It contains spoilers for past episodes, but it is not the season 2 finale.
In “Severance,” “Innie” does all his work in the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees split their consciousness into two parts, and “Outie” doesn't remember that.
The show reinforces its theme with cinematography and production design. Below are some of the ways in which “Retirement” invokes classic film tricks and flips them to create corporate hell.
Filmmakers isolated, trapped and stripped the identity of corporate bosses from images of early movement using dense repetition using desk and cubicle stiffness geometry.
Films like “The Apartment” from 1960 (bottom, top left), and even Pixar's 2004 animated film “The Incredibles” (top right), use these recurring shots to propose a corporate mass that robs individual identities to create “company men” instead.
The Grid fills the screens of these and other films, including shots from the 2018 satire-repressive call center “I'm sorry for the inconvenience” (top left) and Mattel's lifeless corporate floor in 2023 (top right) “Barbie” (top right) to create a sense of confinement for occlusion.
One of the earliest examples of this image in the film appeared in the 1928 silent film The Crowd.
In Jacques Tati's “Playtime,” we find that since 1967, Tati's recurring character Monsieur Hulot is out of sync with the impersonal setting of the Parisian medieval era.
“Retirement” uses some of the same approaches. The Lumon Industries Office was inspired by the workplace in the 1960s, show production designer Jeremy Hindle told the architecture magazine Dezeen. Most offices at the time were places of work very clearly, he said, creating a severe separation between offices and home life. “Now I feel that the workplace is like a “fake” workplace. They are covered in their homes. ”
The opening sequence corrects diverse office shots to reflect the show's split identity, and desk grid with the same workers in all cubicles: Innie Mark S, played by Adam Scott: The Innie Mark S:
In other ways, Levinson said he would hand over “retirement” at the office film competition. Instead of relying on multiples, most commonly quarantine workers in large rooms with anxiety.
The concept of confinement is central to “retirement.” Many characters wear out against the limits of their roles in life, but innies is literally imprisonment. They are merely aware of life at work and are effectively trapped in a cut floor.
Levinson said the low ceilings of “retirement” have strengthened the sense of limitations, including the hallways and the office itself. The low ceiling locks the characters in, and is a useful tool, especially in horror films, like the claustrophobic corporate spaceship in “Alien” and the tight architecture of the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining” (1980).
The “retirement” corridor reminds me of the extreme example of a low office ceiling. 7½ beds of “being John Malkovic.”
The work itself can also be used as a cage. In one scene from the first season of “Severance,” Dylan G. (Zach Cherry)'s screen resembles a shot from the 1999 film “American Beauty,” where both characters see their reflections and are trapped on the screen.
If the space or the work itself forms an office life prison, the watchman is a clock. Those shots are another visual trope from a workplace film, calling back to the iconic clock of an old German Expressionist film. (Levinson has been showing students a similar montage of shots over decades.)
It's in the 2002 film “Schmidt,” where Jack Nicholson, as a retired insurance man, stares at the clock waiting for his final job to finish…
…and about four young women working in a soul-sucking office, with the aptly titled 1997 comedy “Watch Watcher”:
Innies only exist on cut floors, so there is little reason to look forward to going home. In the second season, when Mark S looks at the clock when his work day is over, it is a sign that a dangerous reintegration surgery to combine his severed halves is beginning to work.
In “retirement,” the cut floor manager demonstrates quiet corporate power from behind the desk in a private office. The mutilated worker stands in front of a sitting supervisor, waiting to speak like a royal family.
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Cohen often use the image of “The Man Behind the Desk” in films, such as “Big Lebowski,” “Deputy Had Football,” “Fargo,” and “Burton Fink.” The boss's desk is a barrier between the main character and the real power.
In contrast, employees' desks are vulnerable. Their cubicles make it a simple target for bosses to “just swing” like the 1999 workplace malaise film “Office Space”…
… Or, like the 1985 sci-fi black comedy “Brazil,” accommodations may not be ridiculous. One desk is split into walls and between two employees who have to play Tug of War on the work surface.
The boss's desk and its power are consistent, even if the person behind it is not. During the two seasons of “retirement,” supervisor Harmony Kobel (Patricia Arquette) is replaced by her subordinate Seth Mirchik (Trammel Tillman). He replaces her with both the desk and the same shot she occupied.
In “retirement,” the office elevator is the place of transformation between two identities of a cut worker. As they approach the cut floor, the elevator acts as a breaker switch between Innie and Out's identity, causing Innie to wake up to the office floor and trapped away from the outside world.
In the 1957 drama “A Face in the Crowd,” the fall from the protagonist's bounty becomes literally as he goes down the elevator of a network television company, watching the buttons click downstairs.
In contrast to “The Hudsucker Proxy,” the inventor-played executive played by Tim Robbins, is crammed into the back of the elevator until the operator realizes he is important and expresses himself on the top floor. There is a door nearby behind him as he looks anxious about his rise:
Another pivotal elevator for “retirement” is at the end of a pure white hallway. It goes to the mystical test floor, haunts one character, and he repeatedly paints a gob of black oil paint without knowing what it is. All of the elevators are descent.
Forced fun
Benefits for turning into a child
Lumon Industries highlights workplace perks. This creates short color spots in the monotonous environment of the office. In “Severance,” employees work hard on melon bars, finger traps and music dance experiences to boost morale that is thought to be hardworking, infantile and ultimately laughing.
Other shows like “Silicon Valley” and “Broad City” have memorized moments of forced fun to highlight the troublesome infertility of office life.
“The Office” features a sad celebration with a melancholy fruit tray…
…Looking for the various melon-based features of “retirement”
“Office Space” contains even sadder birthday scenes. In this scene, Milton, an oppressed employee, is taken over for the unpopular, childlike slices at the party.
It's a very unpleasant moment for Milton, but is it more troublesome than the slightest other small workplaces? It's yet another office insult that most workers want to forget, like “retirement” doesn't visually tally and build humiliating hell for innies and spare eating out.
It may all seem like a mutilated life isn't that bad.
Photo credit: Apple TV+; United Artist. Disney/Pixar; Annapurna Photos; Warner Bros.; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Criterion Collection; Universal Photos; DreamWorks Photos; New Line Cinema; GoldCrest Films International; Gramercy Photos; 20th Century Fox; HBO; Comedy Central
Produced by Rebecca Lieberman and Tala Safie
