Living in the Ruins of the World: Severance and the Liminal Space Aesthetic
Behind the Material Girls Episode: Severance x the Kafkaesque
Below you’ll find a micro essay from Material Girls co-host Hannah McGregor about our recent episode Severance x the Kafkaesque. In it, Hannah offers some additional insight and reflection on the “liminal space aesthetic.” Scroll further down for an interview with A.C. — a listener of our show who worked on Severance in the Art Department. In her conversation with Coach, A.C. speaks to the state of the TV/Film industry and its relationship to the crumbling American Empire.
Living in the Ruins of the World: Severance and the Liminal Space Aesthetic
from Hannah McGregor
Severance – the hit Apple TV+ series that has the whole world asking “wait did I know that Apple TV+ existed?” – is a study in empty spaces. Much of the series unfolds in the eerily unoccupied “severed floor” at Lumon Industries, a biotech giant that has pioneered a procedure where employees’ brains can be altered such that their at-work and at-home selves become fully separated. While working at Lumon, the severed employees know nothing about their outside selves, or “outies” as management calls them; as soon as they leave, their outside selves return with no knowledge of their “innies.”
The empty spaces of the severed floor, then, have a clear metaphorical function. The external blankness echoes the innies’ internal blankness; all those doors and hallways that go nowhere, those unoccupied conference rooms, stand in for the holes in their memories, the webs of relation that have been purposefully cut off. And when we follow Mark S. home to his empty home in an empty suburb, we learn that his outie has chosen this life in response to an un-fillable emptiness: the death of his wife. The fantasy Lumon offers via the severance procedure is not a full life, but a life in which you don’t know enough to worry about the emptiness because you can’t remember what used to be there.
Like all good metaphors, though, the empty spaces of the severed floor have additional layers of meaning. When I was reading about the show’s design for our episode of Material Girls on Severance x the Kafkaesque, I learned about something called the “liminal space aesthetic.” Wikipedia (the encyclopedia of the people) defines this aesthetic as “empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal,” their eeriness linked to the divide between their function (to hold people who are doing something) and their reality (the absence of said people). Writing for HowStuffWorks, Alia Hoyt explains that spaces can be liminal for different reasons. “Liminal” comes the latin limen, meaning threshold (oh my god limen = Lumon MIND BLOWN), and some liminal spaces feel eerie because they’re transient, the spaces in between where we aren’t meant to linger, like stairways and parking garages. But spaces can also be temporally liminal. Hoyt quotes architect Tara Ogle: “These are spaces that are liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another.”
The liminal spaces that inspired Severance are sometimes thresholds – the elevator in which employees transition from their outies to their innies is a major feature, and the show is practically obsessed with doorways – but the severed floor most strongly evokes the latter definition, the temporal liminality of a space that is obviously meant to have a lot of people in it. A place that makes you look around and think, where did everybody go? If you’ve worked in any kind of office building in the past five years, you’re probably familiar with this vibe. Once occupied floors have become ghost towns as workforces have pivoted to remote or hybrid work. This added aesthetic layer makes Severance a distinctly pandemic-era show.
But this metaphor also operates on a third level. All the external shots of Lumon Industries were filmed at the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in Holmdel, New Jersey, a highly stylized midcentury modern construction built in the late 50s and early 60s to house Bell Labs’ research and development facilities. The complex is a gorgeous visual metaphor for a particular era of American industry: a purpose-built temple to hard work, technological development, and modernity. This was post-WWII America in its prime, promising a vision of work as meaningful and fulfilling, as a path to the good life (defined as a house in the suburbs and a single income that could support an entire family). In the 21st century, that promise lies in ruins along with many of the buildings that housed it. When Lumon’s severed employees walk these halls, it feels like they’re trapped in the ruins of something once great but long dead.
An Interview with A.C.
Last month, Patreon supporter, A.C., left a comment on our Severance x the Kafkaesque episode about her experience working on the show. She was part of the Art Department in Season One and in her Patreon comment she noted that the experience of work during lockdown was reflected back at her in the narrative of the show itself.
Below is a conversation between A.C. and Coach that digs into the state of the TV/Film industry, Covid, and the fall of the American empire.
*There’s one Season One spoiler below!*
Coach: Hannah and Marcelle are really jealous that I'm the one who has the time to do this interview.
A.C.: Honestly, that's great. There's a reason I'm in the art department. We never get to meet famous people because we're just holed up on our computers doing technical things. If they made us talk to real people, it would be embarrassing for everyone.
C: [laughs] On your LinkedIn (which I looked up immediately after you commented on our episode), you say that your goal is to “bring a production designer a visual story beyond a simple set.” I can't think of a more zeitgeist-y television show [than Severance] that does that, so great job. Congratulations.
A: Thank you. That particular show was so wild to work on because in so many ways the experience of working on it mirrored the experience of working at Lumon. We made season one during the weird period between the complete shutdown of everything for COVID and then film production in New York City resumed in September of 2020. We were doing a whole lot of masking and people were working remotely.
By the time I came on, they were on their fourth production designer who then ultimately finished season one. I was hired ostensibly to do a ceiling. So I was told like, “Okay, we're really just bringing you in to help us out with this one little project because this new guy is getting up to speed and we just need a little bit of help.” And then I ended up working on it for two months. They were going to film through the ceiling and it was going to be really important. And that is the only brief that I got. That ceiling then became the one that Helly used to try to strangle herself and it became this very big thing. But I was like, “What the fuck am I doing spending all of this time working on the minutia of the details of this ceiling? What is the deal with the ceiling?” And yeah, we really filmed right through it as she tried to murder herself. So that was wild.
C: Yes, you said you didn't get a script?
A: I would be handed projects in this very piecemeal way. Like, “Okay, now we need you to figure out a wiring diagram for this basement.” And I was like, “Okay, whose basement? What are we talking about?” “Well, this character Mark.”
So it just meant that the whole thing felt like I was basically dragging numbers to a box. I can do this mechanical task, but I'm completely isolated. I'm at home in my apartment.
C: Did you feel like it was intentional on their part to be alienating you from the final product of your labor?
A: No. I think it was totally just a product of like we had way too much to do. Nobody had time to explain it to me. Nobody wanted to waste my time by having me read the script. Because they were like, well, we can just tell you what we need you to do. And that's fine. It worked. And obviously the sets all came together beautifully. So the people who were in charge had a grand vision and it really worked out well.
C: I’m going to pivot slightly to get into another part of your original comment — your description of the building your team worked in.
A: Yeah, I had to keep going back to Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, the former site of Bell Industries. I mean, obviously you see it on screen. It's incredibly beautiful design. It's really unique, but it's also very, very empty because they completely abandoned it when they closed that branch of Bell Industries. And then this company has come in and like kind of tried to make it a co-working space. And there are like weird little like lunch places and restaurants there, but it feels like you are squatters in a in a landscape that was made at a completely different time in American industry. It was built for a time when it felt like American innovation was going to solve every single problem of the world. And like people were employed and happy to be there. I'm obviously overgeneralizing a lot there. It's not like the 60s was some grand time to be alive for most people. But the building remains and yet we were just sort of like, nobody works this way anymore. There were all of these weird spaces where it was like clearly research had been being done, but now they were just aesthetic for us to use as a film backdrop.
And that's actually very common in New York.
C: I'm going to quote you back to yourself because in your comment, you said, “We're not just building sets that look like liminal spaces. We're often actually shoehorning ourselves inside of weird spaces that are already there because America has been crumbling from within for a long time.” Can you say more on that?
A: Yeah, another one we use is called Pearl River, New York and it's an old Pfizer lab. Pfizer still exists and they're still doing science somewhere — but they do not use this building anymore. It’s weird, clean rooms and big sheets of glass and all these warehousing spaces and it's so distinctive and we film in it all the time. And it's like, what happened here? Why did this not get upgraded? Why did it get abandoned? What were you doing here that then has meant that you can no longer use this space?
C: Well, right. I mean, there's something so interesting about spaces that are grand in their scope — in the way they're made.
A: Yeah, this is like a six floor building with a different weird lab on every floor. And somebody just walked away from that in a place where real estate is expensive. Like we're in the surrounding New York Metro Area. How does this just continue to exist as a thing that I can rent to film a movie in?
C: Right, it kind of screams of either excess or of bankruptcy. It's like, which one is it? There's sort of a threat of either.
A: Yeah, these companies are huge and they were able to just walk away from real estate in a way that's very troubling. And again, where did all the people go who used to come to work here every day? It's very haunting to be a tiny little film crew in the middle of this massive complex where you can feel like it once was a place where a lot of stuff was happening. And now it's silent, except our weird little group making whatever horror movie or whatever we're up to.
C: This is a leading question in the sense that I am an optimist at heart, even though everything about the world is telling me I shouldn't be. But I'm curious if there's anything hopeful to you. You don't have to think there is. But if there is any part of you that's like, “Well, at least we're able to use this space for art making or social commentary.” Or does it feel just like, “Okay, we're just doing this capitalist endeavor of this hit TV show for Apple in this liminal space.” You know, obviously the comparisons are endless. Like your experience working on the show, the narrative, the fact that it's for a tech company that owns the show…
A: The fact that it's like window dressing for a tech company — that Apple makes no money off of any of these shows, and that they do this as basically their equivalent of like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, where it's like, we're just doing this to get good press. It's a very troubling thing. I don't know, it's something that I've had to confront as someone who has put my life in the direction of being an art maker.
C: Yeah.
A: We use so many resources to make these shows happen.
C: Sure, I mean we [Material Girls] had that episode about Barbie and I feel very haunted by that as well. The sense of like, wait, the sets that they made to make the movie that was kind of about feminism, then is also just about this plastic doll and plastic using Barbie as a way of—
A: Yeah, and like, is it worth it? Am I just a cultural imperialist? Part of the last great project of trying to make America seem good to the outside world through our cultural exports? I don't know. None of that sits great.
C: Well, you're not just that. I can confirm that you're not just that. That might be happening. I can't speak to that. But I think that art, you know, hopefully can change things.
A: I want to believe that it still matters, right? But especially since having kids, it's something that I think about a lot. How do I defend my career in this industry to my kids when they ask me why everything is the way it is?
C: We're coming up on our time, but I'm curious if you feel like your work has changed dramatically since starting in this career.
A: Yeah, the workplace has changed. It has become more Kafkaesque now that I know what that means (thanks guys!). But yeah, I've been working in television for ten years and in the last two to three, but really since the pandemic, things have gotten much harder and feel much more disjointed.
C: Mm-hmm.
A: And it's wild to work for companies that will claim that they have no money to do things right or to do things well. And yet, you know that they're making billions. I don’t know if any of that is useful to you at all. It’s just sort of me musing on the fall of the American empire…
C: I mean, as you said, America's been crumbling from within for a long time.
A: I think TV was like the last industry that felt like it couldn't be offshored, right? It was like, okay, we have working class people in unions doing things here and that matters. And since the end of the strikes, we've seen Netflix being like, “Actually, I don't really care about making shows in the US anymore.” Like, let's see if we can pick up as many pieces as possible internationally where labor is cheaper. And like, let's cut the writers and see how few writers we can get away with.
It's just a bummer because I thought the leopards wouldn’t eat my face — to use that internet meme. But like, I did think there was something unique and magical about the things that we were creating together here. And it's been interesting to watch that illusion crumble a little bit and to feel more and more like, I'm not a fellow artist. I am just a cog in the machine.
C: Yeah. It's grim, of course. But also there's something — and again, maybe this is just like me searching for some not silver lining — but there’s something to the fact that you are not the only artist who feels that way. And at least now, I got the opportunity to talk to you about your art and be like, “Yeah, you worked on that ceiling!” I know that it was you behind it now. Like real people did that, real craftsmen.
A: Yeah, real people did that. We really made it. We all worked together and pulled together to do this thing. Craftsmen all across the board. I was one tiny piece of it, but that was something where it did feel like, “okay, I don't see the whole picture, but I do know that my part in it feels valuable. Something about this is going to build something cool.” And then it is nice to actually get to see the finished result and be like, there it is. Yep. I know that ceiling. I know that ceiling very well. Didn't realize we were doing that with it…
C: Well, I really appreciate you talking with me about your experience working on Severance and your experience in the industry at large. I'm really interested in that and I know a lot of our listeners and Patreon supporters are in the arts (or are people who aren't in the arts because they haven't been able to stay in them but still appreciate them) and want to know what's happening.
A: Well, thank you so much. It was lovely talking to you. You guys tend to, with your editing, make guests sound really coherent, so hopefully you'll be able to work your magic on this.
C: You sounded great.
Special thanks to A.C. for joining Coach for this conversation and letting us share it with the WPP community!