(Image source: Taylor Callery)

Two Emmy-nominated TV dramas from 2022 explore the birth of new religious movements in communities under duress: Yellowjackets and Severance.

Yellowjackets, streaming on Showtime, focuses on a girls’ high school soccer team from New Jersey who, together with the team’s male assistant coach and head coach’s two sons, survive a plane crash in the Canadian Rockies on their way to the 1996 championships. Stranded in primitive conditions for nineteen months, not all of them make it out alive. The ritualized cannibalistic survival tactics of those who do are the show’s main focus.

Severance, streaming on Apple TV, is set in an alternative version of our current reality and explores the alienating excesses of corporate capitalism. The show’s title refers to a procedure undergone by the main characters in which a chip inserted in their brains bifurcates their consciousness into a work self (or “innie”) and a personal self (or “outie”). The innies’ entire existence is confined to a sterile subterranean office, run by the megacorporation-cum-cult Lumon Industries, where innie workers perform tedious tasks to no clear purpose. When the workday ends, their outies move about the world freely, conducting their affairs unburdened by any work-related stress. But the outies also suffer confusion about the parameters of their freedom (which are, in fact, quite limited), and carry with them a debilitating, if vague, sense of loss.

On the surface, the two shows could not be more different. The crash survivors in Yellowjackets deal with threats to their existence: wild animals, cold weather, and a lack of food, water, and medical care. In Severance, the innies inhabit a pristine, nature-free world of fluorescent lights, computer screens, and key cards. But there are important similarities between the two programs. Severance alternates between the storylines of the severed characters’ innie and outie counterparts, presenting their struggles to find meaning and purpose as separate but linked. Yellowjackets also moves between two connected storylines, set 25 years apart. It juxtaposes the harsh wilderness reality of the crash survivors in 1996 against the materially comfortable existence of four who are still alive in 2021 suburban New Jersey. Now middle-aged women, they wrestle with the memories of their violent forest past as they navigate an equally bewildering present.

The shows’ creators explicitly deploy religion to explore these issues and, in the process, offer up an array of ideas about the role of religion in modern life. Both series present religion as something we turn to in moments of weakness or crisis, when we are forced to confront what nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called our “absolute dependence.” Religion is also presented (à la Marx’s “opiate of the masses”) as a means of social control, rife with possibilities for manipulation and abuse. On Severance, Lumon Industries guises its self-serving mission to control all facets of its employees’ lives in grandiose pronouncements contained in a corporate handbook entitled Compliance and type-set like a Revised Standard Version Bible. The non-severed bosses quote it reverentially. On Yellowjackets, the cannibalistic cult that emerges has its sadistic enthusiasts even as it terrifies other participants.

Each show also presents religious experience as something psychosomatic, rooted in our body’s organs and chemistry. Such a view sets religion up as a sham to be exposed by rationality and science. Yet the very physicality of the characters’ mind-bending experiences on both shows also attests to such experiences’ inextirpable presence in their bodies. It is only natural, then, that the characters’ attempts to interpret such experiences become indelible features of their collective psyche.

Reviews of both shows have been overwhelmingly positive but the very same critics have often singled out these religious elements as weak links, not fully integral to the plot or characters. James Poniewozik of the New York Times calls the cultish features of Lumon on Severance the show’s one “misstep” and questions whether Yellowjackets really needs the supernatural dimension.

This assessment misses the point. While modern critics may want to ignore religion, Yellowjackets and Severance remind us that religion will not be ignored.

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The first episode of Yellowjackets is interspersed with scenes in which one of the plane crash survivors (it is unclear who) is hunted, trapped, slaughtered, cooked, and consumed. This is not merely a matter of survival; the storyline presents this activity as part of an emerging cult, one in which some sinister but potentially protective forest forces are being placated through blood offerings. Lest modern audiences get too judgmental, the show’s first episode links the survivors’ participatory ingestion of these offerings to the Eucharist. Star soccer player and moody introvert Shauna Shipman, still in 1996 New Jersey and innocent of what fate has in store for her team, speaks to her friend of her fleeting desire to become Catholic: “I liked the saints. They were all so tragic.” Shortly thereafter, the show cuts to a scene of the young women in the snowy forest, unrecognizable in antler headdresses and fur hoods, as they rip into a ceremoniously presented platter of human meat.

Bodies and blood figure prominently in Yellowjackets, but not always in a Christian idiom. The show forces us to confront the links between menstruation, sexuality, birth, and death that have inspired countless religious regulations. When the teammates’ periods synchronize, the women wash and hang their bloody rags to dry in strips around their encampment, just to the side of the strips of bloody deer meat they are attempting to turn into jerky. One of the male survivors, the bereaved teenage hunk Travis whose father was killed in the crash, is disgusted by this. He argues with his romantic interest, tough-girl Natalie, in favor of reviving ancient practices of menstrual isolation. Their debate underscores the fact that their new reality is aligned with the bulk of human history, when sexuality was often deadly and its associated processes were feared (a reality recently revived in the United States for largely religious reasons). Indeed, would-be Catholic Shauna is secretly pregnant and it is her lack of a bloody strip hanging on the communal line that brings this information to light. Her pregnancy only increases the group’s anxiety about its circumstances.

Also of concern is the fact that the forest itself seems to have a hankering for human blood. During a mock séance that the team holds in an attempt at some traditional campfire levity, a force speaks through troubled rich-girl Lottie Mathews. In French, a language Lottie claims not to know, it informs the group that “it wants more blood.” This episode, entitled “Saints,” is when Lottie, who has been doubting the visions she’s been having, is baptized by her evangelical Christian teammate, Laura Lee, who interprets Lottie’s experiences as the descent of the Holy Spirit. (She also sees the plane crash as a punishment for the team members’ sins.) When Laura attempts to leave the forest to get help, she meets with a mysterious end. Laura’s death undoes Lottie’s temporary allegiance to Christianity and realigns her sympathies with the forest and its apparent claims on its residents. There are indications that the forest has made these claims before. The Yellowjackets find an abandoned house in the woods that contains some much-needed provisions but also the skeleton of its former inhabitant. There is a menacing symbol carved into the home’s beams and floorboards: a female stick-figure struck through by a diagonal line with a hook protruding from the bottom of her skirt. The symbol resonates with images, shown in fragmentary flashbacks throughout season one, of the team’s first sacrificial victim hung upside down by her legs as her blood drips onto the snow.

For some viewers, these aspects of Yellowjackets place it firmly in the horror genre. But guardian cults in which deities act simultaneously as threats and saviors pervade human history. This motif is found throughout the Bible as well as in south Indian forest cults and ancient Mayan rituals involving human sacrifice. Reciprocity between the realm of humans and that of the gods is fundamental to many religions. When we sacrifice to the gods, we give something valuable to get something valuable in return—and what could be more valuable than life? But even as the show reminds us of these ancient traditions (which persist, to varying degrees of literalness, in many religions today), the show also supplies our modern minds with potentially rational explanations: Lottie, who seems to communicate with the forest gods, takes prescribed psychiatric medication. As her supply dwindles, her propensity for hallucination increases.

In season one’s penultimate episode, the group throws a doomsday party where they seek temporary respite from their misery by consuming fermented berry juice. They also unwittingly consume a stew spiked with hallucinogenic mushrooms foraged by the team’s equipment manager, Misty. Misty had intended to use the mushrooms to take sexual advantage of the badly injured male coach, on whom she harbors a misguided crush. When the mushrooms accidentally get integrated into the main meal, what ensues is a night of revelry so frightening even Misty’s warped priorities pale in comparison. Setting the stage for the blood cult that emerges in the final episode, the drugged women hunt Travis and nearly slit his throat under Lottie’s direction. She claims that he “belongs” to the forest, that “it is coming”, and that the group “won’t be hungry for long.” The Yellowjackets’ minds are addled by hunger, drugs, alcohol, hormones, trauma, and toxic group dynamics. While this jumble of rationalizations for their gruesome behavior might be more than enough to preclude any supernatural explanation, the show’s equitable juxtaposition of all these possibilities renders its supernatural conceits more plausible. Unlike other shows that have trod similar terrain less coherently (e.g., ABC’s Lost or HBO’s The Leftovers), Yellowjackets effectively highlights reason’s inability to contend with our full lived experiences and levels the explanatory playing fields of psychology, biology, and bloodthirsty forest gods.

(Image source: Showtime/Ringer illustration)

The season ends by suggesting that this cult extends into the present day, where the survivors could be said, in modern parlance, to be processing their trauma. They do this in all the stereotypical ways—drugs, rehab, book clubs, and therapy—but to little effect. The four main characters—Shauna, Misty, Natalie, and Taissa—are resourceful, ironic, and often quite funny about their situation. This makes them as easy to relate to as their younger selves even as they scare us. Part of our fear is on their behalf, particularly the extent to which they are vulnerable to others’ coercion. But it also has to do with their enduring reliance on their forest ways of life. Taissa, a Black, openly gay lawyer running for state senate, is meant to stand for progress and pragmatism, two cornerstones of modernity. In the forest, she is the chief advocate for rational problem-solving. But in 2021 New Jersey, she has not fully abandoned the religion that helped her to survive, much as she works to suppress it. A shrine with fresh bloody offerings sits in the coal room of her basement, hidden not only from her wife and son, but even from her own conscious mind. She visits it only when sleepwalking.

What compels audiences to watch such television? The show’s conceit that primitive living will render us savages is clearly an enthralling view of human psychology. Yellowjackets accepts that our “primitive” views remain with us as modern people even as they strike us as unbecomingly savage. But the show also challenges us to rethink the modern myth of progress by reminding us not only that modernity coexists with—and often amplifies—our baser urges, it also has its own discernable end. Whether our circumstances be primitive or modern, we are all born to die.

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Questioning the value of modern progress is at the heart of Severance, which focuses on how corporate capitalism controls every aspect of our lives. It presents mega-corporation Lumon Industries as a religious cult that masterfully manipulates its employees, both through a belief system that guises the company’s mission as one of “illumination” and through a patented surgical procedure that divides employees’ consciousness, rendering them incapable of real knowledge.

Severing employees’ minds keeps Lumon’s work product secret from society because, once severed employees leave the office, they cannot recall what they spent their day doing.  While the severed “outies” theoretically live on perpetual vacation, what “innie” workers get out of this arrangement is harder to discern. The four main innie characters who constitute Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) Department have little insight into their tasks. They spend their days staring at computer screens full of random number sets coded to evoke certain emotions in them, based on which they then “refine” the data. These worker-consciousness innies have no idea whether their refining cleans the oceans, removes swear words from movies, or kills children, all of which are theories advanced by the show’s protagonists. Yet, thanks to Lumon’s lofty doctrines, which are presented as divine pronouncements from the founding CEO and which play on the human quest for meaning in the face of existential mystery, many of the innies buy in.

By linking contemporary capitalist culture to religion, Severance probes the question of why modern people, so invested in the idea of personal freedom, willingly submit to corporate controls. For much of the first season, the severance procedure is presented as voluntary yet controversial. The main character, Mark, opts to undergo it after his wife dies precisely so that his grief will be turned off for the eight-hour workday. If this strains credulity, think of the amount of time each of us spends daily in the alternate realities of the internet, hiding from our real-life problems. In addition to highlighting our contemporary tendency toward emotional anesthetization, the show is correct that mega-corporations own our psyches. Intimate details of our personal lives, including data about our physical and mental health and our private hopes and insecurities, have been made available for purchase by a range of actors who can now track and manipulate us. This may not be the result of a chip installed in our brains, but of a phone that the majority of us carry in our pockets, sleep with at our bedsides, and use to publicize images of our unwitting children who can then be similarly tracked. And many of us do this quite blithely.

Of course, not all of us are willing participants in these invasive and controlling structures. (They would not need to be invasive and controlling if we were.) The show’s innies have technically not chosen to spend their entire lives working in Lumon’s subterranean offices; their outie counterparts have. If an innie wants to quit Lumon, the rules stipulate that such a request be approved by one’s outie. These requests are routinely denied not only because Lumon insists, disingenuously, that the severance procedure is irreversible, but because the outies are callously indifferent to how truly miserable their innies’ lives are. Innies cannot sleep, see sunlight, take a trip, enjoy the weekend, eat at random times of day, or read anything besides corporate literature. When their bodies leave work, their consciousness does not and so it is like they are always in the office. They know nothing about their outer lives that might imbue their office lives with a sense of purpose. Whether or not they are partnered, have children, or enjoy hobbies is all closely guarded information, dispensed by Lumon during prescribed “wellness sessions” that are highly manipulative. The innies’ lives are torturous.

And yet, three of the four main innie characters initially refuse to admit this. The show opens with a new innie, named (unsubtly) Helly, undergoing her intake procedure. She cannot recall her own name, birthplace, or the color of her mother’s eyes. However, she can name a state–Delaware–indicating that the least interesting and most impersonal parts of her knowledge base are intact. Helly has been brought in to replace Petey, who has disappeared. Unbeknownst to his co-workers in MDR, Petey has had a Lumon defector hack his brain-chip to undo the severance procedure and is on the run from Lumon authorities. His disappearance makes his coworkers quite uneasy, but it is Helly’s arrival that disrupts the team’s stasis as she exposes and mocks their passivity.

Helly’s colleagues view their work at Lumon from different vantage points, influenced by their individual dispositions but also by the multifaceted nature of Lumon’s coercive control. There is Mark’s quiet resignation; Irving’s firm conviction in the importance, however unclear, of Lumon’s mission; and Dylan’s aggressive competitiveness about racking up quarterly numbers that will secure him the most rewards. (These include such flashy items as erasers and finger traps.) But Helly, who turns out to have been highly indoctrinated by Lumon prior to undergoing the severance procedure but who is also very privileged, balks at all of this. Ultimately, she convinces the others to balk, too.

Life for the outies is not much better as the reach of the company extends beyond the office walls. Mark’s neighbor in the outside world is also his boss. But he has no way of knowing this because he has no recollection of his life at Lumon. The bifurcated consciousness of the severed renders both innies and outies equally lacking in self-knowledge and it is this lack that enables Lumon to own them. One of the show’s richest themes is the role of memory in shaping human agency. Without a sense of history, it is hard to know how to act, which is exactly what Lumon Industries wants. This is made explicit in a quote by current CEO James Eagan, emblazoned on a wall of Lumon’s Perpetuity Wing where workers can go to immerse themselves in the grand ideas of the corporation-cum-cult’s leaders: “History lives in us whether we learn it or not.” In response, Helly quips, “It almost makes me wish I could remember my own childhood.” Yet, prior to undergoing his severance procedure, Mark had been a history professor. Apparently, knowledge of history proved useless in managing his grief and Mark was so tortured by memories of his wife, he chose to have them erased for eight hours a day. That said, Mark’s grieving outie is no better off; he spends much of his time crying and drinking.

Via such details, the show unearths the complex ways larger structural forces interact with our own worst tendencies, prompting us to choose ignorance over self-awareness. As in Severance, our global capitalist system uses our ‘ignorance’ of the true implications of our consumption patterns and other daily habits to undermine our moral agency. By farming out certain forms of labor to economically disadvantaged regions, global capitalism hides its worst features, such as human exploitation and environmental devastation, from the office workers located in the developed world. But it is also true that the ignorance of first-world office workers is largely willful, as we allow ourselves to be bought off by a seemingly infinite supply of cheap products, commendatory plaques, competitions of no real significance, and false notions of mission supplied by the corporations we work for. These easily accessible forms of comfort are extremely tainted, making capitalism in the developed world distinctively creepy. In contrast to the starkly gross moral universe of Yellowjackets, with its clear correspondence of victim to victor, the moral costs of modern capitalism are much murkier. They are so hard to keep track of, in fact, that most of us stop trying.

In the characters’ refusal to admit their lives are meaningless in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Severance highlights religion’s complex role in human life. While religion can be a force of coercion and control, it also reflects a basic need for self-understanding achieved in communion with others. This means that religion is both enlightening and deceptive, and always works in tandem with larger cultural dynamics.

By presenting Lumon Industries as it does, Severance reminds us of the religious roots of capitalism, helping to explain this system’s peculiar grip on our contemporary psyche. Viewers might wonder how twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber would react to seeing his theories about the Protestant work ethic presented in such a format. Like many Protestant churches, the cult of Lumon emphasizes doctrines and ideas, textual interpretation, and salvation through self-improvement born of the taming of inner demons. In Weber’s view, capitalism owes its existence to this understanding of the individual’s existential situation. In challenging Catholic Church leaders’ exclusive claim to a special vocation vis-à-vis God, the Protestant Reformation encouraged ordinary workers to invest their occupations with ultimate meaning and to elevate their work ethic to the fullest statement on their character. Such worldly asceticism elicited self-monitoring on the part of the general population and the accumulation of much societal wealth, both of which proved essential for capitalism. While we may struggle to relate to the religious motivations of such a worldview in its infancy, wherein the rewards were far off, these forces continue to lurk behind every corporate mission statement and in claims that our coworkers are our family. Even in the context of contemporary capitalism’s emphasis on immediate gratification, the true purpose of our lives remains mysterious.

In keeping with the show’s Protestant ethos, the characters debate the implications of Lumon’s scriptures. While this underscores just how much their moral agency is governed by the corporation they work for, it is also a sincere quest for meaning that is fundamental to the human mind. The show’s bleakness is mitigated by the rich connections that exist among the main characters. There is still love, humor, and physical attraction, even in the severed world. The psychological sustenance provided by such connection is evident in the four innies’ reactions to a cheesy self-help book that accidentally makes its way into the severed offices. Called The You You Are, it contains such wisdom-nuggets as “Destiny: An Acrostic Poem as Experienced by the Author” and “What separates man from machine is that machines […] are made of metal.” It is meant to be mocked, as is its author, Ricken, a fatuous self-promoter. But the solace Ricken’s words provide the innies is real and the contraband book becomes a source of genuine comfort to the MDR team. Ricken’s statements on camaraderie and the proper place of work in human life inspire Mark to lead a coup against the bosses, one that undoubtedly gives the team greater self-knowledge and augurs its own reformation.

Whether this reformation will effect real change or, as Yellowjackets would have it, simply repeat old patterns, remains to be seen in future seasons. One thing on which both shows agree: religion, as escape route or trap door, will be with us for a while.

Valerie Stoker is Professor of Religion and Associate Chair of the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. During the pandemic, she watched a lot of TV.