years removed from his first feature, and was his ninth film overall. Despite this, it has all of the intensity and urgency, the intangible je ne sais quoi of an early work.
Lynch’s style is always coherent and legible, but also expansive enough to never be agglutinated. Things are Lynchian, but Lynch is always pulling the threads on his previous work in building the next, never transposing images, concepts, or aesthetics wholesale.
What Lynch models is a needle threaded through the most narrow openings imaginable. Lynch may derive but is never derivative. And he borrows often from others but never rests on his laurels. His late work is distinguished from that of other auteurs by what is always ungovernable and unexpected in what he produces.
He will be, eternally, among the greatest artists of the screen.
Mortality and Photography in Bad Bunny’s DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS
On the title track of DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS (2025), Bad Bunny’s new album, he has a chorus of… non-professional singers belt out:
Debí tirar más foto' de cuando te tuve
Debí darte más beso' y abrazo' las veces que pude
Ojalá que los mío' nunca se muden
Y si hoy me emborracho, pues que me ayuden
In English:
I should've taken more pictures when I had you
I should've given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could
I hope my people never move away
And if I get drunk today, I hope they help me out
The phrase, “debí tirar más fotos,” is wistful. But there’s also some irony there, at least to me. In his interview with Fallon, he makes a qualification about the title:
It really means that I should have embrace, appreciate more the moment, the present. I should have appreciate more the people who is around me people who love me, and it’s all about that [sic].
There’s a tension between what a photograph represents in contemporary culture, inordinately photo documented in comparison to a pre-smartphone age, and living in the moment. A widely held belief is that taking a photograph brings one out of the moment. However, the perspective of this song and the album as a whole is that a photograph may be called upon to immortalize a moment that is being thoroughly appreciated.
Bad Bunny also moves between various senses of loss, lamenting those who die, those who simply move away, and those with whom he has fallen out. He sings, “Disfrutando de todas esas cosas que extrañan los que se van (Enjoying everything that the departed are missing out on)” and highlights his relationship with his grandfather — his lineage and patriarchal name is another repeated album motif. But he also sings:
Si me pregunta si aún pienso en ti, yo le digo que no
Que mi estadía cerquita de ti ya se terminó
These lyrics obviously allude to a romantic relationship.
“DtMF” (the actual song title, which is an acronym for the album’s title) shows the homology between these kinds of loss and how easily a song about a breakup can become a song about death (see “The Way We Were” by 21st Century or “Changes” in its Black Sabbath and Charles Bradley incarnations). The lyrics “Debí darte más beso' y abrazo'” are especially potent for Spanish speakers. “Besitos y abrazos” are common parting words in conversations with family — and what my dad always said when ending any conversation with our family.
For Bad Bunny, photos serve as a bulwark against the sense of loss that comes from a final departure. At the same time, the photos seem to ultimately be beside the point of being present and appreciating a moment. These are hardly new topics for popular music or popular entertainment.
But what makes “DtMF” more poignant is the overtures and allusions to the final final departure, the irrevocable one that no one comes back from. Pictures, appreciating the moment, none of these things can truly diminish the anguish of that loss. In fact, they may exacerbate it. An awareness of someone else’s significance in your life makes losing them all the more painful. Reflecting on memories with them, viewing your photos together, is also painful. But that pain is the guarantor of their significance. And the village that comes together to support each other in the wake of a loss are los mío’, “my people,” Bad Bunny hopes never move away.
Losing someone, a friend or family member, is extremely hard. If I decided to make a memoriam video today for the people I’ve lost, I would set it to this song.
Weekly Reading List
https://www.ssense.com/en-ca/editorial/culture/new-york-fashions-favorite-grocery-store — Sami Reiss of Snake and Super Health writes for Ssense about Happier Grocery. It’s a destination, boutique grocery store in NYC inextricably bound to the world of fashion.
https://balanceofterror.bigcartel.com/ — My friend Jim released issue #2 of his hardcore fanzine today. Also keeping the spirit alive by selling $20 shirts. I don’t know how he does it in this economy, probably helps that he only printed on one side of the shirt.
Slavoj on Lynch.
GQuuuuuuX (2025) is coming. Its cinematic compilation film, -Beginning-, released in Japan over the weekend. The internet is alive with excited spoiler-filled breakdowns of this unexpected new installment in the Gundam series, one that is set in the world created by Yoshiyuki Tomino: the Universal Century. You might see familiar names in the summaries of the movie, names like Char Aznable and Garma Zabi. You might even see some of those familiar faces in this trailer.
I have averted my eyes from the more detailed descriptions of the events of the film in favor of seeing it myself. And see it I will, it will be screening in U.S. theaters on February 28th, courtesy of GKids.
For MLK Day, “The Drum Major Instinct.”
Until next time.
I can’t type “outie” again outside of parentheses or footnotes and I want to make a Lacanian connection.