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Contains spoilers about past episodes but not <\/em>the Season 2 finale<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n In \u201cSeverance,\u201d the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the \u201cinnie\u201d doing all the work and the \u201coutie\u201d remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless.<\/p>\n The show reinforces that theme with its cinematography and production design. Here are some of the ways \u201cSeverance\u201d invokes and inverts classic film tricks to create its corporate hell.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n From the earliest days of moving images, filmmakers have used the rigid geometry of desks and cubicles and dense repetition to create images of people together, yet isolated, trapped and stripped of identity by corporate bosses.<\/p>\n Films like \u201cThe Apartment,\u201d from 1960 (below, top left), and even Pixar\u2019s 2004 animated movie \u201cThe Incredibles\u201d (top right) use these repetitive shots to suggest a corporate mass that takes away individual identities to instead create \u201ccompany men,\u201d said Julie Levinson, a professor at Babson College and the author of \u201cThe American Success Myth on Film.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Grids fill the screen in those movies and others, including in shots of the oppressive call center of the 2018 satire \u201cSorry to Bother You\u201d (above left) and the lifeless corporate floor of Mattel in \u201cBarbie,\u201d from 2023 (above right), creating a claustrophobic sense of confinement.<\/p>\n One of the earliest examples of this image on film came in King Vidor\u2019s 1928 silent movie \u201cThe Crowd\u201d:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Jacques Tati\u2019s \u201cPlaytime,\u201d from 1967, Tati\u2019s recurring character, Monsieur Hulot, finds himself out of sync with the impersonal settings of midcentury Paris:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSeverance\u201d uses some of the same approach. The Lumon Industries office was inspired by the workplaces of the 1960s, Jeremy Hindle, the show\u2019s production designer, told the architecture magazine Dezeen<\/a>. Back then most offices were very clearly places to work, creating a strict separation between office and domestic life, he said. \u201cI find workplaces now kind of \u2018fake\u2019 workplaces \u2014 they\u2019re home-ish.\u201d<\/p>\n The opening sequence modifies the multitudinous office shot to reflect the show\u2019s splintering identities, with a grid of desks that has the same worker in every cubicle: the innie Mark S, played by Adam Scott:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In other ways, Levinson said, \u201cSeverance\u201d bucks office-film convention. Instead of leaning on multiples, it most commonly isolates its workers in unnervingly large rooms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The concept of confinement is central to \u201cSeverance.\u201d While many characters chafe against the limits of their roles in life, for the innies the imprisonment is literal: They are effectively trapped on the severed floor, only perceiving life in the workplace.<\/p>\n The sense of restriction is reinforced by the low ceilings in \u201cSeverance,\u201d including in the hallways and the offices themselves, Levinson noted. Low ceilings trap characters and are useful tools particularly in horror movies, like in the claustrophobic corporate spaceship in \u201cAlien\u201d (1979) or the tight architecture of the Overlook Hotel<\/a> in \u201cThe Shining\u201d (1980).<\/p>\n The corridors in \u201cSeverance\u201d recall an extreme example of low office ceilings: the 7 \u00bd floor in \u201cBeing John Malkovich,\u201d where employees have to physically hunch over as they exit the elevator:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The work itself can also be the cage. In one scene in the first season of \u201cSeverance,\u201d Dylan G.\u2019s (Zach Cherry) screen resembles a shot from the 1999 movie \u201cAmerican Beauty,\u201d with both characters looking at their reflections trapped behind the work on their screens:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n If the spaces or the work itself form the prisons of office life, the wardens are the clocks. Shots of them are another visual trope in workplace movies, one that calls back to the symbolic clocks in old German Expressionist films<\/a>: Employees repeatedly glance at the time, waiting to be free. (Levinson shows her students a montage of similar shots across decades.)<\/p>\n It happens in the 2002 movie \u201cAbout Schmidt,\u201d as Jack Nicholson, as a retiring insurance man, stares at the clock waiting for his final day of work to end \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2026 and in the aptly titled 1997 comedy \u201cClockwatchers,\u201d about four young women working in a soul-sucking office:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Because innies exist only on the severed floor, there is little reason for one to look forward to heading home. In the second season, when Mark S. looks at the clock as the workday winds down, it is a sign that risky reintegration surgery to combine his severed halves is starting to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cSeverance,\u201d the managers on the severed floor exert quiet corporate power from behind the desks in their private offices. Severed workers stand before the seated supervisor, waiting to speak as in a royal court.<\/p>\n The filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen often use that image of \u201cthe man behind the desk\u201d<\/a> in their films, including, clockwise from top left, \u201cThe Big Lebowski,\u201d \u201cThe Hudsucker Proxy,\u201d \u201cFargo\u201d and \u201cBarton Fink.\u201d The boss\u2019s desk is a barrier between the protagonist and real power:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Employees\u2019 desks are, by contrast, vulnerable. Their cubicles make them easy targets for bosses \u201cjust swinging by,\u201d like in the 1999 workplace malaise movie \u201cOffice Space\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2026 or the accommodations could be absurdly ineffective, as in the 1985 sci-fi black comedy \u201cBrazil.\u201d One desk is divided by a wall and split between two employees who must play tug of war for the work surface:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The boss\u2019s desk and its power are consistent, even if the person behind it isn\u2019t. Between the two seasons of \u201cSeverance,\u201d the supervisor Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) is replaced by her subordinate Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman<\/a>); he takes her place both at the desk and in the same shots she occupied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cSeverance,\u201d the office elevator is a site of transformation between a severed worker\u2019s two identities. As it nears the severed floor, the elevator acts as a breaker switch between the innie and outie identity, with the innies waking up on the office floor, locked away from the outside world.<\/p>\n In the 1957 drama \u201cA Face in the Crowd,\u201d the main character\u2019s fall from grace is made literal as he goes down the network television company\u2019s elevator, watching the buttons tick to lower floors:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By contrast in \u201cThe Hudsucker Proxy,\u201d the inventor turned executive played by Tim Robbins is crammed into the back of an elevator until the operator realizes he is important and goes express to the top floor<\/a>. The doors close behind him as he looks uneasy with his ascent:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The other pivotal elevator in \u201cSeverance\u201d is at the end of a pitch black corridor. It goes to the mysterious testing floor, and it haunts one character so much that he repeatedly paints it in gobs of black oil paint without knowing what it is. That elevator is all descent.<\/p>\n Forced Fun<\/p>\n Lumon Industries emphasizes its workplace perks for innies, which create brief spots of color within the office\u2019s otherwise drab environs. In \u201cSeverance,\u201d employees strive for melon bars, finger traps and Music Dance Experiences as rewards for their hard work, supposed morale boosts that are infantilizing and ultimately \u2014 and laughably \u2014 ineffective.<\/p>\n Other shows, like \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d<\/a> and \u201cBroad City<\/a>,\u201d have also memorably used moments of forced fun to emphasize the awkward sterility of office life:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cThe Office,\u201d a sad celebration features a depressing fruit tray \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\nInfantilizing Perks<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n