Half A Life
It’s the day after the season two finale of Severance, which means I’ve accidentally run into at least one take that would set me off. In this case, it was a Bluesky post by Aaron Bady linking their piece for The American Prospect, which suggests that “the only good Severance was the original conceit” and that “Ben Stiller is a counterrevolutionary who has diluted the pure Marxist message at the behest of Apple and Capitalism”.
Before I say anything else, I want to note that Bady’s piece is interesting, especially the read on what the sort of Soviet-style design ethic might mean for the in-universe alternative history of Kier Eagan. What struck me, though, is this idea that while the show “originally about the class struggle”, in season two it “stifles that in favor of corporate crisis management”.
This is not the season two of Severance that I watched, in part because the show was never about the politics but about the personal. It’s just that there were inevitable political trappings due to the specifics of its technological premise. It’s not that season two somehow abandoned political philosophy but that (usually) you can’t tell a story that’s just politics—or at least not one that anyone actually wants to watch. The driver of a story has to be the people, because that’s where the technological implications matter first.
Politics, of course, is about people, but how a system impacts people is what comes before there even can be any politics about it.
Somewhat tangentially, it made me think of The Good Place, a show explicitly and unabashedly about moral philosophy—and yet the episodes were not twenty minutes of Chidi’s makeshift classroom, because you tell a story through how it impacts the people. That fact didn’t somehow make the show not implicate moral philosophy.
This idea that Severance abandoned the class war in season two is nonsense on its face even without getting to last night’s second season finale (floor manager Mr. Milchick’s quiet disgust at the blackface variants of paintings depicting seminal moments in the life of Lumon founder Kier Eagan being an obvious example here, but so is this episode’s disjointed conversation between Mark’s innie and outie conducted entirely by video camera) but the finale literally culminates in several different if interrelated acts of solidarity, up to and including Dylan G., backed by a newly-radicalized Choreography and Merriment, telling Milchick to fuck off.
How did we get there? We get there thanks to the most blatantly political statement the show’s ever made.
Having agreed to conspire with Mark S. to free Gemma (the wife of his outie) from the training floor, Helly R. (whose outie, of course, is Helena Eagan) distracts Milchick while the Choreography and Merriment marching band is celebrating Mark S. having finished the Cold Harbor file. Managing to trap Milchick in the restroom, they are aided by Dylan G. who arrives and shoves the vending machine to block the restroom door.
(It’s important to note that in many ways Dylan G. had a storyline almost entirely separate and apart from the others this season, but only and specifically because Milchick found a way to drive a wedge into the growing solidarity in Macrodata Refinement. When push comes to shove—literally—Dylan G. shows up for his coworkers.)
As the rescue plays out on the training floor, events at Macrodata Refinement come to a head, with Helly R. imploring Choreography and Merriment to understand that Lumon will come for them next. For all of them, really. She lands on one, simple call to action.
“They give us half a life,” she yells from atop the triple-desk ramparts, “and think we won't fight for it!”
It’s no secret that the last few weeks for me have not been awesome, as the pressures both personal and political have had me acclimating to the fact that my life is a waste, and that maintaining it is a burden. Of course, of course, I’m not alone in these things.
Suffice it to say that Helly’s exhortation to Choreography and Merriment hit me like a fist to the gut. They do give us half a life. They do think we won’t fight for it. That’s especially hard when it seems that no one else will fight for it, either.
They do everything they can to make sure we won’t fight for each other, but Severance’s season two finale puts the lie to the argument that the show somehow abandoned the class war. By the end of the episode, Lumon headquarters is on high alert and in disarray as one person is dead, Gemma is free, Dylan G. and his C&M army have cornered Milchick, and Mark S. and Helly R. are on the run through hallways cascading with pulses of red light.
Helly R. shows up for Mark S. Dylan G. shows up for Helly R. Choreography and Merriment shows up for Dylan G. Do all these things happen in the context of an emotional centering of Mark S.’s needs? Well, yes: he’s the show’s protagonist. In the end, though, Mark S. shows up for Helly R. after seeing Gemma to the exit. That’s not “merely” a reliance upon a romance trope. It’s one innie to another saying, “We matter.” There’s solidarity here, too.
Maybe the problem is that political commentators think that if a creative work isn’t overtly polemical it isn’t sufficiently political. This simply isn’t true, and isn’t how good stories work. In the end, maybe it’s mostly good news that political commentators don’t write televison shows.