‘Severance’ Asks, What if We’re Not Paranoid Enough?

 

 

 Adam Sternbergh

 As the second season of “Severance,” the lavishly surreal series on Apple TV+, comes to an end, faithful viewers may be left with an unshakable unease. The show is about many things — work, grief, elaborate cut-fruit buffets — but this season proved especially interested in the unsettling notion that you can never truly know the people you love the best and trust the most and that some of them may actually mean you harm.

Now is a time of great paranoia, and an ambient feeling of distrust is being manifested in the streets, at the polls and on our screens. Spy films and secret-identity thrillers have long been genre staples, but the recent crop, including “Severance,” is conspicuously concerned with a particular anxiety: the creeping fear that you can never truly know anyone, possibly including yourself.

“Severance” follows a quartet of employees at a mysterious company who’ve had their consciousness split into two identities: innies, the people they are at work, and outies, the people they are everywhere else. If its first season was an extended, absurdist riff on the notion of work-life balance — the outies carried on obliviously while their innies were consigned to a fluorescently lit, purgatorial office — the second season expanded the show’s concerns to explore the ways in which people often aren’t who they seem or profess to be.

Some innies were covert outies, while some outies were at war with their innies. In one story line, a woman cheated on her husband with his innie. One of the season’s great reveals — spoiler alert if you haven’t yet watched the whole thing — involved the emotional fallout when the main character, Mark S., realized he’d had an intimate encounter with a woman he thought was his office romance but was, in fact, the malevolent future head of the company. (Thanks to the mechanics of the show, those two people inhabit the same body.)

All this reflects our national dilemma, in which we’re experiencing our own kind of bifurcated daily reality. We seem fated to follow every election from now on by looking across the partisan divide and wondering: Who are you? And how could you? We don’t trust one another. We don’t even believe we know one another. Maybe you thought you knew your kindly next-door neighbors until one day they unfurled a MAGA flag on their front lawn. Or perhaps you thought you knew who President Trump was until he decided to gut the Department of Veterans Affairs or threaten to annex Canada.

It’s a destabilizing realization — that people who once thought they were involved in a common project, informed by common ideals, are living in different realities. And there don’t seem to be any ready political remedies. While we muddle through, there’s a fascination and perhaps even a comfort in seeing these anxieties reflected in the fun house mirror of our entertainment.

The 1970s were a similarly fertile period for paranoid thrillers, with movies like “The Parallax View,” “The Conversation” and “Three Days of the Condor” (recently remade as the limited series “Condor”). But those films pointed to the apprehensions of a different age, telling tales of vast, complicated conspiracies that played out at the highest levels of power — perhaps not surprising, given the real-life revelations of vast, complex conspiracies, whether Watergate or the efforts to cover up clandestine military actions in Cambodia.

In our mutually mistrustful moment, the enemy is not — or at least not only — a vast unseen conspiracy; it’s our office colleague, our neighbor, our spouse. In “Black Bag,” a new espionage film starring Michael Fassbender, a spy suspects that there’s a turncoat in the ranks and that it may be his beloved wife. In “The Agency,” an espionage series also starring Mr. Fassbender (a master of bloodless opacity), a C.I.A. operative becomes chillingly expert at ensuring that no one close to him knows who he truly is.

“Black Doves” delivers Keira Knightley as the seemingly benign wife of a government minister who has lethal weapons hidden in her clothes drawer and a lethal vocation hidden in her past. On “Special Ops: Lioness,” an operative goes undercover to become the best friend of (then falls in love with) the daughter of the person she must kill. The recent readaptation “Ripley” and the reboot of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” reimagined their stories as parables about the perils of opening up to those closest to you — a mistake that can leave you distrustful, despondent or dead.

Perhaps we’ve become too culturally cynical to be titillated by whispers of official malfeasance in the halls of power (that familiar cry that the conspiracy goes “all the way to the top!”) given we’re busy screaming that idea at one another online. Or maybe we’ve been numbed to vast conspiracies by the sheer abundance of theories on offer — Kate Middleton’s body double, microchips in vaccines and the truth about the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein. Lacking a shared public reality, we’ve started to doubt our private ones.

The McCarthyite Communist scare of the 1950s was another time when paranoid thrillers turned their eyes on our fellow citizens — an era whose vibe, notably, is once again rearing its head. On the political stage, that era ended only when national figures stood up and decried Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to wield cultural distrust to political ends.

On “Severance,” reintegration is the painful but necessary process by which people restore their split personalities into one functioning consciousness. Such a resolution, no matter how painful or how necessary, is hard to envision for us in real life. For now, we’re left to eye one another suspiciously while we enjoy our weekend viewing and worry that, until now, maybe we haven’t been paranoid enough.

NEW YORK TIMES