"Enjoy": Severance, Milchick, and Emotional Labor
BIG FAT SPOILER WARNING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA: This essay is written with the expectation that you're all caught up with Severance. I'm going to be discussing details from many episodes, even that scene in the last episode where Mark S. goes "It's severin' time!" and severs all over those guys. If you get spoiled, don't come crying to me.
Have you ever applied to work at Wal-Mart? It's a deeply humiliating experience. Many things surrounding working at Wal-Mart are, from the obnoxious mandatory meeting dances1 to the Potemkin village radio station you have to listen to if you spend any time on the floor to the VR training video game that makes you play-act an active shooter scenario with Garry's Mod models2, but the application process is an important tone-setter for the rest of your experience interacting with Wal-Mart corporate.
After the normal steps of name, establishing that you can legally work, work experience, etc., you get to the personality assessment. In actuality, this is a list of demands phrased like a Quizilla quiz, but instead of finding out which Shrek character you are you get to find out whether you're going to be able to pay your rent or not. You're made to answer questions about your "personality" -- are you detail oriented, or do you think more big picture? Do you do exactly what you need to, or do you go above and beyond? Are you a team player, or do you prefer to work on your own? -- that in no way, shape, or form correlate to the basic competency needed to work at most positions at Wal-Mart, those being, "Can you lift things, follow basic instructions, and operate a cash register?" There's a general superstition around that if you answer too perfectly, the system flags you as just telling it what it wants to hear and throws your application in the trash, so you should "answer honestly", but obviously not too honestly, since there's no button that says, "I'm a grown adult, stop subjecting me to this bullshit".
Anyway, let's talk about Severance.
If you've never heard of Severance, go watch it, it fucks. I heard the basic premise before I started it, but my sister hadn't, and she insists that the show's better going in completely blind like she did, but here, let me ruin that little bit for you before you read on: Severance is about a megacorporation named Lumon that's invented a procedure known as severance, which allows your consciousness and memories to be split between your work life and the rest of your life. This sounds nice for the outside work version of you, in the show called your "outie", but for the work version of you, your "innie", it's basically a living hell where you come down from an elevator, spend eight hours participating in bullshit work and corporate rituals, and when you finally get to punch out and go up the elevator again, you just come right back down, not getting to experience the relief of the normal life reserved for your outie. Basically, wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat, except without the waking, eating, or sleeping. And that's before you start asking questions about what the fuck is going on in this company.
There's a lot you can talk about with this show, but I wanna analyze the way that Lumon exerts emotional force on its workers, especially through the lens of the best villain on the show: middle manager and style icon extraordinaire Seth Milchick.
Mr. Milchick is the face of emotional control on the severed floor. His first act on the show is to tell our wagie MC Mark S. to complement the big boss Ms. Cobel's new office, because she would never say it, but a compliment about the office would just make her day. Mark does, to which Cobel responds with how much she hates it because she doesn't give a fuck. Most of the work we see Milchick do, outside of trying to foil the workers' attempts at uprising, is like this: small gestures designed in theory to keep morale up that rarely do anything but paper over the misery. There's a whole structure to the meaningless trinkets you get for hitting milestones on your file: 10% gets you a single eraser (all of which are pointless, since there's no pencils), 25% gets you a chinese finger trap, 75% gets you a Music/Dance Experience, and 100% gets you a caricature portrait. Miscellanious treats are given out, buffets of hors d'oeuvres like eggs or melon, on special occasions, and you get random doohickeys like crystal photo cubes for exceptional work, whatever criteria is used to judge putting numbers into boxes as "exceptional". All of these are either implied or explicitly shown to be doled out by Milchick.
Every interaction Milchick has with the main cast is done through a smile, every word said in a velvety-smooth, happily empty tone of voice that does its best to convey that everything is fine, nothing is ruined. While the workers may have bullshit jobs, Milchick's job is Bullshit. It is the distribution, manufacture, and maintenance of Bullshit. Not a single word he says is meant to convey truth, merely the official Lumon version of Truth©, and that Truth© extends to the emotional realities of each individual worker.
Behind each reward given is an implicit demand: Enjoy©. It's not enough to receive the prizes, you have to have the proper emotional response to them. The worker must pursue the perks with the fervor one would pursue their actual wage, since the perks are the only wage that the innie gets to experience, being segregated from the world of money that can be exchanged for goods and services. Not only that, but you have to treat them as gifts, given to you out of the benevolence of your benefactors, not as half of a transaction for your labor. Here at Lumon, our workers are our family, so when daddy rolls out the melon bar, you'd better be grateful.
Ironically, this point is driven home most blatantly in a scene where Milchick is the recipient of this emotional demand. After season 2, when Milchick is promoted to floor manager after Cobel gets sacrificially sacked for the worker's uprising, he is graciously given the gift of a bunch of paintings of the founder, Kier, edited to be black, so he can better see himself reflected in his great visage.
Oh, shit, did I forget to mention that Kier is the figurehead of the official company religion whose words are treated as literal scripture that the innies have to follow like ceremonial law? I mean, I thought that was kind of implied, him being an American business tycoon.
Anyway, Milchick is given these paintings by the literal mouthpiece of The Board, Natalie, herself a woman of color who informs him that The Board says when she recieved these paintings, she found it deeply moving. All throughout the scene, she constantly looks at him, making sure he never deviates from the proper reaction to this gift. He does his best to comply, even though he obviously thinks this is weird as shit and sticks the paintings where he can't see them. When he tries his best to ask Natalie if she was as weirded out by this as he was, she brushes off his question and reminds him of his corporate responsibilities. Neither of them can even come close to acknowledging the obvious facts about the paintings.
Milchick isn't the originator of the Bullshit he spews, not by any means. He's merely the nozzle of a long, long Bullshit hose, as powerless to change anything in the company as anyone else. When he does get a little bit of power in season 2, he does try to institute a couple of reforms to make the innies' lives better, but it all has to be within the official structure of Lumon Truth© about how Lumon is listening, and there was a bad apple who somehow wrested power from your benevolent overlords, who are deeply reflecting on how they could have possibly let this happen. He can change the angle a bit, like a knob clicking from shower to mist, but he can't change what's coming out of the hose, and he can't alter the thing actually at the heart of the workers' pain, the toil, alienation, and incomprehensibility of their labor.
The thing about working at Wal-Mart is, it's not even really the work itself I hated, it was everything around it. The work itself was fine, checking people out, loading bags of dirt into trucks, watering the plants, keeping my area neat. None of that is what I remember hating. What I remember hating is the fucking condescending electronic training, forcing me to sit through bullshit videos shoving corporate nonsense down my throat. I remember hating having to waste my time farting around, waiting for customers, scrolling my cellphone and trying to hide it from the customers. I remember hating having to stand all the fucking time, for no good reason beyond standing at the cash register feels more like working than sitting on a stool, doing the same fucking thing.
And I remember fucking hating Wal-Mart Radio. Every day, having to go to a job I hate, for a company ruining the world, and hearing propaganda about how great it is to work at Wal-Mart, and what a family we are, and just wanting to fucking work in peace. This is the most accurate depiction of what it feels like to hear Wal-Mart Radio, except the music is never that good. Every day, you are literally Dylan, just trying to focus and bury your misery in work, 3 seconds and hundreds of miles away from jumping up and biting Kirby Gwen and friends.
Praise Sam.