Mysterious Work & Alienation of Labor in Severance

[osteophage]

Severance employs a fantastical scenario at an imaginary company to depict a phenomenon that’s very real: the systematic alienation of labor. This theme has been widely remarked upon by those familiar with the framework, but not everyone is already familiar, and so it warrants explanation. To that end, this analysis presents a brief introduction to alienation as a concept, an in-depth exploration of how it applies to the characters of Severance, and some observations on how that theme relates to the real world.

Alienation of labor is a term used in political commentary to refer to an experience of estrangement between workers and their work. You might think of it as like wearing a mask, building up walls, or being reduced to a cog in a machine. These experiences arise from the sacrifice of autonomy involved in selling labor to an intermediary (an employer), which, within a given societal system, is necessary for most people in order to purchase what we need to survive.

Alienation of labor is dramatized in Severance at multiple levels of analogy and realism. For severed workers, the outer self is alienated from the work self, and the work self is alienated from the work. These workers are insulated from understanding the nature of their work, they are forced to work, and they are also (supposed to be) estranged from themselves and each other, buying into corporate mythology at their own expense. Together these factors combine to facilitate greater horrors.

Notes:

• This analysis contains major spoilers for the first two seasons. Before reading further, I recommend watching the show for yourself.
• Content warnings for violence will appear later at the start of a specific section. More generally this analysis deals with themes of workplace abuse, with brief references to suicide. 

Crossposted to Pillowfort and my personal site. Note for off-site linking, I recommend using the version on my personal site.

 

The Alienation of MDR

The Macrodata Refinement department is alienated in at least three different respects. First, these workers have undergone the severance procedure, so in that sense, their outer selves are psychologically alienated from their work selves. Second, the work selves are alienated from the output of their labor, in that they do not really understand what they are doing and why. Third, they are pressured by the corporate hierarchy into repressing their emotions and adhering to a corporate script. These expectations far exceed what any professional should have to put up with, but the severed workers have no choice, in that they are functionally being held captive by the employer.

The most fantastical aspect of how Severance portrays alienation lies in the consequences of the severance procedure for the outer selves, who retain no memory of what happens at work. In the very first episode, when Mark leaves the building and notices that he has a bandage on his forehead, he does not remember how he was injured. As Petey puts it to Mark in S1E3, even if you spent all day at work murdering people, you’d never know. The hypothetical example is extreme, but the warning is warranted: in the second season, Mark uncovers major life-altering secrets about what really goes on at Lumon—secrets that were kept from him through the barrier of severance.

Even at work, the nature of the work is kept a secret from the MDR workers. The MDR team is instructed to categorize the numbers that appear on their screens, but they are not given the context to understand what these numbers are. In a moment of frustration in S1E6, Mark asks his supervisor, “What is it we actually do here?” Her only answer is to scream at him that they serve the company founder. Raw subservience to authority, she conveys, is supposed to supplant the need for comprehension. No need to understand, just obey.

Being kept in the dark can make the work feel arbitrary and meaningless, yet the workers are supposed to make peace with it. That tension between what workers feel and what workers are supposed to feel manifests in this fight between Mark and Helly in S1E4:

Helly: You’re more loyal to this place than to your friend.

Mark: I’m loyal to how it felt around here before you showed up.

Helly: You mean when Petey was here?

Mark: Yeah, because there was balance. We could have fun and work without the whole goddamn department imploding.

Helly: The work is bullshit.

Mark: The work is mysterious and important.

This is clearly an official company line. It represents the sense of reverence that the company wants to encourage in its workers, as opposed to the more authentic and realistic response we see from Helly. One can imagine she would agree with David Graeber on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

Even setting aside the inscrutability of the work, the team’s interactions reflect a stark division between corporate obligation and authentic personal connection. In S1E1, Mark speaks to Helly by literally reading from a script, and when Helly asks a question, he looks to the script for answers. When this approach proves ineffective, he physically pushes the script away and begins engaging with her more earnestly, in defiance of his instructions. Later he will be reprimanded for this and pressured back into compliance.

The relationships between workers are also strictly curtailed. Some amount of banter and even camaraderie is allowed, but only within the department. Continuing contact with someone who has quit or retired is strictly forbidden, as we learn when Mark reacts to the sudden disappearance of Petey. Petey no longer works for the company, and so when Mark asks what happened, Milchick solemnly explains, “We’d love to tell you, but unfortunately, non-disclosure policy forbids. We’d be aiding an assault on Petey’s privacy by you” (S1E1). Milchick’s phrasing here transforms Mark’s initial question—an expression of his personal investment in Petey—into a kind of interpersonal violence, an “assault on his privacy,” inappropriate, out of bounds. From Mark’s perspective, he has just irrevocably lost someone he cares about, and yet he’s expected to turn those feelings off like a switch.

Unfortunately, just walking out on the job is not an option. As Helly soon learns, physically leaving the building is no use because once she leaves the designated workspace, her body switches over to her outer self, who simply turns around and walks her back in. When Helly acts out and defies her supervisors on the job, she is punished and coerced into compliance (S1E3). When she communicates a desire to resign, her outer self refuses: “I make the decisions. You do not” (S1E4). By the end of the fourth episode, she resorts to an attempt at suicide. This stage of Helly’s character arc condenses the severity and psychological consequences of a life deprived of autonomy—a life relegated to forced labor.

Forced labor, of course, is another way of saying slavery, and slavery in the United States has been historically entwined with race, a connection that warrants examination of the show’s portrayal of race… which means, if nothing else, we need to talk about Mr. Milchick.

The Alienation of Mr. Milchick

In concept and in execution, there is something exceptionally twisted about Milchick as a character. A “company man” would have been troubling enough in this context, but for a company man to be Black—for a Black man to act as overseer—escalates the premise from troubling to uncanny. In the wrong hands, this could have played out very badly. To the extent that it didn’t, give credit to the actor Tramell Tillman for his exceptional charisma and for raising questions behind the scenes that likely inspired his expanded storyline in season two. This expanded storyline presents us with evidence that Milchick is navigating his own sense of alienation, facing disrespect and degradation from his employers while struggling to contort himself into the shape they have devised.

To be frank, I initially had reservations about this character. A dark-skinned Black villain in such an otherwise light-skinned cast, playing an oppressive boss figure for our enslaved heroes to rebel against? It seemed all too reminiscent of the White Victim Fantasy I’ve described before. If, hypothetically, the show had ended after season one, rather than being picked up for another season, then I think this criticism could be levied at the show unqualified.

Season two changes the game by introducing more complexity to how Milchick is presented within the narrative. The paintings scene, the performance review, and the subsequent practice in the mirror all show us a man who is actively repressing himself in order to keep his job. He may be a villain, but no matter his outward loyalty to the company, even he is subject to the bitter pain of alienation.

The first exchange that brings Milchick’s alienation to light is an iconic scene from S2E3: the scene with the paintings. In recognition of Milchick’s recent promotion, Natalie presents him with a gift from the Board to “help [him] see [himself] in Kier, our founder.” The gift is a set of “recanonicalized” paintings that depict Kier Eagan as if he had been Black. Upon seeing the paintings, Milchick looks to Natalie (herself a Black woman) as he tries to figure out what to say, but Natalie is all plastered smiles and decorum. To quote from Lex Pryor:

[Milchick] gets these borderline blackface paintings from the Lumon board. And he looks at Natalie like “What the fuck are these white folks doing?” and she just does not help him at all. It felt like when you’re in a lily-white space and you spot another one of us—maybe you give them the nod or lock eyes—and they don’t give you anything back. Nothing.

This scene is eye-watering in its tension. A lot of viewers have compared it to a certain scene from Get Out (2017). Milchick is looking for any acknowledgment from Natalie of what’s really going on, any stray trace of her own personhood outside of serving as a mouthpiece, but she refuses to budge. The same occurs again in S2E5, when Milchick asks her point blank about her own reaction to the paintings, but she just gives him a strange look and changes the subject—and if she doesn’t feel safe enough to react honestly, then neither can he.

These scenes highlight how racial hierarchies can contribute to alienation. Milchick and Natalie may not be severed medically, but emotionally, culturally, psychologically, they are divided inside, unable to fully express themselves without risking their careers. In recognition of that dynamic, Banseka Kayembe’s analysis of the show draws a connection to the concept of double consciousness:

Writer and academic W.E.B Du Bois wrote about the concept of “double consciousness” in his book The Souls of Black Folk which captured the duality of the Black American experience. He believed that Black Americans faced an inner struggle to remain true to themselves while at the same time conforming to the dominant white society. This struggle created a “split” or double consciousness of the soul: the real person and a projected dehumanizing idea of Blackness within a white supremacist society. Du Bois wrote “one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”

While much of Milchick’s interiority remains obscure to us, we can see that this work environment is taking a toll on him. His performance review in S2E5 subjects him to many indignities, including an absurd complaint about his vocabulary, and in the wake of this extended humiliation, Milchick stands in front of a mirror and practices his language. At one level, he is revising an order he’s previously directed at one of his subordinates, taking a more wordy phrase and whittling it down into nothing but the word “grow.” Implicitly, though, he is commanding himself to “grow,” or rather, to shrink into the servile shape demanded of him.

The fallout from the performance review provides context for Milchick’s reactions in a later scene, a scene that challenges him to reflect on the intensity of his commitments. During a suspenseful moment in the season finale, when Mark calls in to request the day off (S2E9), he poses a question to Milchick that in any other context could have been a simple, offhand, everyday remark: “I mean, work is just work, right?” The question is met with an ocean of silence. Milchick stands in a silhouette against a backdrop of cold light, just holding the phone, as the soundtrack slides a sickly drone over a muffled heartbeat. That reaction in and of itself—rendered speechless by “work is just work”—underscores the fact that Milchick, too, has let his life be overtaken by corporate subservience.

In Milchick’s case, we don’t yet know much about what brought him to this point. For other characters, though, the incentive to capitulate is much more straightforward.

Unemployment Is Death

For severed workers whose conscious existence is bound to the workplace, unemployment equals death. To be explicitly clear, it’s not that unemployment “represents” death. Unemployment is death. This is recognized unmistakeably in the way that the characters talk about the prospect of quitting, retirement, and disciplinary firing. In-story this may be considered a matter of the peculiar worldbuilding, but once we recognize this equivalence, we can draw a line of continuity to how, for most people in the real world, the selling of labor is necessary for survival—meaning that the show’s portrayal of severed death operates as a foreshortened form of a real phenomenon and a legitimate basis for anxiety.

The link between unemployment and death is first established early on as Mark tries to gently discourage Helly from trying to quit her job. As he puts it, “Since this perceptual version of you only exists at Lumon, I mean, quitting would effectively end your life” (S1E2). Helly doesn’t get in a response to that before the focus of the scene changes, but the idea introduced here will later come to fruition with Burt’s involuntary “retirement.”

At Burt’s retirement party (S1E7), Irving interjects and explicitly characterizes what’s happening to Burt in terms of death. After Milchick plays a goodbye video and the other workers react with polite applause, Irving objects, “You’re all just going to stand here and let him die?” Milchick challenges the characterization of retirement as death, but he doesn’t dispute the specific psychological facts that have led Irving to describe it as such: this version of Burt as we know him is going to cease to exist.

This equivalence between unemployment and death is why Dylan has such a strong reaction in season two when Irving talks about wanting to resign. Dylan tries to talk him down from the decision with a desperation as if he’s talking the man down from a ledge, and Irving talks about being “gone” as if he might be reunited with Burt in a kind of afterlife: “I want the pain to be over. If he’s gone and I’m gone… then somehow, we’ll be together” (S2E1). Both characters understand that what Irving is contemplating here amounts to suicide.

In S2E4, when Irving resorts to drastic measures and Milchick reacts by firing him on the spot, the scene is portrayed like an execution. Milchick delivers the decision in language that’s dramatic and legalistic, like a man delivering a death sentence—because he is—and the scene is scored with low, ominous music. In Irving’s final moments, Milchick declares, “It will be as if you, Irving B., never even existed… May Kier’s mercy follow you into the eternal dark.” Subsequently, during the next day at work, Dylan demands a funeral service and delivers a eulogy (S2E5).

The portrayal of job loss as death operates as a more condensed form of a real phenomenon: selling one’s labor in order to survive. When we talk about this understanding of wage labor, to be clear, what we talk about is is not a matter of subsistence farming. Wage labor is only ever a contract with an intermediary who stands between the worker and the tickets to the means of survival. This arrangement creates what economists like to call “inelastic demand,” which is basically what you call it when you’re in no position to negotiate. Workers in no position to negotiate are easily coerced into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t want to do, whether that means putting up with mistreatment, making personal sacrifices, or even becoming the instruments of others’ demise.

The Instruments of Others’ Demise

This is the section about how alienation relates to physical violence, including murder, including actual murders taking place the real world. What this section covers is not essential to the argument, but once I spotted this connection, I couldn't unsee it.

The possibility of severance as cover for murder is first introduced in S1E3, in an outer world conversation between Petey and Mark. Mark makes the claim that severance has “helped” him psychologically, to which Petey asks, “What if the cost of that help is that you’re murdering people eight hours a day and you don’t even know it?” The idea surfaces here as a rhetorical question, an outlandish hypothetical raised only to make a point. We’ve seen what Mark does at work, and it isn’t that. Or so it would seem.

Later, the second season will reveal the significance of Mark’s labor: by “refining” the provided data, Mark is aiding and abetting an unethical psychological experiment that is meant to culminate in someone’s murder. He himself may not be the one to pull the trigger, but he and the other refiners are in fact paving the way for someone to be killed. If any of the refiners really understood what they were doing, they would not want to be doing it.

In the show, Petey’s question was initially presented as a hypothetical, but in the real world, it’s not always hypothetical. Real, actual people have worked on corporate projects only to later learn that their labor was being used to contribute to murder, as in the case of Joe Lopez, who has written about his realizations in the wake of the protests against Microsoft:

Like many of you, I have been watching the ongoing genocide in Gaza in horror. I have been shocked by the silence, inaction, and callousness of world leaders as Palestinian people are suffering, losing their lives and their homes while they plead for the rest of the world to pay attention and act.

Like many of you, I have tried to do my part in small ways. Staying informed, sharing information with friends, signing petitions, making donations. All the while continuing my work at Microsoft. [...]

Then I came across the No Azure for Apartheid movement, whose members have been organizing, taking action, and speaking out no matter the cost. I saw Ibtihal and Vaniya’s disruption of Microsoft’s 50th anniversary on April 4 and was shocked to hear the words coming from their mouths. Microsoft is killing kids? Is my work killing kids? […]

I started to look deeper. I read the articles, saw the evidence, heard the testimonies of employees who were horrified to find out that the technology that we are building is being used by Israel in their mission to erase the Palestinian people.

Joe Lopez is not alone. Since this letter I have read about other workers at other companies realizing only after the fact what their labor was being used for. These are the stakes of denying agency to workers and obscuring the outcome of their labor. These are the stakes of “mysterious” work.

Punching Out

Although the particular worldbuilding in Severance may be outlandish, the characters employed at Lumon share a recognizable throughline of alienation.

Put simply, severed labor is alienated labor. Outside of work and even at work, the workers don’t always comprehend what they’re doing. The MDR team is not allowed to know what the numbers are for. They are not allowed to exercise agency over their work. They are not allowed to leave. They are not even allowed to ask about people who’ve gone missing. They are supposed to suppress their regard for others, plaster on a smile, and embrace a muted existence as cogs in a machine.

While the show mostly focuses on workers who have been severed, other employees like Milchick are shown to be alienated, too, in that they cannot safely reveal their authentic reactions to mistreatment at the hands of their employer. Milchick is not allowed to even remotely acknowledge anything amiss about the paintings. He endures an excruciating performance review with polite composure, and afterward he tries to absorb every petty criticism as if it were fact, practicing fervently at shrinking his language and himself.

In multiple cases, the workers fear speaking out because they fear retaliation, including the possibility of getting fired, which is depicted as a kind of death. Their lives come to an end when their jobs do, and they treat getting fired with all the gravity of execution. At the same time, by continuing their work, the workers risk contributing to the deaths of others.

These dynamics as depicted in Severance may be wrapped in a fantastical sci-fi premise, but the underlying concept at play here, the primary source of the show’s emotional magnetism, is unfortunately all too real.