EPISODE 1007: SEVERANCES
I hear there's a special place where boys and girls can be queens every single day.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the pop culture/spirituality/theater sometimes Australian interviews newsletter! Here is a partial list of possiblities I had compiled of possible topics for this week’s newsletter:
Daredevil ever get old for me, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m Catholic or because Charlie Cox Charlie Cox Charlie Cox.
Why Anora winning best picture says good things about the Oscars, even if no one is seeing it.
How attacking that Oscar-nominated actor I don’t like taught me something about the problem with sharing outrage.
Severance, because everyone is talking about Severance and shouldn’t I have a take?
White Lotus episode 3
The Last of Us trailer
How the dumb tariffs are going to mean that comic book prices go way up which will mean way few buyers and books which is going to kill a massive number of comic book stores (aka small business owners) and also a lot of the creativity that Hollywood currently relies on.
“Pink Pony Club”—I have nothing to say on this. I just want to listen to “Pink Pony Club”.
I settled on Severance, and I have to admit, I was initially a little disappointed in myself, because a) As I mentioned, isn’t everyone talking about Severance right now? and b) Is it really that popular? Yes, critics are talking about it, but how many of you watch Severance? I bet I’m lucky if it’s half. Mo Ryan, one of my favorite TV writers, properly calls it “a dad show.” (Dad TV, as she defines it: “Dad TV is not about gender—it is a state of mind. It’s earnest, focuses on problem-solving, and often involves science, teamwork, diligence, and the occasional injection of genial sarcasm (though Gary Oldman gets to do lethal sarcasm).”)
But then instead of digging into the conspiracy of it all, which is a huge part of the show, I stepped back and looked it as a show about what’s going on in everybody’s minds, which it absolutely also is, and things went in some unexpected directions (although with some of my usual preoccupations, for which I’m sorry, I’m trying everybody, I’m just stuck inside this old Tandy TRS-80 that I was born in and the subroutines are INGRAINED, I told you I needed a Mac, Mom and Dad!).
ME, BATMAN, AND THE SHIT BOSS
When I had been in therapy for a couple years in Los Angeles, my therapist—a fantastic human being named Vic Cohen, whom I highly recommend—started pointing out some of the different voices that seemed to be at play within me. There was a sort of Batman figure who would emerge from out of nowhere whenever I felt attacked and work without mercy to utterly decimate whoever was doing that. There was the Insecure Teen with Bangs to Hide Her Face who could expand any perceived slight into an entire drama, culminating in cutting people out of her life entirely. There was a quiet kid who liked to play and be creative, and the Shit Boss who was constantly telling me to be practical and calling me at best lazy and at worst a failure.
This sort of sifting out of different characters—like panning for gold, except most of what you find is wriggling insects—was very familiar to me. In the Jesuits we would talk about paying attention to the good and evil spirits that are moving in you, and how the evil ones tend to want to stay hidden because it makes it a lot easier to control us.
And Vic’s thought was, What if you thought about yourself as the chairman of the board of all of these creatures? When a situation arises, sure, Batman and the Shit Boss and the Insecure Teen with Bangs to Hide Her Face may get a chance to speak, but so do other parts of you. And none of them get to make the ultimate call about what’s to be done. You listen and then you decide.
I’ve actually found that in doing so, some of the voices that seem malevolent end up taking on a whole different character. Batman is really just trying to protect you. The Insecure Teen with Bangs to Hide Her Face is just afraid. The Shit Boss—
Actually the Shit Boss is a Shit Boss. Some voices in our heads really do just hate us. Maybe it’s because at some point we were around someone who didn’t understand us and said some awful things and in some horrible but totally normal way we believed them, and so they took up residence in our head. Whatever the reason, as far as I can tell those voices really do just want to see us utterly shattered. And, to paraphrase St. Ignatius, “Fuck them.”
There’s a great Jesuit named Anthony DeMello who wrote a book called Awareness (available online as a PDF) that arrives at the same place in a slightly different way. He doesn’t talk about boards or Batman, but he talks about stepping back from the fray of a given moment, understanding that my feelings are distinct from me. And that creates a similar sense of self-awareness and self-determination.
It creates a healthy skepticism, too. Over and over in that little book he ends up saying, “Why are you disappointed that people don’t live up to your expectations? They’re human beings. Of course they don’t.”
Sit with that a while. It’ll burn every ounce of righteous anger you have to the ground.
THE SCOUTING REPORT
I think down deep Apple TV’s Severance is chewing on a lot of the very same stuff.
By the way, SPOILERS.
Adam Scott (Parks & Rec) plays Mark Scout, an academic whose life completely falls apart after his wife Gemma dies. And he’s in such a dark state, Mark agrees to a medical process called “severance,” which creates a sort of second, “Inner” Mark, a sweet, hardworking guy with no memories of the “Outer” Mark or his traumas at all.
Each day Mark drives to Lumon Industries, which created the severance process, steps into an elevator, and travels down to the Severed Floor. During the course of the elevator ride Mark’s Innie emerges and works all day with other Innies, receiving feedback and affirmations (which consist of supposed information about things his Outie likes or is good at). At the end of the day he takes the elevator ride back to the surface, emerging as Outie Mark, who has absolutely no memory of anything that has happened below—which is quite convenient for Lumon, because in fact its managers work their employees through a chilling combination of manipulation, lies, and shame.
It’s a wild, creepy show, perfect for anyone who loves a good tech conspiracy story. The work that Mark and his Innie friends are asked to do is very strange, basically a nonsense version of Minesweeper and other 90s video games that people secretly played on their computers in big corporate offices (which is exactly the aesthetic of the Severed floor). And while the purpose of their work is unknown, it’s very clear that it’s all in the service of some grand and seemingly scary goal.
Who knows where the Severance’s plot will lead, or whether it will be satisfying. But what strikes me is how much this very weird show is building on these very relatable psychological experiences. The Severed floor is Mark’s mind. Innie Mark is that part of him that remains untouched by the trauma of his life and therefore is open, generous, pure. His coworkers are the allies in his head—Irving, the Voice of Courage (brilliantly performed by John Turturro); Helly, the Voice of Rebellion (Britt Lower); Dylan, the Voice of Friendship (Zach Cherry). And the Lumon staff like Patricia Arquette’s Ms. Cobel and Tramell Tillman’s Mr. Milchick are the antagonistic voices we all have within us.
I think it’s really telling that the “bad guys” are all given titles of respect that the severed have to use, like Mister or Ms. Those titles define them as authority figures. And when we’re all young we’re surrounded by such figures who tell us what is right and wrong from their point of view. Some of them exert such an influence on us, they really do come to occupy parts of our brains. And some of them are so subtle and insidious, too, that they run deep in the background where we don’t usually see them, just like the figures behind the scenes that we’re only just beginning to catch glimpses of on the show.
(Yes, I used air quotes around bad guys. The day to day villains in this show are incredibly disturbing, and yet if this is a show about the voices in our head, I’m going to guess there’s going to be a point where enemies become allies. And maybe Lumon itself is not what it seems, either, though again, the Shit Boss really does just want us dead.)
At the end of season one, through an escape plot hatched by the Innies, Outer and Innie Mark both come to learn that their wife Gemma is somehow not dead, because her Innie has been interacting with Innie Mark on the Severed floor. From a psychological view, that, too, makes perfect sense. If the Severed floor is a metaphor for Mark’s mind, of course Gemma would be there. His imagination is in fact the only place that she can still be alive. And the creation of this whole scenario where she is trapped and he has to rescue her is the perfect wish fulfillment. What we’re watching is an 80s-IBM version of Orpheus and Eurydice, with Mark’s mind as itself the hell he has to travel in order to find and rescue her.
Orpheus and Eurydice doesn’t end well. (Few Greek myths do, really.) I won’t spoil what season two has brought to this storyline. But I will say, I think it’s fascinating that Outer Mark has decided to investigate the process he learned about in season one called “reintegration.” The goal of the process is to allow him to get to a point where he can remember what his Innie sees and experiences, and thus to try and find Gemma—who was spirited away to some deeper realm, via an incredibly frightening-looking corridor, at the end of season one.
It’s also a fascinating way to talk about his personal situation. Trauma is itself an experience of severance; there is a Before You and there is an After You. And After You has no way back to Before You—as Dante is told at the entrance to Hell, There is no way out but through. But given what “through” means, After You doesn’t want to go that either.
On the show, reintegration is described as enormously dangerous, uncharted waters. And that is exactly how dealing with trauma and loss feels, doesn’t it? When I first moved back to New York, someone who had caused me an incredible amount of pain would sometimes come to our offices. It was so upsetting for me that I would try to work from home those days. And it was so visceral that it took about a year before I was able to even realize that I was doing that.
From Mark’s point of view he’s being asked to stop fighting off the waves and allow himself to be pulled down by his ocean of rage and grief. No fucking way.
HOLD ON (FOR ONE MORE DEI)
While I was in Australia recently a good Jesuit friend of mine asked me about my decision to go on leave from the Jesuits. “I thought you had a job and a community you really liked,” he asked me. And he was right. Those last two years working as an editor at the Jesuit-founded America Magazine were filled with positive experiences and feedback, probably moreso than any other experience I’d had in 31 years as a Jesuit.
I tried to explain to my friend that there were other issues. When I went on leave in 2021, I did so feeling like I did so with some pretty important questions, particularly about my own capacity to continue to live under a vow of obedience, and about working in a church that could be so hostile to queer people. Both of those issues had only grown bigger for me as the years went on.
Yes, I’d had some rough things happen in recent years, too. But by the time I went on leave, I didn’t feel like I was living in those feelings or experiences any more. That’s why I felt okay about going on leave, actually. It was coming about while I was in a much better space.
My friend listened and didn’t challenge me. But I couldn’t quite let go of the conversation myself. Something about it didn’t feel right. In fact it reminded me of the story of how I came to believe in a personal God in the first place…
INTERLUDE 1990
It’s the fall of my senior year, and I’m working as a resident advisor in a small dorm—we called them residence halls, actually, because dorms are where you sleep, residence halls are where you live.
There was a priest living in our building, because Catholic universities love a chaplain in a dorm, even if to my mind it was weird and stranger danger even way back in the heyday of Sinéad O’Connor and Wilson Phillips, who in 1990 had surged to their first #1 single, “Hold On.”
But it was my second year working as an RA and I’d had a year to get to know the priest and get comfortable with this whole, Hey, look who lives on my floor, a middle-aged priest! Also I’d spent a month in the U.K. and Ireland in the summer and had some unexpected experiences that felt sort of God-adjacent, and I came back maybe more open to whatever conversations a priest might want to have, but that’s another story, never mind…
(Actually he mostly wanted to talk about the Cardinals, which as a White Sox fan was very fine, the enemy of my enemy and all that.)
This priest would sometimes open his apartment to whoever wanted to stop by, and a group of guys would sit around talking with him about whatever, while he offered sticks of Trident and Pepsis (i.e. the plural of Pepsi, not the plural of a medicine you take for digestive issues), which were kind of his thing. Honestly, I think a lot of it was guys who were okay with priests feeling that it was pretty great that they got to hang out and talk with their own for the first time.
Somehow I ended up in this group from time to time, and on some occasion the topic of God came up, and I offered what had been until that point my standing belief that the Deists (that’s Mr. Washington and Mr. Franklin if you’re nasty) had it right: God was like a watchmaker. He made the universe and then he went away and let it run.
I had in fact propounded his theory at brunch with my parents maybe a year after I started to college as an explanation for why I should not have to go to church any longer when I came home. They listened quietly as I explained about the virtues of a theology whose name sounded like it might have come from the Ewoks on the Star Wars movies that I loved. And when I was done, he looked at me and growled, “You’re going to church.”
To be clear, I did not help my case by doing this on Easter Sunday.
(What can I say, the Spirit moves when it will.)
Undaunted, I had continued to hold onto Deism, until that conversation in the priest’s Trident-wrapper-and-Pepsi-can-laden living room. When I was done, he started asked questions about how I understood other things and whether Deism could explain them. Others listening did the same. I don’t remember the content of this conversation at all, but what I do remember is the sinking feeling that as I started trying to explain it Deism did not sound all that right at all.
RE-SEVERANCED
My conversation with my Jesuit friend in Australia had exactly that same “Uh oh, I’m missing something” feeling about it. And I started to see something that a number of wise old Jesuits had said to me when I was leaving—I had been badly hurt by a number of people who were supposed to be looking out for me, and I was leaving because I didn’t want it to happen again.
At America I used to kid some of the people around me that I thought I was kind of the office Mole Man. I would hunch over my desk in my cubicle and spend a good part of the day typing away. But I’ve started to realize that posture of being hunched over and away is also an instinctively defensive pose. If you’ve been hit and you’re afraid of getting hit again, what do you do? You curl up and give them your back.
In a sense, I think I went on leave because I didn’t want to have to give them my back.
Insight is a weird thing. You can put it down on paper and it’s an idea, something intellectual. Read it and enjoy. But sometimes when you have an insight it’s like a key in the lock, or the tipping point they talk about, where suddenly everything is totally different and you had no idea that anything was even going on. Somehow realizing that Deism didn’t work for me was enough to open up to a more personal image and experience of God. And knowing how pain had driven a good part of my judgment to leave the Jesuits made a lot of the anger and defensiveness vanish.
A lot of expectations, too. Why am I disappointed that the church doesn’t live up to my expectations? It’s full of human beings. Of course it doesn’t.
Last night I had a nightmare in which the person who I was so afraid of showed up out of nowhere and started being friendly, like the goofy neighbor on a sitcom. I woke up completely freaked out. So clearly there’s still work to be done.
But I’m surprised to say that a lot of the time when I think of him, I instinctively laugh. Maybe in part it’s because he’s not my problem any more.
But I think maybe I also (finally) feel some relief.
This is super long and personal for my normal Sunday/Monday free edition of the Wow. Apologies/You’re welcome, as the case may be.
If you’re new to the Wow, there’s also a paid subscriber option, which allows you to pay for the year or per month. I know it’s a crap time for everyone in every way, including financially. I’m going to discount the price for the subs for a while. If you like what you’re reading and would like a little more, I hope it helps.
MOMENTS OF WOW
I have zero interest in football-that-is-not-Australian, but Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker piece about the Super Bowl is gorgeous.
And lastly, because a Roan Gotta Roan.
Have a great week.
My parents kindly recognized that a) they had made me go to church all throughout HS even though I had been an atheist since freshman year, and b) I hadn't gone anywhere near a church my freshman year at Marquette, and stopped making me go when I came back from Milwaukee that first summer.
Your paragraph on insight really spoke to me. Thanks.