Here’s something in Severance that I’ve been thinking about a ton, but haven’t seen many people talking about: the mismanagement of the severed floor.
So many pieces of dystopian media tackle the threat of corporate overlords, but they do so in a way that makes the corporation/the people managing it seem like an almost insurmountable force, in that they can and will track your every movement, or surveil your family, or spend enormous resources to close any loophole, physical or legal, that might allow you to overcome their stranglehold on your life. But not Severance.
In fact, Severance seems to go out of its way to show that the corporate overlords DO NOT have absolute power. Besides the severed workers, the floor is understaffed: a manager, her peon, and one security guard. We KNOW it is understaffed because when Helly R. does what she does in the elevator, it takes Graner several minutes to even realize what is happening, much less get to her, despite her obvious importance. When Dylan locks Burt in the conference room, Irving goes off shouting for a manager, but no one is manning the cameras. When they break into the security room, there is no one there. They are able to plan and execute a jailbreak with virtually no intervention, which in any other piece of writing I might interpret as laziness, or plot armor for the main characters, but in this case I can’t get over the intentionality of it, nor the message: they aren’t always watching you. Not only that, they don’t *want* to always watch you. They are too cheap for that. It is much more cost efficient for them to simply make you *believe* they can see your every move.
So much of the power we think they have over us is smoke and mirrors. As soon as we recognize the illusion, we have the power to break free.
