The conference room where she was “born” into life as an innie in Lumon, the mysterious society at the center of “Severance”, is also a kind of womb. And when she leaves him, she’ll be confined only to the confined, labyrinthine world of the Lumon building, which doubles as a mid-century prison.
Jeremy Hindle, Emmy-nominated production designer for “Severance,” took the metaphor of “childbirth” and put it to use, creating a world within a world at Lumon. It’s an understated, meticulously designed environment that, at first glance, is impressive and aesthetically pleasing. But the longer you spend inside Lumon, the more menacing he becomes.
“It should be this beautiful environment, but also, they experience them underground,” Hindle told CNN.
The details, big and small, that make ‘Severance’
Part of “Severance’s” appeal is its inability to be placed in time, an effect that was created in painstaking detail, Baseman and Hindle said. There are clear nods to the mid-century offices of “Mad Men” or “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, structures that are elegant, precise and somehow still practical. (The exterior of the Lumon building was shot in an existing mid-century building, the Bell Labs Holmdel complex in New Jersey.) But the very concept of “Severance” feels like a futuristic dystopia.
“Part of the mystique of ‘Severance’ is that you don’t really know where you are or when you are,” Baseman said. “We just wanted to create a new world that we hadn’t seen before.”
To do that, Baseman said, the team behind the series — including executive producer and director Ben Stiller and showrunner Dan Erickson — focused as much on the background details as the larger design. There’s not a pen out of place at Lumon – even the fake foods in the office vending machines have been selected for a purpose.
The cars his characters drive are slightly outdated station wagons and similar models; the desktops the four main innies work on are chunky, rounded, and retro. The opaque and eccentric character of Patricia Arquette with a double life required double the detail – at work, where she is Mrs. Cobell, her office is sparsely decorated; at home, where she is Mrs. Selvig, her home is a mess of burnt cookies, framed tapestries devoted to Lumon principles, and that eerie shrine of a Lumon luminary. Many of these details may never enter the frame, Baseman said, but they contribute to the haunting atmosphere — and provide fun Easter eggs for eager viewers to nab during a rewatch.
The office that looks more like a “playground”
The main office of the “Macro Data Refinement Team”, where Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) spend their entire intimate lives, sets the tone for the broadcast, Hindle said. The large white-walled room is bathed in fluorescent light, with an island of four connected desks in the center against an astroturf green carpet.
“It’s the weirdest room ever,” Hindle said, comparing the office jungle to “an underground umbilical cord.” (Another allegory of childbirth!)
The ceiling is deliberately set too low — around 7ft 9in, Hindle said — to create a feeling of coziness and comfort and, conversely, claustrophobia and menace. And the details in the office – the weirdness of the desktop computers, the meticulously manicured kitchen and supply closet, the perfectly manicured carpet “lawn” – are meant to look more like props on a shelf than practical components. a desk, Hindle said.
“They’re kids in an office environment,” he said. “The green is like a playground, the desk is a small device on which you can play.”
And if the desktop reminds viewers a bit of the Discovery One from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” that’s a good thing, Hindle said. The office is downright Kubrickian – beautiful in its starkness and symmetry, but disconcerting in its emptiness. This cognitive dissonance isn’t too far off from what guts and guts feel like once they’re cut.
“I treated it like a spaceship,” he said of the MDR’s main office. “The best sci-fi is really claustrophobic, but you really want to be there.”
The halls of hell are real
Perhaps the scariest part of Lumon’s offices, however, is its seemingly endless, blindingly bright hallways. They get narrower and wider as the characters move through them, and it’s not just a camera thing, Hindle said: The team built the maze of hallways on set, so when the actors skim through them for what feels like minutes, they’re really doing it. It’s a practical effect that, on screen, makes audiences feel like they’re walking with the innies — and, on set, made the actors quite uncomfortable, Hindle said.
“We tortured them in a weird way,” he said slyly.
Lumon green is good for something
Although Lumon’s color palette is largely dull grays and stark whites, the monotony is broken up with pops of green. There is the green carpet of the MDR office; the artificial greens of the fake plants that populate the office; green upholstery in the conference room where Helly was “born” and the seating area near the only impossibly cramped elevator.
“I see it as off-putting,” Baseman said. “Green is often ‘green with envy’, illness is also life. It’s a mixture of all that.”
The green of the MDR office carpet resembles a pasture, Baseman said, on which the innies are supposed to “play” while Lumon’s superiors watch them.
Even when Irving and Burt (played by Turturro and Christopher Walken, respectively) share a moment of vulnerability in the supply room, surrounded by lush vegetation, those plants are also wrong. They suggest the notion of life — an artificial notion, like that of an innie.
The spare innie world against the cluttered outside world
The “Severance” team decided early on that the innie world should look like just weird enough that if someone inside found out, no one would ever believe them about what they saw, Hindle said. But the world of outies has its own unique visual language that often feels darker than Lumon sets.
When Devon and Ricken, Mark’s sister and brother-in-law, appear onscreen, warm oranges and golds enter the show’s color palette. They are totally disconnected from Lumon (as far as viewers know) and share a loving and wholesome relationship. But Mark’s outer self is alone in a blue, permanently darkened townhouse – Lumon’s corporate accommodation – with barely a personal touch in its place. (There’s a single framed poster for vintage bikes leaning against a wall, Baseman said, a detail Stiller suggested that teases Mark’s former life.) We clearly know from spending time with Mark that the separation process has hardly solved its problems.
But Hindle wondered if Lumon understood correctly: an average desk in an office today is likely adorned with family photos, keepsakes and other personal flourishes that make their workspace feel ‘more intimate’ . But when work and family life intertwine, the separation seems increasingly attractive.
“They were really immaculate, immaculately designed, and there was nothing personal about your desks,” Hindle said of midcentury desks of yore. “People are being treated like cattle now. They’re letting you bring your family to work, and that’s why you’re willing to be a slave to this thing. Work, do your job, and go home.”