The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of The University of Scranton.
When my dad first told me that Apple TV+ had filmed a TV series 10 minutes away from my hometown, I brushed him off. Mere months after the Mean Girls movie musical was filmed at a now-defunct high school in my area, the glamour of nearby film production had faded; “That’s cool,” I offered.
That night, Adam Scott caught my eyes as I walked past my living room. “Is this it?” I asked my dad. Just then, Bell Works, the place my sister and I go for Jersey Freeze, flashed across the TV screen in cool-toned cinematic glory. “That’s nuts,” I whispered. “Why don’t you come watch it?” my dad half asked, half instructed. Having nothing else to do, I obliged.
We proceeded to fly through two seasons of, in my opinion, one of the best original science fiction series of the past decade (or two). Severance Fridays became a ritual; even at school, I would carve out time to watch new episodes and call my dad immediately after finishing them to debrief. My father raised me on Star Wars, instilling in me a steadfast love of the futuristic, funky nature of science fiction; our bonding over this show was inevitable.
Part sci-fi, part drama, part thriller, Severance follows an ordinary man named Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott), who is employed by a company called Lumon; he is a “severed employee,” meaning he has consensually undergone a highly specialized medical procedure called Severance that divides his consciousness into two persons: an Innie and an Outie. When Mark is at work, his memories remain at work and cannot stretch beyond it; when Mark leaves work, he has no recollection of his time there. Mark is joined by fellow characters Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro) in a department entitled “Macrodata Refinement,” where they each sit on office chairs in front of box computers and categorize randomized numbers on the basis of the emotions they elicit; if a number scares Mark, it goes in one digital box, if it springs fear, it goes in another. The characters are not told by their management what it is they are truly doing, only that their work is “mysterious and important.” Without spoiling the events of the series, this is about as much that can be shared.
The mind-body problem, most often referenced as a Cartesian dichotomy, attempts to explicate the relationship between our bodies and “minds,” or souls, or consciousnesses. Discourse most commonly surrounds how it can be possible to accept Descartes’ assertion that the body and mind are separate but concurrently act upon one another in a way that creates coherent, intelligible experiences for us. For example, in order to read this sentence, your body is quietly moving through several psychophysical processes to somehow allow you to perceive words upon a screen that connote meaning. Descartes writes that the interaction between body and mind occurs in the pineal gland, what he calls “the principal seat of the soul” and what many today call “the third eye;” modern medical literature now tells us that this is where circadian rhythms are interpreted and melatonin is secreted by and in the brain. In other words, this tiny piece of our brains is what is chiefly responsible for our falling and staying asleep.
What’s interesting about the mind-body problem is that it doesn’t have a universally accepted solution. Descartes’ “solution” of the pineal gland only opened up further questions; above all, how can interaction between matter in space (body) and consciousness not in space (mind) occur at a material site within the body? Wouldn’t “mind” then have to be a piece of matter (something that occupies space and has mass) in order to act reciprocally with the body? Can matter interact with nonmatter?
Severance poses an interesting hypothetical: a medical procedure on the body has near immediate effect on the mind, splitting its being into two distinct halves that operate depending on the body’s geographic location. Not only this, but the Innies’ work centers around emotional sensations as illuminated by the mind, reactions without an apparent physical cause or motivation, perhaps linked to the chip inserted into the brain as part of the Severance procedure. On the one hand, Descartes’ mind-body distinction could make sense in the world of Mark Scout due to the Severance procedure’s metaphysical nature; Scout’s brain is not split in two, his consciousness is. But then again, how does the insertion of a chip into Mark’s brain in turn divide his mind? How do body and mind connect? This is the mind-body problem’s core contention.
Even more interesting is the transition period between the two consciousnesses; when shifting from Innie to Outie or vice versa, characters appear disoriented and entirely still, often with their eyes rolled back into their head as if asleep or entranced. Is an Innie an equivalent being to an Outie? If they are, what rights are they entitled to? Or, are Innies simply a dream state, a second state of consciousness, for the Outie, expendable and ultimately meaningless?
When we fall asleep, where do we go? Who do we become?
And are they us?