Wouldn’t it be marvellous if instead of going to work every day we could contract out the tedium to avatars of whose daytime activities we could remain blissfully unaware? This, in essence, is the premise of the dystopian drama Severance, but I’m not sure it’s a fantasy many of us actually nurture.
Noël Coward once said: ‘Work is more fun than fun.’ And though I wouldn’t push it quite that far – it would be true only if you were a huntsman or a Master of Fox Hounds – I think most of us would be pretty bereft without the adrenaline buzz of deadlines, the thrill of office flirtations, the rapier play of banter, the juice of gossip and the creativity of fiddling your expenses and getting one over on your fatuous, irritating, know-nothing superiors. Not to mention the relief when you’re done for another day.
Still, Severance – a first-time lucky hit for hitherto unknown screenwriter Dan Erickson – is an enjoyable watch. It was inspired, Erickson claims, by his years working in dead-end office jobs. But it must surely also owe something to the MKUltra experiments conducted by the CIA on unsuspecting guinea pigs from the 1950s onwards, where trauma was used to fracture the victims’ personalities so that they effectively became several different people in the same body. In Severance, you get to undertake this process voluntarily and split your psyche into two halves: your ‘innie’ who does all your office drudgery for you, while your ‘outie’ just takes the money and enjoys the leisured home life.
It’s set somewhere in a chilly, northern US state at the headquarters of a sinister corporation called Lumon – no doubt modelled on one of the Big Pharma enterprises.
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