[COLUMN] In Severance, the Office Is a Church | by Darren Mooney

Note: The second season of Severance launched on Apple TV+ this past week. This piece was written before I saw the premiere, so there are no spoilers for the second season here. That said, the piece includes full spoilers for the first season - including the bombshell final twist. If you haven’t seen Severance yet - and you should, it’s one of the best television shows of the past few years - feel free to bookmark and come back.

The third episode of the first season of Severance finds new recruit Helly R (Britt Lower) touring “the Perpetuity Wing”, a museum dedicated to the history of the gigantic conglomerate Lumon Industries. She turns a corner, discovering a life-size recreation of the house in which the company’s founder, Kier Eagan, was raised. “Jesus!” she exclaims in shock at this monument to the long-dead industrialist. “No,” her co-worker Irving B (John Turturro) corrects her. “Kier.”

Severance is centered around the eponymous medical procedure, in which employees have their personal and work lives “severed.” They become in effect two different people. There is the “innie”, the staff member who exists within the confines of the working day. There is the “outie”, the individual who lives outside the office. Neither half has any communication with the other, no shared experience. The work elevator serves as a transition point between these two personas.

Severance about many different things, most obviously the absurdity and the horror of late capitalism. The show’s central premise is built around the idea that individuals become disassociated under the mechanics of capitalism, and how even suffering inflicted upon one’s self can be rendered an abstraction. The show revels in the absurdity of modern work culture. It explores questions of economic exploitation and the question of what it means to exist in a culture without history.

However, Severance is also very overtly about religion. In particular, it feels like a very barbed example of the vague spiritual anxiety that permeates so much contemporary pop culture, suggesting that there is perhaps an existential vacuum in contemporary life that has been filled by corporatism. This is not a new idea. Derek Thompson coined the term “workism” in February 2019, arguing work had become “a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community.”

Severance is saturated with religious imagery, and not just in the Renaissance and Baroque artwork that Burt G (Christopher Walken) prints for the office. The first season premiere,“Good News About Hell”, derives its title from an anecdote told by supervisor Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). “You know, my mother was an atheist,” she explains to Mark S (Adam Scott). “She used to say that there was good news and bad news about hell.  The good news is: hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is: whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.”

The office is a spiritual space. Supervisor Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) assures the staff, “[T]hings like deaths happen outside of here. Not here. A life at Lumon is protected from such things.” A dead colleague “sits with Kier now.” Indeed, the “outie” Mark had himself severed to avoid dealing with the death of his wife (Dichen Lachman), with the finale’s big reveal being that she is actually working at Lumon. “I guess this is the part where I should tell you to go to hell,” Helly tells Mark at one point. “Except you're already here.”

There is a nigh-religious fervor to the way that the staff talk about Kier Eagan and his company. Eagan is “the founder” who established “the corporate canon.” Bureaucratic rules are framed as religious commandments. Employees aren’t told not to sleep on the job, they’re advised “no workplace shall be repurposed for slumber.” The rule against mapping out the corridors of the office is framed as an edict from Eagan: "Render not my creation in miniature.” There is a strong sense of what director Ben Stiller described as “the cult of it all.”

Perhaps because the “innies” see no financial compensation for their labor, their relationship to the company is framed in moral terms. Irving takes pride in “working for a company that has been actively caring for mankind since 1866.” Workers’ transgressions are positioned as a profound failure of character. As punishment, they read from a “compunction statement” that equates workplace failure with sin, pleading, “Forgive me for the harm I have caused this world. None may atone for my actions but me, and only in me shall their stain live on.”

There is even a sense of religious schism over the teachings of Kier within the workplace. “I'm more of a first edition guy,” Burt concedes. “The original word of Kier: “‘And I shall whisper to ye dutiful through the ages. In your noblest thoughts and epiphanies shall be my voice. You are my mouth, and through ye, I will whisper on when I am 10 centuries demised.’” It is a sort of corporate gnosticism, arguing that the Kingdom of Kier is inside/within individuals, not in offices of wood and stone.

However, this religious fervor is not confined to the office itself. Harmony Cobel does not appear to be severed, and can carry her memories from the outside world into the office. At her home, she has constructed a religious shrine to Kier Eagan. In the season finale, after Cobel is fired by “the Board”, she remains loyal to Lumon. Despite the fact that she is no longer employed by Lumon, it is Cobel who works frantically to sabotage Mark’s plans to escape the office.

As such, Severance suggests that Lumon Industries is less a capitalist corporation than it is a cult, as much as those two ideas can be meaningfully separated. Indeed, Severance repeatedly emphasizes the heavily intertwined nature of capitalism and spiritualism. This is most evident in looking at the obvious influences on the series and the way in which it depicts work culture as a strangely religious and ritualized space.

There is, for example, a lot of John Harvey Kellogg in Kier Eagan. Kellogg was a hugely influential businessman, but his business was heavily informed by his theological and spiritual beliefs; in particular his Seventh Day Adventism and his desire to encourage abstinence by fashioning a suitably plain breakfast cereal. It seems notable that Kellogg’s wife was named Ella Eaton, and that the fourth question in the Lumon orientation is: “What is Mister Eagan’s favorite breakfast?”

There are also shapes of Austrian philosopher and industrialist Rudolf Steiner in Lumon. To compliment his spiritual teachings, Steiner founded the company Weleda, which packages and sells wellness, recalling Kier Eagan’s origins selling “topical salves.” Indeed, Steiner explicitly wrote about the concept of “severance” in relation to separating the body, the mind and the soul. Steiner’s writings on “the four temperaments” also suggest Eagan’s obsession with “the four tempers.”

"To understand Steiner, imagine a German version of L. Ron Hubbard," wrote Nathaniel Flakin in The Berliner. Hubbard certainly feels like another frame of reference. Observers such as New Yorker writer Michael Schulman have noted similarities between the “compunction statement” and the Scientology process of “auditing.” Hubbard (or “LRH”) would most likely have approved of Lumon’s insistent use of “acronyms and meaning-imbued abbreviations.”

Even the concept of “severance” echoes the Scientology principle of “disconnection”, which requires members to sever all ties to any outsiders who might interfere with their relationship to the organization. After all, “innies” are disconnected from the lives that their bodies enjoy outside the office. These points of overlap are unlikely to be coincidental. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health was required reading in the Severance writers’ room.

Hubbard’s Scientology is most often discussed as a religion, and has fought very hard to be recognized as such – with observers acknowledging the lucrative financial incentives to do so. However, Scientology is also an incredibly effective corporation. There is an argument that Scientology is “a business, not a religion.” After all, Hubbard reportedly claimed that “the only way to make any real money was to have a religion.”

Of course, many seemingly secular businessmen set themselves up as messianic figures with plans to build utopias that will reshape mankind in their image. Walt Disney planned to reinvent suburbia with Epcot. Indeed, aerial shots of Epcot don’t look unlike Lumon headquarters. Henry Ford built “Fordland” in the Amazon, in the hopes that he might “help develop that wonderful and fertile land.” Jeff Bezos wants to take mankind to space. Elon Musk wants to take humanity to Mars.

There is something of a religious fervor to the way that these billionaires position themselves as saviors hoping to redeem mankind. Musk might earnestly believe that he is humanity’s last defense against “the Woke Mind Virus”, the sort of charged nonsensical jargon employed by companies like Lumon. Severance creator Dan Erickson has noted the ubiquity of this philosophy, joking, “There’s often sort of this sense of like, ‘Yeah, this is more than just coffee. We’re saving the world.’”

Erickson has acknowledged that he was making a joke at the expense of Starbucks, but his observation is not unfair. “Starbucks puts the ‘cult’ in ‘culture,’” observed one former barista in February 2019, the same month that Derek Thompson defined the term “workism.” The barista continued, “It reminded me of Heaven’s Gate, or L. Ron Hubbard with Scientology or something.” Starbucks, a company that sells cheap coffee, organizes itself like a religion.

It's interesting that Severance should emphasize the strength of this connection between religion and capitalism at this moment. It might be a reflection of broader religious anxieties in contemporary culture, the sense that popular culture is looking for something to occupy the central space that religion once held in public life. However, it might also make sense to look at it from the opposite perspective.

There is a growing disillusionment with capitalism in mainstream pop culture, most likely driven by dramatic increases in income inequality. Like the “innies” in Severance, most workers don’t see any of the material benefits of their work; the profits they generate tend to go to executives and investors. There is a palpable sense in contemporary culture that capitalism is not working the way that it is supposed to, that it cannot present material evidence of its own value to its participants.

Severance understands that believing in capitalism is increasingly a leap of faith.