The Put-On

Jordan Brower considers the abjuring of depth undertaken by the Apple TV+ series “Severance.”

By Jordan BrowerJune 30, 2025

• Television

• Film

WHAT DO YOU see in the image above? If you’re a watcher of Severance (2022– ), Apple TV+’s watercooler show for the post-watercooler age, you’ve got ore to mine. Behind floor manager Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman), we find an array of meaningful objects: meaningful both to Milchick, who has placed them there, and to those of us inclined to hunt for symbols.

Specifically, we see a handful of emblems of the mind, which the fictional biotechnology company Lumon Industries seeks to subdivide under the pretense of pain management. From left to right: a statue of the duck-rabbit optical illusion (Gestalt psychology), a stock image of an iceberg (depth psychology), a bas-relief representation of Lumon Industries founder Kier Eagan (Eagan’s theory of the “tempers,” the humors that comprise consciousness), a retro computer (a thinking machine), and a bonsai tree (the Zen concept of no-mind).

As if this weren’t already overwhelming, consider that at least two of these emblems are figures of interpretation. The duck-rabbit, Wittgenstein said, illustrates the idea of “seeing an aspect,” a seeing this—the duck-rabbit—as that—a rabbit, or a duck. The iceberg gives us psychoanalysis by way of Hemingway, a description of profound, submerged truth cryptically expressed through surface appearances. This is what you’d expect from a show that begins with an elemental question: “Who are you?” Severance is about looking for answers, and wants us to know that it knows it.

Let’s start with the iceberg, the figure favored by legions of fans theorizing on the internet. By subscribing to this view of the show-as-puzzle-box, every Redditor or Severance Wiki contributor becomes a Macrodata Refiner—the role occupied by the show’s severed principals—sifting meaning for journalists to further mine and refine, which will in turn filter upward to the show’s makers. “We didn’t know if anybody would be freeze-framing or have theories,” writer Dan Erickson told Esquire in 2022. “Turns out they did.”

This trend toward textual data mining typifies the corporate capture of convergence culture, a phenomenon that John Thornton Caldwell described as a hallmark of contemporary media industries. (Caldwell: “This churn of disclosure inside cloaked extractive digital economies—even when couched as collective brainstorming—is not unlike soft-coal strip-mining.”) Of course, this is no different from what technology companies do more generally, transforming observations into attention data, in order to provide more attention-grabbing and lucrative media.

Following the great critic Manny Farber, we might call Severance’s solicitation of this mode of spectatorship the “Gimp in the Age of Streaming.” The show exemplifies a form of insistent, self-regarding meaningfulness particular to the era of social media: when sophisticated interpretations by remote workers with humanities degrees can be found across the internet; when the industry trade papers not only are publicly available but also increasingly offer theoretically informed cultural criticism (a consequence, no doubt, of their ownership by Penske Media); when the history of film and television, dispersed in what amount to private digital quarries, is available to be mined.

Apple might be thanked for making its strategy plain—insofar as the world’s most valuable company has a strategy for its streaming service, which is still an open question. And yet, analogous to the characters’ split selves, Severance’s attitude toward answering its viewers and itself is internally divided.

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Look again at the image above. Instead of homing in on the objects themselves, notice their disproportionate configuration relative to the wall. The floor manager’s office didn’t always look like this. In season one, Harmony Cobel’s (Patricia Arquette) impressionistic triptych painting left much to be interpreted, but its placement at least made compositional sense.

Milchick’s wall, on the other hand, is weird. The credenza is too sparse, the print too small for the wall. If the blue paint suggests the ocean concealing the rest of the iceberg, the perspectival mismatch gives the lie to the implication of depth. We should take this strangeness seriously, and not just because it resonates with Milchick’s struggle to comport himself in a manner required by his condescending white superiors. (Milchick’s Blackness, unremarked on in the first season, becomes in season two an occasion for an implicit parallel between himself and the Innies, when Lumon’s board of directors gifts him a set of African-Americanized paintings of the Kier Eagan mythology so that he might “see [him]self in Kier.” Milchick is clearly struck by these images, and not necessarily happily; in any case, none of them appear on this wall.)

The odd proportions of the tableau and the false depth of the iceberg exemplify an aesthetic principle at work in the show, one that—in deference to Teddy Blanks, the designer of the show’s titles, and in homage to Stephen Colbert—should go by the name of the offness. “The production design in Severance is highly indebted to that clean, modernist ’60s corporate look,” said Blanks, “but there’s something ‘off’ about it you can’t quite put your finger on. The type needed to be the same way.”

Offness is the material expression of Severance’s prevailing strategy of the “put-on.” Announced at the conclusion of season two’s third episode in the form of the Who’s song “Eminence Front,” Severance’s put-on is of the sort Pauline Kael praised in her evaluation of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), that epochal film of the Hollywood Renaissance, the style and sensibility of which the show goes to great pains to emulate. “‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is the first film demonstration that the put-on can be used for the purposes of art,” Kael wrote. “To be put on is to be put on the spot, put on the stage, made the stooge in a comedy act.” Understood this way, Severance’s cartoonish pastiche of midcentury style indicates the taking-on of an aesthetic challenge: how to put on viewers who have come to expect everything, and are ready to interpret anything?

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In the intradiegetic world of the severed floor, offness of design butts up against matters of interpretation at the entrance to the Perpetuity Wing, a shrine to the Eagan family on the model of a wax-museum-cum-theme-park. There, current Lumon CEO Jame Eagan explains to those who enter, “history lives in us, whether we learn it or not.” At first, this might strike viewers as bittersweetly ironic: Mark S. (Adam Scott), the Innie of the erstwhile history professor Mark Scout, knows nothing of the personal pain that prompted his Outie to bring him into being. (Later in season two, both he and we will discover the basic truth of Fredric Jameson’s hermeneutic axiom: history is what hurts.) But at a closer glance, the sign’s letters are too close together, a stylistic fumble that emphasizes the would-be maxim’s clumsy ambiguity, undermining its authority (why “learn” and not the more appropriate “know”?).

Offness compromises in advance any interpretation that relies on information derived from the severed floor. One incredibly industrious fan claims to have devoted “over a week of innie-work” to plotting a corporate history of Lumon, including a discussion of its origins in the American slave trade, based on the fact that Kier Eagan served as chairman from 1865 to 1939. That evidence derives from a Perpetuity Wing placard whose various typographical sins—squished kerning, cramped orthography, inconsistent font size, hyphens instead of en dashes—give the impression of a hasty copy-and-paste job between incompatible word processing programs.

If, as we later learn, Lumon is willing to lie about something as trivial as Kier’s height—Milchick taunts the animatronic statue for being five inches taller than the founder himself—why wouldn’t it fabricate everything else? But the Innies are effectively blank slates with no sense of history, so those dates would be meaningless on the severed floor.

The dates, then, are for the viewers. What’s remarkable is not just that they’re unbelievable but moreover that they are so evidently both interpretation bait and red herrings, Easter eggs and dead ends. This detail makes a mockery of the rage for meaning, and, more specifically, a mockery of the desire to divine the truth of a corporate design—be it Lumon’s or Apple’s—from the aesthetic objects it purveys.

The world outside the Lumon building offers no escape from the offness. The company towns of Kier and Salt’s Neck uncannily mirror the inside. They, too, comprise the flotsam of the shipwreck of History—the cars are, as many have noted and as Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) might put it, old as shit, while characters fiddle with smartphones (conspicuously not iPhones). The Outies are just as fearful of corporate surveillance as the Innies, and go to similarly great lengths to evade it. That Ricken Hale’s (Michael Chernus) harebrained self-help book The You You Are becomes a source of hope for the Innies is no goofier than Lumon fixer and former rake Burt Goodman’s (Christopher Walken) belief that his innocent severed self might accompany his religious partner to heaven. No mythology escapes lampooning. As a result, viewers have no stable standpoint from which to assess the validity of appearances and no warrant to interpret depth.

So far, so postmodern. If this skepticism of metanarratives sounds very 1970s, we have an indication that the midcentury decor entails more than mere pastiche would. Severance flaunts its citations of the New Hollywood, from the opening theme’s eerie resonance with that of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) to the faux-grain of season two’s concluding shot, a freeze-frame of Mark and Helly R. (Britt Lower) running off without a plan, which merges the wayward defection of The Graduate (1967) with the renegade hagiography of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Seventies neo-noir holds the same allure for Erickson and producer Ben Stiller that the original noir pictures did for the Movie Brats. With its anticlassical construction, stylistic excess, and philosophical investments, the genre—in both its classic and neo iterations—met the demands of auteurs anxious to assert themselves against a constraining system.

But however much the neo-noirs confounded themselves by evoking unmappable systems, their makers could at least be confident that whatever they captured on film had actually been there, in the world, as guaranteed by the mechanism of photography. Severance expresses anxiety over that loss in its repeated use of celluloid film. Whether scenes are shot on film (as in this season’s seventh episode, “Chikhai Bardo”) or printed and rephotographed (resulting in the final shot of season two), they are all, inevitably, obviously, digitized for postproduction adjustment and distribution.

This problem is only compounded by the advent of generative artificial intelligence, the major technological incursion that contributed to the writers’ and actors’ strikes that dilated the gap between Severance’s two seasons. An AI can’t be an author, contractually or metaphysically. One might be moved by an AI-produced image, but that experience is akin to standing in awe of the sky (every Innie’s wish, according to Alia Shawkat’s Gwendolyn Y.) or being enthralled by an iridescent gasoline slick under Cobel’s white Volkswagen Rabbit.

Which is to say, they are aesthetic experiences not of art but of the natural world‚ however degraded: unintended, not made, unmeaningful. A company might choose to present and thereby author an AI-generated image, at which point it becomes the most refined form of corporate expression: the theoretical limit where an image becomes money. That may be Apple’s dream, even if it isn’t yet its reality; the company maintains a reputational investment in stars and auteurs. It certainly isn’t the dream of the guilds, who fought for human participation in the making of film and television.

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The world of Severance’s characters and the world of the show’s makers converge on the problem of how to communicate one’s humanity when skepticism of that humanity is more justified than ever. They converge, too, on a stylistic solution—offness and excess—that transforms the put-on from an entertaining cruelty into an aesthetic principle with ethical ramifications. Jessica Lee Gagné, Severance’s director of photography and the director of “Chikhai Bardo,” describes that excess as “fun”: “What shooting on film does to a film set is also a big part of it, changing the dynamic on set and the way that we approach the shot. Everyone has to be on their toes. There were so many times we were [racing] against the sun setting, but that was so much fun.”

It’s an excess expressed by, if not exactly encoded in, the spherical two-perforation 35 mm film they used—the residue of their conviction in the work they do and of their commitment to each other in the process of doing that work. This communication of excess finds its analogue in the values that produce, in the minds of the severed Macrodata Refiners, a feeling that corresponds to one of Kier Eagan’s Four Tempers—Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice. One of Severance’s most effective red herrings is its initial intimation that those values were numerical impurities, the quarantining of which constituted the refining. But the slag is in fact the ore: the ostensible excess of emotion is the essential stuff of personality. The vagueness and ludicrousness of the mechanisms at work are the point: the cognitive process doesn’t matter; the semantic content of the data matters even less. All that does matter is the miraculous fact that a personality, thoroughly mediated by a digital matrix, is intuitively recognized by another.

Anyone who has read student papers since 2022 will identify the basic truth here. AI-generated papers are easy to spot due to their grammatically perfect vacuity. Students—people—make idiosyncratic but recognizable mistakes. These days, more than ever, evidence of the willingness to commit errors signals a willingness to learn.

The intuition of humanity, then, depends on familiarity. Mark is presumably necessary for the completion of Cold Harbor—the code name for the Gemma Scout personality resistant to her most intimate pain—because only he can know this version of her: Gemma after her miscarriage and most in need of the comfort Outie Mark couldn’t provide. That is, only Innie Mark can recognize the woman who was the wife that his Outie had forsaken and grieved as dead, and only Innie Mark can return this woman to life and to his Outie self.

Put this way, Severance bears a strong affinity to The Winter’s Tale, the Shakespearean forbear of the group of Classical Hollywood movies the philosopher Stanley Cavell called “comedies of remarriage,” a restricted set of romantic and screwball comedies in which recoupling involves a new discovery—an “acknowledgment”—of each partner’s humanity. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, given the show’s evident debts to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Charlie Kaufman’s great homage to the genre. If Cavell is right to suppose that the original American comedies of remarriage articulate the “inner agenda of a culture” coming to acknowledge the full personhood of women, we might be justified in thinking of the show along similar lines. Severance investigates whether it’s possible to fully acknowledge another’s personhood at a time when the evidence of such personhood—the words we write and read, the images we make and see—is less reliable than ever.

In this light, Severance’s most compelling excess is an excess of genre: the neo-noir conspiracy sits alongside a remarriage comedy that is itself internally divided and doomed to failure. The show thus knows its history to the same extent that the Innies don’t know their own. From the locus classicus Double Indemnity (1944) to The Conversation, noir has encrypted and thereby negated the comedy of remarriage, as though the possibilities of a more thoroughly realized self and a more perfect union were the promises dashed by the genre’s paranoia, self-deceit, and nihilism.

Severance poses two mutually exclusive remarriages, and therefore can’t help but be, from one vantage point, an aborted comedy. Innie Mark might intuit the personality of Gemma, but he cannot acknowledge her as necessary to the fullest realization of himself, precisely because he acknowledges Helly as his proper partner.

According to the terms that the show has established, the concluding shot of season two is therefore perfect. What do you see here? A neo-noir or a remarriage comedy? An analog or a digital image? A duck or a rabbit? Whatever it is, it’s all right there on the surface, an abjuring of depth: the zoomed-in grain giving way, just before decomposing à la the photographs in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), to red, the final frequency below which no light can be seen. It is excess maximized, the put-on that can’t be put off.