Watching Severance as a Mormon "Outie"

Severance hits way different now that I'm no longer an "Innie" in the LDS Church.

When Severance aired in 2022, I hadn’t fully admitted to myself that I was leaving the LDS Church. It was that blurry, unmarked time when I was too afraid to even write my doubts in my journal, like the ancestors I was told were always watching me would witness the sin and tell it to everyone I knew. One thing I had owned, though, was my obsession with cult documentaries.

At the time of Severance’s release, I was slurping down shows like Keep Sweet and The Vow as quickly as streaming platforms could churn them out. I was (perhaps ironically) fascinated by the lengths it took to free people from the false realities they’d been ensnared in. I’d also, like every true American, done my time in a shitty job, so I found myself insatiable for the corporate cultiness of Severance, the capitalist hellscape of Lumon where job seekers are sold exploitation under the guise of work/life balance; where the work is ultimately senseless, the incentives offensive, and the lives lived outside the nine-to-five vampirized by the nine-to-five. Severance filled me with a bone-deep, scab-licking ick for the the soul-suck of the 40-hour work week and the LinkedInification of corporate culture. And I loved it: the satire, the retro futurism, that gooey, barfy, twisty intro, Adam Scott. It was like a honeytrap designed especially for me.

The writer’s strike happened and then other things happened in the gap between seasons. Let’s circle back: Russia invaded Ukraine, Barbenheimer went viral, America reelected a racist megalomaniac, and I finally had the guts to share on Facebook and Instagram that I was done with Mormonism after two years of quietly growing comfortable with the decision.

Enter the second season.

When Severance’s second season dropped last month, I hurriedly rebinged the first so I could get caught up. Watching it a second time was deeply unsettling. It felt like the overtime contingency switches had been pulled on me and instead of corporate satire, I was observing many of my experiences in Mormonism through the eyes of someone outside of it.

Shiny, Happy People in Blank Chapel Walls

One thing I didn’t expect upon rewatching Severance was how much the physical space of Lumon alone would effect me. Its long, quiet hallways and the long disciplinary council tables in its conference rooms; MDR’s blank walls, devoid of any imagery besides that of the founder; the triple combination handbook in the wall that I half expected to have passages underlined in red pencil; the special totes for said handbooks; an omniscient Board who is never seen and can really only be spoken to through an intermediary or with someone else in the room with the authority to speak on their behalf; the shiny, happy people in white button-up shirts and ill-fitting suit pants greeting everyone with their best primary voice.

Lumon felt like a Church the first time I watched the show, but the time around, in spite of being quite different in a lot of ways, it felt eerily like my Church. Just line up a stack of folding chairs and pull in a wheeled chalkboard, and Sunday school’s in session.

Bad Feelings, Bad Numbers

What made Lumon’s MDR (Macrodata Refinement) team so bleakly funny to me the first time I watched Severance is that MDR is billed as a necessary job, yet it seems entirely made up and meaningless, like so many corporate jobs are. Just take to Twitter during a crisis and you’ll find 100 iterations of “here I am tapping away at my computer having to pretend any of this matters when the world is literally ending.”

MDR’s role is to sort groupings of numbers based on how they make the refiner feel. It seems like pointless busy work but it also seems like a strange kind of allowance for a place so controlled and regimented. It perhaps gives the Innies the sense that they have some choice here, that they can trust their intuition, that their purpose is to do what the “Spirit” tells them to do—but only so far as it serves Kier. When their intuition tells them that something is not right about Lumon, they are the ones at fault, and when they do “wrong,” they’re taken to a private room before a man in a tie who measures if and when they’re sufficiently repentant to rejoin the flock.

Anti-Lumon Literature

Information is the most tightly controlled resource within Lumon’s walls. Severance prevents Outies from knowing what goes on at Lumon, and it prevents Innies from knowing what life is like outside. Everybody has a job, but nobody really knows what they’re doing. They’re prevented from wandering where Lumon doesn’t want them wandering. Nobody really knows where all of those hallways lead or how many departments are in Lumon or what any other department really does or is. As we find out in season two, Lumon can easily make rooms disappear so Innies are left questioning their own sanity. They exist in a constant state of not-knowing and it’s really faith in what Lumon tells them (and perhaps fear of what Lumon tells them) that keeps them incurious.

The largest threat to the Lumon establishment, funnily enough, is a book that smells strongly of the kind of corporate self-help woo woo-dabbling slop that gets mass marketed to mid-level managers to leverage the personal strengths of their team. And yet it’s radicalizing because it lands in a space starved of personal identity.

I’m reminded of how I was always encouraged to ask questions in the church but that invitation always came with the injunction to only look for answers in church-approved material. Taxed with persistent concerns the last few years I was a member, I found myself left empty by Sunday school, empty by prayer, and empty by Q&A devotionals where questions were carefully filtered so that many of the most agonizing ones, questions I knew I shared with many others, were sifted out. I felt as though I was starving and the church couldn’t or wouldn’t feed me.

Over time, church-approved material has changed, seemingly in an attempt to sate members going elsewhere for answers. When I was a kid, bringing up Joseph Smith’s polygamy would have earned you reprobation for reading anti-Mormon literature that spread lies about the prophet. Now the church freely publishes that information on their website.

It feels a bit like the new Lumon under Milchick’s management: Look at us! We’re transparent now! We’re listening! We’re giving you more places to wander!

Meanwhile, the initial “whys” remain largely unanswered.

“Who are you?”

Mark’s persistent question at the very start of the show immediately establishes the main conflict: loss of identity. Innies know nothing of who they are on the outside. Their identities reach only as far as the snarling maze of Severance Floor hallways do.

When I first watched the show, the most disturbing scenes to me were the ones where the Umbridgian Ms. Cobel seeped her way into Mark’s life like a toxin. Upon rewatching it, a new scene I found profoundly disturbing was the icebreaker ball game where each MDR team member has to share something about themselves but they know nothing about themselves except as it pertains to their relationship to Lumon. The only time Innies really get a sense of who they are without violently seizing it away from Lumon is when Lumon chooses to tell them who they are, and Lumon dangles that information like a carrot on a string to keep Innies comforted and compliant: “your outie has a dog named Radar, your outie is kind, you are one of the noble and great ones who was chosen to come to Earth at this time.” Etcetera etcetera.

When I left the Church, one of the hardest things for me to grapple with was the fear that I was leaving myself behind, too. The Church was my whole life, my home country and language. I didn’t go anywhere or make any moves without it, and I worried there’d be left of me if I tried to leave it.

I feared and loathed the version of me outside of the Church. She was a stranger to me. All I knew about her, all the Church told me about her, was that she’d never feel true happiness and she’d sabotage mine. And the woman I was inside the Church? Well, she had people there she loved. It was all she knew. And if she kept all of the rules, Kier would be proud. Maybe she’d get a waffle party out of it, too.

The Pain of Leaving it Behind

In the world of Lumon, there is no way to get out without pain. Helly tries. She slashes her arm up trying to get her message beyond the severance floor door, then she attempts to take her own life. Petey tries. The removal of his chip leaves his sense of the past and present distorted and he ultimately dies. Then there is the emotional pain MDR experiences when they’re able to live inside their Outies for a brief moment in time. They learn they have children whom they will never see, they learn they love someone who cannot love them in return, they learn they’ve known loss, and they learn they are the architects of their own hell.

Leaving Lumon means leaving what they know. It means losing people they love and discovering grief uninsulated by the sheen of those white, long hallways. It means confronting things they perhaps never really wanted to confront and having to build a whole new life for themselves on territory they’re only half familiar with. And while leaving means freedom, Lumon will forever be part of who they are.

They can leave Lumon, but Lumon can’t leave them alone.