This week, there is a big couple of screenings at Harvard Square’s Brattle Theater. They will be screening Memories of Murder (2003) and Cure (1997) on February 6th.
I’ve never seen Cure on the big screen and never seen Memories of Murder at all, so this will be one hell of a night of movies. I’m trying to watch Companion (2025) and Heart Eyes (2025) in the next week or so, too.
W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon Take On “Inclusively Re-Canonized Paintings”
The title of Severance season two episode three, “Who Is Alive?”, has a double meaning. Ostensibly, this title is a reference to the question Mark Scout (Adam Scott) poses to Mark S, trying to determine who Mark S referred to when screaming “she’s alive” at the end of Severance season one. But there is a bigger question the season has been grappling with: do the “innies” represent a discrete subjectivity that is alive as distinct from the surname-bearing “outie”?
How this episode complicates this question is not by diminishing the work-self as such, but instead through the process of reintegration. In the same way as Milchick (Trammell Tillman) telling Mark Scout, “the solace you have given [Mark S] down there will make its way to you,” reintegration, the amalgamation of the consciousness of Mark Scout and Mark S, suggests a kind of continuity between the two identities. By the logic of both Milchick’s statement and the medical procedure, the outie and innie are not two discrete, living subjectivities. Instead, there are shades of the brute-physical view of personal identity underlying reintegration. Mark Scout and Mark S are one because they share one body, regardless of the fact that the two do not share psychological continuity in terms of memory and self-perception. The only psychological continuity that exists between them is specifically related to the body, that of sense-experience, where Mark Scout might feel tense or unsettled leaving the office immediately after Mark S experienced something tense or unsettling. Or, in a more obvious example, Mark Scout’s hair would still be wet if Mark S went bobbing for pineapples and left the office without drying his hair.
Of course, it’s reintegration that sutures these divided selves and collapses them. But, if Petey’s (Yul Vazquez) experience last season is any indication, the encounter between the innie and the outie is far from harmonious. It is possible that for Mark Scout and Mark S, there is not enough room in their consciousness for the both of them.
Dr. Asal Reghabi (Karen Aldridge) assures Mark that she’s better at performing reintegration since Petey. What would be the ideal outcome? On the one hand, because neither Mark Scout nor Mark S exist at the same time as the other, there is a sense that the memories of the one could fill the lost time (Proustian allusion intended) of the other. On the other hand, there is a fundamental incompatibility between their consciousnesses because one knows nothing about the other. That inability to traverse a barrier between two versions of Mark accounts for the messiness and hallucination he might experience following Petey’s example.
There is plenty of doubling to go around this episode, some in the case of the unsevered Milchick. He receives a gift of “inclusively re-canonicalized paintings” of the Lumon founder, Kier. Kier, who by all accounts was a white man, is presented in the gift to Milchick as Black. Representation, even in its most superficial sense, is not sufficiently achieved by simply substituting the phenotypical characteristics of someone for another set of characteristics. Milchick’s stunned reaction evokes both a smiling acceptance of the microaggression, a more accurate manifestation of “emotional labor,” and Du Boisian double-consciousness. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois writes:
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
If one relates Du Bois’s formulation of double-consciousness to the Freudian unconscious, as Lee Edelman does, there is an extent to which the particularity of double-consciousness as a generic self-evident idea (two consciousnesses) is overstated. But, the Freudian unconscious is not, as I asserted last week, simply another person in the sense of the “innie/outie” dyad. Although Milchick is without an “innie,” he must express himself precisely according to the codes that regulate behavior in the face of comments and actions that diminish one based on their race. Likewise, what Milchick sees is not himself in Kier, but the way the hierarchy of Lumon sees him, and viscerally seeing himself through the eyes of other as that gaze transposes Kier’s race from white to Black.
Fanon similarly describes this forceful self-severing by the white gaze in Black Skin, White Masks:
Beneath the body schema I had created a historical-racial schema. The data I used were provided not by “remnants of feelings and notions of the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature” but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories.
Even if every subject can be said to have a double-consciousness of sorts, Fanon and Du Bois illustrate how the double-consciousness of the Black subject in a white dominated society, whether it is the United States or France, inflicts a particular form of doubling through the forceful “weaving” of a subject through a hierarchically advantaged gaze. Milchick, as an unsevered man with a different sort of double-consciousness, emphasizes that particularity.
In addition to the heft of the scene’s theoretical underpinnings, it is superlative in its blocking and camera work. Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander) is the voice of “the board” that gifts Milchick. Demonstratively, she is a Black woman, although she could pass for white depending on the circumstance. She conveys the sentiments of the board:
The Board wishes to express that I, Natalie, received the same gift upon receipt of my current position and found it extremely moving.
This is a bizarre formulation. The Board expresses what Natalie felt was moving, and the confusion of the subject in the sentence (The Board or Natalie) makes it ambiguous who found the paintings extremely moving, though it is clear from context Natalie is parroting the idea of her own experience as The Board understands it. As she explains the gift to Milchick, she moves from his right side, where she is in shadow, to his left side, where she is brightly lit from the window, to stage this scene:
Eric Voss points out the similarity to Get Out (2017), both in the uncomfortable smile Natalie seems to borrow from Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and in the premise of Natalie’s body being the microphone for the sentiments of a presumably white (or, perhaps, non-human) Board.
As The Board’s awkward gift sews the seeds of division among the Lumon loyalists, Mark S is cultivating class consciousness among his fellow severed workers.
There is a clear trajectory from the logic of race in the workplace to the logic of class. The recognition of Milchick’s difference also covers over his proximity to Mark S and Helly R (Britt Lower), as each is closer to the other in a hierarchy of power than they are to the omnipresent Board. Mark’s plea is that of many labor organizers, reminding the workers that they share a fate. Their precarity is such that the worst that could be done to them each could also be done to them all.
All of this likely unfolds under the watchful eye of Lumon, the butt of a joke among Mark and his colleagues early in the episode.
Lumon seems to be neither naive nor incompetent in their careful management of the employees, Milchick included. But even as Lumon surveils actions, they seem to not want to know anything about the subjectivity of their workers. They can only monitor the brute-physical presence of persons in one space or another, doing one thing or another, without much concern for what might lead them to act in such a way. This, I’m sure, will be part of their downfall.
Weekly Reading List
https://blackagendareport.com/death-dei — For Black Agenda Report, Margaret Kimberley re-establishes the fundamental truths of what “DEI” covers over about white supremacy:
DEI mania was a public relations effort intended to stem Black protest while doing nothing to improve the material conditions of Black workers, even for those who were involved in this project. The usual hierarchies remained in place, with white men and women getting the top jobs and the most money. Also Black people were not the only group subject to DEI policies, as other “people of color,” women, and the LGBTQ+ community were also competing for a piece of the questionable action.
She goes on:
Yet it is difficult to ignore the Trump anti-DEI frenzy. At its core it is an effort to disappear Black people from public life altogether under the guise of protecting a white meritocracy which never existed. However, it would be a mistake to embrace a failed effort which succeeds only at liberal virtue signalling and creating a more diverse group of managers to help in running the ruling class machinery.
In short, although Trump’s reaction to DEI are clear symbolic salvos in favor of preserving white supremacy, the misleading regime of DEI’s fraudulent efforts to ameliorate racism needed to come to an end one way or another. Not supplanted by the fantasmatic “white meritocracy” Kimberley describes, but instead by more serious approaches to resolving racial inequities in the United States.
This video is a fantastic narration by two all time greats about an enduring, old school fighting game rivalry.
It has come to my attention that some people don’t know about “Tetris for Jeff.” I’m opening the schools.
Miyachi’s hard-hitting Konbini Confessions interview show has delivered its season three finale.
I know I was just writing about the Rurouni Kenshin (2023) remake the other day, but it is back with new episodes for 2025 (continuing the Kyoto Arc) and it is really good.
Until next time.