Episode 173: Transcript
Episode: 173: Severance and the New Hellscape (w/ Carl Zimmer)
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:02] Charlie Jane, what are you breathing right now?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:05] Oh, my gosh. I don't even know. A lot of steam, a lot of, like, vapor. I'm in my apartment and everything. The windows are all closed because it's rainy, so I'm probably just breathing Dr. Sassy's, like, exhalations and stuff by Dr. Sassy being my cat.
Annalee: [00:00:23] I feel like all of our intro moments on this show are now just, like, us giving updates on our cats.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:29] I mean, it's important information.
Annalee: [00:00:32] Listen, did you know that there are, like, millions of life forms that you're breathing into your nose, like, with every breath that you're taking?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:43] I feel like The Police tried to warn me about this. Like, they were like, every breath you take, you're inhaling microbes. But I don't know, The Police got confused.
Annalee: [00:00:51] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:52] And, you know...
Annalee: [00:00:53] How do you feel about that? How do you feel about the fact that you're just, like, breathing in a bunch of, like, random living creatures?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:00] You know, if I think about it, too much, if I dwell on it, it's a little scary. And, you know, especially, I'm now masking indoors all the time since the pandemic. You know, so I think about air quality in a very different way than I used to. But at the same time, I don't know, it makes me feel less lonesome. It makes me feel like I've got friends all the time.
Annalee: [00:01:19] Well, I'm sorry to tell you that you just snorted up an entire civilization of microscopic creatures who were about to invent cold fusion. So basically, your comfort destroyed the galaxy’s greatest hope for clean energy, so thanks.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:35] You know, it's very on-brand.
Annalee: [00:01:37] Now that you're breathing easier, you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that snorts up little tiny specks of dystopia and sneezes out a whole new world. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer. And I have a novella coming out in August that's called Automatic Noodle.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:00] Oh, it's so good. You guys are in for such a treat. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, and my upcoming novel is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
Annalee: [00:02:12] And it is also fantastic. Today, we are talking about all of the life that lives in the air, the clouds, and in tiny droplets of water you just sneezed out. We're joined by Carl Zimmer, a science journalist who writes regularly for The New York Times and elsewhere, and whose latest book is just an incredible read. I highly recommend it. It's called Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. And later in the episode, Charlie Jane and I will be talking about the new dystopia and how Severance is changing the way we talk about dark futures.
[00:02:47] Also, on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about why Charlie Jane is obsessed with Tumblr. Alright, get ready to smell the show.
[00:02:58] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:03:30] Now we are super excited to be joined by Carl Zimmer, the award-winning journalist who writes The New York Times' long-running science column and has written over a dozen books about all facets of biology, including the recent book Life's Edge. He also teaches science writing at Yale University. Welcome to the show, Carl.
Carl: [00:03:49] Thanks for having me.
Annalee: [00:03:50] So we've all just been through the COVID pandemic, and we've come to appreciate the power of airborne diseases. And now you've written this incredible book, Airborne, which looks at kind of the long road we took to discovering that diseases spread through the air. And I want to talk about that. But before we get into the history and the backstory, I wonder if you could start with something just like super basic for our listeners, which is how does a pathogen or some other microbe float through the air and end up in my lungs? Like, where does it come from? What does it look like? How does it get inside me through my nose?
Carl: [00:04:28] Well, there are a lot of ways. I mean, if you're talking particularly, say, about COVID, that's going to be coming out of somebody else's body. They're going to be talking with you. Maybe on the other side of the room, and they're laughing at somebody else. Or maybe you're singing, and this virus is going to come out of them encased in a little droplet. And that droplet may be small enough that it can float, and it can just drift and drift and drift and drift. And you're breathing in and out, and that droplet just goes right into your airway.
[00:05:03] And for that virus, it's a new home. Now it can start invading cells in your nose and start replicating and get to business. But that's just SARS-CoV-2. You're breathing in living things pretty much with every breath. And so, you know, you might be breathing in some bacteria that came from the Pacific Ocean. You know, a wave crashed and sprayed up some droplets. And one of those droplets went miles into the air and eventually came down. And you breathe it in.
Annalee: [00:05:39] Wow.
Carl: [00:05:40] Yeah, or maybe you breathe in a little bit of dust from a distant wildfire. And who knows, maybe it's got a little lichen on it or a fungus spore.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:50] Oh, my gosh.
Carl: [00:05:51] Maybe something you breathe in might have just, you know, dropped down from the stratosphere. So there are all sorts of things that we are all breathing all the time. Most of them are harmless, and some of them can kill us.
Annalee: [00:06:05] But the point is, every breath we take in has living creatures in it, basically.
Carl: [00:06:10] Yeah, the air is not sterile. They're rich with life. And, you know, it looks invisible to us and we, you know, you can see a seagull at your window flying through the air. But beyond that, you might imagine there's no life. But it is just extraordinarily full of life.
Annalee: [00:06:30] Amazing. So one of the things I found super fascinating about your book was the way that you show us how environmental changes change the composition of the air that we're breathing, like kicking up new diseases, but just other stuff in general. And you kind of mentioned about wildfires. And I wonder if you could talk more generally about how changing our environment is changing what's in the air that we breathe.
Carl: [00:06:54] Yeah, so life goes into the air from the oceans and from the land. And the changes that we create on the planet can, it can drive the evolution of new things that can then get into the air or can change the way they spread. And so, you know, one example I like to use has to do with our food.
[00:07:14] So there are these fungi that are called stem rust that are just the bane of the existence of farmers. They're a real nightmare. And in some countries that are having bad stem rust outbreaks, you know, your farm can just be wiped out. It just, all the wheat turns black because it's covered with this fungus that's just feeding on it and destroying it. And then it sends up these spores that can go off and visit a new farm.
[00:07:43] What's interesting is like, if you go back in history, there's records about stem rust going way back. So like in the Bible, when God is saying, if you're not careful, I'm going to punish you – one of the punishments we now understand through translation is rust, this fungus. And the Romans even had a festival where they would, they had a goddess or deity, I should say, called Robigo that they would worship to. Sacrifice dogs... I don't know why dogs, but they would sacrifice dogs in the hopes that Robigo would not visit rust on their farms.
Annalee: [00:08:17] Wow.
Carl: [00:08:17] But the funny thing is that rust did not exist much earlier than that. You know, the first farmers actually created the conditions by domesticating wheat and making these huge fields of wheat that drove the evolution of this kind of rust. We in effect created it by creating this evolutionary arena, the farm, the wheat farm. And we've been dealing with it ever since. So it's a kind of new form of life. It only existed maybe, you know, several thousand years ago with the dawn of farming.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:49] That is wild.
Carl: [00:08:50] Yeah, yeah. No, it is. And we continue to change the aerobiome, like antibiotic resistance, for example. Like we have driven the evolution of antibiotic resistance bacteria by feeding antibiotics to livestock to make them grow, by taking them in huge numbers ourselves. And so there's all this bacteria with antibiotic resistance. They go up into the clouds. You know, bacteria can live in clouds, and there's lots of resistant bacteria up there. And then the cloud will carry them along and rain them down. Trillions of resistance genes rain down every year.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:24] Holy cow.
Annalee: [00:09:26] Oh, man. I was just reading about how there's PFAS in raindrops as well.
Carl: [00:09:31] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:09:32] Antibiotic resistant bacteria and, you know, very dangerous chemicals raining down from the clouds.
Carl: [00:09:38] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:38] So you know, obviously, the opening minutes of The Last of Us, where they talk about like how the making the climate warmer is going to lead to fungi having a better hold on us. That's scary. But are there other ways that climate change is kind of making this situation worse?
Carl: [00:09:53] Well, specifically, yes, for fungi, because there's one fungus in particular that scientists have been looking at, which is particularly concerning. And it's this fungus that causes a disease called valley fever.
[00:10:10] So basically, it's caused by a fungus that usually lives harmlessly in arid regions in the United States or in South America. It just feeds on stuff on the ground, sends out its tendrils. Rodents that dig their burrows there, they may breathe in the spores of this fungus, but they're fine, actually. The fungus just sort of gets comfortable inside the animal, doesn't harm it. And then when the animal dies, the fungus then starts to grow and feed on the animal's dead body. It has the, you know, good manners to wait until it's dead. And then it feeds on it.
Annalee: [00:10:45] Very nice.
Carl: [00:10:45] Very, very polite. And then, you know, the animal decomposes and the fungus spreads out and continues with its life. The problem is that winds that blow across these arid regions can blow off dust, and that dust can travel for hundreds of miles. And if you, human being, then inhale it, it's not so good.
[00:11:04] Because then it can, if you get a heavy dose or if you have a suppressed immune system, that spore will just start sending out tendrils and it'll just start growing. And it might grow in your airway, it might push further out into other parts of your body. It grows very slowly, so it will take years to kill you, but it can kill you.
[00:11:26] You know, there was like an outbreak, you know, in around Sacramento where like, you know, a hundred people or more got valley fever. And there was dust that had come from Southern California. So it had come a long way to make these people sick.
[00:11:40] So what climate change is going to do is it's going to expand arid regions in places like, you know, the Western United States. The studies suggest that, you know, that's going to be a bigger territory for this fungus and it's also going to put that fungus closer to more people. So the upshot is more valley fever.
[00:12:00] Valley fever cases have been growing and growing and growing as more and more people live in these arid areas. And it's just climate change could potentially just make it worse. This is definitely a kind of, you know, Last of Us type disease. I would not want to get valley fever.
Annalee: [00:12:15] Can it spread between people? Like if I have it in my lungs and I cough, will I cough out spores or is that not how it works?
Carl: [00:12:22] I have not heard of any human to human transmission of valley fever, but who knows? You know, this is something that probably just was very rare disease for a long, long time. But you know, now that arid places are getting heavily populated. Just think about Arizona, you know, and you have like, you know, farm laborers who are working outdoors, construction workers. You're having more and more cases being reported and climate change looks like it's going to make it worse.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:55] Yeah. So obviously at a certain point, we stopped sacrificing dogs to prevent airborne diseases. How did we figure out that diseases could be spread through the air? I read that it was this couple Mildred, William and Mildred Wells, the husband and wife team who kind of figured this out. Who were they and how did they kind of come to this realization?
Carl: [00:13:15] Yeah. So Mildred and William Wells are this fascinating couple who have really just vanished into obscurity, you know, to work them into the book. I mean, I couldn't rely on biographers or historians who had done a whole lot of research on them. But when you put the pieces together, it's, it's a really extraordinary life that they had and kind of tragic too, because you know, they were warning us about airborne infection and people didn't listen.
[00:13:42] So Mildred had got her medical degree at University of Texas in 1915, which is really unusual, just right there. She comes East and works in a microbiology lab in Washington, DC. And there she meets William Wells, who at the time, he's what they call a sanitarian, you know, sort of sanitary engineer who's trying to save people's lives by dealing with water contamination, you know, which can cause typhoid and other diseases.
[00:14:09] He's particularly interested in how oysters can then get contaminated and people who are dying from eating raw oysters. He goes off to serve in World War I. And what he does is he brings clean water to the soldiers. He's in the sanitary corps. And so he's making sure that they're not going to die from contaminated water.
[00:14:30] Unfortunately, they're still dying. And actually a lot of them are dying of influenza, which he can't stop. And at the time, influenza is like a real mystery. There's so much about it, people didn't really understand.
[00:14:42] The 1918 flu pandemic kills like 50 to 100 million people. And I think that really haunted him. He comes back and spends the roaring 20s. He and Mildred, he's continuing to do work with oysters, but then he loses his job in the Great Depression and then gets hired as a kind of a low ranking teacher at Harvard, making very little money.
[00:15:02] He's a terrible teacher, but he and Mildred together start thinking about what if diseases can actually spread by the air. And the thing is that for thousands of years, there had been this idea, like Hippocrates and others, that the air itself could cause disease, miasmas. But that got thrown out in the late 19th century with the germ theory of disease. You know, typhoid, like you don't get that from miasmas, you get it from bad water.
[00:15:27] And so William and Mildred Wells said, no, wait a minute. We can envision a way, like I was telling you about those droplets, we can envision how people can spread diseases to each other through the air. We think that this is a problem. And they started to do a whole series of experiments in the 30s, really remarkable experiments with incredible devices that they invented themselves to demonstrate this.
[00:15:51] And on top of that, they figured out that you could actually stop things in the air. So you could use ultraviolet light. So during a measles outbreak in 1940, when they were in Philadelphia, they actually had taken over a school there and had installed ultraviolet lamps in some of the classrooms.
[00:16:09] So this huge measles epidemic comes and the kids who were in the classrooms with UV light had much lower rates of measles than even in the same school. So they were doing this kind of work that clearly showed that diseases can potentially be airborne and that clearly showed that you could do something to stop them in the air. But they got lost and forgotten and we really paid a price for that.
Annalee: [00:16:33] Yeah, it's so interesting. I just want to be clear on the fact that the reason why that ultraviolet light worked was because it was in the air. It's not that you can shine ultraviolet light on your body and destroy any kinds of...
Carl: [00:16:47] Yes, during the COVID pandemic, I recall some suggestions that you could shine a light into people or maybe bleach to treat COVID. But no, what I'm talking about is ultraviolet lamps that would be installed and actually the light would be pointing up towards the ceiling so as not to harm the kids with the rays coming directly down.
[00:17:07] But the kids would be breathing in and breathing out. And when they exhaled, if they had measles and they exhaled measles, it would float up and would go up to the top of the classroom. UV rays would shoot through those droplets and neutralize the viruses. And they did.
[00:17:27] This was no secret at the time. This was big news and there were headlines, big stories like, hey, soon we are going to be protected by these UV lamps everywhere. In all public spaces. You know, we're not going to have to worry about things like influenza anymore. Thanks to the Wells's, we're going to protect ourselves from airborne infection. It's really weird to see all of this just laid out in print because it was all entirely forgotten.
Annalee: [00:17:57] Yeah. Wow. And then kind of reawakened in ways that were misinterpretations of that study. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that you talk about is in the book is kind of this misdirect, I guess you could say, or this kind of U-turn that the study of the aerobiome took, especially in the mid-century during World War II and afterward.
[00:18:28] And basically, the military industrial complex became obsessed with bio weapons and the idea that, you know, airborne illnesses could be weaponized. And that kind of, it shaped the scholarship around it, but it also kind of diverted it. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that. It's such a weird and sad story.
Carl: [00:18:49] Yeah, this is quite remarkable because, you know, again, in the 1930s, William and Mildred Wells are doing this really remarkable work, demonstrating how diseases can spread through the air. And William Wells even invents this device to demonstrate how this works. It came to be known as the infection machine, where you could actually put animals like a mouse or a rabbit in a bell jar and you'd have these tubes, so you could very carefully deliver this air that's laced with droplets that have influenza viruses in them or something else. You know, you could kill the animals, you know, with a certain dose and lower the dose, the less likely the animals were to die, the less severe their disease was. Another demonstration of airborne disease. So you have that.
[00:19:37] And meanwhile, you also have these scientists who are studying, you know, things that are floating through the air that can harm farms, agriculture. They're flying around in airplanes trying to understand this. And one of them, one of these scientists, Fred Meyer, in 1938, coins the word “aerobiology”. So the whole science of aerobiology is ready to go.
[00:19:57] And then, unfortunately, World War II breaks out and the military says, you know what, we're going to take all this stuff, all these tools like the infection machine and all these other ideas that are being developed by people like Wells and Fred Meyer. And instead of using that to protect our food or our own health, we are going to create biological weapons with them. We are going to create airborne disease that we can intentionally release to kill armies or to starve nations.
[00:20:30] And at Camp Detrick, they just started building up this secret project with huge amounts of material throughout World War II, and then after World War II, the war is over. And the U.S. Army just keeps on expanding its biological warfare program, you know, using aerobiology to create more and more deadlier and deadlier weapons.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:56] Wow. So let's talk about science fiction. Yeah. One of the things you talk about in your book is how science fiction kind of shaped the way we think about airborne illness and, you know, and the notion of biological warfare spread through the air. And, you know, that even shaped how we kind of dealt with things in the run up to the Iraq War. I would love to hear more about that.
Carl: [00:21:16] Yeah, it's really interesting. I've always been a big fan of these kind of scary biological science fiction type movies, you know, like I remember watching The Andromeda Strain when I was a kid.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:29] Oh, yeah. That's a great movie.
Annalee: [00:21:31] Yeah, of course. And the novel has like a giant in-note section bibliography. Yeah, it's kind of odd.
Carl: [00:21:38] Yeah, so there's this really weird sort of dance between science and science fiction when it comes to biological weapons, because, you know, as soon as the germ theory of disease was established in the late 1800s, you know, H.G. Wells himself, the great pioneer of science fiction, like he immediately writes a story about an anarchist who wants to terrorize London with cholera, you know, like he's going to steal some cholera from a scientist to make havoc.
[00:22:10] Then there are these stories that you see in newspapers that, you know, spies are sharing with governments. Like, we think that those people over there in Japan or Germany or the Soviet Union or the United States, we think that they're doing this. We think that they're going to create this new kind of weapon. And everyone started dreaming about what it would be.
[00:22:30] And, you know, then the United States, you know, and other countries did do that secretly. And then in the Cold War, we sort of created this narrative that the terror of an attack from the enemy releasing diseases through the air in our cities. And what's really incredible is like in 1951, there's this public service type announcements on TV. It's like half an hour long. And it's basically like, you know, letting the country know about the threat of a biological attack. And it's presented by this epidemiologist named Alexander Langmuir.
[00:23:06] You know, he's really famous as creating the disease detectives at the CDC. He's really, you know, a real architect of modern public health. He was spending a lot of his time at Camp Detrick. He was very involved in biological warfare. And he wanted to create public health as a way to prepare for Soviet attack. And it's this terrifying video that he puts forward where he's like, you know, spraying fog into these little miniature houses and talking about how easily people would die in them and so on. He's telling a story.
[00:23:38] Like, it hasn't happened, but he wants to get people scared. And there's really like a direct line from there to The Andromeda Strain where, you know, Michael Crichton, he's like H.G. Wells. He sees a good story when he sees it. He's like, you know, biological weapon programs coming to light. You know, Joshua Lederberg, a scientist is worried about, you know, maybe satellites would bring germs down from space. So he creates the Andromeda strain, which is this terrifying airborne thing. And it just keeps going on from there. And on and on and on, movie after movie after movie, novels like The Cobra Event and so on.
[00:24:13] And these things affect policy. You know, Bill Clinton said like, you know, that that novel, The Cobra Event, like really had a lot to do with him establishing a huge bioterror defense program in the United States. And we're, you know, when they're in the run up to the war to Iraq, we were still hearing stories of imminent attack with biological weapons.
[00:24:37] I mean, talk about science fiction. I mean, when Colin Powell like waves around a little vile pretending that's anthrax, there were no giant anthrax stores in Iraq at the time. There were none. And that was part of the justification for that war. A fiction.
Annalee: [00:24:52] Yeah. I mean, it sounds like going all the way back to Langmuir, right? That he had created this kind of sci-fi story where he's spraying these miniature houses with, you know, dust and saying like, this could happen. But people take it in as this is happening. They don't realize that it's fictional, because it's being presented by a scientist or in the case of Colin Powell, by this, you know, military leader. And yet it is. It's entirely made up, right? It's just speculative.
Carl: [00:25:19] It is. It is. And I mean, I don't mean to diminish the possibility that people can die from biological warfare or bioterror. If you remember, like the Amerithrax attacks where, you know, anthrax spores were being spread in the mail. You know…
Annalee: [00:25:36] It turned out by an American, not by a foreign adversary.
Carl: [00:25:39] Right. That came after 9-11. And it was like, oh, this is Osama bin Laden, right? No, it was probably some American. We don't really know. But those were made at Fort Detrick. We know that those spores were American made. Yeah. It's just this dominant narrative.
[00:25:56] On the other hand, like if you're thinking about like airborne attack, you know, well, what about like, say tuberculosis? You know, that is an airborne disease and that kills over a million people every year. But they're mostly poor and it's a very slow disease. And so somehow that doesn't, you know, make for good ticket sales.
Annalee: [00:26:16] So we end up diverting a lot of our resources to this kind of speculative possibility instead of putting those resources into preventing something that we know is happening right now.
Carl: [00:26:27] Well, we still think about the next big pandemic as being, you know, something that's going to attack us, you know, like from the outside. I would say there's a kind of a military approach to how we deal with potential pandemics.
[00:26:44] The U.S. military is still very much involved in how we prepare for these things, which is, you know, kind of odd when you think about it. And the fact is that what you really need to withstand a pandemic are things like, you know, well supported health care systems, you know, really well supported public health networks with epidemiology and all the rest of it, which, you know, has relatively speaking been neglected.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:08] So, you know, after working on this book and writing about COVID for so long, have you changed any of your daily habits when it comes to like what you do to protect your health?
Carl: [00:27:19] I'm certainly aware of the air. Maybe everybody had that experience with COVID. I don't know how it is for you guys. Like, oh, right. I can breathe something in and it can make me sick. You know, washing hands or washing down your groceries, like it kind of gives you more of a feeling of maybe that you have control over what's entering your body. But we have to breathe a couple thousand times a day and we just we can't monitor every single breath. So it's a kind of a weird thing to become conscious of it. Obviously, working on a book, maybe really conscious of it.
Annalee: [00:27:53] Yeah.
Carl: [00:27:53] But, you know, like I'm a big fan of these carbon dioxide meters.
Annalee: [00:27:58] Same one I have. Yeah.
Carl: [00:27:59] Yeah. All right.
Annalee: [00:28:01] The aeronet. Yep.
Carl: [00:28:02] It's just interesting to be like, oh, I'm in a space that is actually really badly ventilated. And, oh, look at all these people here. Huh. I need to bear that in mind. And if one of them has COVID or who knows, you know, measles or what have you, that's going to be building up in that space as well.
[00:28:20] So, yeah, so I try to be more mindful. I do think about like, you know, even if I'm feeling fine, I might be carrying something. So like if I'm in CVS picking up a prescription, there's a chance that people in line to pick up prescriptions are dealing with cancer or something else. They've got a weak immune system. I don't want to be introducing stuff into the aerobiome in the drugstore that could endanger them. So I try to remind myself to pick up a mask and bring it.
Annalee: [00:28:48] Yeah. Awesome. Well, tell us where people can find your work.
Carl: [00:28:52] Well, I write for The New York Times. And so you can find a lot of my stuff there. I write, you know, every week or two, I've got a story there. And for my books and my talks, my website is my name, carlzimmer.com.
Annalee: [00:29:06] Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us and talking to us all about the air.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:11] Yeah. Thanks so much.
Carl: [00:29:12] Thanks you guys.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:13] This was so fascinating.
[00:29:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:18] Hey, by the way, did you know that the podcast you're listening to right now is entirely independent and it's funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon. It's incredible. We're just so grateful that y'all are helping us to make this work. You know, and if you become a patron, you are helping to make this podcast happen. You are fueling our search for truth and justice and, you know, correct opinions.
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[00:30:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:19] Hi, so now we're going to talk about the new season of Severance. Just FYI, first of all, there will be spoilers for all of Seasons One and Two of Severance in this conversation, although I don't think major spoilers. And also, we're sorry this episode is a few days late and also that the sound quality is maybe not the best we've had. Annalee and I are both traveling and we're kind of recording this in a hotel room right now. So...
Annalee: [00:30:44] Not just kind of, we literally are.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:45] Yeah, we are literally sitting in a hotel room right now. We're going to record this and then we're going to eat some chocolate digestives. And so that's our reward for making it through the labyrinth that is Severance.
[00:30:56] So, yeah, I just finished watching Season Two of Severance. And, you know, my main feeling is that I admire this show's kind of ongoing commitment to weirdness.
Annalee: [00:31:06] Yeah. And so full disclosure, I've watched basically the first third of Season Two, watched all of Season One eagerly and with great excitement. And it's funny because I don't feel like Season One was as much about weirdness as Season Two. I feel like Season One, I mean, of course it's weird, but I felt like it was much more conscious of itself as an allegory. And then it was really trying to kind of like follow the contours of that allegory out. So it felt a little bit less chaotic.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:44] That's fair. And I do think Season Two, I enjoyed a lot of the stuff where it was just like, this is fricking bonkers. Also, there were times when I was like, OK, they saw that people really responded to stuff in Season One and they're just doubling down on that. Like having just like, oh, this is just some wacky stuff that's happening. And also like, you know, Mr. Milchick has to do another dance. Like they're like, people really liked it when he danced in Season One, so he’s gonna dance again. And just like stuff like that, there was stuff where they were like trying to lean into what people liked about the show. But it's also like, I think it's a show that is weird because it's sort of Kafkaesque and sort of surreal.
Annalee: [00:32:20] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:20] And it's a show that kind of what I like about it is that it plays with this idea of kind of being trapped in this kind of corporate prison or kind of a labyrinth. There's a lot of labyrinth imagery in Season Two to the point where a major plot point is that there's like a secret hallway that they have to reach. But the directions are like basically you have to turn a million different ways and go like, it's like basically navigating a maze, literally.
[00:32:43] And the ways that corporations, it's also a show that's like deeply about the ways that corporations kind of subsume your entire identity or force you to form a false consciousness around your work self. It's kind of literalizing a lot of stuff that is very real, especially in the days of like return to the office.
Annalee: [00:33:01] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:02] And so, you know, and the thing that really jumped out at me watching Season Two of Severance is, as Annalee knows, you know, I'm obsessed with R.D. Laing, the Scottish psychologist, who, by the way, is the subject of a biopic where he's played by David Tennant.
Annalee: [00:33:17] I know I was so confused when Dr. Who was playing R.D. Laing.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:22] He's a versatile performer, actually. And R.D. Laing, you know, he was a he kind of revolutionized psychology in a lot of ways. He was very much like anti institutionalization, anti like traditional explanation to schizophrenia where it's just like, oh, it's the mom’s fault or whatever. He was like very like he tried to kind of modernize things in a lot of way. And the thing, the book of his that really kind of influenced a lot of people was this book from 1965, The Divided Self.
[00:33:52] And in The Divided Self, he's kind of talking about schizophrenia, which was like a huge concept at the time. But also he's kind of talking about the way that we create different versions of ourselves or different masks or different like identities for different contexts, like you're a different person at work than you are at home or with your family or out with your friends. And people who have mental health problems take this to an unhealthy degree or kind of try to… Their selves get so fragmented that they can't cope.
[00:34:22] And at one point in the book, R.D. Laing writes about a man who feels like he is wearing a false self at work. And this is just this kind of felt really relevant to me. R.D. Laing writes, “He felt that he was a pretense and a sham at school, and experienced panic at the office. It was more particularly when he himself began to deliberately cultivate the splits in his being that his condition took on an ominous turn. He tried to sever the ties that related different aspects of his being together. In particular, he tried not to be in his actions or in his expressions – not to be what he was doing.”
Annalee: [00:35:07] Hmm.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:08] You know, reading that quote after watching the second season of Severance, it lands really differently because he's talking about this idea of suffering the different aspects of yourself from each other and even denying that these different versions of you share the same body, which is a thing that's very literal in the newest season of Severance. Like people kind of deny that they're in the same body as their outies. They're like, well, it's not really me.
Annalee: [00:35:32] And they're at odds with each other.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:33] Yeah. And it's yeah. And so I feel like there's a lot of stuff in R.D. Laing about believing that the other version of you is not you.
Annalee: [00:35:43] Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, Laing was writing kind of in the mid 20th century. And there's a lot of kind of popular sociology books that come out around that time. Like The Organization Man by William White, which was just a big, you know, very popular book about the experience of submerging yourself into corporate life.
[00:36:11] And, you know, this is a period after World War Two when people from the middle class, a lot of white people are experiencing a new kind of affluence. You know, maybe people who had been raised in a working class family, they kind of came up into being able to do office work. And that was considered, you know, a step up. And it really had a different psychological effect on people.
[00:36:37] And one of the different places is that when you're doing a corporate job, if you're in an organization man type person, you're doing what later Robert Reich in the 90s called symbolic analytic labor. You're doing mental work. And it's very different from what people a generation before had really validated as real work, right? Like working on an assembly line, being a carpenter, doing things with your hands that are physical.
[00:37:07] And, you know, there's a whole body of criticism, you know, around that kind of work, you know, I mean, including going back to Karl Marx, who talks about how the experience of doing physical labor is alienation and it divides you from yourself and you go into work and your body doesn't belong to you. You produce products that aren't yours, which is a form of alienation. That's literally the definition of Marxist alienation is when you are making things with your body that you do not possess and that you don't have the power to sell, right? They belong to your boss.
[00:37:46] And so what happens in the 1950s is that people start becoming aware of the fact that there's a different kind of alienation you experience when you're doing mental work so that when you go to work, instead of someone else using your hands to build cars, someone is using your brain to do math or someone is using your brain to come up with creepy policies around resource use or they're using your brain to like build atomic bombs or develop things that you actively dislike.
[00:38:21] And it's called, you know, some critics call it, you know, mental alienation or they call it a divided self. And I think that this becomes more and more pronounced, you know, throughout the 20th century.
[00:38:39] And Barbara Ehrenreich writes about it in Fear of Falling in the 1980s, which is all about the psychology of being middle class. So it's this it's like, what if your brain was working on an assembly line? And like, that's just a completely new concept. And I really feel like Severance is getting back to that kind of critique.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:00] And it's a retro show in a lot of ways. It's a show where all the technology looks retro. Everything in the office is very retro looking. They don't seem to have the Internet. They don't seem to have like their computers are like 1970s computers. So it is kind of interesting. And like, in fact, you know, those kinds of jobs are now are now under threat.
[00:39:19] So the thing I liked about Season Two of Severance is that it takes these sort of questions we're talking about, you know, identity and embodiment. It takes them a lot further than Season One. And then that way, it feels like it justifies itself having a second season. The notion that you kind of alluded to of like the innies being alienated from the outies, that's kind of played up a lot in Season Two, in various ways.
[00:39:41] There are two different love triangles where one person is torn between a person's innie and their outie. First, it happens where like Mark has sex with Helena thinking with the outie of Helly thinking he's having sex with Helly because Helena is impersonating her.
Annalee: [00:39:58] Right. Which is like the whole thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:01] Later, he realizes that actually he had sex with the wrong version of Helena and he has sex with Helly. And it's like he's torn between he's not really torn. But it's this thing of like he's being played between these two different versions, these two different versions of this one body. And then later, there's a full on love triangle where Dylan gets to have visitations with his wife.
Annalee: [00:40:22] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:23] His outie's wife comes to visit him and he starts falling in love with his outie's wife and his outie gets jealous and forbids his wife to see his innie. And it's this whole fucking thing where it gets really weird and intense. And it has to do with like a lot. It's really complicated. It has to do with insecurity.
Annalee: [00:40:40] It has to do with the fact that like the wife also kind of likes his innie more.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:45] She does.
Annalee: [00:40:45] He's a much kinder person.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:48] He's not as like jaded and angry and like the innocence of the innie's is talked about a lot. And like, you know, outie's and innie's are just constantly at war in this new season. And there's a whole, there's a long sequence in the penultimate episode of the season where Mark has an argument with the other version of himself.
[00:41:07] They figure out how to like videotape and like pass it back and forth. It's complicated. And so Mark S and Mark Scout are arguing. And then there's this bizarre scene where there's a long conversation about like, well, a person's outie could go to hell, but their innie could go to heaven. And like Christian theology is deciding that innies have separate souls. It's like, what are we doing? It's very strange.
Annalee: [00:41:34] I mean, I kind of love that though, because it's like you said, they're leaning into the bit. And they're really embracing the weirdness. And this is something about the show too, which is that it started out in the first season, I felt being very clearly about the organization man, about corporate life and the psychology of splitting yourself.
[00:41:57] And I feel like in the second season, it got much more into religion and kind of cults. And of course it's still an office. It's still a workplace, but more of the kind of mythology around the company comes into the story. That's definitely in the first season too.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:19] Yeah, cure and all that crap.
Annalee: [00:42:21] Yeah. And it's like, but in the first season, it felt like it was kind of more in the background, kind of like when corporations tell like mythological stories about their founders. And this in second season, it felt like it was very much the way that a religion can split you in half. And then you have yourself where you're like, there's a part of you that wants to be part of the church and wants to be saved. And there's the other part of you that's like, no, that's actually really toxic and I really need to leave the church.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:49] Yeah, for sure. And like, yeah, the religious stuff, like it's so much more played up. We finally find out why they have goats in the office. And it's because in the final episode of Season Two, they're going to sacrifice a goat to like lead someone into the afterlife and there's like a whole scene where like they're like, this goat is so cute and stuff. And like, how can we kill this nice goat? It's like very silly.
Annalee: [00:43:11] Does Gwendolyn Christie protect the goat?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:14] Yes, she does, actually. She basically helps to kill the guy who was going to kill the goat. She ends up...
Annalee: [00:43:22] Good!
Charlie Jane: [00:43:22] Yeah, no, that guy sucked and he deserved to die. So, you know, and like the thing of having like a separate work self, I feel like a thing that they do a lot in Season Two that's interesting is they kind of play around with like Mr. Milchick and his work self and how his work behavior is being policed. And he has this really traumatizing employee review where they're like, you have to stop using such big words. They want him to act basically dumber. They want him to act dumber and they want him to like speak in monosyllables instead of in this grandiose fashion, which is the way they all speak in a grandiose fashion too. So they just decided that the one like this one black guy shouldn't speak in this. And he finally has that amazing moment where he tells them devour feculence, which is just like, it's so incredible.
[00:44:11] The things that didn't land for me about Season Two are it felt like the pacing was incredibly slow. Like I felt like there were 10 episodes of the season. It really should have been six or eight and like the mystery box stuff. I feel like in Season One, it's like an elaborate extended metaphor about your work self and your home self not being connected. And there's like mystery stuff. Like what are they doing with those numbers and stuff? And you know, what's the point of all this and what's going on and why is Mark's wife there?
[00:44:38] But in Season Two, they really lean into that stuff and they really like, it has that thing that like I associate with a lot of those like post-Lost shows, like The Event or like Flash Forward or whatever, where somebody will be in the room with someone who knows the answers to all their questions. And that the person who knows the answers has every incentive to just spill the beans, but instead they just say cryptic stuff. Like there's a bunch of scenes in like episodes eight or nine where Mark is talking to Miss Cobell and she's like, “and they're going to complete cold Harbor and then they're going to kill your wife.”
[00:45:11] And he doesn't just say, “okay, I'm not doing shit until you explain what the fuck all this is about. Because you just told me like…” And you know, it feels like the reasons for not explaining shit is just because we want to keep the mystery going and stuff does get explained in the final episode of Season Two, but in a way that's like more questions and more mysteries.
Annalee: [00:45:30] Yeah. There’s the box inside the box.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:31] And I still don't really understand what the hell was going on with Mark's wife. I understand it on one level, but I was also like, I don't know.
Annalee: [00:45:38] It's funny because it's sort of the opposite of the info dump problem that you often see in science fiction where like people are doing too much info dumping and too much like, “as you know, Bob” type speeches, but like sometimes you need that. Like there's actually sometimes that that is like incredibly satisfying to have in a story. And when this, when they deny it to you, it's just, I think bad storytelling.
Charlie Jane: [00:46:03] Yeah. And there was a lot of stuff. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that if you think about it, it doesn't really make sense. Like Mark at some point knows that if he goes into work and completes this project, he's going to, it's going to lead to them killing his wife. And he comes up with this kind of convoluted plan to rescue his wife before that happens. But he could just never go back into work and his wife would be spared.
[00:46:24] Like he could just be like, you know what? I, now that I know that me going to work is helping to kill my wife. I'm just, you know, he doesn't even, there's not a scene where he's like, “well, I guess I'm just never going to work again. Or I'm going to like use my incredibly strong bargaining position to like, because they desperately need me to complete this project.” It's very strange. Yeah. I feel like at this point, I'd like to pivot to just talking about like our new kind of model of dystopia in general.
[00:46:48] There was this really good article in Slate recently, which we'll put in the show notes about like the new dystopia and it kind of talked about Severance and The Boys and Paradise, which is a show I haven't gotten to watch yet. And a couple of others. And basically the gist of it is like now it's like kind of once again, kind of paranoid, kind of like shadowy people are doing shadowy things, but it's very focused on these big corporations that are kind of manipulating things and governments are either kind of non-existent or have been like captured by the rich and feels very now like it feels like this is a hundred percent of the world we are living in in real life.
Annalee: [00:47:24] Yeah. I mean, it's the oligarchy dystopia, right? It's interesting because I was thinking about this in the context of sort of late Soviet era science fiction. This Strugatsky brothers are these really well-known science fiction authors write a lot about, I mean, they're writing obliquely about what it means to live in a country where all of your thoughts are controlled and like you can't, your freedom is illusory. And they have this amazing novel that comes out kind of, I think in the early seventies, although I think they wrote it earlier called Roadside Picnic, which is made into a movie called Stalker, which a lot of people have probably seen.
[00:48:12] But anyway, it's about it's a very simple plot. It's like basically basically aliens come to Earth and leave some garbage behind. But it's so their technology is so advanced that humans are trying desperately to kind of find the garbage and reverse engineer it and use it to make energy or like new materials. And and it's set in a capitalist world because they wanted to make it a critique of America.
[00:48:41] And so it's just this horrible dystopia where people are they have no choice in their lives. They're having to go do these dangerous, terrible things that are warping their minds to like get resources. And I feel like that is echoed a little bit in these stories now, because there's this element of being controlled by a corporation. But also, it's strongly about feeling as if you are going insane and feeling as if something about your labor is inherently maddening.
[00:49:18] And which is a little bit different from the organization man vibe, which is more like your work is deadening, like it kills your feelings as opposed to it like turns your mind into chaos. And so that was why I brought up the Sturgatsky brothers, because that's kind of the vibe in Roadside Picnic, too. And I wonder if that's again, to go back to the beginning, I wonder if that's the dystopia of oligarchy, as opposed to the dystopia of, say, pure capitalism, or the dystopia of like pure authoritarianism, because there's an element of chaos.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:52] Yeah. And like, something I was thinking about as I watched Severance, especially was that like, there were a bunch of shows from like the 70s and 80s that got rebooted in like 2010 ish. And like, so Knight Rider, The Bionic Woman, they're all about someone who is like a special person or has a special thing is working for a government agency. Like Knight Rider, he's working for the government, I think. Bionic Woman, she's definitely working for the government. But in the rebooted versions, they're working for a corporation. In Bionic Woman, there's suddenly like a corporation that's like benevolent, that's trying to save the world, that is turning her into a Bionic Woman and using its corporate resources. And like same in Knight Rider, the 2009 Knight Rider reboot, there's like a corporation called the Greyman Corporation that like is what Knight Rider works for with his magic car.
[00:50:41] And it's just like, we can't imagine governments having the wherewithal or you know, the inherent goodness to do these world-saving things. We have to make it be a corporation because that's what's dated about these premises. What's dated is the idea that the government would actually create a Bionic Woman and send her out to fight bad guys.
Annalee: [00:51:01] Or would have the resources.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:02] Or would have the resources. Or would have the will or whatever. And I just, it's interesting to see that flipped around for like, yeah, the kind of dystopias that used to be like the evil government thing that's controlling you or whatever. It's now the evil corporation and the corporation owns you and the government is just like irrelevant. And I feel like this is kind of the flip side of that in a way.
[00:51:24] My other thought was just like, it's so hard not to think about Dollhouse, that show from like 2009-ish. Oh, that same era actually as the Knight Rider reboot and the Dollhouse reboot, the Bionic Woman reboot. It's so hard not to think about Dollhouse because they have Dick and Lockman, who was one of the major characters in Dollhouse, is now playing a woman who, it's Mark's wife and she's got like 25 different personalities that she can take on by going into different rooms. And it's like, this is literally Dollhouse. You're literally just doing Dollhouse with one of the actors from Dollhouse.
[00:51:56] And the thing that they see to be leading towards the dystopia, where I'm going to guess the end game is that Lumon and the corporation wants to be able to like create mind wiped, you know, slaves.
Annalee: [00:52:07] Yeah, yeah. Perfect workers.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:08] That's basically the end game of Dollhouse too, where like actually the end game of Dollhouse is a dystopia where the rich can inhabit like tons of bodies and like they can just put their brains into like everybody. And so everybody's this one rich guy, but also they can like control people and turn them into drones.
[00:52:26] So like it's just basically like Severance is basically a reboot of Dollhouse using one of the main actors from Dollhouse. And it's very strange.
Annalee: [00:52:32] Yeah. It's interesting because this fear of being – of having your mind owned is echoed in a movie like Moon, which came out over a decade ago, but also in Mickey 17. They're both about corporations that are making a bunch of clones of people to be compliant workers. And it's what happens when two of the clones or three or however many clones get together and start realizing like, “wait a minute, like what's going on here,” much as the innies and outies start kind of getting together and fighting each other.
[00:53:15] So I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think that this corporate dystopia, this oligarchy dystopia that we're talking about is really about corporations owning our bodies.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:30] Our identities.
Annalee: [00:53:31] Yeah. Owning our identities in ways that we can't control.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:35] A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think that's actually a good way to place to end it.
Annalee: [00:53:38] Yay!
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Annalee: [00:53:42] Thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. And if you need more of us on social media, remember you can find us on Mastodon, on Instagram, on Bluesky, and on Patreon. And in most of those places we're either called Our Opinions or OOACPod or some variation on our name, you'll find us. And we want to really thank our brilliant producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for our music. And thanks to you, our listeners, for continuing to help us out by funding us on Patreon.
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Both: [00:54:32] Bye!
[00:54:35] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]