Compartmentalized Consciousness: What Severance’s Model of Storytelling Reveals About Power and Resistance
Severance has recently become a cultural phenomenon. The AppleTV series is nothing if not refreshingly original, following a group of white-collar employees whose identities are spliced between their work and personal lives, personas known as “Innies” and “Outies.” Yet the more I watched this depiction of two minds sharing one body, the more I began to draw parallels to several innovative horror films: The Substance (two bodies that share one mind), I Saw the TV Glow (minds trapped in foreign bodies), and Get Out (bodies colonized by foreign minds). This led me to wonder, what is so compelling about fictional technologies that compartmentalize characters’ consciousnesses and intervene in the division between body and mind?
The answer, I realized, is simple yet unshakeable: power. According to conventional formulae, power differentials are often what sets up a character’s struggle and journey over the course of a story. Consequently, the power of the mind-body altering technology is almost always monopolized by an antagonistic force, such as Lumon, the corporation that invented the severance procedure. This power is present in all three films: the mysterious distributors of “The Substance” that entices customers to spend half their time in a youthful body, the Armitage family in Get Out who transplant the minds of wealthy white clients into the bodies of kidnapped Black people, the villain in I Saw the TV Glow who imprisons the protagonists in their alternate physical reality. Aside from establishing the central stakes and struggle, these technologies also reflect deeper themes regarding the methods and impacts of real-world power structures: The Substance explores the patriarchy endemic to the entertainment industry; Get Out exposes the anti-Blackness perpetuated by even nominally liberal American elites; I Saw the TV Glow elucidates the paralyzing social pressures against coming out as transgender. Film is a visual medium, and allows creators to concretely represent these often invisible socio-historical forces.
The Burying
The severance procedure is activated based on location: throughout the show we become accustomed to seeing Mark S. (as his personal self/Outie) step into an elevator in the Lumon building, descend several floors, then step out of the elevator as his Innie/work self. It is no mistake that the “Severed floor” is located in the basement, a labyrinthine network of windowless white walls that reinforces the Innies’ subservient, subhuman status.
Similarly, not only does oppression manifest both psychologically and physically, but it also necessitates control: both top-down and environmental, constructed by elites and enacted by one’s immediate surroundings. Get Out’s Sunken Place is the subconscious realm where Chris is hypnotically imprisoned, unable to access his own bodily autonomy. In The Substance, Elisabeth/Sue constructs a hidden closet to store her older body, gracelessly dumped on the floor in the dark. And I Saw the TV Glow reveals that the “true” bodies of Maddy and Owen have been literally buried alive by Mr. Melancholy. Once again, these representations concretize social realities: the dehumanization and physical exploitation of Black Americans, the devaluation of aging in women, and the isolation experienced by closeted transgender individuals.
The Barrier
Since the severance procedure is entirely controlled by Lumon, Innies’ attempts to find out about the real world are severely hindered. In Season 1 we witness Helly R., a newly severed employee of Macro Data Refinement, attempt to exit the severed floor only to be continually plunged right back, as it is the only place where her consciousness is allowed to exist. The barrier to Innies’ freedom is therefore the severance itself, a fundamental blockage that keeps them in their place.
Accordingly, once someone becomes aware of their own subjugation by a powerful force, there is always a significant physical and/or systemic barrier to escape. Once Elisabeth/Sue starts to abuse the balance and overuse her new body, the effects manifest on her old one: to stop using the Substance now would mean remaining in her old body with these deformities. In Get Out, though the environment of his girlfriend’s family home are highly suspicious to Chris, he does not attempt to leave sooner due to the emotional manipulation of his girlfriend Rose, who has in fact been in on her parents’ scheme the entire time.. Finally, I Saw the TV Glow’s Maddy, a queer teenager who runs away from home, returns several years later to tell Owen that they are both trapped in a pocket dimension; returning to their true selves is possible, but only through an intensely painful process of being willingly buried alive. Despite her urges, Owen ultimately panics and refuses, and though he never sees Maddy again, she leaves him with a message: There is still time.
The Breakout?
Helly is not easily deterred; she fights fiercely against her Outie’s desires, including threatening their shared body. Though these measures fail, they serve as important inspiration for the other Innies, who at the climax of Season 1 join forces and awaken themselves in the outside world. This momentum of rebellious impulse and increasingly drastic corporate countermeasures continues into Season 2, with characters like Irving and Gemma escalating these challenges before each is dispatched. Still, the movement seems to be converging toward uture success, a hope buoyed by Mark’s pursuit of reintegration: the complete dissolution of the barrier of severance.
These efforts reflect an incredibly important feature of the oppressed: their instinct to resist. They will inevitably make some attempt to fight their subjugation, a valiant if monumental task. But crucially, these horror films are designed to reflect bleak realities, hence the question mark attached to the success of these efforts. Take Elisabeth/Sue, or Monstro Elisasue as she ultimately becomes: the merging of her two bodies after heavily abusing the Substance does seem to afford her character some bloody catharsis, if not a happy ending. This is contrasted by the tragic case of Owen, who slowly wastes away in his dismal original reality, and in a fleeting moment of desperation, cuts open his chest to witness that still-present glow of his true identity, only to quickly seal it back up. Finally, Chris’s escape from the Armitage estate is the most successful of the three, but is still far from perfect: he is unable to truly restore their previous victims, only free them from the Sunken Place through death. Additionally, although Jordan Peele opted for the “happy” ending in which Chris is rescued by his TSA friend Rod, he entertained an alternate ending in which the local cops are the ones who discover Chris with Rose’s dead body, a much darker conclusion that lands him in a prison cell.
These resistance techniques are instinctive, essential, and notably strengthened by collaboration: what Helly inspires in her fellow Innies, what Maddy exemplifies by coming back for Owen, what Rod offers Chris with his warnings and ultimate rescue, and what even the absurdly grotesque Monstro Elisasue embodies. It is through working in solidarity with one another to dissolve the boundaries created by oppressive technologies that these characters (and their real-world counterparts) have the greatest chance at breaking free from the powers that aim to separate them.