Apple TV +
This dystopian series of rare elegance plunges its protagonists into a merciless and absurd Kafkaesque universe.
It took three years for actor-producer Ben Stiller and screenwriter Dan Erickson to deliver the second season of their dystopia, Severance. A puzzle series in the pure vein of Lost, become one of the most acclaimed Apple TV+ creations. Working at the data firm Lumon Industries, Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team whose employees undergo surgery to separate memories related to their professional lives from those related to their private lives. At the end of the season, they became aware of this dissociation between their ego « inter » and their self « exter ». Going so far as to display this distortion in public, putting their company in crisis communications mode.
The discovery of this double life is a source of suffering: everyone is torn between their two identities, contradictory and insoluble desires. With the end of the tightness comes anger, sorrow, confusion. Is the procedure really a Pandora’s box that represses all trauma? Mark must deal with the feelings he has for his wife, who he thought was dead, and his assistant Helly, who is, in civilian life, the daughter of the CEO of Lumon. Threatened in its foundations, the company, which pretends to accept this gain of autonomy, is determined to protect its mysterious reason for being. Mark’s former supervisor who knows Lumon’s secrets, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), remains a mysterious and threatening eminence grise, beneath her quiet old lady exterior.
Become a docile automaton or not
Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller readily quote Brazil, The Truman Showthe paranoid thrillers of the 1970s as influences but also Jacques Tati! Of rare elegance, Severance mixes elements of office comedy and surrealism with a noxious atmosphere where conspiracy emerges. Lumon and the cult dedicated to its creator are reminiscent of a sect. Protagonists and spectators move through a Kafkaesque maze of corridors that erase all markers of time or space. Returning to the surface, plunged into winter darkness, is no guarantee of seeing more clearly.
-« It is tempting to abandon some of its facets – a fraction of his humanity – to find your place in the world of work and be left there in peace »notes Dan Erickson. For him, his series is much more than a mise en abyme of work. « The risk is to become a docile automaton who refuses to ask disturbing questions and no longer makes the effort to align one’s actions and principles. », he believes.
The ease of the actors in playing Janus-like characters is impressive. « Your behavior is not the same when you are surrounded by strangers or by loved ones. I put everything that bothers me about myself into the Mark of the outside world. Lumon’s Mark carries the qualities I appreciate »deciphers Adam Scott.
He and his partners pushed the experiment to the limit by spending several hours locked in a Plexiglas office in the middle of New York Central Station to promote the series. Under the stunned eyes of passers-by.
