The Music Dance Experience is Officially Cancelled
The Argument for Revolt and Dissent in Severance
When I watched Severence two years ago—in an America that was post-COVID (ish), pre-the latest genocide, post-Trump 1.0, pre-Biden decline—I read it as many did: An indictment of cubicle culture, of what happens to the middle class when we’re trapped in the endless cycle of institutionalized mundanity. In an era of short-season, bingeable television, it’s remarkably easy to consume a show as one interpretation and then to either rewatch or continue it just a short time later, and through the lens of a rapidly changing world and my own rapidly changing life, see it as something completely different.
The foundational argument that I took from Severance in 2022 remains. The show is a fierce indictment of the aforementioned cubicle culture, born in the 1960s, popularized in the early aughts, and ridiculed by the forever prescient cult classic, Mike Judge’s Office Space and Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant's The Office and its US adaptation. AppleTV+’s series (created by Dan Erickson and produced by Ben Stiller) reimagines these comedic indictments in a dystopic dramedy, where the protagonist, Adam Scott’s Mark S., seeks to escape his trauma in the severed reality of the workplace, where a brain implant allows workers to literally separate their work lives from their “real” lives. Mark is joined by similarly severed co-workers Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro), all with their own reasons for severance, some revealed, others not. The four are plebians to Lumon Industries’ management, Ms. Cobell (Patricia Arquette), and Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), unsevered instruments of oppression and corporate enforcement, members of the professional-managerial class. At work, the severed are innies, while at home they are outies, making a clear delineation between who we are as people and who we are as laborers.
The jobs performed in Lumon have been the subject of much discourse; neither the audience nor the characters know what it is they do, seemingly some sort of data processing. But what they do doesn’t matter; just like what is done in most workplaces, the task is irrelevant to the working class who performs them. It’s a means to be able to live outside of work. The sterile world of Lumon Industries boasts everything we have come to hate from the modern workplace: a placid lack of purpose in the service of a corporate master, where rewards for hard work are vapid insults, like a waffle party, a dance party, company branded gag gifts, portraiture, or a melon ball buffet. At one point in season one, Milchick tries to bribe Dylan with the promise of the banal, “There's paintball, there's coffee cozies. Dylan, come on! Just say the word, and I'll get you a coffee cozy literally right now, Dylan.” The culture at Lumon has its own vernacular, ethos, mythology, and theology. It’s a place that worships its overlords and demeans its workers. And it puts people in boxes, truly America’s pastime. An element of American culture that still astounds me, among many, since I moved here a decade ago, is the blind willingness/tendency to build spreadsheets of homogeny: Black Americans vote like this, suburban moms want this, techbros are the worst. The American populace is oversimplified and dogmatically defined by race, gender, faith, and socioeconomics, as if Americans are born into hiveminds, what Marc Maron refers to as a “monoculture of free-thinkers.” The manifestation of this in Severance’s America (and indictment of ours) is perpetually underscored by boxes: Their cubicles are boxes, the workplace is a labyrinth of right angles, their computers and machinery are boxes, their staff photos are in cubes, an event’s showcases are tesseracts, Mark drives a Volvo and lives in a pre-fab suburban community of boxed houses, Irving’s outer world research is hidden in a chest, his paintings are of a mysterious box-like hell, and even the waffles themselves are a reward of boxed and cubic breakfast pastry. Severance argues that American culture is a series of boxes, properly labeled and inescapable.
And this is where my understanding/interpretation of the show’s thesis ended with season one in 2022. But upon rewatching the show, beginning season two, and enduring the new reality of 2025, complete with the arrival of fascism and the dismissal of civility, I see something new in Severance, and that’s an argument for revolt and dissent born of community. As season one came to a conclusion, the suffering protagonists find solace, love, and bond within their small group and aspire to understanding beyond the walls of their confinement. They realize the corporate structure and its minions are the enemy, and that true freedom/happiness can only come from autonomy and knowledge. They’re unaware of the life that their outies experience, except in brief flashes, but realize that the separation of self between work and “real life” is in and of itself a device of the corporate structure to rob them of their agency.
What separates work from life, or freedom from control, if not the courage to question everything? In this age of conformity and monothink, I have found that questioning the banality, toxicity, and even corruption within companies, colleges, and organizations has been a gateway to unemployment. Fights for equitable workforces, unionization, shared governance, and safe spaces have more often than not been met by vitriol and retaliation. In both Severance and my life, management has used fear to promote a docile workplace. That same type of fear has produced an apathetic citizenry. I’ve been told by coworkers that they admire my courage, which I appreciate, but what I really need is their support, the support of my community, of a community. In Severance, we see the manifestation of the abuse of labor, where the body and mind are the ultimate commodities and those who endure the procedure are ceding their everything in service of their masters. Characters can only truly feel outside of the workplace, mostly because they are unaware of the workplace and what it inhabits/enforces. One innie even argues, “Everything you want is not at work.” It is not until elements of the outside infringe upon the workplace and their self-induced (but naive) dissociation is corrupted that the characters begin to bond, to find love and community in each other, and in doing so, find the strength for dissent and revolt.
This is where Severance steps out of its alternate universe and into ours. We have been corrupted and imprisoned by both the avarice and intractability of our institutions, which have shifted from simply failing us to actively oppressing us. Lumon Industries is Trump’s America, unilateral, unilingual, monotheistic, and authoritarian, where the labor class no longer has autonomy over the commodification of our bodies, where work and home blend in the digital age, where middle-class salaries are static while upper-class wealth grows exponentially, where that upper-class dictates legislation and information and freedom and faith, where our dance and waffle parties manifest as shitty health benefits, the return of TikTok, vicarious fandom, and the neverending promise of a new iPhone. The argument of work as a forum for protest is underscored, albeit subtly and perhaps just to me, in a slight reference to another workplace dramedy where dissent and revolt were foundations of an anti-establishment, anti-government argument. When Irving is “freed” from his innie while at home, we are introduced to his dog, whose tag reveals his name is Radar, in reference to the Gary Burghoff character from M*A*S*H. In that series, itself an indictment of Vietnam and a world where leaders have lost their sense of right and wrong (sound familiar?), though set during the Korean War, Radar is the stand-in for every American: a simple, innocent midwestern kid who believes in the idea of America. The show’s protagonists, namely Alan Alda’s Hawkeye, Wayne Rogers’ Trapper, and Mike Farrell’s BJ, are decidedly anti-establishment, pacifist progressive doctors caught in the chaos of American imperialism. In 2025, the fight against oppressive regimes is a domestic battle, and the 4077 of Severance are four data processors for Lumon Industries, perpetuating capitalism while suffering it.
At the end of season one, dissent endured torture and punishments and turned to revolt, as the four severed protagonists rose up for a brief escape from the separation of work and home, their minds and bodies still divided as commodities, but able for their work-selves to see the truth of the world that is kept from them. Season two begins with the four—seemingly inexplicably given what we and they learned in season one—having returned to the boxed confinement of the workplace, with the promise of newer, shinier benign rewards for serfdom. But at episode one’s end, they are again united in revolt, in the search for escape, to find truth and freedom in the hope of somehow realigning themselves as better selves, as laborers with agency and equity, and perhaps to defeat the enemy that oppresses them. This is where America finds itself, where the only way to fight back against fascism and an authoritarian regime seems to be finding solace and support in like-minded communities, in those who believe that we all deserve more from our institutions than waffles. I am reminded of a passage from writer Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “In the Morning, I’ll Be All Right: Marvin Gaye and the Unlikely Patriotism of Resistance” on the inequality of everyday America, where the truth is obscured by pageantry:
We have to dance, and fight, and make love, and fight, and live, and fight, all with the same ferocity. There are no half measures to be had. It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without any actual hard rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all we’ve done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and movies. There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting, when I don’t feel like I’m pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here. I know that urge to build a small heaven, or many small heavens. Ones that you cannot take with you, but ones that cannot be taken from you.
It is this fight that found the protagonists of Severance and that now finds us all. We must find solidarity and community and build those small heavens, but also push back against the tyranny of a corporate system, against the oppression of dissent. It’s not quite at the stage where, as Turturro’s Irving says, to “ burn this place to the ground” but rather the call to arms of Scott’s Mark S. “Our job is to taste free air. Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours.”