[Severance] o!Irving theorizing
Irving B. brings Helly to perpetuity because she was being mean to Mark, and he thought she was having an existential crisis, so she came to show her how Lumon is a family too. His reaction to Milchick ending Helly’s non-introduction in the weird corporate pronoun circle with “I think she definitely has a family (in MDR)” is fondness and hope.
The way he scolds Mark for the Eagan bingo in the exact same voice he uses to tell Helena that Helly was never cruel, turbo-channeling disappointed but not surprised dad with an edge of actual fury because Helly had an existential crisis and it wasn’t a joke to him/Helly’s body was being used to hurt her and Mark.
And I know this could be absolutely nothing because Irving's outie lore is all speculation on isolated tidbits… But I keep looking at the Helly and Helena axes of the four-way Macroddata mirror. His dad was a marine, but Irving has medals and a uniform too. He has trouble sleeping. Radar behaves more like a service dog than a regular pet. He’s a friend to children, the elderly, and the insane.
I suspect outie Irving was a gay kid desperately trying to prove something by enlisting and came back traumatized and radicalized. He is severed and spends his whole outie existence engaging with art (painting, listening to opera and metal, reading, watching movies, dancing), and the way he acts when he’s the scolded kid for feeling these tender things in the severed floor contrasts hard when you put it next to the times when he tries to care for the younger members of MDR.
Irving is consistently referring to the fact that he's the seniormost refiner (in innie years) and trying to convey to the fledgling that he feels more grounded and less in a state of existential crisis when he thinks about the Eagans as family (as an explanation for why he is the way he is), and things like the nature vs. nurture theme present in the show in the form of the Why are people gay? question (although, of course, innie Irving would not recognize the homophobia as such) that an eugenicist cult like the Eagans might ponder.
The Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis overlapped chronologically briefly but were linearly arranged, and then the Nixon-Reagan double whammy… I think a lot about the ways in which he and Helena are shown to be adults who were once children, through their innies, which is different than the same expositional parallel in Mark and Dylan because their outies have families, in a very conventional sense of the word. Helena’s notion of family is the Eagans, this historical behemoth of an abstract lineage culminating in a cruel father. Irving is utterly isolated from what we could understand as the nuclear family, which ties to material relations of reproductive power, which he is inherently in the margins of in his queerness and his disdain for Lumon/capital.