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Conference burnout?
In »Severance«, greater challenges await the wage-earners
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AppleTV+
Apple CEO Tim Cook usually speaks much more publicly about new iPhones than about the Apple TV+ streaming service.
Recently, however, he allowed himself to be elicited a few dry sentences.
"The content there isn't created for purely financial reasons," he said.
»We try to find content that has a reason to exist.«
Sounds almost philosophical.
At second glance, however, it fits a company that floods the world with expensive things, but has always flirted with it, associating it with a higher meaning.
But Karl Marx and Apple?
So far they seemed to exist in different universes.
Now, with the fantastic new series »Severance«, Apple hasn't filmed »Das Kapital« either.
But the Nine-Part, with its nightmarish version of a very special employment relationship, seems like a visualization of the philosopher's ideas on alienation through work.
In 1844 the young Marx wrote in the Paris Manuscripts, which were not intended for publication but for organizing one's own thoughts: 'Labour not only produces goods;
it produces itself and the worker as a commodity, in the proportion in which it produces commodities at all.”
In "Severance" it's like this: Department head Mark has no clue what he's actually doing.
All day he arranges rows of numbers according to vague criteria and for an unknown purpose.
At the same time, he has become a valuable product for his employer, the Lumon Group, since he went through the Severance procedure: he never asks questions, does what he is told to do and always gives one hundred percent.
Mark has a chip implanted in his brain that splits his self: Mark Two is unaware of Mark One's existence outside of the corporate complex;
Mark One doesn't remember at night what Mark Two worked on during the day.
What sounds confusing creates clarity for him, the apparently perfect division between work and private life.
In truth, it's work-life balance from hell.
Mark Zwei realizes this at the latest when his superior disappears for unknown reasons and his new colleague Helly only wants one thing: switch off the chip and quit again.
Soon, Mark and his colleagues also want to know what they actually do during their working hours - and what Lumon intends to do with them.
With films and series that are thematically up to date, it's one of those things.
It is not uncommon for stories to emerge that tie into social debates without really adding anything of their own.
"Severance" is a very zeitgeisty series because it deals with the topic of work, which was given a huge boost by Corona.
In fact, the attitude of employees towards their work has been changing profoundly for a long time.
Now comes the silent revolution.
The USA recorded an unprecedented wave of layoffs in 2021, which labor researchers see as a turning point.
Many no longer want to be ordered back to the office after they have found the home office appealing, others no longer accept stress and constant overload as a basic condition of their employment.
In Germany, too, the job market is in flux: In a survey, every fourth person stated that they had not given notice of a new job.
One in four also said they missed the meaningfulness of their job.
The creators of »Severance«, which includes Ben Stiller, who directed some episodes, take the question of the meaning of work to lead into a labyrinth of endless corridors and split personalities.
They emancipate themselves from reality and create their own world, which is strikingly similar to ours – and yet not at all.
Thus, the series is vaguely set in the present, while the calculators used by the characters appear to be from the Stone Age of the computer age.
The location could be a city on the east coast of the USA, but there is no reliable evidence of this.
And the fictional corporation Lumon works with a childish reward system and a household custom that contains commandments and punishments that seem biblical.
Self-confidence of the series makers in the USA
»Severance« begins enigmatically, the viewer is left in the dark about many things and wanders through their strange lives with the protagonists.
Slowly but relentlessly, both a thrilling drama and a breathless thriller emerge from the events.
It speaks for the vitality of series creation in the USA, the self-confidence with which the team around "Severance" initially alienates the audience, how strongly the pictures are told here, which in their clean aesthetics seem to lead nowhere, to gradually to get more and more involved - not least because of the fantastic cast with the veteran stars John Turturro and Christopher Walken in central roles.
It is only in the last episode that there are completely surprising answers to questions that had been building up more and more and which now in turn lead to new questions.
One thing is clear: the Lumon group is becoming a quasi-religious substitute for finding meaning.
Should Tim Cook watch the series, he might notice some parallels to his own company.
»Severance«, on Apple TV+