‼️ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW (if you want to figure out the show for yourself) STOP READING NOW. ‼️
⭐️If you’re ready for whatever comes next I urge you to continue….⭐️
Severance is about religion, theology, ideologies, ethos, creation myths, believers, non believers, and everyone in between, the secular vs non secular, the occult and forbidden knowledge.
Severance is about world history, history told, history written, history lost, history rewritten, and humans struggling in vain to fill in the blanks in an effort to explain who we are and where we come from.
Severance is about politics, regional and provincial strife and success, the destruction of civilizations, and the founding of new ones.
Severance is about worship, economies, boarders, walls, empires, good, bad, light vs dark.
Severance is meant to be viewed and seen through the perspective of each individual watching. Keep in mind there is no correct way to view this. What means something to me may mean nothing to the person sitting next to me with whom I am watching. although they may be able to understand the concept and they generally follow my thought process it’s likely my viewing partner won’t fully be able to grasp the archetype, principal, or even my reasoning for ending up there because they are not me.
One of the messages Still and the production team intended I believe is to see all of Earth’s inhabitants as human and to be kind, empathetic and compassionate: this seems simple enough but as with most things humans complicate it by their very nature.
But of course with any complexity there is always more than one message. And again I have looped back (hah) into this: it all comes down to who is watching, and what they want to see.
p.s. it took me around 3 days or so of pausing on split second shots of innocuously seeming text or something of the like for this to begin taking shape. It’s intentionally confusing, and nothing is a red herring. It became clear to me that there were at least 2-4 different but similar “story lines” or “perspectives” happening per episode.
E.g. Caesar Augustus and his Pax Romana, the Civil Rights Movement and the dreaded uncle Tom, the Red Scare in Hollywood, the Holocaust and Holocaust deniers.
or
I.e. preservation of one’s soul through orthodox tradition, unorthodox practice, agnostic, atheist, life which is painful or suicide which at times seems the only way to end the pain but there are those who say you’re soul will lie in “purgatory”, which goes by many a name depending on your beliefs, forever and all eternity. To others this seems harsh. You get the picture.
P.s.s. If anyone is interested I have a book recommendation. I have to believe to some extent that the book The Escape Artist had a significant impact on perhaps Ben Stiller as I know he’s Jewish. It’s about 2 men who escaped from Auschwitz. The only 2 Jewish prisoners to engineer and pull off their own escape. They pulled off the impossible. Their mission was to tell the first person they could trust of what was happening in Auschwitz. What happened? No one would believe them, not even other Jews. Why? The absolute horror of what they were saying was so horrid and so inhumane that no on believed this could possibly be happening. and why not? Because no one even knew there were such camps. Deception was intentionally baked into the 3rd Reich’s plan from the beginning and it was dutifully carried out by those loyal to the 3rd Reich. Remember that it was an ideology Hitler sold to the German public; it pandered to those who felt they deserved more. In very short time they it went from what they felt they were owed that had been stolen from them and snowballed into what they believed was their inherent birth right. Deception wasn’t a method they employed when it suited them best to lie. Deception was fundamental to the Final Solution.