Text:Vikram Murthi; Translation/Gong Siliang
Editor's note: Recently, the news that countries including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand plan to pilot the "4-day-a-week work system" has attracted a lot of attention. Many people say that how to better balance work and life has become a major problem for workers today. The American drama "Severance", which has received a lot of attention this year, depicts a chilling "future" to the workers, completely stripping life and work. However, the play leaves many unanswered questions; Perhaps the most question the character should ask is, "What are we doing?" "Why are we here?" And "Why do I exist?" This article was originally published in The Nation by Vikram Murthi.
Poster of "Life Cutting"
In the last decades of the 20th century, the U.S. workforce underwent a number of well-documented changes that systematically disenfranchised workers in all sectors of the economy. Long-standing unions are either dissolved or face a sharp drop in membership. Despite steady domestic GDP growth, workers' wages have stagnated. Politicians have successfully launched campaigns to cut taxes on capital gains; Inequality between income and wealth has risen sharply, and higher profits have allowed employers to exploit workers more boldly. If, during the Industrial Revolution, workers were alienated from the products of their labor; By the beginning of the 21st century, then, they were psychologically distant from labor itself—because the ostensible sole purpose of labor was self-perpetuation.
"Living to work" rather than "working to live" has become a work pattern for many people, especially after "upward mobility" has long since become an unattainable goal. Now, not only do Americans need to do their jobs, but their workplaces have also "become" a "home," even though the "home" offers them little protection and requires them to spend more time at work. "When you're here, you're family," the famous cheesy slogan of olive garden restaurants in the United States, was hyped up. It has become chillingly the motto of the American workplace.
The release of Apple's TV+ series Severance benefited from good cultural timing, as many people have begun to re-evaluate their attitudes towards work and the workplace after the coronavirus outbreak. Now, people are starting to try to decouple job satisfaction from overall personal happiness, although the gains from this attempt may be minimal. The premise of "Life Cutting" is: What if you could medically guarantee that you would never take your work home? In this series, one of the world's largest companies uses surgery to separate employees' working and non-working memories. In essence, they are divided into the working self ("innie") and the personal self ("outie") who "wakes up" every time you enter the office.
The series's protagonist, Mark Scott (played by Adam Scott), works in the macrodata refining department of Lumont Industries. After his wife died in a car accident, he underwent separation surgery. At the beginning of the show, Mark tries to get his colleague Hurley (played by Britt Lore), who has just undergone separation surgery, into the workplace. She woke up at the conference table, not knowing who she was or where she was. She will replace Mark's best friend at the company, Pete (Yule Vázquez), who is fired in a mysterious situation. We soon learned that Pete's work and personal memories were "reintegrated" through a controversial behind-the-scenes process. The disheveled Pete eventually gets in touch with the non-working Mark, telling him that Lumon isn't what it seems.
Written by Dan Erickson and with Ben Stiller as executive producer, the show explores the overextensibility of dystopian corporations based on a high-concept framework in the style of Twilight zone. The show necessarily needs to create an immersive world of mystery, so Erikson and Stiller create a man-made, time-out-of-time world and a "hell" designed in the image of a big tech company. In fact, although "Life Cutting" is widely praised for its "puzzle box" plot, retaining the audience through various stories, it is first and foremost inseparable from the feats of production design. The architects deliberately designed Lumont's office as a mid-20th-century office building, and the interior design of the office can be called eerie, almost like hell.
Lu Meng's warm and ominous image has greatly increased the confidence of the macro data refining department to resist the company's boss. These bosses include the protagonist's immediate boss, Seth Mirchik (Trammell Tillman), and acting boss Harmony Kerber (Patricia Aquiette). In the first season of "Life's Cutters," Mark, Hurley, and their colleagues: the profane, smug Dylan (Zach Cherry) and the picky and conformist Owen (John Te toro) realize the evil of their employers and refuse separation surgery. Since then, they have begun to feel that the "ostensibly safe" workplace is gradually oppressing them. Despite its sheer volume of information (and even some of its greedy), Life Cutter succeeded in focusing on the gradual radicalization of Mark and his colleagues. Like many labor activists before them, they were inspired by an article to overthrow the system. They are awakened not by slogans or theories, but by a pretentious self-help book. The book's boring cover is enough to distract you, and it's one of the best jokes of the year.
Although Stiller was deeply involved in the show, directing two-thirds of the episodes of the season, "Life Cut" is not a comedy, at least not a comedy in the traditional sense. Some surreal vignettes occasionally break the serious tone of the series, but it still retains a serious character that complements the show's disturbing premise. However, this does not mean that the show has no sense of humor. Many elements of Life Cut can be called structural (and even architectural) comedy. Dark jokes involving design and philosophy form the basis of the play, emphasizing the emotional nature of the characters.
A prime example is Mark's arrogant, sensual brother-in-law Ricken Hale (Michael Cherus), who both Marc and his sister Devin (Jen Tarrock) scorn him. Hale gave Mark a copy of his new book, The You You Are. Before he could begin reading it, the book was confiscated by company leader Kerber. She posed as Mark's kind neighbor and watched him outside of work. She took it to a common office, where Mark accidentally found it and hid the book from his boss. He and Dylan secretly read the book in their spare time and began to absorb its old, well-intentioned aphorisms. In one episode, we hear a series of excerpts: "A society cannot prosper if the workers are dissatisfied." It's like a person with rotten toes who can't jump"; "The difference between man and machine is that machines cannot think independently. There are also machines made of metal, and people are made of flesh and skin"; "Bullies have nothing but wild talk and lies".
The ridiculous prose of "You Are Yourself" may be ridiculed by Mark outside of work, but Mark and his compatriots find real inspiration in a book that advocates workers' emancipation through the vernacular of the new age, albeit in a clumsy way. The Cut of Life highlights these differences by implicitly contrasting the book's content with the teachings of Lumont's founder, Kiel Egan (Mark Geller). Egan spread his cultist rhetoric through a workers' manual, which was also the "working bible." Thankfully, the series doesn't overemphasize this contrast. Interestingly, Egan's mission is more elaborate and more elaborately written than Hale's, but also more insidious. In one episode, Owen quotes two sentences from the manual: "Be content with my words, don't waste time learning from people who are inferior to me" and "No workplace can be used for sleeping." Translated as "Don't listen to outsiders" and "Don't take a nap at work."
Perhaps the show's most successful, however, is the labyrinthine design of the Loumon Building, which is specifically designed to confuse and trap the workers inside. Mark and his colleagues spend most of their time in the Macrodata Refinement zone. The atmosphere of this huge room with low ceilings is dull, and its family décor and the quirky and outdated techniques used by the staff are out of place. Floors are made up of endless, identical white corridors that seem to guide employees anywhere (or to places no one knows). Lumon banned employees from drawing office maps, and while employees were aware of the existence of other departments, it was unclear how many departments there were within the company, nor exactly where they were. The technique used by director Stiller in the final episode depicts the company's labyrinthine structure superbly. He briefly followed Mark and Milchik in the hallway, but as they walked to the right, the camera moved to the left. White walls filled the entire screen in that second, until Mirchik walked in from the right. Stiller's shot was still tracking to the left, eventually catching up with Mark. The disorienting effect shows that we don't even know which direction they're heading in.
Stills from "The Cut of Life"
"Life Cutter" turns many Of the Dilbert's Laws (America's best-selling business management book) jokes about office culture into reality. These include "it is not possible to leave the building until the end of the hours". Ironically, the work That Mark and his colleagues did was meaningless: dragging and dropping random sets of numbers on a computer screen. This couldn't be more appropriate because the work of "macro data refinement" is so vague that it makes no sense. The team ostensibly works for frustrating, trivial perks including finger-set toys, egg snacks, waffle parties, and more. But those are cheap, distracting activities. It's all about stopping Mark and others from asking the question that many white-collar workers have asked: What are we really doing here?
The Cut of Life raises a series of questions and attempts to uncover a larger conspiracy. But it also leaves many unresolved questions, and it makes a mockery of Lumont's influence and its harmful targets. Impressively, director Eriksen has left a lot of leeway for future seasons. For example, the show only touches on how separation surgery affects the outside world. Mark lives in a clearly surveilled, subsidized town by Lumont' company. And the company's political clout, how it got state senators to decide to crack down on "popular aversion to the surgery," has yet to be explored. Mysterious figures, such as the invisible "board of directors," conveying information about approval or non-approval through an agent remains unexplained. The final turn of the season shows that Lumon has been hiding a lot of collateral damage from the public. Moreover, we don't even know how many other floors, departments, or workers are on the company's building.
This daunting attitude can be frustrating, as it's unclear whether the answers to these questions will satisfy the audience. Viewers are likely to see this opaque plot as a lengthy cycle. In some less satisfying moments, Life Cutter looks like it's stalling for time. But like most of this type of television, the process tends to make more sense than the ending. At first, the show was compelling because it concealed the basic information of the plot setting; When the audience finally has enough information and begins to feel grounded, the director's scheduling and performance become the selling point.
The show's most salient question is not its lack of answers or details, but a more existential question: Why would a company offer separation surgery in the first place? The play tries to convince the audience that Mark's decision to dismiss memory as a byproduct of grief is qualified, despite the unreliability of his emotional reasoning. Questioning, would most people be willing to accept the incoherence of their self-memory so that they can experience grief only half the time? Viewers have similar questions when it comes to his colleagues, and although the fact that they underwent separation surgery is simply hinted at, it seems that they have similar traumatic motivations. Even from the perspective of the most exaggerated evil company, the benefits of full control over employees can hardly outweigh the enormous liability of allowing employees to ask questions about the company, or separation surgery, including the objections it raises. Lumont employs psychological torture and covert surveillance operations to keep order among its workers, but it is for this reason that it triggers suicide attempts and blatant confusion. From a credibility standpoint, with the likelihood of anarchy so high, the company's medical intervention doesn't seem to be the safest option.
Of course, it might be foolish to criticize the credibility of fictional dramas, especially when it comes to the shortsightedness of corporate entities. But if the series wants to address the exploitation of labor, even in its own exaggerated way, it should help to make the authoritarian means of oppression more logical and emotionally meaningful. Perhaps, "Life Cut" can make the characters start asking "What are we doing?" And "Why are we here?" " and other issues. Of course, the best question should be, "Why do I exist?" ”
Editor-in-Charge: Han Shaohua
Proofreader: Luan Meng