Can human beings ever truly empathize with one another? Or even with ourselves?
This is the critical question running throughout Severance, the blockbuster Apple TV+ puzzle-box show that recently wrapped its second season.
A global cultural phenomenon whose alleged $20-million-plus-per-episode price tag has dwarfed all other offerings in the streaming era, the Ben Stiller-run series has attracted attention for numerous reasons.
Many have labeled it the ideal workplace drama for the Great Resignation era, a program that lampoons the drudgery of seemingly pointless white-collar jobs (the show is the brainchild of Dan Erickson, who toiled for years at a door-parts store). The four main characters labor cluelessly in a generic building, in an unidentified town, during an ambiguous era, performing “macrodata refinement” that none of them understands.
Others regard it as a well-justified middle finger to global conglomerates like the fictional Lumon Industries, which cares little for its workers and much for its profits—a winking swipe, perhaps, at the show’s platform, which is owned by one of the world’s largest and most diversified companies.
And yet others have deemed it a withering critique of society’s apotheosis of technology, a deeply unfavorable appraisal of how, in the dawn of the AI age, we worship the false gods of progress and innovation at the cost of our humanity.
All of these approaches to the series have merit. Yet they underplay the key conceit of the show, enshrined in its name: the division of the main characters’ consciousnesses into “outies,” who exist outside of Lumon, and “innies,” who grind away within its walls. When the outies descend the elevator every morning toward their “severed floor” at Lumon, they transform into their innies, bright-eyed and ready to start their workdays. But the innies’ lives, while seemingly simple and pleasant in their frame, appears deeply oppressive and limited from the outie viewpoint.
And this severance, in turn, highlights the fundamental difficulty we encounter in truly understanding and empathizing with those who are different from us—including distinct aspects of ourselves.
In her landmark 2016 book Transformative Experience, the philosopher L.A. Paul articulated the “vampire problem,” namely, how can anyone make a rational, informed decision about whether or not to become a vampire, if given the choice? “After all,” Paul writes:
you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have.
In other words, we can never fully analyze whether or not we should become someone else because we can never fully understand what it’s like to be someone else.
The four Severance protagonists encounter the same choices (minor Season One spoilers follow).
Mark Scout, the main character, decides to sever himself following his wife’s tragic death. Grief-stricken and unable to focus at work, he calves off a part of himself that becomes an innie cheerfully dedicated to his inscrutable Lumon tasks. Played masterfully by Adam Scott, Mark’s dual personas are subtly but perceptibly distinct in voice register, appearance, and mien.
But in a crucial sequence late in the second season, Innie and Outie Mark engage in a long back-and-forth, and they fail profoundly to understand one another.
“The first thing I need to say to you is that I am so sorry,” Outie Mark says to his innie. “You know, I created you as a-a prisoner and as an escape. Lumon told me you’d be happy, that innies are content, and because I took their word for it, you’ve been living a nightmare for two years. It’s horrific what they’ve done to you.”
But in response, Innie Mark says, “nightmare is the wrong word, actually, because we find ways to make it work, to feel whole… Whatever this life is, it’s all we have, and we don’t want it to end. Can you understand that?”
Meanwhile, Helena Eagan, who becomes Innie Mark’s love interest, is actually Lumon’s heir apparent, granddaughter of its revered founder, Kier Eagan. Determined to prove the safety and fairness of the company’s severance project, Outie Helena, depicted winningly by Britt Lower, takes part in it herself. As Innie Helly, she winds up serving as a sort of Norma Rae, uniting the innies of the world, and Helena and Helly regularly sabotage each other, often in destructive ways.
Then there’s Dylan, a kindly, well-meaning screw-up played by Zach Cherry who can’t hold down a job (a hilarious and ultimately unsuccessful interview at a door company must have brought Erickson joy), spawns an innie who is focused and aggressive and winds up tangling with Outie Dylan over his (their?) wife Gretchen.
And finally Irving, a loner and introvert on the outside in an inspired turn by John Turturro, generates an innie persona who falls in love and forges a critical alliance with his coworkers.
In all cases, the dichotomy between the innie and outie consciousnesses of all the characters highlights how alienated we can become not only from one another but even from ourselves.
And yet Severance points the way toward the possibility of empathy, toward character traits that evade the elevator. “To me, what’s really interesting about the show,” Stiller told tech journalist Kara Swisher on her Pivot podcast, “is finding those places where something transcends the severance barrier, an emotion or a feeling.”
Each character, in their own way, seems to find such transcendence. For all his demon-wrestling, Outie Mark imparts his rigorous sense of loyalty to his innie, even as the latter’s faithfulness runs at cross-purposes to the former’s.
Outie Helena imbues her innie with her passion and fire despite an even starker mismatch of objectives.
Outie Dylan loves his wife and children as a matter of rote until his innie—also a lover, not a fighter—rekindles the outie’s passion for his beloved Gretchen. In return, the outie praises the innie as a “self-assured badass.”
And, ultimately, Innie Irving inspires his outie to pursue friendship and affection in powerfully similar ways, notwithstanding their grave consequences.
Severance concluded its second season with an explosive episode that both brought resolution and hung viewers off a cliff. But as we wait for the next installment in a world filled with turmoil and human suffering, perhaps the mere possibility of empathy is enough to carry us forward.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI. Danya Rosen is a recent graduate of the Tzahali pre-military academy in Israel.
