[Severance] Irving Bailiff, Outie of All Time
Irving Bailiff is such a character of all time. Marcus Aurelius, a reader that thinks self-induced insomnia through caffeine and Motörhead tapes is an effective tool to carry out an inside job. So certain that his stoic discipline will carry his grieving self and his innie through. He uses surrealist automatism (Not even muscle memory! The guy bets on the subconscious and dozing off!) because his art-guy pattern-finding ass thinks it’s the best way to reach his severed self. Because he is the kind of person to excise himself and still have opinions about which parts of him are fixed points in the self.
Meanwhile, Irving B. is falling asleep on the job he was created to do and having nightmares about black goo that he doesn’t even know is oil paint because his body is sleeping two hours a night, getting literally tortured because of it, feeling all-encompassing emotion about corporate propaganda, and developing a crush on the man who curates said propaganda. In a way, it also carries him towards an understanding of his own disposability and the kind of love that can’t be sold back to you in an allegory and art as a message, but at what cost.
I respect an utterly out of touch guy obsessed with themes and motifs with profound resentment towards corporations and authority (T/N: Love it when it's a fictional guy; hate it when it's me).