Is ‘Severance’ a Stealth Critique of the Pro-Choice Movement?

Spoiler alert: This article will assume the reader has already seen the first season.

Is hit series “Severance” subtly making the case we should consider what we owe to unborn babies?

Apple TV+’s “Severance,” Ben Stiller’s darkly comedic psychological thriller starring Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation,” “The Good Place”), lends itself to interpretations, most proposing some variant of the theory that the show is about the difficulty of finding the “work/life balance.” Others explain that it is about the dehumanizing character of corporations, and still others contend it is about the dangers of escapism and the desire to self-anesthetize to cope with trauma.

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These “readings” of “Severance” are obviously sound—indeed, they’re right there on the surface, since the show is quite literally about Mark S. (Scott) and three other employees of a mysterious med-tech megacorporation (ironically called “Lumon,” suggesting light) that requires the surgical implantation of a chip that literally bifurcates—“severs”—one’s consciousness into a work-self (an “innie”) and a home-self (an “outie”). Scott, an alcoholic mourning the death of his wife, has undergone this irreversible procedure as a way to escape the pain for a few hours a day.

Innies vs. Outies

For the innies, this means they literally never experience sleep, fresh air, sky, or leave—their life is nothing but work; thus newly-severed innie, Helly R. (Britt Lower), naturally asks Mark whether she’s dead and this is hell. So the unsustainable division and tension between innies and outies puts them on a collision course—this is the predictable direction of the series.

Despite this, “Severance” is not predictable. It is instead full of seemingly random encounters, hilariously surreal dialogue, and often disturbing twists. The story follows the two interspersed plotlines: the literally above-ground interactions between the outies with the unsevered, and the subterranean interactions between the innies with each other and the unsevered running the “Severed floor” in the basement of Lumon.

As the first season unfolds, layers of an onion are slowly pulled back, whether regarding why the outies (aside from Mark) chose to undergo severance, or the significance of their “mysterious and important” work they perform on ’80s-era computers by staring at and clicking on random “scary” numbers, or Lumon’s ultimate purpose in wanting severed employees.

But these mysteries, combined with the deeper, more existential themes that dominate the two plots as they unfold over nine episodes—a recurring question asked by different characters, and the opening line of the first episode, is “Who are you?”—together suggest that there’s something more interesting going on here. “Severance” may be pressing a hotter button than the canned moral lesson that we should all more carefully thread the needle between workaholism and the clock-watching of corporate drudgery.  

Childish Things

Anyone paying attention will at some point notice an initial clue: The innies often wistfully reflect on the brevity of their memories—indeed, of their existence—spanning only a few years for some, a few days for others. Those in charge of Lumon’s Severed floor, Ms. Cobel and Mr. Milchick (Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman), often address the innies the way a kindergarten teacher does 4-year-olds. These overseers offer simple toys (finger traps and caricatures) or comfort-food prizes (waffles) and candy (popsicles, punch, and “spicy candy”) as incentives to an innie that does his work well. But they also restrict them all to their “room” as punishment for any sort of disobedience, or force them to apologize repeatedly until the overseers are satisfied that “they mean it.” Innie-Dylan, played by Zach Cherry, in a fit of anger, even bites Milchick.

Unbidden, the thought occurs to the viewer that the four innies—the main protagonists of the series—are not merely childlike but in a real way are children, even infants.

This same suspicion takes on a more sinister shape when innie-Helly, after desperately trying and failing to escape Lumon—each time being sent back by outie-Helly—receives a recorded message from the latter telling her (in a firm “mom voice”) that “Eventually we all have to accept reality, so here it is: I am a person. You are not.”

At that point, especially if one has paid any attention to the abortion debate over the last half century, something clicks … and suddenly the recurring pregnancy subplot and even the umbilical language of “innie” and “outie” take on a whole new meaning. Outie-Helly continues: “I make the decisions. You do not.”

We almost expect outie-Helly to shout, “My body, my choice!” The innies are wholly dependent on and created by their parental outies—and are consequently treated by them as somewhat disposable property, without rights. Notice that the Severed floor of Lumon is windowless … perhaps a womb without a view?

Similarities to the Abortion Debate

At the center of “Severance” is what today we tend to call the “status” of the innie—his or her (its?) moral, legal, and metaphysical value or dignity. Is the innie, as outie-Helly coldly declares, not really a person? Or is the innie, as outie-Mark casually says at one point to a non-severed who tries to prick his conscience, just a part of the outie? Or, as innie-Mark insists to Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the strange and spacey therapist to on the Severed floor, “We are people, not parts of people.” The opposed “talking points”—or really, first principles—of the abortion debate are obvious.

And the drift of the season, as it unfolds, is that innie-Mark is in fact his own person, with his own (albeit limited) memories and (underdeveloped) personality—he doesn’t remember, much less feel the grief of outie-Mark who is coping with his wife’s death, the trauma that he is trying to escape by being severed for half his life.

Similarly, innie-Helly shows her own uniqueness by ultimately trying to bring Lumon down literally from within. That’s an action outie-Helly, a propagandist for Lumon and the daughter of the company’s creepy CEO, would never condone.

When a friend says she couldn’t undergo severance because she’d always be thinking about “the other one,” outie-Mark unconvincingly insists that “there is no ‘other one.’ It’s me. I do the work.” But of course it’s not, and he doesn’t.

The emotional—and perhaps ontological—wall between the two severed “halves” comes to the fore most forcefully when the fourth innie, Irv (John Turturro), who had until then been a devoted Lumon employee revering the memory of Kier Eagan, the founder and patriarch of Lumon, discovers that the outie of his friend and romantic interest, Burt (Christopher Walken), an innie in another department, is about to retire. Irv panics. While innie-Burt accepts with docility the fact that after he leaves work that day he will no longer exist, Irv tells it like it is, addressing innie-Burt’s coworkers: “You’re all going to stand here and let him die?”

Cursing at Mr. Milchick, he accuses him: “You’re not severed. . . No one can rip your memories away from you, snuff them out, like they never existed. Like you never existed!” When an outie quits Lumon, he doesn’t stop a beating heart, but he does end a life.

“Severance” seems to be constantly provoking not only the rather personal question, “Would you ever get severed?” but also more worrisome prerequisite questions: “What kind of claim would I have over the life of my innie, once I have created him or her (or it)?” “My innie is in my body, but is what I do with it/she/he simply ‘my choice’?” “If I quit Lumon, am I not effectively committing murder?” “If I terminate my employment, aren’t I terminating my ‘pregnancy’?”

Challenging the Pro-Choice Perspective

These questions, particularly for viewers sympathizing with innie-Helly’s defiance of outie-Helly, suggest that “Severance” is showing that just because you create doesn’t mean you control—or own.

The main reason the pro-choice perspective gets a foothold in us is that a pregnant woman and the father have no personal acquaintance with the fetus growing within her. (This is also why ultrasound machines are so dangerous to public opinion about abortion.) Like our readiness to say horrible things on internet message boards or in the comments section to faceless and nameless interlocutors, it’s far easier to “terminate a pregnancy” when the fetus is a perfect stranger, indeed almost a merely theoretical object.

“Severance” seems to be asking, what if you knew personally the “thing” growing in your womb? What if you were friends with “it”? What if you were loved by “it”? Wouldn’t you at least stop calling it an “it”?

Of course, this is not to say that the directors and writers behind “Severance” intend it to be about the fetus and the morality of an abortion. Stiller himself was a frequent and high-profile endorser of abortion supporter Kamala Harris in her bid for the presidency last year, so there’s no reason to think he and creator/writer Dan Erickson are closet pro-lifers. No doubt—as one finds many online propose and Stiller himself has said in interviews—he is closer to thinking (consciously) about something more like the Jungian unconscious “shadow-self” and its opposition to one’s conscious persona.

But sometimes artists don’t fully grasp the meaning of their own creations, what their own concrete universals and symbols suggest, and the shadow-self might itself be at work in the writing of “Severance.” (What might the writers or the execs at Apple do to the show in future seasons, were they to read this article?)

As “Severance” concludes its second season, presenting its own curveballs and revelations that deepen the intertwined narratives and start to answer our questions, we should be careful not to take the question about life in the womb as some sort of key to unlocking or predicting the story’s secrets. “Severance” is much more than a covert metaphorical defense of the pro-life thesis.

Even if there’s allegory here—regardless what that allegory is—it would be foolish to look for symbolism and clues to the metaphor in every object and scene. Good art is not so simplistic, and “Severance”is nothing if not good art—arguably the best thing on television in recent years. Trying to decipher every element as “standing for” something else will inevitably interfere with the experience, to say nothing of the fact that one will start to see things that aren’t there.

Yet it’s also hard to unsee the pro-life angle once you see it.

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