[Severance] Grief & Greenery
Lumon is a pharmaceutical that needs disease to exist for their economic profit while also claiming that their ultimate goal is balance, pulchritude, purity, and control. They base their whole promotion of severance as something that can cure a person’s grief through the amputation of it, as if death were the ultimate evil, as if grief were a septic miasma to drain. Conveniently, a lack of grief means a lack of attachment, and a lack of attachment makes for better workers.
Darkness is used in the show to provide intimacy; it’s a right to one’s emotions without a purpose or an audience. Lumon’s halogens light up everything that transpires inside the building; your own grief can be repackaged and sold to an audience if edited well enough. Darkness is a shroud that takes away our sense of direction but also returns us to our body.
Kier seems to be in perpetual winter; the tree branches are nude, and there’s no end in sight to fields of snow and blue light and hunger. Animals can’t thrive, and crops can’t thrive. Woe’s Hollow is much the same, insofar as it’s Lumon land. Dieter Eagan became one with nature; he wanted, he loved, and his rotting corpse haunts and entices. Sex and desire are constantly presented as a prerequisite for suffering and rot, because loving someone means losing them will bring grief, because bringing a person into the world (through childbirth or severance) means accepting that you will love them, and they will suffer, and they will die someday. To love is to accept death.
Grief is suffocating, a black rot encroaching on the wood in our trees and the canvases we made out of them. We carry it with us wherever we go, and it’s heavy, but it’s this rot that will feed new life. We will sit at our green desks on a green carpet under a great big halogen light that primes all of our words of kinship and love for an audience to justify our suffering, but conspire in a dark supply closet where our grief and desire can be just ours, cramped and warm.
Plants become a symbol for warmth, care, and grief. Plants die, plants rot, plants feed you, and you feed them. Green is for rot and for spring; the garden in perpetuity doesn’t even get real sunlight. Mammalians Nurturable's field feeds the goats, and the goats feed it upon death. Burt and Irving’s little Eden is a mysterious storage room, but the plants are real. Gemma died, and the warmth of spring went with her, but Ms. Casey has a tree of her own in her office. Charlotte Cobel used a green intubator; it didn’t save her, winter came inexorably after each spring. But spring will come again. We will grieve, and in the warmth of the sun we will watch a sapling grow from the rotting remains of our old selves and loved ones.