[Severance] Ahistorical Black bodies
I’ve been thinking about Dylan and Milchick as Black men in this environment and where they differ and the few interactions they’ve had with other Black people and among themselves.
Dylan applied for the door salesman job while literally mirrored in pose and body type by an employer that refused to hire him because he was too poor to reject a job offer from Lumon.
Milchick threatening to report Dylan to Ms. Cobel after he bit him and Dylan hitting back with “Wanna go see her together?”
Milchick is trying to bribe Dylan out of solidarity with perks constantly (promotion was what kept Seth himself going), but very specifically, with getting to see his family. his white wife. his progeny.
Milchick is making excuses and doing the dirty job for Cobel, and he only gets a promotion when she gets fired, immediately gets gifted blackface portraits of Kier the incestuous eugenicist, and gets told by Natalie, another Black employee (a secretary, a mouthpiece, another person that has been discarded by Harmony Cobel’s white womanhood when she demanded to speak to the board with no intermediaries), that he should be grateful.
Milchick at Burt’s retirement party, clearly aware of Burt and Irving’s gay and definitely not Eagan-approved love, and keeping Irving in line by talking about shame to the family. They get a curt handshake and a reminder that being forgotten is what awaits all of them, believing himself to be exempt from that statement because he’s not severed.
Also, as whale-blanket on Tumblr pointed out in one of our conversations, Seth is the darkest-skinned Black character by a significant margin out of the recurring ones in the show, and I’ve been thinking about the minstrel show undertones of the MDE and him being in charge of water/melon bars that he can’t eat from.
Natalie is a light-skinned Black aristocrat with a notably gendered job whose personhood is reduced to being an Eagan mouthpiece and PR manager. Dylan is a working-class Black man in a heterosexual marriage (with a white woman) who has three kids. Seth is a lifelong middle manager who doesn’t get to have a family of any kind because he has no life outside his work, which could pass as white-collar to an external observer but includes so much actual physical labor that I’d hesitate to call it such, an alienated as fuck Black man. In Lumon they both have a paycheck, but there is no community, no frame of reference. and race is a historical construct, embodied— there can be no solidarity without a historical framework for the Black working-class body.