Anyone seen Severance? Great anti-professionalism/capitalist art
I recommend ️ it because who pays for apple tv.
Anyway I’ll try to give a summary of the with minimal spoilers, but if you want to go in blind- its a great kafkaesque comedy/drama about late stage capitalism and dehumanization of the employee. Watch it fr.
So the basic premise is that people can be cognitively split between their work selves and their free selves. Their work selves remember and experience nothing but office drudgery and their free selves never have to step into the office. Aside from more wishy washy themes of how memory and narrative shapes our identities, I think the main target of the show’s satire is professionalism. Its a joke, and a cruel one for the “innies” trapped in the office their whole lives.
These perma-employees have to act, talk, and feel a certain way lest they be “corrected” in horribly authoritarian ways. Unironically similar vibes to 1984 in places- just with a corporate middle manager instead of a party bureaucracy exercising totalitarian control over behaviors and expressions of the under class. The employees are always being watched, and they broadly must exhibit robotic, blandly, hollowly professional affect or face psychological torture.
Obviously this is satire, and an exaggeration of trends in the real world, but I’d be lying if I said it didnt touch a nerve. No, I’m not trapped at work, and no, psychological torture is (mostly) uncommon in the workplace. Still, the pressures of conforming to a very narrow set of postures, expressions, dialogues, and behaviors as a neurodivergent person is difficult and inescapable (and, even for NTs, work dissatisfaction is at ~80% last I checked).
Its a vacant, cartoonish smiley face stapled on to the heads of miserable, stressed people (especially in the service sector here in the US), and its truly hellish to wear it for most of your waking life while accomplishing nothing except shareholder RoI.
I could go on and on- how it clearly demonstrates wages of whiteness, manufactured infighting, the fear of middle managers driving their cruelty, the religious fervor of those at the bottom to “make it” some day by emulating the rich, the mysterious pointlessness of their work. All of it resonated to things I’ve experienced in less severe forms in my 5 or so years working.
Those who’ve seen it- what did you think? Is my analysis accurate? Those who havent- are you hooked now lol?
PS
Its also poetic that its 2nd season is delayed for the writers strike- although I love the series, its main message is worker liberation and I couldnt be happier to be inconvenienced by its writers putting the themes of the show into practice. Donate to the strike fund if you can instead of paying for apple +