[Severance] In defense of Ricken Hale
Ricken was, according to The You You Are, “the first baby born for theatrical purposes.” His mother’s pregnancy culminated in a stage play meant to be a commentary on how having children with the state of the world as it is borders on cruelty. Of course, he was still brought into the world, and hey, his whole purpose was to be a highbrow art piece. His parents would leave for weeks at a time; he wondered if they’d even wanted a child at all or if he was just a little project. He calls art his brother, which ultimately led him to try his hand at literature.
And still his writing will never be as insightful and incisive as his parents wanted his whole existence to be, because he’s earnest to the point of absurdity. His parents will go through pregnancy and give birth on stage, and how can he ever make them proud when he’s so scared of making his child feel the same way his parents did him that he writes a whole chapter about it in the hopes that someone will validate his worry?
He feels extremely ashamed about the fact that his comfortable life, his condo, and the fact that he can even dedicate himself to writing professionally come from his parents’ success. He’s thankful and resentful and wants to have his own life, to be some kind of self beyond being their son. But his own self is unmarketable, a little too intense, and absolutely shit at being something he’s not to the point where at times it feels like Devon is the only person he regularly interacts with that likes him. The people at the dinner talk in hollow platitudes and emotionally removed intellectualism; even Rebeck, who praises Ricken’s writing, is enamored with the academicism of it rather than Ricken’s oversharing. She asks him to not punish Eleanor after they break up the party after the OTC despite, ostensibly, having read the book where Ricken spends the entirety of it talking himself down from resenting his parents for making him the way he is so that he can reconcile his life as they expected with the way his life turned out to be.
The You You Are is jarring because it’s a diary selling itself as a manifesto (and, full disclosure, I believe it works as a manifesto for the innies because it’s a diary, because it talks about an outie’s fears that they see in themselves, reaffirming that they are entitled to full personhood). It makes the reader feel like a voyeur. It’s not some insight into any great structural truth; it’s, as Ricken’s parents put it disdainfully, “conventionalist art.” Ricken is writing about having wild amounts of awesome sex with Devon, about wrangling the memories of his childhood into something that feels nice to reminisce about, about how he’s terrified of being a bad parent, and about arguments with his brother-in-law. Most of all, he writes about the idea of self as a part of something, as a role, as an archetype.
He writes about all these intimate and vulnerable things and drapes them in pomposity because he’s performing, like his parents did. He tells us about Gemma, her death, and her friendship with such warmth and such a lack of frills compared to the rest of the book, and then about how Mark weaponized her genuine warmth to mock him to the point where he’s now haunted by the idea that the last thing Gemma said about him was an insult. And he talks himself down from that resentment too; he understands where Mark’s insult came from. He tries to accept that he can never know if Gemma truly did mock his tape but that he knows what she directly said to him about the songs, which was kind.
When Natalie Kalen offers him reliable royalties for a brand-approved edition of The You You Are, Ricken sees an opportunity to stop being a coda to his parents’ own artistic legacy. to finally have money he can call his own and stop feeling guilty for relying on them, because no matter how much he performs a reconciliation in his writing, he resents the cruelty of his birth and their absences. He resents that he’ll never be sophisticated enough, that he’ll always “sound like a hamburger waiter,” that people who appreciate him like him pristine and intellectual, and that anyone who sees the oversharing, the inappropriate venting, the earnest admission that he’d like to get to know people better, and the guy who wants to show the delights of couloir skiing will dismiss him as a bumbling fool, like Mark did. Like, crucially, Devon and Gemma didn’t.
Lumon exploits the shame and regrets of their employees constantly; they use them to promise peace and warp them into a cage through repeated punishment and tantalizing promises that can never come to be as long as the point is the company’s profit. Natalie praises Ricken’s writing; Natalie praises the emotional parts of it, the parts that Ricken is worried about and wants to obscure with pseudo-intellectual trash, because they are helping the innies. It’s a promise of economic safety and independence (isolation, which Lumon wants) from his own larger support network. He’s been waiting his whole life to have something to call his own, to stop performing and still be appreciated.
What do you do when the you you are is someone you are ashamed of? What do you do when it’s easier to blame your parents for the person you have become? What do you do when you understand that you also got some good things from them? What do you do when you understand your parents are not the only people who made you into who you are at present? What do you do when you realize you can fail people in the same ways they failed you?
Ricken’s in the same crucible as every other character in the show, trapped between expectation and reality, in some weird fucked-up relationship with the people that put him into the world, trying to decide where they end and he begins, trying to understand if there’s anything he is beyond the role he was given and that he gives himself.