Growing up in a baptist home, my earliest ideas about Hell were quite primal–constant physical agony, fire, torture, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” They became slightly nuanced when I read CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce and deeper when I saw Richard Mattheson’s What Dreams May Come, which spoke to my developing agnosticism. It wasn’t until Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (which spoke to my solidifying atheism) that I started understanding “modern hellscape” as an emerging genre of storytelling.
Like science fiction, hellscapes give us an alternate reality where we can run through believable scenarios, change one thing, and learn something about our identity and values as humans. Also like science fiction, the variable tends to deal with either new technology (Black Mirror, Westworld), environmental discoveries (Color Out of Space, Annihilation, Sphere, Solaris) or medical advancements (Maniac, Altered Carbon, and the show that inspired this piece, Severance).
Within the first episode, Severance tells us that it knows exactly what it is. The boss of the company, Miss Cobel, advises the protagonist with the following:
My mother was an atheist. She used to say that there was good news and bad news about hell. The good news is, hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is, whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.
What separates a hellscape from a horror is the believability. Mark H isn’t trapped in a lake of fire or a pit of skulls. He’s trapped in the same carpeted, fluorescent prison we’re all trapped in. He gets worker appreciation in the form of fruit platters and paper weights. His compensation for a work-related injury is a gift card to a bar & grill. Those details are what make the horror of his daily life resonate deeply in us.
The sheer amount of time and energy Mark spends at work is amplified through the show’s use of lighting. We only see the sun when it is low in the sky–either on Mark's commute, or briefly right outside of a building to have a quick conversation. The rest of the show takes place either in the bright synthetic lighting of an office, or in the cold blackness of night where his only work-free life exists.
Even at an indoor book party, the characters float in a poorly-lit abyss of a life that allows little time for connection. At the climax of Season One, Mark fights his way through a current of meaningless interruptions–“You didn’t bring your own book? Oh, shoot. Hm. Shoot. Maybe you can share with someone”–to have one single, life-defining conversation with his sister.
Do we live in hell? Are we stuck in a bottle episode of our careers? Why does Mark’s horrific life look so much like ours?
“Let’s chat about something I bet you have heard of, the ‘work life balance,’ ” Mark tells his coworker Helly (hmmm. Hell-y.) on her first day. “To start, imagine yourself as a seesaw.”
That’s the moment I jumped out of my crumb-sprinkled couch and pointed at the screen. Had they been reading my diary? Yeah, of course I’ve fanticized cloning myself to be my work-errand-cleaning slave so I could write and play and have sex all day like a king.
I love my career. I know this because I ask myself every evening if I love it, as I put my bag down, look at my running shoes, and fight the urge to nap. It’s a losing battle. I can’t help but harbor a little resentment when so little of my energy is left for just me.
Miss Cobel, I too am an atheist, which makes Time more powerful than either of us. And this art witch refuses to die before it’s my time. But I can’t snap my fingers and change the weight of the market, or the anthropology of economics, or the universal pattern of power and slavery. And what Severance teaches us is that the fantasy of “leaving it at the door” wouldn’t actually make us happier, and it certainly wouldn’t give us more time.
So I wake up, center myself, hunt for joy through fervent meditation, and bring it to work. Not Garden-of-Eden joy, mind you–I mean rebellious, stupid, silly, gritty joy. I dance my way down the halls and make goofy faces at my coworkers. I approach conflict as a challenging puzzle, which means that solving it counts as play. I compose my prosody and body language like an opera. When a compromise is reached, I sing a victory song from old video games.
I can do all these things and still meet 85% of my daily expectations, which is a fine number. Severance might even call it a “happy” number. Some things don’t get done. But I can love myself enough to foster the joy I deserve in a work culture that I can’t change.
I’m not happy everyday. Some days I message my husband, “Kill me please. Have mercy on my dying corpse. For the love of Christ, cut my arteries,” and I have to remind myself that the end will come soon enough. The hellish truth to our lives is that work is a constant, inescapable shackle that occupies most of our corporeal allotment on this earth, leaving us paltry crumbs when it is time to clock out.
The good news about hell isn’t that it’s fake–it’s very real, and we’re very much stuck here. The good news is that our inner world…our whole inner world…still belongs to us. As Orwell wrote in his most famous hellscape (1984), “If you can FEEL that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
So maybe, definitely, shirk something. Find one thing on your plate that no one checks, and banish it to fluorescent oblivion–as bright as forgetfulness, as invisible as the question, “What was that thing?” Because our brains need space and stimulation to be creative. Because creativity is a human right. And as we can see from the diminishing sunsets in Severance, it actually can’t wait until 5 PM.
