A Sever Darkly
Druggie '70s-cum-'90s Orange Country versus the timeless cold of Lumon's North America: what do an old novel and a new television show have to say about work—life cognitive dissonance?
31 July 2025: I first published this piece on 27 April 2025 and have subsequently edited it. I wasn’t satisfied I’d acknowledged my positioning as someone with reasonable job security and privilege, so have made some changes below.
Content note: This post contains spoilers for the first two seasons of Severance and the novel A Scanner Darkly.
Philip K. Dick published the science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly in 1977: it’s set in the year 1994 in a futuristic, drugged-out Orange County, California. The protagonist, Bob Arctor (played by Keanu Reeves in the 2006 film adaptation, which I’ve written about here) is an undercover cop who’s friends with a bunch of addicts and is trying to make his way up the supply chain of the fictitious, psychoactive Substance D. When Arctor clocks in at the office he goes by the codename Fred and, like his peers, wears a ‘scramble suit’—a suit that projects an ever-changing cycle of fragments of other people’s appearances, to protect the wearer’s anonymity, lest their ranks be broken by an informant who’ll warn others about their identities on the outside.1 So it’s got something in common with the television show Severance—instead of Mark Scout and Mark S., there’s Bob and Fred. Both the show and the novel are about the psychological murkiness associated with separating your work and home selves. I think A Scanner Darkly does the better job at this. It’s also, in line with the title, darker.
The book is based on the experiences Philip K. Dick and his friends had burning themselves out on drugs in the early seventies—people who, in the author’s note at the back of my edition, he says he loved and were “punished entirely too much for what they did.”2 There is a thread of anger, carried by Arctor, running through the book which is levelled at ‘straight’ society for treating drug addicts as unworthy of equal treatment. Arctor ruminates on a mall in downtown L.A. which sells “good products to the straights” and which you “bounced off like a rubber ball” unless you had good enough credit on your card to make it through the electronic sensors at the entrance.3 In one chapter he tries to help an addict under threat from her abusive boyfriend and is incensed when an elderly couple who live next door seem more concerned about the dog shit that gets left in their shared hallway: “He felt like laughing hysterically at the old folks’ priorities …”4 This is the first separation in the novel: ‘straight’ from the perceived degenerate. As a trans person, I often feel solidarity with those capitalist society molds into down-and-outs, given historical crossovers in treatment (insofar as I can’t speak to other people’s experiences). The old-fashioned use of the word ‘straight’ to mean ‘normal’ or ‘upstanding’, in tandem with the book’s critiques of these people, felt welcoming—like fostering this solidarity by labelling a common enemy.
Because his superiors don’t know his real identity, because of the scramble suit, Fred’s bosses ask him to investigate Bob, who they suspect is a kingpin drug-runner. Bob Arctor ends up in the unenviable position of having to report on himself. Worse, according to the medical deputies who evaluate him, Substance D is causing the two halves of Arctor’s brain to compete with one another. The more his mind degenerates, the less he is able to remember, when pretending to be Fred, that he is also Bob Arctor, the guy he’s watching back on surveillance tapes he himself set up to spy on the house where he and all the dropkicks live. Philip K. Dick does a clever thing here. The psychosis Arctor undergoes paints a freaky picture of what it was like when things went from “mellow” to frightening in the lives of the author’s friends: Arctor imagines a “nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror … with unrecognizable entities creeping about.”5 But it also serves to show how cruel the systems which divide people into straights and degenerates can be. The drug-induced personality split could be read as a metaphor for the soul-crushing pressure Arctor is under to keep Bob and Fred separate, which would drive anyone crazy:
He had to neutralize himself … They became neutral; they spoke in a neutral fashion; they looked neutral. Gradually it became easy to do so, without prearrangement. And then afterward all his feelings seeped back. Indignation at many of the events he had seen, even horror, in retrospect: shock. Great overpowering runs for which there had been no previews. With the audio always up too loud inside his head.6
I work in the public sector—in the justice sector, specifically. In New Zealand, per s12(1)(a) of the Public Service Act 2020, it is a “public service principle” to act in a “politically neutral manner”.7 I can say that A Scanner Darkly was a relatable read, but no more, insofar as it relates to my knowledge and experience—other than that this self-imposed constraint, of course, is part of the reason why this book moved me so much. “What is identity?” Arctor asks himself, at one point. “Where does the act end? Nobody knows.”8 By the end of the novel the man is a husk, having been shipped off to New Path, a rehab organisation based on actual cult-like rehabilitative movements X-Kalay and Synanon, which Philip K. Dick had some exposure to in the early 1970s (if you click the second link, scroll about halfway down the page to read about his X-Kalay experience).9 It turns out Arctor’s girlfriend Donna was a fed herself, and facilitated his addiction to get him into New Path as a potential mole, hoping his cop instincts would break through his post-psychosis shell—because, in a cynical turn of events, New Path grows the flowers that get harvested to make Substance D.
Donna sees herself as an arbiter of justice, a patronising position that people in power often feel entitled to hold: “It requires the greatest kind of wisdom, she thought, to know when to apply injustice.”10 But she knows there is an evil in this, somehow, that a long time ago the “mechanism … of things fell apart, and up from what remained swam the need to do all the various sort of unclear wrongs the wisest choice has made us act out,” and that “[w]e can’t turn around or open our mouth and speak, decide at all, without doing it.”11 In other words, the great big bad structures of the world, like bureaucracy, or systems of global capital, are so deeply ingrained that lots of people make decisions that hurt other people all the time, in the name of a greater good, just as Donna did with Arctor, and just as societies do when they criminalise poverty, or mental illness, or drug addiction. Her hope that there’ll be a way to escape the cycle, if not reassuring, is beautiful, based as it is on her memory of a guy she knew who tripped and saw God: “I just hope one day the shower of brightly colored sparks will return, and this time we’ll all see it.”12
That’s A Scanner Darkly. Severance is stylistically pretty different. The California in Philip K. Dick’s novel is filled with “neon ooze”—the Lumon interiors traversed by the innies are a pleasing mix of white, aqua, navy and green. I have read not one, but two, thinkpieces on how Severance fetishises office culture—a take I broadly agree with.13 All the show’s nods to the silliness of office life, like the finger traps and waffle parties that are handed out as incentives, are made so people like me can laugh and feel seen, because offices are indeed psychologically strange places to work—but this gentle satire is not a critique of the office environment itself. The viewer does not come away thinking that offices are horrible places to work in—just that they’re weird, if not endearing. Maybe this is a weakness of the show, given it’s supposed to critique corporate life. But I don’t think so, because it is true that the physical safety of the office is one of the trade-offs workers agree to when we sell our souls to a corporate overlord, or strip away the political parts of ourselves when we swipe in for the day, in the case of public servants (the other, obviously, being a wage or salary that means we can live with dignity). We are physically comforted, making coffees with boiling water that comes out of a tap on demand, and it can feel like a privilege, working in a place where there is little mess, and where the temperature is evenly maintained. And that’s part of the trap—because physical safety should be available to everyone, everywhere, not used as a bargaining chip to keep workers feeling grateful while doing things they don’t agree with.
A Scanner Darkly is (partly) about how the attempt to separate your work self and personal self by sheer force of will alone is impossible, and in fact damaging to the psyche. Severance takes on more of a science fiction hypothetical—given an outer ‘unsafe’ world and an inner ‘safe’ world, what would happen if two halves of a person inhabited each of these exclusively? Will the innie really be able to be safe? Watching the first season, I enjoyed getting to know the innies and their beautiful, naive workspace. I loved the design of the Macrodata Refinement room—the bright blue pens and paperclips, the tennis green carpet, the symmetrical desk quartet. I liked seeing the innies, particularly Mark and Irving, take pride in the office they called their home. Maybe this was because I appreciated watching men find fulfillment in domesticity, because that felt relatable. But even if Severance does celebrate the quirks of office life, rather than disparaging them, there’s an unavoidable melancholia attached to watching this on screen (click the link for a mood-appropriate album).14 Because the show is set up as a thriller, and because it portrays corporate power as evil, as it should, we know from the start that for this show’s characters at least, the answer to the question, Will they be safe? is no. Irving reveals this in heartbreaking fashion in the third episode when he shows how he places trust in an organisation that only cares about him because he is completely mouldable:
It’s an unnatural state for a person to have no history. History makes us someone. Gives us a context. A shape. But waking up on that table, I was shapeless. But then I learned that I work for a company that has been actively caring for mankind since 1866.15
There is a vague sense, through its mise en scène, that Severance is offering broader critiques of the historical contexts, and cultures, it draws from. The imposing buildings and mid-century interiors that pop up across the show seem not only a nod to corporate America of the sixties and seventies (this Vulture article breaks down the show’s design references, including to works by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen) but to Soviet-era brutalism.16 The tragicomedy of Severance and its fetishisation of bureaucratic processes did remind me of later Soviet history—like as described in this book about the Chernobyl distaster, which argues that the disaster was one massive bureaucratic failure.17 Bit ironic for a show which, again, is meant to lampoon capitalism, but I guess it’s easier for Americans to look further afield for material to criticise—and it works in the context of the show’s story, anyway.18
The cold and the snow, mixed with the religious veneration of the Eagans, and the closed-in piety of Harmony Cobel’s childhood home are reminiscent of New England Puritanism. Kier’s fable of the four tempers betrays a hatred of natural human emotion that harkens back to Puritan beliefs in how strict moral discipline and emotional self-control might allow an individual to “grow in holiness”:
I walked into the cave of my own mind, and there I tamed them [Woe, Dread, Frolic and Malice] … It is this great and consecrated power that I hope to pass on to all of you, my children.19
This is an interesting idea: connecting a history of American asceticism to the concerns of the contemporary biotechnology industry (for which Lumon, with its desire to eliminate pain, as hinted at in S02E10 “Cold Harbor,” is a stand-in). I wonder how far you could push the argument that those fears of inevitable human experiences, like grief, particularly as they arise in white America, are the result of long-standing religious harm—but Severance doesn’t take the question too seriously. It’s introduced many dead ends in its two-season run. Why was there so much build-up around severance during birth in the first season? Why did it seem like Macrodata Refinement was on track to unify the departments of the Severed Floor and lead them in rebellion, but never did?
Because the streaming financial model is so precarious, it seems like these days, television is always being pitched for a single season, with the proviso that if the show becomes a smash hit, there’ll be money for more episodes. It means writers have to make things up as they go along, extending plotlines in various directions in the hopes that some might stick and be worth returning to in future. This is what it felt like to watch Severance. The show is worth watching: its aesthetic sensibility is moving, and it touches on histories and cultural phenomena that are worth exploring. The first season especially has a lot going for it, talking about work in a thoughtful and balanced way and exploring the dynamics between the innies and their relationship to Lumon. But by the second season, the need for fan-service has already crept in, giving viewers single, memeable images (like a bloodied Gwendoline Christie holding a goat) that will keep the show relevant and funded. If you’ve finished Severance, or if you just want something about going insane at work that’s more cohesive and has bite, go read A Scanner Darkly.
This reasoning isn’t very logical—but it works in context, given the novel’s preoccupation with pointing out absurdities inherent in the way the justice system deals with drug addiction.
Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly, Vintage Books, 1977, pp276–277.
A Scanner Darkly, p10.
A Scanner Darkly, p79.
A Scanner Darkly, p133.
A Scanner Darkly, p57.
Public Service Act 2020, New Zealand Legislation, accessed 20/04/2025, https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2020/0040/latest/LMS356871.html
A Scanner Darkly, p29.
“Synanon,” Wikipedia, accessed 20/04/2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon
Arthur Byron Cover, ‘Vertex Interview with Philip K. Dick,’ Vertex, Vol. 1, no. 6, February 1974, accessed 20/04/2025, https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-archive/vertex-interview-with-philip-k-dick/
A Scanner Darkly, p236.
A Scanner Darkly, p236.
A Scanner Darkly, p236.
Katy Waldman, “How “Severance” Makes a Fetish of the Office,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2025, accessed 20/04/2025, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/how-severance-makes-a-fetish-of-the-office#:~:text=At%20this%20moment%20when%20the,the%20office%20than%20a%20fetishization.
Izzy Copestake, “We’ve reached peak workplace fetishisation,” Dazed, January 29, 2025, accessed 20/04/2025, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/65970/1/severance-industry-babygirl-we-ve-reached-peak-workplace-fetishisation
William Basinksi, Melancholia, 2062, 2003, accessed 26/04/2025,
Irving B., Severance, S01E03 “In Perpetuity”, Apple TV, 2022.
Jackson McHenry, “The Stories Behind Severance’s Eerie Office Design,” Vulture, April 1, 2022, updated January 17, 2025, accessed 26/04/2025, https://www.vulture.com/article/severance-office-design-explained.html
“Eero Saarinen,” Wikipedia, accessed 26/04/2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eero_Saarinen
“Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy review – Europe nearly became uninhabitable,” Daniel Beer, The Guardian, May 9, 2018, accessed 27/04/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/09/chernobyl-history-tragedy-serhii-plokhy-review-disaster-europe-soviet-system
[Footnote for images used directly below].
Screencap, Severance, S01E01 “Welcome to Hell”, Apple TV, 2022.
“Lenin Monument, Istaravshan,” Shahina Travel, accessed 27/04/2022, https://eurasia.travel/tajikistan/istaravshan/lenin-monument/
Nathaniel Warne, “Emotions and the Development of Virtue in Puritan Thought: An Investigation of Puritan Friendship,” in Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda, eds., Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p.194.
Recording of Kier Eagan, Severance, S01E03 “In Perpetuity”, Apple TV, 2022.