Watching the second series of Apple TV+’s “Severance” feels like peering into the endless, fluorescent-lit corridors of a nightmare that capitalism forgot. Lumon Industries, with its unsettling blend of retro-futuristic office aesthetics, seems to exist in an uncanny valley between nostalgia for the 1970s corporate promise and dread of a sterile, hyper-controlled future. The show’s refusal to pin itself clearly to a specific era creates a profound sense of dislocation, making its critique of capitalist alienation all the more potent.
Lumon’s practice of severing workers’ consciousness into two isolated selves—”innies” chained to perpetual productivity and “outies” oblivious yet complicit—embodies alienation in the starkest terms. Marx once wrote that under capitalism, workers become estranged from themselves, their labour, and each other. Here, the metaphor is literalised in a horrifying surgical procedure, rendering workers unable to recognise themselves or their exploitation.
As the series progresses, resistance becomes not just possible but inevitable. Workers, driven by an instinctual yearning for solidarity, begin to sense the oppression embedded in their daily routines. Yet despite this emerging consciousness, it’s hard to escape the sense that something elusive, almost spectral, haunts their struggle, an unfulfilled promise of liberation that capitalism perpetually defers.
I often find myself lost amid the show’s labyrinthine plot. I’m frequently baffled by intricate details that other reviewers seem effortlessly to catch, possibly via obsessive rewatches or frame-by-frame analyses. My experience feels more honest, a bit chaotic, like a worker trapped inside Lumon, forever unsure what’s actually happening beyond the immediate tasks at hand.
“Severance” taps deeply into hauntology, Mark Fisher’s notion of being haunted by the lost futures that capitalism once promised but never delivered. Lumon’s ambiguous time period, mixing past, present, and speculative futures, evokes a ghostly melancholy for possibilities never realised. This temporal ambiguity underscores capitalism’s stasis, an endless repetition of the same exploitation and alienation dressed up in new forms. Fisher might argue the show illustrates capitalism’s greatest trick: presenting eternal stagnation as progress.
What makes “Severance” resonate deeply is its insistence on reclaiming human dignity. Marx would probably appreciate how vividly the series captures both alienation and resistance, highlighting capitalism’s structural cruelty while pointing toward collective worker solidarity as the path to true liberation. Lumon is both a fictional corporation and an allegory for real-world systems that exploit, divide, and discard workers without remorse.
The series thus transcends mere dystopian sci-fi; it’s a visceral exploration of capitalism’s psychic wounds. And while I still can’t fully unravel its narrative secrets, perhaps that’s the point—under capitalism, clarity is deliberately withheld, leaving workers perpetually striving to understand and overcome the very forces that keep them subdued.
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