Unsevered: How great storytelling transcends political and ideological boundaries

Severance, Joe Rogan, political divides and how viewers negotiate their interpretations of stories whose viewpoints challenge their own

In case you missed it, my discussion as part of a panel on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on BBC Radio Wales’ All Things Considered is available on BBC Sounds for another 14 days – listen here.

When was the last time you deeply enjoyed a story that challenged your core beliefs?

In this polarised age, it feels like we’re increasingly pushed to consume media that aligns with our existing worldviews. Yet some of our most meaningful encounters with art happen precisely when stories push against our comfortable assumptions.

For some audiences though, enjoying stories is reduced to ideological agreement. I’ve seen that both in Christian circles where there’s a strong emphasis on engaging with content that presents the right ‘worldview’, and in various secular attempts to conform media engagement to ideological alignment.

For example, I was struck recently by a comment on X about Apple TV’s brilliant show Severance, with a left-wing viewer puzzling over why Joe Rogan as a right-winger should like it:

For myself, I’ve been gripped by the second season of Severance. At London Book Fair this week, I loved the badges from Emma Barnes on the Consonance stand, with Severance-flavoured badges like “I do Book MDR” and “EAA is Mysterious and Important” (EAA is the European Accessibility Act, which publishers are scrambling to comply with, by the way), as well as AI-sceptical slogans like “Don’t prompt, think”. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Severance recently, and also about having meaningful conversations across divides.

Severance is a dystopian drama/thriller/satire of corporate culture, brilliantly written, shot, and paced, with a very deliberate tone and cinematography that gives it a distinct voice while echoing something of the symbolic weirdness of Patrick McGoohan’s classic show The Prisoner.

I’ve been struck by both its timeliness in this era of runaway dehumanising technology and in its echoes of C S Lewis’s prophetic critique of technocracy, sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength (perhaps something I might explore more after the end of the current season, when I can evaluate it as a whole).

I don’t know if I’ll end up ‘agreeing’ with its total outlook and worldview as that emerges over the whole story. But as a Christian and enjoyer of Severance, I found the implication of the commentator on X that someone religious shouldn’t enjoy the show because it’s critical of religion reductive and odd, as is the wider criticism of someone ‘right-wing’ enjoying it.

Why do we enjoy stories from different perspectives from our own?

The idea that someone ‘right wing’ shouldn’t appreciate Severance reveals quite a low ‘theory of mind’ in terms of not being able to understand in good faith where people from another viewpoint are coming from (as the pejorative ‘lizard brain’ suggests!).

I’m not right-wing (I feel pretty homeless on the political spectrum), but I’ve engaged enough in right-leaning conversations and spaces to know that many wouldn’t see themselves as being about ‘control’, rather emphasising themes of liberty and freedom.

Of course, the danger is that the kind of freedom the right talks about is only freedom of a particular sort for particular people, which might work out in practice as control of others. The freedom of a corporation to treat its workers exactly how it wants can have some pretty controlling consequences, for example, as Severance illustrates vividly in the nightmarish experiences of the severed workers, Mark S, Helly R, Dylan G and Irving B.

To have a meaningful dialogue, we need to understand our political opponents’ views in the terms that they recognise, as well as challenging the unintended (or at least unspoken) impacts of their positions.

More fundamentally, this attitude suggests our enjoyment of stories is reliant on us agreeing with what they are ‘saying’ in terms of a clearly defined ‘messages’, which I think is a pretty reductive and narrow way of judging stories.

But it does raise an interesting question: why do we often still enjoy stories even if they are critical of things we support, communicate ‘messages’ that we deeply disagree with?

Negotiated interpretations

Let’s start by granting the premise that Severance is ‘explicitly critical of capitalism and corporate culture, of religion, of control’.

(I actually think that Severance as a sophisticated piece of storytelling is doing more than just delivering a critique of these things as its ‘message’, but we’ll get to that later).

The obvious nuance is that it is perfectly possible to see capitalism and religion as being in principle good things, while also recognising that they can become distorted and abused.

As a Christian, for example, I’m not offended by the critique of high-control religious indoctrination, because I’m opposed to that form of faith too.

Where I am likely to disagree with a critic of religion is whether my particular faith falls in the subcategory of harmful religion. (I’d also want to debate how we define the category of ‘harmful’ in the first place, which depends on a prior framework of morality and of human flourishing – these definitions aren’t neutral, floating free of our ultimate commitments.)

I recognise there are such things as cults, and agree with the critique of them; I just don’t believe that Christianity is a cult, at least not inherently, though it can be distorted in that direction.

The religious dimension of Lumon has strong echoes of sects like Scientology and Mormonism. We’re very obviously on the fringes here, on the extremes of weird, and it’s not clear to me that the writers and producers of Severance have set out to attack religion as a whole, as the Twitter commentator above seems to assume, as opposed to exploring how religion can be used in controlling and dangerous ways.

So I can appreciate what Severance is doing in critiquing religion, without feeling I have to accept that as applying to every instance of religious faith.

Sympathy with the devil?

Even then, I think it’s possible to enjoy a story even when your own beliefs are the target.

A good example of this tension is my enjoyment of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I love Pullman’s storytelling and imagination, all while rejecting the viewpoint that we are better off trying to build the ‘republic of heaven’ – not a kingdom ruled by God. Pullman’s narrative is one in which ‘the Authority’, his version of God, is killed by the heroes. In his Miltonesque story, his sympathy is for the devil, though Pullman sees Milton as being ‘of the devil’s party, without knowing it’.

But the God that Pullman rejects is not the God I believe in either: I believe in the God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, who is not raw power and authority, but emptied himself self-giving love to sacrifice himself for us so we can have relationship with him and be part of his kingdom as a better way of being human.

Of course, Pullman’s critique is explicitly aimed at the Judeo-Christian God (the Authority is named as Yahweh, El, Adonai and so on), and I take his objection seriously — if I’m being intellectually serious, I can’t just “no true Scotsman” his concerns away. But I think it’s possible to show how the Christian understanding of God is materially different to the Authority he depicts in his story, with Jesus, who is so absolutely central to the Christian understanding of God, almost entirely absent from mention in His Dark Materials.

As such, I’ve come to a negotiated appreciation of Pullman’s writing, affirming in part his critique of authoritarian religion, while distinguishing it from my own faith. Indeed, I think the best aspects of what Pullman is aiming for in terms of ‘the republic of heaven’ shows that he might be of Christ’s party, without knowing it.

Stories as embodied dialogues

A story dramatises tensions and conflicts, which means that it doesn’t resolve down simply to a ‘viewpoint’ or ‘argument’. A story might contain themes and perspectives, but an interesting story is richer and more complex than that, with characters, choices and events that resist reduction to a single statement. I prefer stories that pose questions more than they impose answers.

As such, I think storytelling works better as an invitation to reflection and conversation around a theme, than as a way of dictating a single unambiguous ‘position’.

If you try to honestly capture the complexity of people and the world, you will find yourself representing people, situations and questions that don’t have easy answers.

And part of the narrative tension of a story is working out what kind of story it is going to be, and what the author means to say by that – is it comedy or tragedy? Will the good guys defeat the baddies, or is it not that kind of story?

The conflicts between characters, the choices they make, become a kind of embodied dialogue between different worldviews at play.

An author usually tips their hand by having a particular viewpoint ‘win out’ – whether good triumphs over evil or not says something about the author’s view of the world.

The Lord of the Rings, for example, offers a nuanced climax (spoiler alert!): Frodo fails by succumbing to the power of the Ring, but, providentially, evil defeats itself through Gollum seizing the Ring and falling into the fires of Mount Doom – an outcome only made possible by the pity of Bilbo, Frodo and, in the end, Sam to a wretched creature who is victim as well as villain.

Frodo is ultimately unable to cast the Ring into the fire

All of that is highly suggestive of Tolkien’s worldview and beliefs, of human fallenness and divine providence, of the ultimate triumph of goodness against the ‘long defeat of history’.

But similar endings can be vehicles for very different meanings: a story where evil wins, for example, might be written out of cynicism or nihilism, or it might be written by an author who uses it to suggest, realistically, that evil wins sometimes, but we should keep fighting for good anyway.

(See, for example, Game of Thrones, which is sometimes been interpreted as nihilist, but I think has an implied moral perspective on the side of the downtrodden, all while focusing on how often people are actually downtrodden.)

The importance of form and excellence

Art does not exist on a single dimension, that of ‘message’. We also need to remember that art is form. It’s possible to appreciate and delight in the craft of a well-made story, even if there are aspects of it we find objectionable in terms of theme and message.

And Severance is simply very well-made: the writing is sharp, the acting performances are brilliant (especially the different versions of characters played by Adam Scott and Britt Lower as their ‘innies’ and ‘outies’), the whole vibe and cinematography impeccably pitched and very deliberately defined.

Stories speak to us at a deeper, more implicit level than the rational and didactic. The strength of Severance is that it makes you feel the oppression of Lumon and conflict in the characters. It captures an emotional reality that people can find applicable to their lives and situations in very different ways, that speak to our experiences in ways that cut across ideological lines and that we might interpret rationally in very different directions.

Interplay and imaginative hospitality

I don’t think it’s wrong for stories to put across a particular viewpoint – some authorial perspective is inescapable, and important for art as a form of communication.

The problem is when it gets reduced to only this, with no remainder.

I think good stories resist a singular line of argument, exploring tensions and offering a kind of imaginative hospitality.

“Imaginative hospitality” both as invites people into the story to see the world in a particular way, and leaves space for discussion and alternative interpretation in the interplay of characters and situations.

Perhaps that space arises is in a villain whose viewpoint and motives we can sympathise with.

Perhaps it is in a key choice in a story which different characters have different perspectives on, inviting the question of what we think and what we would we do.

Perhaps in contrasting episodes that seek to explore the reality of this, but also that, like ancient proverbs that pair opposite but not necessarily contradictory truths.

These interplays make a story feel like a conversation that the reader is invited to participate in, rather than a monologue to listen to.

Loving our neighbours by listening to their stories

Finally, one of the fundamental reasons I enjoy stories is to encounter viewpoints that are different from my own.

I read and watch stories to listen and to learn, and to be able to respond with my own perspective in conversation with them.

If someone is telling a story about the evils of religion, they may well have good reasons for doing so. Or maybe they are repeating biases and cultural assumptions that aren’t very well examined. Either way, I need to listen attentively to understand where they are coming from, to love my neighbour by listening to their perspective.

Stories are a powerful way to step into other people’s perspectives – it’s important not to lose ourselves so that we aren’t able to give a response based on our own convictions, beliefs and experiences.

But we must also be open to being moved and changed by what we hear from others. In an era that seeks to polarise, and to push people and stories into clear opposing tribes, we need stories that can bridge ideological differences and open up space for conversation.

As much as there is that divides left-wing and right-wing, the corporate dystopia in Severance is one that few people actually want – but we have a world that resembles it uncomfortably.

Rather than gatekeeping who gets to enjoy the show based on their political leanings, perhaps we should try to work out the common ground we have by which we can make our world less severed and more integrated, for everyone’s good.

What do you think? How much do you enjoy stories because they offer other points of view, and how much do you want them to align with your beliefs? Let me know in the comments!