In “Severance,” the Gothic Double Lives On

“Severance” is an office drama with a twist: the central characters have undergone a procedure to separate their work selves (“innies,” in the parlance of the show) from their home selves (“outies”). The Apple TV+ series is just the latest cultural offering to explore how the modern world asks us to compartmentalize our lives in increasingly drastic ways. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz trace the trope of the “double” over time, from its nineteenth-century origins in such works as “Jane Eyre” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” to the “passing” novels of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Today’s Oscar front-runners are rife with doubles, too, including those seen in  the Demi Moore-led body-horror film “The Substance” and “The Apprentice,” in which a young Donald Trump fashions himself in the image of his mentor, Roy Cohn. At a time when technological advances and social platforms allow us to present—or to engineer—an optimized version of our lives, it’s no wonder our second selves are haunting us anew. “I think the double will always exist because of the hope for wholeness,” Cunningham says. “It's such a strong desire that the shadow of that whole self—the doppelgänger—will always be lurking at the edges of our imagination.” 

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Severance” (2022—)
“The Substance” (2024)
“A Different Man” (2024)
“Frankenstein,” by Mary Shelley
“The Apprentice” (2024)
“Passing,” by Nella Larsen
Key and Peele’s sketch “Phone Call”
“Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë
“Lisa and Lottie,” by Erich Kästner
William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”
“The Uncanny,” by Sigmund Freud
Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices