How the Other Half Lives

The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen for AT&T in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and completed a year after his fatal brain surgery of 1961, almost seems like a deathbed conversion, a repudiation of his crowd-pleasing, if never-quite-convincing, organicism. Outside, a procrustean rectangle wrapped in dark mirrored glass refuses the inquiring gaze. Inside, a severe open habitat of balconied walkways intended to create moments of interoffice happenstance instead forms a panoptic fishbowl. The stern and stumpy building forgoes the blandishments of Saarinen’s greatest hits—the gee-whiz frontier triumphalism of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch (1965), the jet-set Googie of JFK’s TWA terminal (1962), or the respectively botanical and maternal insinuations of his so-called Tulip (1955–56) and Womb (1946) furniture lines for Knoll. If the 1946 collection affixed connotations of reproductive humanity to the alienness of neofuturism, AT&T’s ascetic nerd farm would become a womb of another kind: an incubator for the technologies of remote work. Antecedents to the cell phone were developed in this Nobel Prize matrix, which, following the company’s pioneering Voorhees Walker Foley & Smith–designed 1940s corporate campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey, extended white-collar labor’s flight to suburbia and the attendant myth of workplace as community. It’s with some poetic irony, then, that Saarinen’s complex would also facilitate the office’s downfall.

Six decades after the opening of Pandora’s mirrored box, the building was downcycled into the colossal coworking mall/“metroburb” Bell Works. That was when Ben Stiller, the cat-milking starchitect of Blue Steel, would walk its halls and restore it to cultural dominance—in an alternate reality. It became the headquarters of Lumon, the fictional biotech corporation at the heart of Apple+’s doleful boffo Severance. In another irony, the primary function of this imaginary occupant of the historic telecommunications hub is to box consciousness into physical place.

The building is the parturient puzzle at the center of the prestige mystery-box series. It is here that Lumon births new consciousnesses from older, sadder ones but keeps them forever inside an amniotic sac of alienated labor. Saarinen, like a certain Cold War cordon bleu, worked for the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, and was no stranger to almighty, cultic institutions with everything to hide. His uncharacteristically conservative creation (even more austere than the similar complex he built for General Motors in 1956 as his debut project as lead architect) is the ideal headquarters for Severance’s vision of corporate supremacy. Its sublime Jersey sprawl allows the design an expansive horizontality—to spread its rigidity over everything.

For any discourse-severed readers: The foundational concept of the Stiller-produced (and largely directed), Dan Erickson–created series, whose second season concluded this spring, is that workers on a “severed floor” have had a chip embedded in their brains that flips on a rebooted self at work. The quarter-mile-long atrium of Bell Works—its Broadfork Greens and Grains, Iorio Plastic Surgery & Medspa, Swing Loose indoor golf range, and OasisVRX Virtual Reality Arcade digitally erased, presumably—hams it up in the role of Lumon’s corporate lobby, a space of total visibility and a contrast with the labyrinthine, riot-proof severed floor. (The latter is a Bronx soundstage set designed by Jeremy Hindle.) While one’s off-hours consciousness retains its memories and remains the person they’ve always been—now enjoying a life devoted exclusively to domesticity, leisure, and the unbearable heaviness of being—an employee consciousness is born anew on this floor, prostrate on a conference table in a padded room, into white-collar bondage. Such an obedient, baggage-free workforce would be the envy of any corporation. (As real life so often bypasses speculative dystopias, we now just call this ChatGPT.)

Compartmentalization is what Lumon sells, but the company has designs on broader social control. It owns the surrounding municipality, named Kier after Lumon’s nineteenth-century founder Kier Eagan, an ether-peddling industrialist who was equal parts Henry Ford and L. Ron Hubbard. This bleak company town is, in reality, a hodgepodge of Hudson Valley and Catskills sites in frumpy attire; Phoenicia Diner becomes Pip’s Bar & Grille, in honor of departed Lumon CEO Phillip “Pip” Eagan. The corporation doles out Pip’s VIP cards as workers’ comp. It even owns Kier’s local fertility clinics, reifying a recurring metaphor for the workplace as birthplace. It has spun a religion from a Victorian NoFap fable, turning acolytes into middle managers and vice versa. It seems to own the future of the human mind.

As Lumon does its severed employees, Severance kept its first season largely cloistered, to commanding effect, within its central conceit. It used retrofuturist design to foment tension between old-school office work as a site of both menace (Saarinen’s leggy UFO of a watertower is shot with Death Star ominousness) and nostalgia, but mostly as fertile ground for the exploration of the self across partitioned identities. At the beginning of the series, we meet woebegone widower Mark Scout (Adam Scott), who two years earlier underwent the severance procedure to create a self liberated from the permafrost of grief blanketing his soul. (Mark’s spiritual glaciation finds its meteorological mirror in the Fimbulwinter in which the series seems to be set.) The first version of him we encountered was actually Mark S., the wryly chipper, dutiful desk jockey who only knows Lumon. Powered on by Scout’s elevator ride into Lumon’s corporate Hades and switched off immediately on ascent, this Mark never sees remuneration for his labor or understands its purpose. He is, in fact, only labor, servile to the seminal consciousness that electively spawned him in this Upstairs, Downstairs of the mind. Mark S. has never experienced sunlight and only knows the cold fluorescence of Lumon’s severed floor, where he works in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department, navigating gamified sequences of code to identify and file “scary” numbers on a prehistoric desktop.

An eloquent social constructivist provocation amassing depth through Beckettian repetition and substantiating design, Severance raises the same questions clone narratives do, but it does so with the far more intriguing proposition of an internecine duality within the same body. Lumon calls Mark S.’s kind “innies”—an infantilizing, belly button–izing word that also sounds like a euphemism for inmate. The series gradually divulges bytes of information about Mark’s colleagues’ “outies”—all antitheses of their innie selves. Sardonic class clown Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) is disappointed to learn that his AFK counterpart is a milquetoast “loser” in a stagnant marriage. Irving B. (John Turturro) is, at the beginning, the biddable, by-the-books innie of an ex-military metalhead queerdo outie. (His two selves converge more and more, to heartbreaking results, in the second season.) Nascent revolutionary-firebrand-with-dye-job-to-match Helly R. (Britt Lower, in one of the most mercurial and spellbinding performances on contemporary TV) is revealed to be the heir to the Lumon throne and a direct descendant of corporate godhead Kier Eagan.

It’s a testament to the show’s patient pacing and form-follows-function approach that its first season never felt convoluted. Its containment was rare among the conceptual glutting of much prestige TV. This was the successful result of marrying sci-fi with the minimalism of the workplace sitcom: four quirky misfits headbutting their reliably recursive, boxed existence. Straying from its site-specific ontology to pursue digressive world-building, the second season swerved between soaring highs and bizarre lows, its fraying expansionism commensurate with its budgetary boost from Apple TV+. (It cost around $20 million an episode, making Severance the streamer’s most expensive show.) In season 1 our four refiners were treated to an MDE (“Music Dance Experience”), an Orwellian disco charged with rainbow lights swooning through the barren interior of MDR; the series calls back to this moment in season 2 with the maximalism of an entire marching band. An outie resistance plotline sees renegade biotechnician Asal Reghabi persuading Outie Mark to undergo “reintegration” surgery—bridging his two consciousnesses—a matter, ultimately, of surprising insignificance. And an episode-long excursion to a village beyond Kier breaks Severance’s unspoken and successful rule: Sequester and control our experience like Lumon does for innies. The more we see of the outside world, oddly, the less specific it becomes.

This late-season detour visits a disinvested postindustrial town (filmed in Newfoundland), apparently the epicenter of an ether epidemic. The bottle episode is devoted solely to the development of oddball villainess Harmony Cobel—a character Patricia Arquette has made undevelopable: a camp object with sheet-metal hair droning cryptic one-liners in a Mid-Atlantic monotone before combusting with clockwork rage. (In moments, she bears a temperamental resemblance to another hoary antagonist from the Stiller cannon: Mugatu.) In season 1, Arquette’s drillmaster supervisor of the severed floor was an aluminum foil for the innies’ constrained humanity, but her arch stylization is irreconcilable with season 2’s newfound concern with her interiority. With Cobel sticking it to the (Lu)man and embarking on a tangential redemption arc beamed in from a Marvel movie, the far more intriguing antagonist is her successor Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), a verbose weekend leather daddy with a minatory managerial smile—and, most importantly, the character that binds everyone to Lumon’s building. A sign that minimalism and containment work for Severance: The most disquieting memory from the season is Milchick standing alone in front of a mirror trying to “eradicate from [his] essence childish folly.” He hurls the word “grow” at himself in ever more violent grunts as his face severs—his mouth strained and dictatorial, eyes callow and scared—the whole scene an act of verbal self-flagellation. Cobel, now exiled from Lumon, is therefore a gateway to context—the very thing Lumon’s technology battles, the very thing its building evades, and the very thing of which Severance should be wary.

One episode has all the appearances of digression while actually deepening our understanding of Lumon and its captives. In an inspired spin on the sitcom vacation episode (think of adventures to LA in Sex and the City, to London in Friends, to Niagara Falls in The Office), “Woe’s Hollow” sees Mark, Helly, Irving, and Dylan’s innies for the first time beyond their MCM gulag, exposed to the wildness of the great outdoors. Milchick chaperones the ensemble on a camping trip—in Lumon lingo, an ORTBO (“Outdoor Retreat and Team-Building Occurrence”)—in a frosted mountain forest, such an unnaturally natural setting for them that it initially seems a simulation. On this plein-air tour through the freaky Lumon Evangelion, the leafless, lifeless landscape teems with company lore: One-and-a-half centuries ago, Kier Eagan came to these woods with his twin, caught him masturbating, and watched him disintegrate into anguished moss.

Erickson characterized the innies as “children” in the first season and “adolescent” in the second. Like any teens, they’re brooding over the meaning and purpose of their existence. Since that existence is a single floor of Lumon (and their home a swastika of conjoined demi-cubicles on a steppe of Astroturf-green carpet), they want to understand, and upend, its parental rules. Mutual work crushes Mark and Helly fall in love, fuck, and fuck the system. There’s just once catch: Back in season 1, Mark S. learned that his outie’s wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), is in fact still alive, in the evidently lobotomized personage of Lumon’s wellness counselor, Ms. Casey.

For the characters to learn who they are, they must comprehend where they are. Mapping at Lumon is strictly forbidden (by Kier’s commandant: “Render not my creation in miniature”). Several innies have nonetheless attempted to spatialize the tortuous interior of the severed floor, which among other mysterious departments houses Optics and Design (O&D) and the goat-dotted indoor hillock of Mammalians Nurturable; the management and security offices, the latter outfitted with an elaborate surveillance architecture; a corporate museum called the Perpetuity Wing; and the Brutalist, wood-paneled Wellness Center, where Gemma’s reprogrammed innie soothes her colleagues with quaint factoids about their nonworking lives (“Your Outie knows a beautiful rock from a plain one”). Directions hidden by Irving B. behind a motivational poster eventually lead his colleagues to a blackened corridor that haunts both his innie and outie unconscious. In “Chikhai Bardo,” half of which is the season’s best episode, we finally access the space deepest within Lumon via the hallway emblazoned in Irving’s mind.

In this basement laboratory, we find Gemma being lurched between a series of themed pods, each an experiential prison for a consciousness created expressly to inhabit it. The functional comforts and false organicism of midcentury design become even more clinical—and chilling—here. In the dour showroom of the usual severed floor, celebrity seating cameos include Ricardo Fasanello’s Fardos lounger (1968) and a quartet of Henry P. Glass’s button-back armchairs (c. 1955), while the Mad Men–meets-morgue aesthetic of this sinister substructure features a white leather Massoni Dilly Dally vanity set (c. 1968) and Dieter Rams’s 620 Chair Programme for Vitsœ (1962). At one point, Gemma resists her siloed fates—eternities of perpetual airplane turbulence, thank-you note–writing, and dental trauma, among others not shown—by bopping Sandra Bernard (impeccably cast in the role of this underworld’s own Nurse Ratched) over the head with Joe Colombo’s polypropylene stalwart Universale (c. 1967).

Gemma’s Persephonic capture within Lumon’s penetralia offers an imaginatively disturbing portrait of personhood torn multiple times asunder. In this bombshell divulgence of her trajectory since her “death,” Lachman soulfully rounds out a character that has thus far been an imprint. Her by turns enigmatic and devastating performance also far transcends the more facile other half of the episode: a Kodak-moment montage of Gemma’s courtship with pre-severed Mark, in which Severance 180s from its typical digital winter to a golden-hour idyll on 35 mm.

Puzzle-box television in the post-Lost lineage inevitably presents showrunners and viewers with a catch-22: The promise of discovery beguiles, but discovery itself deflates. This self-demystifying form is thus a self-defeating one. Severance’s writers seem to have internalized this, stalling narrative resolution by bloating the show’s world. “What is Lumon?” is a question that brings us closer to windy ramblings of  Westworld and away from the stark psychological architecture of Beckett. Mistaking this mystery for the series’ essential, existential one—as the second season itself so often does—misses the vastly more interesting conundrum at its crux: “What is a person?” The sparest moments are the most unforgettable: a woman running through an emergency exit into a stairwell to escape, only to be returned, on repeat, by an ego that wants to keep her inside. A woman telling another side of herself, via video, that she is not a person. A man who doesn’t know the runny nose he carried into the workday was from sobbing.

Much ink has been spilled, not all of it persuasive, on Severance’s relevance as a satire of contemporary corporate life. But the show’s retrofuturist aesthetics and its parallel vintage anxieties about the nature of the physical workplace unbind its philosophical drama from the demands of topicality, severing its world from our own. Rather than embellish that televisual world, the anachronistic modernism of the production design effectively strips it down to a potently peculiar essence, such that any infiltration from outside can feel pollutive. To interpret the show as “an Indictment of  Workplace Hell” (to quote one representative headline) is to overlook the ways that our PMC perdition has pivoted toward the incorporeal. Identities blur across platforms, are never turned off, and offices are increasingly decentralized, immaterial, and insidious. As The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman notes, Severance “arrived during the twilight of the pandemic’s W.F.H. phase, as the office was becoming a site not only of fear and resentment but also of longing.” Now, thanks in part to advances made right here in Bell Labs, we are less divided into professional and domestic selves than ever. The very trajectory of Saarinen’s caliginous Crystal Palace—a hotbed of invention, abandoned and nearly razed in the mid-2000s, and finally rescued and repurposed for remote coworking, grain bowls, and occasional Severance promotional pop-ups—reflects this. Just step inside the metroburb to behold our own world’s deceptive, wan vision of freedom.