Severance gave me anxiety from the get-go. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to watch it after the news. Maybe it was the fragmentation, the office, which reminded me how much of my life I've wasted for money. The music didn't help, neither did the close-ups. They rang like secret experiments that must go on somewhere under mountains, with code names and badges and badge readers.

As I slept I dreamt of this winter in August. I saw the thin veneer of morality dissolve like snow, desperation dangerously intertwined with pride as the antidote for grace. I blame connectivity. We were never meant to hear the cries of millions, the inner thoughts of little brains below the surface of LCD screens. I wanted to sleep without interference, not even from love, difficult with fingers pointing to my chest. It's unfair how deeds go on everywhere unhinged and lap at my foundation like the angry sea. And so I identify with the protagonist but my old nature does not veer towards redemption. Not now anyways.

The series captures the most Dickian atmosphere but without the warm presence of its divine. Scenes are folded instead into dark alien spaces in the service of oppression as he warned us in the sixties. As the possibilities of the control of reality, the thin narrative that we construct as story, close in in our wake.

Jam26