Haven’t Finished Severance Yet, But One Of The Themes Of The Show That I’m Really Appreciating Is

Haven’t finished severance yet, but one of the themes of the show that I’m really appreciating is the idea that humans will find and create the meaning they need from the media around them, even if it is incredibly limited.

For those who haven’t seen the show, the central premise involves people for whom their entire lives, their memories and consciousness, is limited to just being at work in an extremely isolated office with no access to the outside world at all.

The only book available that they’ve ever known is the employee handbook, the only art they’ve ever seen is the art that hangs on the walls of the office. And of course, these pieces of media are incredibly heavy handed workplace propaganda. As viewers with outside context, we can understand its disturbing messaging. But the characters, having known only this book, have made a sort of religion out of it. It becomes a sort of scripture that they quote when trying to make decisions or are trying to explain complex ideas (even ideas that are against the workplace itself!)

And then another book shows up. It’s a ridiculous memoir full of very eye-roll inducing truisms by a very entitled and self absorbed author. But to those in this workplace, it is the only competing source of information they’ve ever had. It is something from the outside world that has shown up, unapproved by the company. They read it in secret, it is heretical and challenging. Basic truisms without much meaning take on enormous rebellious meaning to the people there. Basic ideas about valuing yourself and your friends, about working together for common goals, about deserving to breathe fresh air, become highly radical passages that they begin quoting to each other in secret.

It makes me think about how we all have different access and different life histories that influence what media and messages we’re taking in. And sometimes you’ll meet people, people who seem to have good values, who express a real fondness for what feels like objectively bad media. Or you can think back to some of the super problematic media you absorbed as a child before you knew anything about the world. And you have to sit there and think through, despite the reality of what this text is, taken with all of the context you know, you have to think about what lessons that individual took from it, what passages they projected their own values and human need for meaning onto.

There’s a poem called “Confessions of an Uneducated Queer” by Lauren Zuniga that involves similar themes– piecing together meaning and knowledge about ones self and one’s community from whatever scraps you can find, from random comments friends make, from tumblr, from books your friends leave at your apartment when they go to college. There’s a line, “This is for the first time I heard the term heteronormative and felt like I was handed a corkscrew after years of opening the bottle with my teeth.”

So many people have a strong sense of important ideas relevant to their lives, and go long periods without words to communicate them. I’m thinking about the profound, almost spiritual, relief of finding language to speak about these ideas, to communicate ones own experiences to people around you, even if you find that language in less than perfect places.