So, I’ve taken several days off the Severance project and wanted to give an update. Beyond my recent focus on the political economy, which is real and may lead to more rants from me, I’ve also run into some exhaustion in writing about the AppleTV+ show.
The central issue is this — there’s a lot of “Severance,” 19 episodes to date — and my method requires a lot of attention. I write beat-by-beat, which should lead to somewhere between 7 to 9 segments for each episode, making this a much larger project than my work on “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” “Drive My Car” or “Three Colors: Blue.”
The second issue is that, unlike those other works, “Severance” is popular, which means there is a LOT of content about it out in the wild already, tons of YouTube analyses, blogs, TikToks, you name it. It’s easy for the kind of material I create to get lost in some of the extremely detailed episode recaps that are already out there. My method isn’t quite the same — it’s slow viewing, meant to focus on details, but not the kind of puzzle-solving that most “Severance” watchers tend to focus on. I don’t particularly care about solving the mysteries of the show. If anything, I’d like to find new, deeper mysteries.
My third issue is that while I like this go-slow approach to a lot of narrative art, I’ve recently become hooked on its exact opposite — speed watching. Most of the streaming services right now (Netflix, AppleTV and the Criterion Channel, in particular) allow you to crank up the speed of the playback, all the way up to 2X speed. I used this to rewatch season 1 of “Severance” before the new episodes came out, and I’ve been watching a whole lot of really long movies recently this way. I’m now accustomed to speeding through narration, so slowing everything back down to the style necessary for my writing is highly jarring. My mindset is more engaged with really long Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean films, watched at breakneck speed.
Which brings me to my final problem — my attitude right now. And this circles me back to politics. I’m deeply turned off by all things Americana at the moment. The fact that country music is having a major moment really sickens me and I’m not inclined to like anything happening in pop culture right now. This attitude, however, has become so widespread that it too is having a moment, as witnessed in this SNL skit from last night. I’d prefer to just silently go about my method of paying a lot of attention to things no one else cares about and not patting myself on the back for it.
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