The wounds we run from.
‘Severance’ and the healing found in suffering.
A version of this article originally appeared on 1517.
I admittedly discovered Severance very late — so late, in fact, that I didn’t have to endure the incredibly long three years between Seasons 1 and 2. This was fortuitous, however, because I’m not sure how I would have handled waiting (read: not well) to find out how the first season’s spellbinding cliffhanger of an ending would be resolved. Truth be told, I was introduced to Severance via a clip from the opening sequence of Season 2 that was going viral at the time, which featured an unbroken shot of Adam Scott running through a maze of stark-white hallways. I had no context for what I was watching, but I was immediately intrigued. I needed to know who this character was, what he was running from, and why he looked so frantic. There was, of course, much more to this scene than just an actor who I only knew from Parks & Rec doing his best Tom Cruise impression. Much to my surprise, what I would soon learn is that Severance offers a searing lens through which to see and understand the effects of suffering, grief, and loss on the human psyche.
Premiering on AppleTV+ in 2022, Season 1 of Severance was greeted with glowing critical acclaim, earning fourteen Emmy nominations, winning two (for Main Title Design and Original Dramatic Score). It goes without saying that, by and large, the show speaks to my cinematic proclivities, e.g., hyper-aware writing, slow-burn storytelling, show-don’t-tell exposition, extended one-takes, etc. This in and of itself is a feat coming from creators with credits such as Spike TV’s Lip Sync Battle Pre-Show and Zoolander. Nevertheless, Dan Erickson’s and Ben Stiller’s creative partnership has yielded a captivating dystopian sci-fi comedy-drama whose subtext is so potent that one can find myriad ways to interpret its ambitiously high-concept narrative. (For instance, The Gospel Coalition’s Brett McCracken sees it as a parable of hell.) While familiar elements from other “false reality tales” — such as The Matrix, The Truman Show, and The Island, to name a few — are present, Severance never seems wholly derivative or contrived. This is due, in part, because its characters are blisteringly human, trauma included.
At its core, Severance is a series that explores the ethical, social, and even spiritual ramifications of a futuristic medical procedure called “severance,” developed by the mysterious biotechnology company Lumon Industries, in which participants willingly rupture themselves into two distinct identities, the “Innie” and the “Outie.” While one’s “Outie” is free to carry on living a normal life, one’s “Innie” exists with no shared knowledge, memory, or awareness of life outside the walls of Lumon. As an employee of a tech conglomerate as increasingly shady as Lumon is revealed to be, it follows that the higher-ups would want a safeguard like the severance procedure in place. Early sequences in Season 1 show Adam Scott’s Mark Scout going through the ordinary routine of waking up, driving to work, and clocking in, which, in this case, involves taking an elevator down to the severed floor where only his Innie, a.k.a. Mark S., exists.
For much of Season 1, the viewer watches as Mark S. slowly but surely becomes aware not only of life outside of Lumon but also that there might be more to Lumon’s inner workings and humorously verbose departments than what he’s been told. With divisions such as Macrodata Refinement (MDR), which is where Mark S. is employed, Choreography & Merriment (C&M), and Mammalians Nurturable and such workplace procedures as The Overtime Contingency and an Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence (ORTBO), one might be given to view the events of Severance as a torrid commentary on life in corporate America, complete with jargon-filled turns of phrase and feigned incentives to keep the Innies marginally satisfied as they go about the tedium of their days. To that end, Severance excels as a parable of workplace bullying and the ethical dilemmas often imposed on corporate life. Its meticulous storytelling has not only led to a deluge of fan theories but also to a number of sobering analyses probing the nature of personhood and other psychological phenomena.
What becomes undeniably apparent by the end of Season 1 and throughout the events of Season 2, however, is that the themes of Severance are less niche and far more human. As Mark S. discovers, and we along with him, Lumon’s health and wellness sheen are little more than a gloss for its cult-like underbelly. Emerging from the pseudo-religious doctrines of the company’s founder, Kier Eagan, Lumon is a testament to his enduring legacy and prevailing tenets revolving around the Nine Core Principles — Verve, Wit, Cheer, Humility, Benevolence, Nimbleness, Probity, Wiles, and You — found in Kier’s writings, which are revered as Scripture. Framing the pursuit of these virtues is the aspiration of taming the Four Tempers: Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice. Employees of Lumon are indoctrinated with this burden of spiritual and moral refinement, even as they accomplish mind-numbing tasks in the workplace. More pointedly, though, the pious ideals of Eagan and his adherents are preoccupied with the annihilation of pain and discomfort in the human condition.
Despite how earnest this endeavor might be, self-perfection through taming one’s passions and eliminating experiences of pain from one’s life makes for a soulless existence. That this is the Lumon mantra, though, speaks to the innate inability within humankind to confront the griefs, losses, and traumas of life. Nearly every Innie to whom we are introduced in Severance comes with their own devastating set of circumstances that ultimately led them to Lumon’s door. Whether it’s the marital complexities of failing to live up to a spouse’s expectations, the hope of earning a second chance at eternity, or the possibility of escaping the agonizing death of a spouse, Lumon’s payroll seems to almost function as an indulgence for the distressed and devastated. Those who’ve felt the worst life has to offer turn to severance out of desperation — as a way to navigate failure, loss, and death. However, the hope of salvation via grief avoidance is not only false but also incompatible with the trajectory of salvation as articulated in the biblical gospel.
Two years after severing himself to circumvent the upheaval caused by his wife Gemma’s miscarriage and subsequent fatal car accident, Mark Scout’s Innie is inundated with the sneaking suspicion that his employer isn’t being truthful with him. The unrest of Mark’s Innie is mirrored by the restlessness of Mark’s Outie, who is still learning to cope with a domestic life that is much quieter, lonelier, and devoid of love. Whatever freedom or healing thought to be offered under the aegis of severing himself, however, doesn’t seem to be working. Indeed, it cannot. As one Innie incisively asks, “Do you ever think that maybe the best way to deal with a [bleeped]-up situation in your life isn’t to just shut your brain off half the time?” The ambition that Lumon Industries embodies “is,” Erin Qualey writes for Vulture, “certainly seeking to create a product that many people might want — the ability to sever from all discomfort or pain — but our traumas are ultimately a part of what make us us.” In other words, to disconnect from one’s suffering is not only to disassociate from what it means to be human but also from the very means by which humanity is redeemed.
The big reveal of Season 1, of course, is that Gemma isn’t dead after all. Instead, she’s being used as a test subject in the bowels of Lumon Industries for their obsessively and malevolently warped endgame. Her Innie is known as Ms. Casey, the on-staff wellness counselor, with whom Mark and the other Innies have regular visits. Without getting distracted by the mechanics of it all, Season 2 makes it clear that every new project Mark S. works on only serves to further erase the Gemma he knew and loved. Any possibility for her to experience difficulty, hurt, or discomfort is “refined” to the point of removal. The most poignant and emphatic example of this occurs during the finale of Season 2, aptly titled “Cold Harbor,” which is also the name of the definitive project Mark S. is assigned and urged to complete throughout the season. As he finishes his involvement, Gemma is led to another examination room where she is instructed to disassemble a baby crib while Lumon executives and doctors watch on with gratuitous interest.
Of course, this isn’t just any crib. It’s the very crib Mark bought and pieced together when Gemma’s pregnancy was still viable. Dismantling the cradle is not only a token of Gemma and Mark at their most human but is also emblematic of Lumon’s ethos of life devoid of pain, which, in theological parlance, is representative of a theology of glory. Indeed, Severance, as a whole, functions as a contemporary prism through which to understand Martin Luther’s paradigmatic theologia crucis (“theology of the cross”) versus theologia gloriae (“theology of glory”). What might sound like an esoteric distinction, the theology of the cross, in contrast to the theology of glory, serves to illuminate both the heart of the Christian faith and life itself by showing us that God rarely, if ever, works in ways we expect. Rather than revealing himself in an exhibition of power and pristine glory, he shows the world who he is in suffering, weakness, failure, and death. Christ crucified for us brings to bear the divine paradox of grace, which says that death leads to life. The theology of the cross tells us that ours is a God who meets us and finds us precisely in our pains, griefs, and struggles, not apart from them.
Just as pivotal to Luther’s breakthrough concerning justification by faith is his gradual conviction that, paradoxically, it is in and through suffering and death that the nature and salvation of God are revealed. “As divinity was veiled under the flesh of weakness,” Luther comments, “so his works were veiled in the weakness of suffering” (11:34). It is precisely in and through the sorrow and grief of the human condition that God discloses who he is and how he intends to reconcile all things to himself. “God chose to reveal himself at the Cross,” writes Graham Tomlin, “in humility, weakness, and suffering. God can be known only there” (115–16). As the Man of Sorrows (Isa. 53), Jesus endures the blistering realities of sin in the world that came to be by the word of his power. He doesn’t avoid but willingly acquaints himself with the traumas and transgressions of humankind, deploying a wisdom that appears to be foolishness by revealing himself “in the very things which human wisdom regards as the antithesis of deity,” Alister E. McGrath asserts, “such as weakness, foolishness, and humility” (149). In so doing, God in Christ espouses the hope of redemption to the contours of death and resurrection. Indeed, there are no other means of salvation apart from the wounds by which “we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).
For Mark Scout, as well as every other sinner and sufferer, healing and salvation cannot be discerned or discovered by separating oneself from sorrow but by confronting and even embracing it, not out of a sense of pietistic masochism but with a faith that is tethered to the sufferings of Christ for us. “Life itself,” as one reviewer put it, “not freedom from pain, is the real sacred thing.” As humans, we are, to cite Erin Qualey again, in many ways, “a collection of our traumas and memories, and to sift out the bad is to mute the good.” Thus, disowning grief or attempting “to remove it from the story of [our] lives,” as Nicholas Wolterstorff mused in a recent New York Times interview with Peter Wehner, is both existentially untenable and redemptively impossible.
Even with all its gleaming white hallways and shady corporate machinations, at the heart of Severance is the most human of all delusions — namely, that we can sever ourselves from grief and loss and somehow emerge the better for it. Consequently, Severance stands as the inevitable end of any theology of glory, which attempts to realize salvation by denuding life of its pain and despair. As tempting as this escape may be, its promise of freedom and healing from suffering is ultimately left unfulfilled since there is no such thing apart from the gift of Christ’s body and blood. In fact, the searing truth of Severance is that any hope of conquering pain and suffering bereft of Christ exacerbates it instead of alleviating it. Devoid of the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection, sufferers are left to frantically run the halls of self-salvation, turning this way and that but never getting anywhere. It is only in the upside-down logic of the cross that we are healed and restored. After all, as the cross shows us, there is no redemption without a wound, no wholeness without brokenness, no resurrection without death.
Works cited:
Martin Luther, “First Lectures on the Psalms II: Psalms 76—126,” Luther’s Works: American Edition, edited by Hilton C. Oswald, Vols. 1–55 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1976).
Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
Graham Tomlin, The Power of the Cross: Theology and the Death of Christ in Paul, Luther, and Pascal, Paternoster Biblical and Theological Monographs (Carlisle, United Kingdom: Paternoster, 1999).