“Defiant Jazz”: Corporate Rewards as Plantation-Style Oppression in Apple TV’s Severance

In Severance, employees voluntarily undergo a medical procedure to isolate their consciousnesses according to their physical location. Because “outie” selves have agency over both “innies” and “outies,” the corporation can be interpreted as a plantation where “innie” selves are enslaved labor, unable to request transfer or termination and prohibited from self-harm—essentially barring any escape. Lumon-as-plantation allows us to consider tactics of oppression in the workplace, especially those surrounding productivity incentives and founder worship that have roots in the American slavery system and have become normalized in both white collar and blue collar occupations. Contemporary American work culture, allowing only brief hiatus from work, encourages concentrated indulgence or fatuous entertainment as reprieve rather than real rest in order to placate laborers. From the finger traps to the waffle parties in Severance, Lumon offers many examples of incentives through entertainment and (over)consumption that satirize this workplace phenomenon.