'Who are you?’ Writer finds eerie link between TV's 'Severance' and life in MAGA world
In a piece for The New York Times, opinion culture editor Adam Sternbergh drew some uncomfortable parallels between MAGA world and the "lavishly surreal" Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller "Severance," which aired its second season finale Friday.
To the uninitiated, "Severance" "follows a quartet of employees at a mysterious company who’ve had their consciousness split into two identities: innies, the people they are at work, and outies, the people they are everywhere else," Sternbergh wrote. It was the second season's exploration of "the ways in which people often aren’t who they seem or profess to be," that got him thinking about those living in Donald Trump's MAGA world and those watching in disbelief from the sidelines.
"This season proved especially interested in the unsettling notion that you can never truly know the people you love the best and trust the most and that some of them may actually mean you harm," Sternbergh wrote, adding that the show perfectly captures "the creeping fear that you can never truly know anyone, possibly including yourself," manifested in today's political paranoia.
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"All this reflects our national dilemma, in which we’re experiencing our own kind of bifurcated daily reality," Sternbergh wrote. "We seem fated to follow every election from now on by looking across the partisan divide and wondering: Who are you? And how could you? We don’t trust one another. We don’t even believe we know one another. Maybe you thought you knew your kindly next-door neighbors until one day they unfurled a MAGA flag on their front lawn. Or perhaps you thought you knew who President Trump was until he decided to gut the Department of Veterans Affairs or threaten to annex Canada."
Sternbergh called it a "destabilizing realization" to find that you and someone you thought you knew very well, "are living in different realities."
And, although Sternbergh wrote that "there don’t seem to be any ready political remedies," for what Americans are living through in 2025, there can still be comfort in "seeing these anxieties reflected in the fun house mirror of our entertainment."