Severance never faces the fact that the flaw in its own conceit is much more salacious than anything the show does. The main flaw in Severance’s concept is that we’re biomechanical machines and not electronic robots. So the side effects of grieving a wife will still severely affect the performance, mood, and mental health of your “innie” because their chemical and structural precursors are all there. Which is literally more horrifying of a personal story than the “omg we’re doing slavery as an evil cult but we won’t say wink” that Apple TV writers do in this shit.
Imagine that your only existence is 9-5 and for whatever reason you’re always ill, you never feel good, you wake up like this and you go to sleep like this. You have no way to improve this situation because you cannot leave your prison, you have no way to even figure out what’s going on. Instead it’s a big old “who dun it” with all the ChatGPT style hallmarks of hack modern writing. The real horror is that not only can this go horribly wrong, someone might attempt it because they’re stupid enough to think it will go right.
The concept of Severance is literally a torment nexus in and of itself, not because it’s done by an evil cult. That’s why you’ll see a bunch of libs on BlueSky and Twitter praying for Severance IRL like people prayed for Squid Games. This is the exact hack lib writing problem that the US Office, the Good Place and Lovecraft Country had – that it’s capitalist realism.
The Office and The Good Place are obvious. The Office becomes flanderized cuteness about how work is quirky and not an unstable arbitrary constructed system made by morons, unlike the UK version. The Good Place discovers capitalism and then pretends that there’s no reason that humans should be responsible for it’s creation and existence in the view of cosmic justice.
Lovecraft Country is actually one of the worst fucking ones. What’s the central conceit? “Lovecraft was racist.” It doesn’t go any deeper than that. Yes Lovecraft was racist. Yes cosmic horror as a genre has it’s roots in fear of the unknown other. We know that applying that to races is bullshit. That’s a baby brained thing. But guess what, the fear of a group of people whose intentions are unknown, unknowable, capricious, and they wield great power to affect your life – yet you have seemingly no way to fight them. You know who that is? I’ll give you a hint:
But no we have to remind everyone how good and liberal and virtue signalling we are as a writers room of an HBO TV show. Channel Zero Butcher’s Block for all its faults at least presented a clear interesting story and didn’t shy away from, “oh yeah these people are interdimensional beings who are extracting value from this community and are literally eating its members because they owned a factory once but it stopped being profitable.”
By the way Lovecraft Country was literally written by a white guy. He even looks like Bradley Whitford’s character in Get Out:
So the side effects of grieving a wife will still severely affect the performance, mood, and mental health of your “innie” because their chemical and structural precursors are all there.
wouldn’t say the show is ignorant of this since it’s basically what Petey says in Ep 3
spoiler
00:09:59
Mark: I lost my wife a couple years ago in a car accident. This is— It’s helping me, you know?
00:10:06
Petey: I’m sorry, Mark.
Mark: No, no, no. No.
00:10:10
Petey: At work…you’d come in sometimes with red eyes. We had a joke that you had an elevator allergy. There was even a song for it. But I always wondered.
00:10:32
Petey: You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don’t know what it is.
The problem is that it’s not “real”. Under capitalism your grief doesn’t count for anything it might as well not exist, it’s reasons might as well not exist. In as such a character who is experiencing grief without knowing why and only exists within the context of work is the most abstract presentation of humanistic grief under a capitalist system. Our relations are so alienated this feeling itself might as well be alien itself.
They’re trying to make a point. It’s a show to make the viewer feel smart for “getting it”. They could have made a much better one if they took the concept seriously and weren’t so small minded. Mark S is going thru it in the show. That’s an obvious emotional element, but it’s squandered.
W post. What are some shows or films that talk about capitalism without doing capitalist realism? I can think of a couple movies that are shamelessly anticolonialist like RRR and Parasite (with the interpretation that it’s about the Korean war), but all this media about capitalism tends to do what you described where they talk about capitalism’s failures but ultimately don’t say anything about how to overcome it, or even why it came about in the first place.
That is a great show. Wish it was possible for it to get more than just those 7 episodes, but as long as Boots keeps making stuff I’m sure it’ll just continue to get better and better.
You’re basically asking for solidarity movies: They Live is a classic one. Sorry to Bother You. Hackers. Planet of the Apes Trilogy (the 2010’s version). O Brother Where Art Thou. Ip Man 1. Stalker.
I think just to clarify. Capitalist realism doesn’t necessarily doom these shows to being bad. The thing that dooms these shows is the combination of capitalist realism and the need to appeal to the broadest possible audiences in a simplistic way. You can have a show trapped in capitalist realism and still have a good show. Squid Game Season 1 (I’m avoiding Season 2 it’s irrelevant, there’s nothing more they can say) was perfect in that sense. It was a great critique of capitalism where victory is hollow. Your characters in the story can get crushed by the system! It’s a real thing that happens, it has emotional weight and it’s a human understanding of the problem. Writers rooms avoid this shit because Americans love treats not art, they simply want their treats to pretend to treat them like adults who can handle art. So you get these “high concept” things that run into a brick wall fairly quickly.
For example: The Good Place could have explored Kiirkegaardian ethics where Kiirkegaard says that humans in aggregate are responsible for the systems under which they live, and they can be punished by God for it in aggregate. The Good Place character arcs could have explored that within how to live with being in a position where you’re constantly being unethical in a way you have no real choice in, and how the characters deal with it.
Severance never faces the fact that the flaw in its own conceit is much more salacious than anything the show does. The main flaw in Severance’s concept is that we’re biomechanical machines and not electronic robots. So the side effects of grieving a wife will still severely affect the performance, mood, and mental health of your “innie” because their chemical and structural precursors are all there. Which is literally more horrifying of a personal story than the “omg we’re doing slavery as an evil cult but we won’t say wink” that Apple TV writers do in this shit.
Imagine that your only existence is 9-5 and for whatever reason you’re always ill, you never feel good, you wake up like this and you go to sleep like this. You have no way to improve this situation because you cannot leave your prison, you have no way to even figure out what’s going on. Instead it’s a big old “who dun it” with all the ChatGPT style hallmarks of hack modern writing. The real horror is that not only can this go horribly wrong, someone might attempt it because they’re stupid enough to think it will go right.
The concept of Severance is literally a torment nexus in and of itself, not because it’s done by an evil cult. That’s why you’ll see a bunch of libs on BlueSky and Twitter praying for Severance IRL like people prayed for Squid Games. This is the exact hack lib writing problem that the US Office, the Good Place and Lovecraft Country had – that it’s capitalist realism.
The Office and The Good Place are obvious. The Office becomes flanderized cuteness about how work is quirky and not an unstable arbitrary constructed system made by morons, unlike the UK version. The Good Place discovers capitalism and then pretends that there’s no reason that humans should be responsible for it’s creation and existence in the view of cosmic justice.
Lovecraft Country is actually one of the worst fucking ones. What’s the central conceit? “Lovecraft was racist.” It doesn’t go any deeper than that. Yes Lovecraft was racist. Yes cosmic horror as a genre has it’s roots in fear of the unknown other. We know that applying that to races is bullshit. That’s a baby brained thing. But guess what, the fear of a group of people whose intentions are unknown, unknowable, capricious, and they wield great power to affect your life – yet you have seemingly no way to fight them. You know who that is? I’ll give you a hint:
But no we have to remind everyone how good and liberal and virtue signalling we are as a writers room of an HBO TV show. Channel Zero Butcher’s Block for all its faults at least presented a clear interesting story and didn’t shy away from, “oh yeah these people are interdimensional beings who are extracting value from this community and are literally eating its members because they owned a factory once but it stopped being profitable.”
By the way Lovecraft Country was literally written by a white guy. He even looks like Bradley Whitford’s character in Get Out:
wouldn’t say the show is ignorant of this since it’s basically what Petey says in Ep 3
spoiler
00:09:59 Mark: I lost my wife a couple years ago in a car accident. This is— It’s helping me, you know?
00:10:06 Petey: I’m sorry, Mark. Mark: No, no, no. No.
00:10:10 Petey: At work…you’d come in sometimes with red eyes. We had a joke that you had an elevator allergy. There was even a song for it. But I always wondered.
00:10:32 Petey: You carry the hurt with you. You feel it down there too. You just don’t know what it is.
The problem is that it’s not “real”. Under capitalism your grief doesn’t count for anything it might as well not exist, it’s reasons might as well not exist. In as such a character who is experiencing grief without knowing why and only exists within the context of work is the most abstract presentation of humanistic grief under a capitalist system. Our relations are so alienated this feeling itself might as well be alien itself.
They’re trying to make a point. It’s a show to make the viewer feel smart for “getting it”. They could have made a much better one if they took the concept seriously and weren’t so small minded. Mark S is going thru it in the show. That’s an obvious emotional element, but it’s squandered.
W post. What are some shows or films that talk about capitalism without doing capitalist realism? I can think of a couple movies that are shamelessly anticolonialist like RRR and Parasite (with the interpretation that it’s about the Korean war), but all this media about capitalism tends to do what you described where they talk about capitalism’s failures but ultimately don’t say anything about how to overcome it, or even why it came about in the first place.
I’m a Virgo by boots Riley. One character has a super power of psychic theatre where they explain Marxism to other characters and the watcher,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpagmvYZKRc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUq-bk-x6tw
That is a great show. Wish it was possible for it to get more than just those 7 episodes, but as long as Boots keeps making stuff I’m sure it’ll just continue to get better and better.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
You’re basically asking for solidarity movies: They Live is a classic one. Sorry to Bother You. Hackers. Planet of the Apes Trilogy (the 2010’s version). O Brother Where Art Thou. Ip Man 1. Stalker.
I think just to clarify. Capitalist realism doesn’t necessarily doom these shows to being bad. The thing that dooms these shows is the combination of capitalist realism and the need to appeal to the broadest possible audiences in a simplistic way. You can have a show trapped in capitalist realism and still have a good show. Squid Game Season 1 (I’m avoiding Season 2 it’s irrelevant, there’s nothing more they can say) was perfect in that sense. It was a great critique of capitalism where victory is hollow. Your characters in the story can get crushed by the system! It’s a real thing that happens, it has emotional weight and it’s a human understanding of the problem. Writers rooms avoid this shit because Americans love treats not art, they simply want their treats to pretend to treat them like adults who can handle art. So you get these “high concept” things that run into a brick wall fairly quickly.
For example: The Good Place could have explored Kiirkegaardian ethics where Kiirkegaard says that humans in aggregate are responsible for the systems under which they live, and they can be punished by God for it in aggregate. The Good Place character arcs could have explored that within how to live with being in a position where you’re constantly being unethical in a way you have no real choice in, and how the characters deal with it.
GOOD post