Science and culture -

Review: Severance created by Dan Erickson

Reviews 6 May 2025

By Sam Casey, Socialist Party, Ireland 6 May 2025 The popular Apple TV series Severance recently returned for its second season. One of the most watched shows across various streaming services, Severance is a psychological, sci-fi thriller that depicts the lives of a group of workers at the giant tech corporation, Lumon Industries. We follow four workers from Lumon’s ‘severed floor’, where all the workers have undergone a neurological procedure to split their consciousness and memories in two. This effectively means that, once they enter work, they are an entirely different person with no memories of their outside self. And once they clock out, they transform back from their “innie” into their “outie”, with no memory of the work-day. The “innies” live their entire lives within the walls of the ‘severed floor’, a maze of drab white walls resembling a mid-century corporate office. The second they enter the elevator to leave work, they reawaken the next day in the same elevator returning to the office. This allows Lumon to completely dominate their workforce, controlling every aspect of their lives. The workers’ split consciousness becomes the central pivot of the show’s ever-unfolding mystery – as both the “outies” and the “innies” struggle to find out what Lumon is up to, beginning to band together in a striking metaphor for workers unionising. Similar to Black Mirror, Severance uses dark-comedy to investigate aspects of modern capitalist society. It forces us to ask questions about corporate power, workplace alienation and where the billionaire tech-oligarchs of our own world may be leading us. It is a show about workers rebelling against corporate overlords. Its massive popularity reflects a growing disillusionment and unease with work under capitalism. While none of us are ‘severed’, most working-class people can relate to the feeling that the time they spend in work isn’t really their own. That time belongs to the boss, because under capitalism workers are forced to sell our labour-power to companies that exploit us for profit in order to survive. Even the term “work/life balance”, which is hardly a reality for most workers forced to work long hours for low wages, is itself an acknowledgement that somehow “life” must end where “work” begins. Lumon is not so dissimilar to the massive tech corporations that dominate our own world. Ironically, Severance is the flagship show of Apple TV – precisely the kind of company that the show is skewering. And the show’s concept doesn’t take too much suspended disbelief, given tech billionaires like Elon Musk are themselves developing dystopian-sounding products like the “neuralink” brain microchip. In addition to its strong writing, the show is being hailed for its incredible filmmaking. It is so meticulously detailed that the viewer can find meaning in everything from the creative cinematography, to the brilliant score by Theodore Shapiro, and the intricate differences in the actors’ performances as their “outies” and their “innies”. Season 2 contains what many have claimed to be one of the best directed episodes of TV ever. Severance brilliantly satirises the mind-numbing drudgery of office work. Throughout Season 1, it wasn’t clear exactly what Lumon Industries even does. The four central characters – Mark S (Adam Scott), Helly R (Britt Lower), Dylan G (Zach Cherry) and Irving B (John Turturro) – work in the ‘Macro Data Refinement’ department. They spend all day looking at a series of shifting numbers on a computer screen. Every so often some of these numbers begin to stir deep emotions in them; feelings of fear, dread, disgust etc. When this happens, they simply file the numbers away. What does it all mean? Many workers can relate to the feeling of doing a job that they have no control over and that seemingly holds no real value to society, part of what Marx described as the alienation of work under capitalism. In Season 2, the workers begin to uncover the mystery behind their own labour, and the full extent of their exploitation is revealed. Where Severance really hits its stride is in its cringe-inducing depiction of corporate culture. The managers, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Mr. Milchik (Tramell Tillman), act as the face of the shadowy, unseen “Board”. Milchik in particular perfectly encapsulates the worst kind of corporate manager. Always with a grin on his face, he enforces Lumon’s oppressive, prison-like rules on the severed workers while constantly acting as though this is all one-big-happy-family. He goes between torturing workers for insubordination to giving them meaningless rewards, like the “5-minute music dance experience”. Tillman’s performance is hilarious and genuinely creepy at the same time. As they live their entire lives on Lumon’s terms, the company uses elaborate propaganda to influence the “innies”. Its internal culture is eerily anachronistic, with outdated language and visuals that are reminiscent of the Gilded Age of American capitalism. It all centres around Lumon’s “visionary founder” Kier Eagan, similar to how CEOs are venerated as supposed “geniuses” in our own world. Lumon’s “Compliance Handbook”, which contains “the word of Kier”, is drilled into the workers, who are told lies about times in the past when workers from other departments violently attacked their fellow workers – a classic example of the ‘divide and rule’, union-busting tactics used by capitalism to dominate workers. Despite this, a revolutionary spirit begins to break through, as the severed workers band together to take Lumon down. In this way, it is fitting that Season 2 was delayed due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike in 2023, which pitted the show’s writers against Apple TV and the other Hollywood studios that were attempting to use AI to make it impossible to make a living as a working writer. Just one example of many of how the world of Severance isn’t so far from life under capitalism in the 21st century.

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Review: Adolescence by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham

Reviews, Socialist feminism 31 March 2025

By Manus Lenihan – Socialist Party Ireland. 31 March 2025 Adolescence is shaping up to be one of the most talked-about TV dramas of the year. Partly this is down to the performances and production. Each episode unfolds in real time, and in a single take. But it is really resonating with audiences because of its themes, especially masculinity, misogyny and gender-based violence, which are of burning relevance in 2025. The series is set in the aftermath of a murder. A 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper in an amazing debut) is alleged to have stabbed to death a girl of the same age. Such crimes are not as rare as you would hope; the idea for the show came from two similar real-life crimes in Britain. Irish viewers will be reminded of the horrifying murder of 14-year-old Ana Kriégel in Lucan in 2018. The boys convicted of her murder, like the fictional accused Jamie, were just 13. This set-up hits viewers hard, especially parents: what if you lost a loved one, not due to them being a murder victim, but due to them committing a murder? In addition, any viewers who have worked in or around education, law or social services will have uncomfortable déja-vu moments as the camera roams around a police station, a school and a ‘training centre’ – actually a prison. Adolescence stands in the powerful tradition of British social realism. Episode Two is spent entirely in the school that victim and perpetrator both attended. The police visit to search for the murder weapon. But they come to understand a great deal about the background to the crime just by experiencing life in the school. Teachers bark orders and over-rely on videos. Students bully one another and are contemptuous and callous. The crime was gestated in this underfunded institution, staffed by teachers too overworked and burned out to give kids the care and attention they need. But it could be argued that this episode is inauthentic: even the most deprived school would be subdued by profound shock immediately after the murder of a student. The show taps into anxiety about how Big Tech is worming its way into the minds of children and how far-right ‘influencers’ are working around the clock to take advantage of boys’ insecurities. Tiktok, for example, will actively promote misogynistic videos to young boys the first time they sign in to the app. Adolescence addresses this explosion of online misogyny in the last ten-plus years. By half-way through, it’s clear that the ‘manosphere’ and ‘incel’ culture have lined up many of the dominoes for this murder. The third episode, where the accused murderer Jamie sits down with a psychologist, hammers home how this culture grooms kids at a vulnerable age. The revelations come out slowly but with explosive impact, such as the role of image-based abuse in the lead-up to the murder. We see how the online hate preachers have told Jamie he’s worthless, which is largely left unchallenged in school and at home. He truly believes he will never have a girlfriend or have sex unless he resorts to manipulation and violence. When Jamie’s sister (Amélie Pease) asks him, in a desperate attempt at a joke, if he will become a bodybuilder in prison, his reply is a flat no. That’s a sore point: Jamie is not an athletic kid, not the type of cocky, physically strong male valued by traditional gender roles. He has learned to hate himself for falling short of society’s expectations of boys / men according to the rigid gender binary promoted at all levels of society. He idolises his father, who superficially hews closer to the ‘man’s man’ stereotype. Many of our expectations are turned on their head. The accused is not a glassy-eyed psychopath, but a child who can be by turns cheeky, pitiful or terrifying. Likewise we assume there must be dark secrets in Jamie’s home life, but his father Eddie (Stephen Graham, who also co-wrote) comes across as a decent person. We feel for him keenly as the police subject their home to a terrifying invasion minutes after he returns home from a night shift; when he bravely protests at his son being strip-searched in front of him; as the evidence mounts up and he flinches away from his son’s outstretched hand. Eddie is overworked and he and his wife (Christine Tremarco) have lost touch with their son’s emotional life, but they are not abusive or negligent. Eddie was beaten by his own father and attempted to break the cycle of abuse. However, patriarchal gender roles are evident in the family unit with negative consequences. Jamie has a formative memory of his father unable to look him in the eye when he fails to perform well in a football match, and another of his father tearing down a shed in a fit of rage. Still, Jamie’s shocking misogynistic violence cannot be explained without looking outside at the broader culture. Eddie is not a saint and his character flaws are clear in the final episode, which highlights how his temper and emotions are carefully managed by the mother and daughter. While his temper was not directed at them, the threat of aggression hangs in the air because that is how Eddie learned to cope, and the consequences of this are felt by women and children in particular. It is true, as the show’s co-writer Jack Thorne has publicly argued, that children are particularly vulnerable to having their lives destroyed by toxic online communities. But it’s worth bearing in mind that people of all ages do irresponsible and harmful things on social media. Those adults who verbally abuse strangers, repeat obvious lies and share faked images have no right to scold teenagers. Obviously, murderous sexism was claiming the lives of women and girls long before the internet. Online communities can be a wholesome and positive lifeline for many young people. The problem is not that social media sites exist, but that they are owned privately and run for profit.

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BIMM Dublin: A cultural and educational crisis driven by capitalist greed

News and analysis, Workers' struggle and solidarity, Art and literature, Europe 14 February 2025

By Kate Quinlan, BIMM graduate, class of 2024, 14 February 2025 The proposed mass redundancies at BIMM Dublin, one of Ireland’s most prestigious music colleges, represent not just an attack on workers’ rights but the potential for a grave cultural loss. Lecturers at the institution, many of whom are accomplished musicians who have contributed to shaping Ireland’s music industry, now find their livelihoods under threat. With outrageous plans to cut approximately one-third of the workforce with lecturers being told they have to all reapply for their jobs, this decision risks irreparable damage to Ireland’s artistic heritage in the name of profit. BIMM is home to some of the brightest talents in Irish music. Its graduates include acclaimed bands like Fontaines D.C., and singer-songwriter Erica Cody. These successes, however, did not emerge in isolation. They were nurtured by the dedication and expertise of BIMM’s lecturers—working artists who have performed with iconic Irish groups such as The Frames, The Stunning, Villagers, and The Coronas. These are not merely educators; they are mentors with unparalleled experience, offering students a bridge between academic theory and the realities of the music industry. “Uber-isation” Despite this, BIMM’s management, now under private equity ownership, has reduced its teaching staff to disposable commodities. By forcing lecturers to reapply for their positions amidst a chaotic “consultation” process, management is imposing a new employment structure that could cut pay nearly in half. As Robert McNamara of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT) aptly described it, this represents the “Uber-isation” of lecturers—stripping educators of stability, dignity, and fair pay in favour of exploitative precarity. Management claims this restructuring will create a “stable environment” for students and staff. But how can such claims hold weight when the very mentors who inspire and guide students face uncertainty and demoralisation? As McNamara put it when speaking to the Irish Independent, “The lecturers’ working environment is the students’ learning environment.” Undermining staff not only affects their livelihoods but directly diminishes the quality of education and mentorship available to students. Art and education, not profit At its core, these cuts are a symptom of the negatives of privatised education. BIMM, originally founded as an institution for modern music education, has been reduced to a profit-driven entity since its acquisition by Intermediate Capital Group in 2020. This private equity firm—like others of its kind—exists to extract wealth, not to foster cultural or educational value. For them, the lecturers and their students are merely numbers on a balance sheet. The arts cannot and should not be quantified in this way. Ireland’s music industry is a cornerstone of its cultural identity and international reputation. The decision to gut BIMM’s teaching staff in such a cavalier manner sends a chilling message: the arts and the people who sustain them are expendable in the pursuit of cost-cutting measures. These lecturers, with their wealth of industry knowledge, have not only guided students toward success but have also contributed to the vibrancy of Ireland’s cultural scene. Their insights are indispensable, offering students lessons that textbooks cannot. If these cuts proceed, the consequences will ripple beyond BIMM’s walls. Ireland risks losing an essential incubator for musical talent, depriving future generations of the opportunity to learn from the very individuals who have shaped the industry they aspire to enter. What’s more, the exclusion of the IFUT from this process is a blatant disregard for workers’ rights. The refusal to engage with union representatives speaks to a disdain for the collective voice of workers. All workers and students must support the IFUT lecturers. Every single job must be maintained without attacks on wages or conditions. BIMM should be brought back into the public system if the union-busting management cannot guarantee this. This is not just a fight for fair wages or secure contracts—it is a fight for Ireland’s cultural future. BIMM’s lecturers are more than employees. They are custodians of an industry that has given Ireland a global platform, a source of pride, and an enduring legacy. Their knowledge, artistry, and mentorship are invaluable, and their contributions cannot simply be replaced by a “restructured” model designed to cut costs. This must be a call to the wider public to recognize that when private interests strip resources from the arts, society as a whole pays the price. The Irish government, too, must intervene and uphold its responsibility to safeguard workers and cultural institutions. This situation is a stark reminder of the dangers posed by the corporatisation of education. It is not too late for BIMM’s management to reverse course and engage meaningfully with its staff, their union, and the wider community. Ireland’s music industry and cultural heritage depend on it. To lose these lecturers is to lose part of what makes Ireland’s arts scene so unique, so vibrant, and so profoundly impactful on the world stage. We cannot allow that to happen.

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Review: The Substance directed by Coralie Fargeat

Art and literature, Reviews 5 February 2025

By Steph Lacey (Socialist Party Ireland) 5 February 2025 The Substance is a satirical, body-horror film that centres around the character of Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading Hollywood star who goes to extreme lengths to try to reclaim her youthful looks and career, by taking a new, secret wonder drug called ‘the substance.’ The film aims to put a spotlight on the objectification and ridiculous beauty standards faced by women in Hollywood. The casting of Demi Moore in the lead role works so well because she is an incredibly beautiful woman who is only guilty of aging. It’s less about losing your ‘looks’ but losing your youth, which are so entwined, especially for women, in this patriarchal culture of capitalist society. French director Carolie Fargeat has cited David Lynch, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg as her influences, which is very obvious from this movie with nods to The Elephant Man, The Thing, The Fly, Videodrome and Existenz throughout. There are also references to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Brian de Palma’s Carrie, as well as ‘The Nightmare and Dawn’ theme from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. All of which makes it a very fun film for movie-buffs, but with an original, female-driven perspective. The film can also be compared to All About Eve – in which Bette Davis plays an aging Broadway star who is being ‘replaced’ by a younger actress. Twelve years after All About Eve, Bette Davis would take out an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter and other trade papers looking for work. It read: “Mother of three – 10, 11 and 15. Divorcee. American. Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumour would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway.) References on request.” While the subject of the movie dates back to the early days of Hollywood, it is still very topical. In 2000, for example, the best actress Oscar winners were Angelina Jolie, 24 at the time, and Hilary Swank, 25. The best actor Oscar winners were Kevin Spacey, 40, and Michael Caine, 67. In 2013, Jennifer Lawrence, 22, and Anne Hathaway, 30, were the best actress Oscar winners, and Daniel Day-Lewis, 55, and Christoph Waltz, 56, took home the best actor Oscars. Last year, Cillian Murphy, 48, and Robert Downey Jr, 49, took home the best actor Oscars, while the best actress Oscars went to Emma Stone, 36, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph 38. While there are exceptions, with Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis winning the Oscars in 2023, both older than the actor winners, it is still rare to see older female actors consistently getting great roles, unlike their male counterparts. The film is a reflection of Hollywood and society’s obsession and fetishisation of female youth, and the lengths people will go to to reclaim it. Both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley give powerhouse performances. Moore’s resentment of her younger, ‘prettier’ self, and Qualley’s hatred and anger at her older self makes for an uncomfortable and uneasy watch as it can be very relatable for a lot of people. While the film does go to the extreme of body horror and grotesque imagery, every shot and scene feels very intentional and not just done for shock value. Carolie Fargeat is a staunch advocate for practical effects and sought to minimize the use of VFX throughout the film, which, although over the top, gives it a very real quality. It is a film that starts, (or continues), a very important conversation about the impossible beauty standards forced on women, and the demonisation women face when they decide to either ‘grow old naturally’ or seek out ways to cover up aging. We, as a society, need to dismantle what is typically seen as beautiful, and really examine who sets these beauty standards and why, when they are very much steeped in ageism and racism.

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Review: Conclave directed by Edward Berger

Reviews 5 February 2025

By Michael O’Brien (Socialist Party Ireland) 5 May 2025 Already the recipient of multiple nominations for various movie and TV award ceremonies, Conclave dramatises a fictional papal election and paints an entertaining picture of the Catholic Church as a highly factionalised institution. Based on a 2016 novel written by British author Robert Harris, the story unfolds from the vantage point of Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, who is responsible for the task of conducting the Papal conclave (election) after the death of a ‘liberal’ pope. The method of election involves the cardinals who make up the electorate voting in successive rounds until one candidate achieves at least two-thirds of the vote. There is no open, organised discussion and debate in this electoral process. Instead, the time between each round of voting is filled with informal lobbying and backbiting. The candidates that emerge in the contest cover a spectrum within the narrow limits of the Catholic Church – a fundamentally conservative patriarchal institution. It includes traditional conservatives Cardinal Tedesco from Italy and Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi; ‘liberals’ American Cardinal Bellini and Canadian Trembley, the unwilling ‘liberal’ candidate and principal character Cardinal Lawrence; and finally (and most improbably) Afghan-based Mexican Cardinal Benitez. Cardinal Benitez resembles most closely what would have been recognised between the 1960s and the 1980s as the liberation theology wing of the Church. Liberation theology was a minority trend in the Catholic Church, heavily centred but not exclusively in Latin America, that sought, within the parameters of Catholic doctrine, to foreground the concerns of the oppressed and spoke to the language of social justice. Among a cohort of priests and nuns, it represented a relatively progressive reaction to their witnessing of the material conditions of working class and poor. The most committed to this trend of Catholicism ultimately were on a collision course with reactionary regimes in Latin America, sometimes resulting in high-profile assassinations such as that of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was shot dead in El Salvador in 1980. The ultra-reactionary cold warrior Pope John Paul II prioritised the suppression of liberation theology, the most high-profile episode of which came when he visited Nicaragua during the civil war to support the pro-Contra conservative wing of the church. There, he publicly castigated priests who supported the then radical leftist Sandinista regime. The crushing of the liberation theology wing reinforced a monolithic conservative church thas rightly seen as being remote from the lives of the poor and oppressed in the Global South. This unintentionally created a space for evangelical protestant rivals who in the decades since, have made massive inroads in Latin America and Africa at the Catholic Church’s expense. One of the outdated aspects of the portrayal of the various candidates is the ascribing of ‘liberal’ values to the American cardinal when in reality, the hierarchy in the US is currently the most conservative, typically pro-Trump and most open in opposition to the current pope for his perceived ‘liberalism’. As the papal election unfolds, various candidates take the lead and are then effectively eliminated as skeletons emerge from secret children to plain corruption. Terrorist incidents occurring while the election is ongoing feed into the conservative vs. ‘liberal’ debate and the only open debate among the cardinals in the whole process. This debate decides the ultimate winner of the contest. From a purely dramatic perspective, the finale is gripping, and the final twist is highly imaginative and entertaining but impossible to conceive as occurring in the church. While the author of the novel upon which this film is based claims that he ran a draft of the text by the now deceased British Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and was told by the cardinal that the backstabbing among his peers described was accurate, the movie itself has attracted the accusation from some Church quarters, especially in the US that it is anti-Church. If anything, the opposite can be said. The film overstates the ‘diversity’ of the hierarchy in a way, alongside the ending, that conveys a message to progressive Catholics that they have a stake in hanging in there.

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