Of all the sumptuously realised analogies presented by Greek philosopher Plato, none has stuck in the public imagination quite like the allegory of the cave. In it, a group of manacled people can only witness flickering shadows, cast on the outer wall of their cavernous residence by the unchained inhabitants of the sunlit world. Their reality is just a silhouette of the world as it is, but how can they know the limitations of what they’re seeing, without the context of what’s missing?
It’s a tantalising vision, and one that has inspired countless filmmakers, from the Wachowskis in The Matrix to James Wan’s Saw. It’s also made an impression on the small screen, not least in JJ Abrams’s Lost and Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar’s 1899 (which was abandoned by Netflix on a cliffhanger ending). But it’s hard to believe that Plato himself would’ve enjoyed any of these half as much as AppleTV+’s sensational Severance, which returns to screens this week, three years after it left viewers feeling as frustrated and clueless as its protagonists.
OK, Plato would probably have some catching up to do. After all, what makes Severance so compelling is not just the shadow play slowly revealing itself, but the resonances with our modern world. When it first appeared on Apple’s streaming service, back in 2022, it did so with remarkably little fanfare. The pedigree was immaculate: a cast led by the ever-reliable Adam Scott but packed with Oscar winners (Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken) and cult stars, like John Turturro and Dichen Lachman. It was also directed, in part, and executive produced by Ben Stiller, coming off the back of his Golden Globe-winning mini-series, Escape at Dannemora.
“But he’s hardly Sophocles,” I hear Plato saying. And the response to Severance, at first, was tepid. What exactly was it? Unlike the overwhelming majority of modern film and television, it wasn’t based on existing intellectual property. There was no source to consult, no pre-existing caucus of fans to carry an early torch for the show. Instead, it was left to its striking visual iconography: a small bank of desks marooned in the middle of an oversized office, strip lighting humming overhead, scorching the retinas of four besuited grunts sat at their computers. So familiar, and yet uncanny.
What began with a simple, dystopian sci-fi premise – in this world, people can opt to “sever” their work self from their home life, operating as two distinct people with no knowledge or memory of the other – became an exploration of humanity. At the heart of this were its central quartet of “innies”, the word used to describe those trapped in the purgatorial office block: ineffectually upbeat Mark (Scott), gloomy stickler Irving (Turturro), foul-mouthed rebel Dylan (Zach Cherry), and the newest arrival, despairing cynic Helly (Britt Lower). Welcome to hell, Helly.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, in his 1944 play No Exit, that “hell is other people”. Sartre’s obsession was with the ontological friction caused by the fact that consciousness is not a shared experience. Viewed from the perspective of other people, you are just an all-singing, all-dancing object. This 20th-century innovation – so-called “existentialism” – inverted Plato’s maxim that “essence precedes existence”. All this would likely send Plato spinning into a rage, one that could only be soothed by a lazy evening on the sofa with Jean-Paul, and a long binge-watch of Severance.
Even though Severance is not a philosophical text to inspire the fashion choices of pretentious undergraduates, it is precision engineered to strike at viewers’ sense of themselves as humans. The pointless sorting of Macrodata Refinement and the brutal self-improvement of the “break room”; alienation from obscure corporate directives through to the fraternity of a shared experience; desire for repression versus longing for comprehension. These are the things that make us human.
And then there’s what a third great philosopher, former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, would call the “unknown unknowns” and the “known unknowns”. Severance’s first season was a journey from the former (the compliant, if not blissful, ignorance of the consensual drone) to the latter. Mark, Irving, Dylan and Helly now know enough to comprehend the sheer vastness of the world that they have not (yet) experienced. Consciousness, they have come to see, is a privilege, not a right. The flickering shadows on the walls of the cave are starting to come into focus, even while the chains remain tight around the innies’ ankles.
Plato, Sartre and Rumsfeld would all enjoy Severance (though Plato might, first, need to get his head around the light-emitting theatre box in front of him). Not just because it is a work that gets under the skin of what it means to be human, but also because it’s a deliciously compelling drama. Moments of black comedy to make Plato chuckle. Visual panache to keep Sartre’s eyeballs glued to the telly. And moments of sucker punch revelation to drop even Rumsfeld’s iron jaw. Come for the entertainment, stay, then, for the existential despair.