Chris Duncan
The second season of Severance came and went earlier this year, and appeared to take the world by storm for a short time. As someone who patiently waited years since the first season to see the story continue, I was very satisfied with the show’s return. From the beginning, the narrative hook of Severance–that is, the idea of literally separating one’s self at work and outside of work into two distinct personas—struck me as fascinating and simple, with the potential for some truly unconventional character work. The first season delivered that, with the romance between the “innie” versions of Irving (John Turturro) and Burt (Christopher Walken), the contrast between Mark’s “innie” and “outie” personas, and of course, the reveal of Helly’s “outie” as Helena Eagan, a daughter of mysterious company Lumon’s founding family.
I have not seen many television shows like Severance, but watching the show did evoke a number of memorable films in my mind. Revisiting them may shed light on the dynamics of Severance and its potential path going forward into the coming third season. It may also afford an opportunity to appreciate where the show, or the films, may build on each other, or succeed where the other failed.
Please be warned: I will be heavily spoiling both seasons of Severance in this list, so read at your own discretion.
The Shooting
The key mystery at the heart of Severance is, of course, what the heck Mark S. and the Macrodata Refinement wing are actually doing. Even in the finale of season 2, when Patricia Arquette’s Ms. Cobel explains the work of Macrodata Refinement in a roundabout way, the viewer is still left with more questions than answers. The Shooting is a similarly vague and foreboding jaunt. Protagonist Willett (Warren Oates) and his hand Coley (Will Hutchins), two prospectors in the old west, help a mysterious woman (Millie Perkins) on her journey to a town a few days’ ride from them, but their party is soon crashed by a hired gun named Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson, in one of his most devious performances) who is in cahoots with the woman. The two men begin to question what it is they’re working toward, and whether they are hired help or hostages.
Clearly, there is a through line to Severance. After all, are Willet and Coley not experiencing largely the same thing that the innies on the severed floor are? In both contexts, the characters have no idea what they’re actually working towards, and come to realize that they largely lack any kind of agency. The later episodes of Severance’s second season take on the mood of a slow march toward doom, a feeling that permeates The Shooting. Both stories evoke the same senses of hopelessness and desperation, Driving their characters to similar violent ends.
To watch The Shooting and Severance, really, is to wonder about the significance of both protagonists in the context of the people exploiting them. Mark S. is clearly highly important to his employers at Lumon and their mysterious goals, and Lumon clearly believes that it is achieving something very important with global implications—that much the second season of Severance made clear. Willet, though, is not some highly-coveted asset—he only got hired to guide a lone woman to town. The woman and Billy don’t seem to think very highly of him, and yet they keep him around. They seem to take some pleasure in his torment, but they don’t go so far as killing him, which is to say: he’s useful. He knows the area and can guide them to civilization, but as the film marches on, one might begin to wonder whether they’re even going there, and what purpose Willet actually serves.
Ultimately, The Shooting leaves one questioning what the point of this whole journey was—a carefully planned scheme, a raw exercise in cruelty, or perhaps something beyond understanding? This ambiguity is not a narrative flaw, but a broader mystery, for which the film offers no closure. Perhaps Severance’s eventual ending will leave us wondering about the point of it all, too.
Dead Ringers
The second season of Severance delivered on the show’s promise of particularly strange character work, in particular with its twisted spin on a love triangle. Helena Eagan does essentially the same thing that the Mantle twins (Jeremy Irons), namely Elliot, do in Dead Ringers. She uses her identical appearance to a different person (or alternatively, her shared body with another person) to essentially trick someone else into sex. Maybe Helena can be understood as Elliot, the more confident of the two, who only wants to use Claire (Genevieve Bujold) for sex, while his twin Beverly actually cares for Claire.
The dynamic is, of course, quite different in Severance. What struck me about the beat in particular is just how lightly the show seems to treat Mark’s experience, learning about Helena’s deception, and coping with it. He gets over it quite quickly, and it turns into, more than anything else, an opportunity for him and Helly to solidify their romance. Not so in Dead Ringers, which treats it with the gravity and complexity that the situation, arguably, demands. It is a psychologically torturous situation for Beverly Mantle in particular, and the jealousy he feels toward his more confident brother paired with his genuine love and care for Claire make him an especially tragic figure. The film benefits, of course, from the fact that its two doppelgängers can speak and interact with each other, accentuating their contrast, and the fact that its two lead characters are so similar yet different is a testament to Irons’ subtlety as a performer. Ultimately, I tend toward the thought that the ultimate tragedy of Dead Ringers resonates more with me, and feels more true to the stakes it appears to set up. It’s a tremendous downer, but there may be no better way for a story like that to wrap up. Perhaps the same is true for Severance and its doomed romance.
The Trial
With a show like Severance, with its themes of alienation at work, the facelessness of corporate bureaucracy, the quasi-religious worship of efficiency, and so on, the comparisons to Franz Kafka are inevitable. I have long thought that Severance is very clearly trying to evoke Kafka in a more approachable way than is perhaps possible. The faceless nature of the Board, the maze-like structure of the severed floor, the mysterious goats, all build to a very similar sense of confusion and alienation expressed in Orson Welles’s The Trial. The life of “innies” begins to feel much like the dream logic that Welles articulates in the opening of the film.
Where the similarities between The Trial and Severance appear most strongly, I would argue, is in their leading men. Anthony Perkins’ Josef K. and Adam Scott’s Mark S. are both scrawny fools who get into trouble through their search for clarity and truth in worlds that seem to exist specifically to take those things away from them. They also get distracted, they lust clumsily, they act brash, and they go where they’re not supposed to, which only leads to more confusion and insanity. Severance is not a Kafka-esque work, but the influence of Kafka and of Welles is clear, and it might prove to be an effective entry point into The Trial and, more broadly, Kafka’s often impenetrable-feeling work.
Lost Highway
As is explained many times in Severance, protagonist Mark originally took on his job, and from there his severed persona “Mark S.,” to cope with the death of his wife Gemma. Lost Highway is about many things, meanwhile, but it is fundamentally about jazz performer Frank (Bill Pullman) and auto mechanic Pete (Balthazar Getty) and their affairs with two women, Renee and Alice, respectively, both played by Severance regular Patricia Arquette.
Frank and Pete are very loosely connected, and so are Arquette’s two characters. Renee, Frank’s wife, is the first to appear. Frank is seemingly tormented by the thought that she might be unsatisfied with him, or potentially unfaithful. Yet, Renee makes no outward mention of these feelings, which is to say that Frank may have dreamed up all these paranoid feelings. Alice, meanwhile, is a mistress of a big time gangster named Mr. Eddy, and she actively pursues Pete and seduces him. We’re thus presented with two narratives that are, in a sense, inversions of each other. This in itself evokes Severance, which is, of course, defined by its two inverted worlds, although both narratives in Lost Highway take place in what feels like the same world.
The low-hanging fruit with Lost Highway in the context of Severance is that here, Patricia Arquette plays two characters, and gives the kind of performance that she hasn’t had the opportunity to give in Severance as someone who has, as far as we know, not been severed.
If we look deeper into Lost Highway, though, what we see is that the two characters of Frank and Pete are, in fact, just Frank, and as the film’s iconic Mystery Man puts it, there is no Alice, only Renee. It’s revealed partway through the film that Frank is believed to have murdered Renee, after which the story primarily focuses on Pete. Is this world, then, that of Pete and Alice and Mr.Eddy, just a creation of Frank’s mind, a coping mechanism for his guilt? Here we see the obvious connection with Severance. Both men, Frank and Mark, distraught over the loss of their wives, wracked with guilt, or perhaps a sense of inadequacy, create new personas for themselves to lighten their burden. They never escape their struggles, though, and both stories show the limits and dangers of masculine repression, and the layers of insecurity that underlie it.
Beyond The Black Rainbow
The first season of Severance ended with the tantalizing revelation that Gemma, Mark’s late wife, is actually alive, and in fact, works on the severed floor as wellness counselor Ms. Casey. In the second season, the show reveals that Gemma is being held at Lumon and seemingly subjected to various experiments, perhaps to test the limits of the Severance procedure. This situation is what immediately evoked in my mind Panos Cosmatos’s nightmarish Beyond the Black Rainbow, which stars Eva Allan as Elena and Michael Rogers as Dr. Barry Nyle. In the film, Nyle holds Elena captive as some kind of research subject at the mysterious and new-agey Arboria Institute.
As with many of these entries, the surface-level elements of Beyond the Black Rainbow clearly evoke Severance; the film’s laboratory sets clearly evoke the crisp sterility of the severed floor, and the cult-like Arboria Institute is very similar to Lumon and their worship of founder Kier Eagan. In terms of its narrative approach, too, Severance echoes Cosmatos’s film in its lack of interest in excessive explanation. As with any ambiguous elements in storytelling, the viewer will naturally seek clarity and answers. What I love about Beyond the Black Rainbow, and about Severance so far, is that regardless of whatever complex analysis and theory-crafting it might inspire, the real answers will be more vague and less purely satisfying than one could possibly piece together based on evidence alone. Severance takes a seeming delight in confusing the viewer and always posing more questions than answers. Much like Beyond the Black Rainbow and many of the other films in this list, it abandons the instinct to make physical sense, that is, to create a narrative that is purely logical and coherent, and instead focuses on what makes narrative sense, that is, something that feels true to its world and characters. Such is to say that it listens to its heart instead of its head.
