ombre

Ugh. I was slow to love it, but by Eps 6 and 7 I was fully on board, totally digging. The love letter to *all* aspects of making art. Yeah, I'm there for that. From the massive backstage apparatus in Paris and the sequences of breaking in new toe shoes to the actual dances. All that. Eat it with a spoon. But this so undermined that! And it's funny... I actually agree that getting to see a choreographer working with a company in real time and highly dramatic circumstances would become an absolute sensation. But... There had to be a way to do it without it feeling hackneyed like the end of Elf! I have a lot more thoughts, but it think it comes to this: I can't stop comparing it to bunheads and how bunheads let the dance speak for itself. The piece in Paris actually felt so much like the bunheads numbers (Marguerite derricks - love your stuff!) that it made me really miss how they became epilogue, summary, moral - the coda that transcended the storyline. But they kept cutting away to take care of plot points. And bunheads-era asp would *never* have cut away from those numbers to advance the plot. Finally, I'm just not sure what the end goal is. It *feels* like jack and Geneviève are being set up as the endgame, but it *also* feels like by showing how they are peers they're set up as the opposing kings of a chess set. There's no way to make them happen as a couple without having one or the other lose the thing that makes them get up in the morning. And that's no foundation for a good relationship! So I just don't know what we're supposed to be rooting for. Sigh. I think it's time to re-watch bunheads.

I've been bopping along until now, enjoying it, but not really sure what the primary idea is. So many people! So many similar problems! So many families and crazy family dynamics! But I feel like this episode really snapped things into focus and... Kinda took my breath away. For my money, the primary idea of the show is a love letter to arts that require armies to produce. And she includes absolutely everyone in that gesture - not unlike the sweep of the arm a ballet dancer gives to draw particular applause to the orchestra and everybody else involved in the show. The cleaning ladies. The corps. The teachers. The stars. The administrators who embody the poor souls who love the art but couldn't *do* the art. And I'm loving that (thus far, at least) the relationship between Jack and Geneviève is one of captains of ships who take comfort in being able to turn to one another as friends. It doesn't *have* to be lonely at the top. It's better if it's not. I've been thinking a lot about how Paris and NYC are such representative cities to talk about money in the arts. You need an army to make a ballet and you need moooooolaaaaahhhh to pay for that army. (it's no coincidence that during economic hard times composers write piano solos and string quartets!). Paris and NY. Monarchy and corporate oligarchy. This is how you make big arts. Like ballet. Or, presumably, like tv. I was initially disappointed that it doesn't show as much dance as bunheads. (gawd I fucking loved bunheads). (If I'm honest, I'm still disappointed in that, but only because I was *thoroughly* spoiled by bunheads.) But I'm really in awe of what this does seem to be trying to do. It really feels like it comes from a place of generosity and love. I took ballet classes a few years back (decidedly an "old" for the class). This is making me really miss the whole thing. The stretching and chatting. The work. The funny rooms that ballet classes end up in. The funny hand gestures and nonsense syllables as people try to remember sequences that are not for words or hands. The wonderful moments when all that just disappears and you're moving exactly with the music. What a miracle of translation that any of this ever turns into dance!

I'm pretty sure each episode is basically a day, so, yes, it's just a couple days ago.

This absolutely. The story lines that most interact me are Irving (I *hope* we can trust that cobel's interest in his knowledge of the testing floor hallway means that they'll be following up on that) and Helena, who feels really ripe for a redemption storyline (has plenty of reason to turn on her family, has major consequences if she does). And she feels like such a ripe way to explore the way that abusing one group of people creates such sweeping abusive systems that everybody gets caught either dishing it out or receiving it. Or, more often, both. That whole "hurt people hurt people" idea. I've got to think that the end goal is outies and innies finding peace with one another. So far, we seem to be seeing mostly how it can go wrong. But then, that means we have many ways to explore either worse or better in upcoming seasons, just as this season used all the relationship complexities to explore the ethics of severance and the possible levels of autonomy for each.

Lol. It's so easy to write one thing and go down a rabbit hole and totally forget half of what you wanted to say. This is the *other* half of what I meant to say wrt storytelling. I feel like this season was asking the audience to stick with it for a style of storytelling that is rare and hard in this era of fast jumps. This season - for better or worse - insisted on telling stories in long chunks rather than short jumps. The first episode is entirely within Lumon and basically just following Mark (with little interludes with Milchick). The second episode is entirely outside Lumon. The camping episode is entirely the camping episode. The Cobel ep is entirely the Cobel ep. The Gemma ep is almost entirely the Gemma ep. Even in eps that have more complex plots, there are often big chunks. I'm rewatching the finale and so far it's been 20 minutes of the Marks, then 20 minutes of Mark finishing Cold Harbor and Dylan/Dylan. Really, really big chunks. In one sense, I think they kind of forced their own hand into this style by having the action take place over such a *tiny* timeline, but I suspect there's more to it. In the first ep, I was really aware that we had always followed Mark to and from, to and from Lumon. This was the first time we ever saw the world as innie Mark does - just an endless fucking slog of bright white corridors. No escape. I've been wondering if that's the point of this slower method of storytelling - driving home that sense of being trapped. But it's *so* not the popular style of telling a story these days. I watch a fair bit of tv with my mom who is, bless her, not a skilled tv watcher. (Which fills me with all kinds of conflicting feels to realize that I *am* a skilled tv watcher! :D brb crying) She has spent most of her life watching PBS and has *real* trouble with shows that are constantly jumping between four different plots. I'm going to be curious to see how she does with season two and its nearly aggressively linear storytelling (reintegration flashbacks excepted!!!). The timeline thing continues to fascinate me. I'm gradually starting to think that the entire show thus far has taken place over he course of about three weeks. In the ep where Devon gives birth (ep 5?), Ricken mentions it's been five days since they dropped off the book (ep 3). I'm pretty sure Helly started two days before ep 3. So it's a week between the first ep and Devon giving birth. And then I think it's about a day for each of the next eps. And then the new season starts *right* after that. And in the course of this season there are some days that we experience multiple times. Cobel is doing her thing while Mark is reintegrating and having flashbacks to his time with Gemma, which means that eps 7 and 8 are simultaneous, and come right on the heels of ep 6 and are *immediately* followed by ep 9, which is *immediately* followed by ep 10. It's not quite 24, but it's not *that* far off. But because it has the weird dreamy feel it doesn't seem like it should all be happening bam bam bam bam bam. Also it's been interesting to watch the first season again after watching the second. I think only after the first two eps of the second season did I really understand that literally *all* outie mark does is drink and be a dick to the people around him. (until Petey shows up). An amazing portrait of broken-with-grief-nigh-unto-living-death. It's truly only bearable because we get to escape into the innie world.

I've been thinking a lot about how the storytelling works in this show and how it's changed between the first season and this season. One of the things that totally fascinates me in storytelling is when you can make something appear without just obviously having it enter the stage and wave hello. I first started tracking this in a play I saw a few years ago that used the physiological way the eye and brain work together to literally appear a character onstage out of nothing. Instead of turning the lights off, they built them to be so bright (with just a solid white set onstage) that your eyes just stopped processing information. When the lights turned down to a normal level, bam, there he was. There are a lot of ways to hide information in front of you. I've loved how Slow Horses does it - inserting tiny scenes or fragments of scenes that have absolutely no obvious connection to the main plots. We're narrative-loving beasts. Because the fragments don't fit with the narratives that we're really tracking (and which it takes a fair bit of work to track!) they kind of go into cold storage in your head, like they're your own buried memories, and only come into play much later in the season. They're managing to both literally put something in front of you and yet hide it from you. It feels like magic. I feel like this show is trying something similar. Because each of the severed characters has one actor, we can feel like we've seen a lot of one actor or another, but the other half of the person is a mystery. We end up filling in details based on our own life experiences and viewing habits. They've given us some broad brushstrokes of the other outies - rebellious Helly an Eagan! by-the-book Irving a saboteur! ambitious Dylan a failure! - but we really don't know all that much. They *seem* like we should know them because we're so familiar with BL, JT, and ZC onscreen, but we truly do not know these characters. It allows space for them to surprise us. I'm so glad that Dylan was the first to get to capitalize on that disjuncture. I've been so interested in how the Dylan-Gretchen pair - more than any other characters - brings out people's tendency to write their own experiences and prejudices onto their couple dynamics. (Because where we don't have enough info, we create info, pattern-seeking beasts that we are!) Outie Dylan - a character we've been told to write off as a fuck-up - did such a good job rising to the moment. And the way they shot the scene - lingering glances at the kids playing, that tiny, soft contact between Gretchen's hand and Dylan's shoulder - really gave a sense of hope and possibility and love. And the scenes after gave me a real sense that outie Dylan was about to try to commit to being a better person and that innie Dylan was feeling a new, deep sense of purpose. It was so astonishingly beautiful. And I think that moment was only available because they *hadn't* given us a deep sense of who outie Dylan was beforehand. They'd generally just shown him as a bulk in shadows. We kinda thought we knew him. We did not. He was awesome. *** I totally agree with not being *quite* ready for Milchick's redeption arc. I am so *so* curious about that man and I don't want his arc to be rushed. I want him to have an episode like sweet vitriol where we get a sense of what made him who he is. I am separately intrigued by the way that he becomes the real center of the show's alluding-to-but-not-dealing-with race, which, in turn, is deeply connected to setting the start of Lumon in a period that we associate with the end of the Civil War. The portrait and the unspoken convo with Natalie. The way his different middle-management personae are often connected to stereotypes from ways film has represented Black men (he's always sliding around on a continuum between "Uncle Tom" smiling and the blaxploitation-era version of a "buck" character).* The constant micro- and macro-aggressions making clear that he does not belong and is there on sufferance. And then the scene with the fucking statue. In that scene he's basically stuck playing the Interlocutor role from a blackface show - the *white* role. The butt of the jokes. Tambo and Bones, the endmen, always get the laugh. The Interlocutor is basically a dumb overseer - the boss who the wily workers get to get one over on. (For anybody who's seen White Christmas, there's a "Minstrel Show number in which Danny Kaye and Vera Ellen play the endmen with Bing Crosby as the Interlocutor that gets at the dynamics pretty well.) And then he reverses it with his very funny, very biting comment that the statue is five inches taller than Kier was in real life. I feel like he's ready to turn. I cannot wait to see it. * Apologies if these terms offend. They *are* offensive, but I don't know how to discuss the idea of these damaging stereotypes without naming the stereotypes themselves, and I'd rather speak plainly and in ways that make clear the discomfort and potential offense. TT has, to my mind, done a really exceptional job of both evoking the stereotypes and making clear the reasons why his character is sometimes boxed into them and how very, very much they grate on him. I haven't seen him in anything before Severance and I am dying to see him in other things. He is so damned good.

I have other thoughts on the storytelling that I'm not gonna get into right now, but one thing that I keep thinking about is how much time has actually gone by in the show. So many of this season's episodes were either happening right after one another or literally simultaneously that I kinda get the impression that it might have only been a week or so. And we know it starts right after the last season. And honestly, I don't think that last season covered all that much time. Mark missed a few days here and there and helly missed a few days after she tried to hang herself but... The whole show may have taken place within maybe a month? I kind of get the impression that there are weird things going on with sense of time - both because of the three-year gap between seasons and the way that the episodes were spread out over two months for us. But I feel like this has been one crazy snowball for the characters, just one thing right after another, and for the viewers is been a slow, gradual unfolding. Which makes things feel really odd.

Which particularly sucks because, as I think I remember discussing in the sweet vitriol thread, there's a lot of evidence that cobel's hometown had some good stuff going for it before Lumon. There was a there there and Lumon sucked it dry.

I think we're going at this in two different directions. I'm looking at what Lumon does (minimal security, in this instance) and trying to understand why. We've seen that they treat the innies as children and that they have a very strong quasi-religion, also that they keep their departments quite siloed (both through physical space and myths about long-past warfare), which means smaller groups to have to quash. It seems to me, therefore, that they think that is enough. Maybe it is, maybe it's gonna bite them in the butt. It's also possible that having more security would have begat more rebellion sooner by making people *feel* their imprisonment (much like how having a more heavily armed police force makes crowds more likely to become violent.) It seems obvious that they need more security now, of course, but how will they get that? It would be hard to hire for - who is going to be willing to hold the gun that keeps their neighbors enslaved? - and the Lumon hierarchy already seems stretched quite thin. I disagree with your characterization of how colonization works, but also, it seems that they have already tried *and* *abandoned* the approach that created cobel's hometown in favor of building their own town (keir) in their own province (pe) and creating an authoritarian world within that administrative buffer. There are clearly people in there who hate Lumon (which... Interesting! Not authoritarian outside the company building, presumably because it would be bad pr!) but getting a connection between them and the innies would be difficult, in no small part because each of the outies we've seen (except perhaps Gemma) has a real reason to want their innie to be going to work every day.

Getting a little off-topic here, so my apologies to anyone who objects (but hey, not so hard to skip to the next post?). Slavery *absolutely* had to think about pr. The end of slavery in the British colonies came about because of a long pr campaign by abolitionists, combined with a slave revolt in Jamaica that so horrified normies back in Britain that they elected a parliament who would end slavery in their colonies. A pr loss for slavery after many, many years of pr victories. The US was awash with positive and negative pr about slavery. That's part of what made pro-slavery folks so convinced that slavery was right and just and moral - they were buying the pr arguments of the generations who had come before them. And lots of people outside the US south had financial incentives to protect slavery because their industries were all bound up in it. Plenty of companies right now don't like too much attention on exactly how they get things done - people get really upset at hearing about, say, Amazon workers peeing in bottles and getting injured on the job, it is offensive to the idea of human dignity. They do some positive pr and try to keep people from talking about the bad stuff. I'll stop now, but yeah, the pr campaign that supported slavery is a super fascinating topic. As is, of course, the pr campaign that fought against it.

There's a super-important scholar of Haitian history, Michel-rolph truillot, who argues that revolution in Haiti was "unthinkable" - as in, it was too utterly horrifying (to white folks) to bear thinking on. If they ever really reckoned with the fact that they were outnumbered in *insane* ratios by people who they tortured and killed with utter impunity, they would be reduced to quivering balls of fear and panic. So they just didn't think about it. A number of people who look at the literature of the period point out ways that this terror runs under the surface of, well, almost all of it. Think of Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane eyre. The hubris of Lumon reminds me very, very much of the hubris of Haitian slave owners. If the innies do decide to do a revolution, it will be possible because of that hubris. It is perhaps worth noting that living in a world where it is impossible to contemplate the real fabric of your existence without going insane is its own kind of, well, severance. Disassociation. I've been having a lot of thoughts about disassociation and severance over the last month but haven't had non-work time at an actual keyboard (ie, without the decking pop-up ads covering the whole screen), so I haven't put them into words yet.

Helly has been the most vocal about her hatred of outies and rallying innies to their common cause. A pan-innie sentiment, if you will. Every time someone else gets angry at an outie she cheers them on. So it made perfect sense to me that she would both work to help innie Gemma ("she's one of us") and also kinda dig winning her man over outie Gemma.

I originally hail from the midwestern US and I spent a few years in more than one marching band. Marching bands and their music bring me joy, and although I understand there is a relationship to the military, I don’t think of them as associated with violence. I think of them more as a celebration of the better parts of being involved in something that is larger than yourself, something that can only be experienced on a group level. I think when Lumon takes their show on the road, and that is what they are gearing up to do, there will be parades, dammit, and a sense of belonging! Yes, I am saying that this aspect can and is used to manipulate people. If I was severed, C and M sounds like a good group to join. Music, exercise, and the muscle memory may carry over to the benefit of both halves of the personality. I think next season we will see the kitchens, or at least the severed will look for them. Since we found out about My comment about the marching band being an army stems from a very specific moment - Milchick thinking this big mass of people will be on his side (hey, he was just dancing with them!) and then seeing helly rally them away from his control. He thought he had a mass of people big enough to overpower those pesky mdrers, but she persuaded them away from his power. He thought they were automatons, she thought they were people. They sided with the person who thought they were people. He thought he had a little private army just for that moment. He was very, very wrong. (I will say, the characters I am most curious about for next season are Irving and Milchick. They have so thoroughly degraded Milchick in this season. I've got to think that this is rock bottom. Where does he go from here?) Anyway, while the band was theoretically only part of the story to provide *jazz hands* pizzazz, the specific nature of the movements of marching bands (military background, etc) meant that they foreshadowed the extreme violence of the rest of the episode. Which is also part of why they could keep seamlessly cutting back and forth between the band and the actual violence. It's like how the waves crashing in the Cobel episode at first seem like just atmosphere and then (when they overlay her moans on top of the images) become a way of showing the earthshaking, absolute grief and chaos in her soul. This is a show that likes to get at big ideas by presenting things that give a similar feel. But also, and specifically... Through this show, we have been relatively small groups of people. If you're thinking in a "can i/we take them" kind of way (as we see Dylan do through season one), the numbers are, generally, pretty even. It's one of the reasons the goat people scene was so wooooaaaaaahhhhh... That was a *lot* of people - they could totally surround mark and helly - and they were presented, at first, as a threat. But we haven't seen them since. This was even more people. We're starting to see so many people down there that there's no way that our heros (mdr team) could ever take them on (if dylan's fantasies were to play out). But while it seems that each of these larger groups are a threat, time and time again it turns out that they are amenable to working with the mdr folks. And if that's the case, then Lumon has a real problem on its hands. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I study slavery. It's one of my "to a hammer, everything is a nail" lenses. If something gets to be roughly similar to topics that come up in studying slavery, my brain starts to read them through that lens. And the introduction of *so* many people hit that switch, for this reason: Slavery is very, very different in different places. I the mid-atlantic of the US, where farms were relatively small and freedom was a short flight away, Slavery was highly negotiated. In, say, the west indies, where plantations were *gargantuan* and slaves hugely outnumbered owners/overseers the system encouraged the most shockingly, inventively horrific tortures you will ever see. Within Lumon, we were shown a world similar to mid-atlantic slavery (small numbers of innies per outie supervisor). Adding the numbers seen in the marching band potentially makes the dynamics very, very different. We will see what comes! One last quick thought about the band. My life has included both deeper music studies than *aaaanyone* needs and a couple decades of training in a combat sport. As I watched that scene, I kept thinking about the original purpose of combat instruments - 1) keeping your side together and 2) making such an unholy wall of sound that you induce physiological fight/flight/freeze in your opponents. As I watched, I just kept thinking about the physical sensations of being in an interior space with that many instruments, how thoroughly it would make your chest vibrate, your ears ring, your ability to think shut down. And then I kept thinking of how amazing it would have been to throw an opponent into a situation like that. One of the essential skills in my sport was the ability to create and exploit milliseconds when my opponent lost their concentration. The moment when the marching band came in would have been that moment to the nth degree.

In retrospect, the episode with the camping trip was important because it showed that innies *could* have life experiences outside the cubicle jungle. But they'd need Lumon tech to make that happen. So they need Lumon to exist and they need their outies to be on board and... Well. They need a lot. They are hugely dependent on the people and system around them. And they are terrified of that and really resent it. Pretty much like a lot of teens. One thing I keep thinking back to, having recently rewatched some of the very first episodes, is how Petey described reintegration. He talks about the two timelines melding, but in such a way that early experiences for each were kinda equally far away. The innie's time-line was stretched to cover the same amount of time as the outie's much, *much* longer life. I don't know if they've moved away from that idea or what, but mark scout doesn't mention anything similar when Mark s is being worried that he'd just get lost.

Well. This episode very successfully answers what is, in retrospect, the only question worth asking: does the spirit of Ben Vereen cross universes? Either Milchick grew up on a steady diet of Pippin and All That Jazz, or Vereen is simply an elemental force, as I have long suspected. More to the point, man, the marching band was such an excellent way to raise the most important questions of violence long before any punches were thrown. It was such a major quiet theme of the first season - MDR would take O&D because it was only two people, oh wait, no, they'd be totally out matched. Milchick is outnumbered in general but controls the group by manipulating numbers, interests, alliances, etc. I keep going on about the weakness of Lumon's strict hierarchy as opposed to the mutual support of the MDR crew, but it's felt like a really important part of the overall story to me. And now... A marching band. Heck *yeah*. Because what is a marching band but a semblance of a military. The unified action. The aggressive, restrained dancing that highlights the marchers' strength (especially of thighs - all those half-squats) and lung capacity. They are an army. And Milchick thinks they're his army. That poor, poor man. He seems to still be saying that he's a company man, never mind that this company seems to be taking every opportunity to belittle him. We'll see if that holds up in the next season. As to the questions of why Lumon *has* a marching band? Well, we know they do everything in house. This seems to imply that they do enough pomp and circumstance stuff to have regular use for a band. That they really get off on patting themselves on the back. That they love a display of force. That they are deeply prone to utter hubris. And yes, we did already know that, but hey, as Chekov definitely meant to write: if you're working in a universe where the megacorp obviously is so pompous and hubristic as to have a marching band, wouldn't you want to get to fire that sucker off? I'll have other thoughts at other times, but right now I'm digging the band. In the extra bits, TT says something along the lines of "I gave them a *band!*" [implication: how could those ungrateful peons be unhappy?!?] and golly, I am coming to genuinely love that man.