THESE CHARACTERS ARE MAD

The Clashing Paranoias of Mark S. and Helly R.

I've just finished catching up on the show Severance, and I am deeply intrigued by the dynamic the show initially sets up between the characters Helly R. and Mark S. Not in the romantic way the show begins to set up, but specifically in the ways that their respective paranoia's clash and grate against one another.

As a whole, I find the dynamic of "Symptom / Coping Clash" to be particularly compelling. The conflict between "The both of us are in the same boat, but I can't fucking stand you, because the way you live with your situation is fundamentally incompatible with the way I live with mine." The overwhelming angst of "Technically, neither of us is doing anything wrong, but I fucking hate you for everything that you're doing." I think it tends to be a little underrated. I'm thrilled to see it play out here on this show. 

Mark S. and Helly R. are, after all, both deeply paranoid personalities, but they show and cope with that in two extremely different ways, and the clash of those presentations and coping mechanisms means they can't quite stand each other for the first several episodes of the show. Mark S. masks heavily, he copes via Adaptability and Compliance, he is a very solid example of the "Fawn" response. Helly R. on the other hand, has no interest in masking at all, copes with Aggression and Stubbornness, and perfectly exemplifies the "Fight" response.

We don't see Mark's introduction to the Severance floor -- by the time the plot of the show picks up, he's been working there for two years, but I think we know enough to be able to get a sense of what he might have been like initially. Mark alludes to his introduction in ways that don't paint a picture of someone who integrated smoothly. He says that he had to be asked the "Who are you?" question 19 times before he finally tried to answer, and then switched immediately to threatening to find and kill the person giving him the survey. When Helly scoffs at how quickly he backs down from asking about Petey, Mark's tone in responding that Milchick is nice, but "doesn't always get to be that nice" heavily implies he is extremely familiar with just how unkind Milchick can be in correcting employees. When Helly attempts to smuggle out a message by swallowing a pen cap, Mark's admonishment seems to imply that he's equally familiar with the process of Graner preventing that message from making it off the severance floor. He's quick to volunteer himself to take Helly's punishment after her first attempt to smuggle out a post-it note, like he knows exactly what's waiting for her and doesn't want to make her face it. His allusion to having notes on skin being forcibly scrubbed off with "bad soap" also seems to belie this as something he's experienced personally, not just something he knows about abstractly.

What's less clear to us is when and how Mark transitioned from dedicating himself to these escape attempts to focusing on just surviving and trying to carve some kind of life out of what the severed floor offers. Did he catch on quickly? Or was he just as stubborn as Helly is? Was it him who was quicker on the uptake, or was Petey the one who was able to successfully navigate this conflict between "education" and "masking" in a way that Mark can't? Petey does seem to have a more reassuring nature than Mark does; he ingratiates himself to Mark Scout almost immediately, despite Mark's strong tendency towards avoidance on the outside. Even with coaching, Mark S. can't seem to grasp the idea of deliberately making "kind eyes" at Helly. He knows how to navigate conflict by getting out of it as quickly as possible, but he's not nearly as good at portraying himself as anything more than "blandly inoffensive".

The miscommunication begins, then, with the fact that Mark is extremely high-masking in this way. Almost everything he does and says is performed from behind the mask of compliant employee; his mask isn't designed to be reassuring, because it didn't have to be, that was Petey's role. The reintegrated Petey comments to Mark Scout that his voice as an outie sounds different from his voice as an innie -- Petey seems to take this as a sign of their conflicting personalities, highlighting the differences between them, but I think it's arguably more that Mark speaks in a higher pitch when he is masking. Mark S. doesn't always speak in those higher, more nasal tones, after all. When he confesses to breaking protocol during the ball game, his voice drops to the same register Mark Scout uses on the outside, because he's speaking honestly, but as soon as Helly confronts him and tries to push him into asking for more, Mark's voice hits that higher register as he tries to tell her the facts about their life while still maintaining enough of that mask to satisfy any of their managers that might be listening in.

And Mark is always very aware of the fact that they are being surveilled. Throughout the entire orientation scene, Mark is casting multiple furtive glances at the security camera on the wall as he tries to navigate the confrontation and figure out how to get them both out of it. He ignores Helly's attempts to bait a more honest, visceral reaction out of him because he knows that their conversations are being monitored. When he tries to impress upon her the gravity of their situation, he does so through oblique jokes and muted comments -- speaking as honestly as he can while still giving himself enough plausible deniability to maintain the mask. His overeager, cheerful persona is just that -- a persona, using an overabundance of fake, strained, and awkwardly timed laughs to try to avoid causing problems. Even during the ball game, when Mark has an "outburst" about Petey's disappearance, this is seemingly calculated. Helly has just had a confrontation with Milchick that ended without much fuss, but Mark's gaze catches on Helly when he is trying to come up with an alternative fact to share, his expression drops into something that looks like dread. He knows that Helly got off easy and tries to come up with a way to tell her that she needs to be careful, he confesses to the breach in protocol. His first explanation is clean and masked -- he speaks as if he's merely worried about his ability to perform the job left for him. But then he pushes further and talks about the possibility of Petey being dead, to elicit a stronger reaction out of Milchick, and then he backs down immediately and performs a kind of withdrawn contrition at the first hint of that darker undertone to Milchick's personality. He's the one who initiates conversation with Helly about the "derailing", and when she picks up the thread he drops for her, he takes the opportunity to try to speak as explicitly as he can about the potential threat that Milchick poses to them both.

And when Milchick cuts their conversation short, the pitch of Mark's voice jumps back up to that high, nasal pitch, he offers up another short, canned laugh, and hopes that she'll understand.

And since Helly doesn't yet understand the significance of Mark's mask, she doesn't. Mark even seems to understand that she hasn't gotten it even after he took the fall for her first attempt to smuggle out a message: When Helly puts in her first resignation request, she consoles Mark by telling him that he won't have to go to the break room anymore in a way that seems to alarm him, because he knows that he won't be able to take the fall for her more than once. When her resignation request is denied, he won't be the one dealing with whatever fallout of the next attempt, she will, even though she doesn't seem to understand it yet.

I find Helly so fascinating because her paranoia seems so,, short-sighted? It's a character trait that makes sense, of course -- she's entirely new to the concept of her life and has no previous experience to put anything in context for her. She only has the word of the people around her to go off of, and she doesn't trust any of them, because she has no way to reliably differentiate between who is Complicit in their situation and who is Actually In her same situation. She has no context that separates Mark from Milchick -- both of them ultimately want the same thing from her, and she doesn't have the experience necessary to understand that it is for two different reasons (Milchick because he wants Helly working compliant for Lumon; Mark because he just doesn't want to see her or himself punished more for noncompliance). But she thinks on a very short-term basis because of this. She understands that she is in a threatened position, but doesn't consider the consequences of what it looks like when someone follows through on that threat. She understands that she is someone being Held in place by those with more power, but doesn't stop to think of what the full scope of that power looks like.

She constantly works to push boundaries, and scoffs disbelievingly every time one of the other employees tries to tell her what the consequences might be. She wants to know where the boundaries are, but doesn't trust anyone to tell her, meaning that she continues to push until she hits the wall on her own. When she confronts Mark and tries to get him to speak honestly with her, she expects Mark to speak freely because she's thinking on the simple level of "we are the only people in this conversation". Mark, meanwhile, knows that he cannot speak freely because he's the one who can never lose sight of the fact that they are being constantly surveilled. She doesn't have any trust for anyone on the floor with her, but she seems to maintain a dedicated faith that if she can just get her message out, her outie will listen, despite the fact that her resignation request has already been denied once. She doesn't seem to believe Mark when he insinuates that he's already tried everything she's trying before, but she does hold onto the belief that if she can just reliably get her message out, her Outie will listen.

They're repeatedly backing each other into corners. Helly is infuriated by the masked self that Mark presents, making her unwilling to listen to his attempts to get her to understand the reality of their position. Helly's repeated aggressive, spite-fueled commentary and attempts to break the rules leaves Mark feeling frustrated and helpless, increasingly aware of the threat posed to both of them and unable to get Helly to understand. He doesn't just lament the time before she arrived because Petey was there and now is gone, but also because Petey's presence marked a "tone" that allowed Mark to maintain the mask only enough to skate under the radar. They could still joke and get along and have their lives together without having to maintain that constant, iron-clad mask at all times. They're being watched closer because of Helly's introduction, but if things had gone the way they should have, then that surveillance would likely have backed back down to the level Mark is used to. Instead, Helly's repeated outbursts, arguments, and refusals to get in line means that the surveillance is just continuing to increase. Mark knows that both of their well-beings depends on her ability to learn to mask and feign enough compliance to get the job done without conflict. Mark also knows that there's nothing he can say to get Helly to understand this, because they are being surveilled, and if he gets too honest, then that could put them in danger all over again. The more he tries to balance these conflicting scales, the more frustrated Helly becomes by the perceived spinelessness of the people around her who are seemingly content to watch her suffer instead of helping her escape.

It's a back-and-forth conflict that intrigues me. Especially when Mark tries to weigh the scales in Helly's favor, even to his own detriment. Not just him taking the fall for Helly at the elevator, but also his defiance of Harmony's refusal to grant permission for taking Helly to the Perpetuity wing. He knows that his attempts to communicate threat have failed, and so tries to figure out if Irving's idea of giving her something positive to focus on will work instead. Mark is the one who goes to speak to Milchick and Harmony, knowing and ignoring the typical protocol required for such a conversation, he's the one who gets denied, and he's the one who takes them out anyway. Whether it works or not, Mark has effectively set himself up to take the fall for the trip in its entirety before they even leave their desks.

Helly, of course, derails this by instead taking the opportunity to run off in an effort to get her newest note through the stairwell door. Instead of Mark taking the fall like he'd planned, Helly finally has to be the one to bear the burden of the consequences. His expression when Helly looks back at him, almost expectantly, seems to be a mix of regret and frustration; he already knows he can't get her out of this one, but I wonder if part of him is left just hoping that at least she might finally understand.

She doesn't seem to, though. When Helly catches Mark looking at the map that Petey had left behind, she still doesn't seem to recognize him as a potential ally, but instead calls him a hypocrite. She doesn't see any of their previous interactions as attempts to help her, but as "lectures" -- as if he's speaking entirely out of a place of pompous disregard. I think this episode is when their respective backs well and truly hit the wall, and cause them to lash out. Alarmed by the fact that Helly is still posturing them as opposites with conflicting goals instead of aligned ones, Mark is almost certainly frightened by the idea that Helly is going to use this map's existence against him. He doesn't seem quite as alarmed by Dylan in this confrontation, but when Helly accuses him of loyalty to Lumon and tells him outright that she views him as an antagonist over an ally, Mark destroys the map without hesitation because it means that it's not around for her to use it against him. He isn't loyal, which is exactly why he hadn't turned in the map when he'd found it. His paranoia has just shifted in a way that no longer really has room to consider Helly a potential ally either.

Helly, who likely was aiming more to get a reaction out of Mark than anything else, seems equally alarmed by Mark's response. She pushes against him almost compulsively, but the way she does look back at him after Graner catches her at the stairwell almost does seem like she was looking to him as an ally. When his response to the map confrontation is to destroy the evidence in a way that posits her as a threat (it's notable that he still doesn't turn the map in, and instead eliminates the option for any of them to turn the map in, which he's not supposed to do), Helly's own back feels back against the same wall, leading her to once again try to take matters into her own hands by threatening to cut her own off. And when Helena responds by making it finally, inescapably clear that she doesn't care about Helly's opinion at all, in a way that Helly can no longer deny, Helly responds by trying to kill them both. I think this might ultimately be the reason why we cut between Helly preparing her attempt and her seemingly remembering a more positive interaction between her and Mark -- whether or not she's actually retroactively understood what Mark has been aiming for, I think the abrupt threat of losing him as that potential ally alarmed her and made her feel the wall at her back even more intensely.

I think this is why they seem to understand each other a little better after this attempt that Helly makes. I think that Mark's frustration at having his paranoia constantly pushed back in his face and struggling to juggle the anxiety and anger that Helly's previous outbursts have caused is cleared up slightly. There's not the room to see her anger as a lack of comprehension, he's finally able to understand it as her response to fear. Different from his own, but not necessarily more or less "right" than his own. Ricken's book emphasizes this -- the line, "They cannot crucify you if you if your hand is in a fist" seems to explain Helly's anger in a way that Mark can understand. The line, "Should you find yourself contorting to fit a system, dear reader, stop, and ask yourself if it is truly you that must change, or the system." Mark has been contorting himself to fit the system, that's what his masking has been. Helly's anger is the incentive to ask whether that is the right call, or if they should be questioning, the way Helly has been.

On a personal level, of course, I identify more with Mark's choice of masking as compliant more than Helly's dead-set refusal to accept her circumstances. I've been juggling intense paranoia since I was a teenager -- I know the fear of never knowing exactly where the threat is coming from, but knowing that it exists, and the complete and utter helplessness of Knowing that there is someone watching everything you do and listening to everything you say and hearing everything you think and that there is nothing you can do to get them to leave you alone. It's a horrifying position to be in.

So I understand Mark's methods of coping with that helplessness. You can't get them to stop, you can't get them to leave you alone, you can't get them to grant you a single moment of privacy. You don't have any control. So what can you control? Only yourself. You can't make the threat go away, but if you become The Best at adapting then you can learn to live with the threat. You can adapt to your situation and monitor yourself and do everything in your power to present the image of someone who thinks that they're "safe", because you don't know what they'll do if they know that you know what they're doing to you. You can't control them, but you can control yourself, and that's still control at the end of the day. You're not as helpless anymore, you can control this much, at least.

In contrast, Helly presents herself as a new uncontrollable variable. A new threat that leaves you completely helpless in the face of it. You can control yourself and make sure that you present the idea of yourself that you think They're looking for, and you can make sure you do everything in your power to minimize the threat as much as possible, but when there is a second person who is doing the opposite of everything you're trying to do, they're just as terrifying as the threat you were already dealing with. Especially since Mark has been put in the position of Department Chief -- he is supposed to be controlling Helly because he is supposed to be In Charge, but she isn't letting him. Instead, it feels like the only thing this position has earned him is the threat of being punished for someone else. He can't control Helly, so the only thing his new position gains him is additional punishment for the actions of someone else he's not able to control. It's scary.

But there is, I think, a part of me that can almost relate to Helly. I remember when I was younger, during a point where the surveillance paranoia was at one of its higher levels, when I abruptly got so fucking angry about it. Where all of a sudden it hit me how unfair it was that I was being put in this position, that someone else was putting me in this position, that someone else was doing this to me, and it was infuriating. The terror didn't feel broad and all-encompassing anymore, it felt targeted. Precise. This wasn't just "happening" to me, someone was "doing" this to me, and I couldn't stand it. I remember writing a tirade in a journal, seething at how unfair it was that I couldn't even write about my own feelings without someone else reading it afterwards, and the flood of angry accusations and litanies at the injustice that I wrote out to whoever it was that had decided to do this to me.

And then the terror came back. And I tore the pages up as small as I could and drowned them in the sink until the ink was illegible and got rid of the dredges as quickly as I could, because I didn't want to think of what would happen if someone saw and realized that I knew. And I didn't feel like I could afford to be angry anymore, because I had to be clear-headed, and I had to control myself, because that was the only way to stay safe. "Anger" isn't a safe emotion, it's a destabilizing one, it's a threat that ultimately only points back at yourself. It doesn't matter whether the surveillance is real, because you're still not in a position that holds any power. Either they're real, and they're a threat, or they aren't, and that makes everyone else a very different kind of threat. When you're crazy, you're not the one who holds the power. I don't think it's all that dissimilar to the thoroughly infantalized way people talk to and about the innie's -- Milchick demanding they be grateful for the enclosed surveillance they deal with, Cobel throwing things at Mark and scolding him like he's a child, the grating insistence on cheap 'perks' that seem little more than condescending, Irving losing "points" for reacting in a way he shouldn't to the facts about his outie, the fact that they have to recite lines as punishment, and that Mark S. seemingly had his knuckles smacked as further punishment. Even outside of the tangible threat of punishment, innie's still aren't taken seriously. They don't hold any kind of power. They don't get to decide whether they leave or come back, someone else has the power over them. If their outie decides not to come back, the innie is effectively killed without being spared a second thought. When you're crazy, you're not the one who holds the power -- even if the Them surveilling me weren't real, I still had to destroy the evidence, because the only thing worse than being crazy is, of course, someone else finding out that you are. Then, the surveillance doesn't go away, it just becomes more literal. The threats that were vague and elusive become more tangible: involuntary incarceration, being forced on medications, wellness checks, mandatory therapy, constantly having  your thoughts and actions monitored "For Your Own Good". When you're crazy, you're not the one who holds the power. "You're not severed. You walk out of here with your memories. You carry them home with you every night. No one can rip them away from you, snuff them out. Like they never existed. Like you never existed." When you're an innie, you're not the one who holds the power.

I wonder if Mark is going to stay angry, or if his terror will come back. I wonder if Helly is going to stay angry, or if her terror will replace it. I wonder if they'll understand each other better, or clash even more. It'll be interesting to find out.

((There's a second essay I might write again some day, about the way the Finale made me feel. About how intensely I felt like I resonated with the fear of waking up in a situation you don't have any context for, surrounded by people who know you but that you don't know, more people than you've ever seen in your life, and knowing that you have to do something but having no idea if you know enough to be able to do it. And being in a place that is supposed to be familiar but that couldn't be more alien. I felt like I was going to throw up that entire episode. But, of course, the essay will have to wait for me to actually understand what memories we thought these situations could possibly be resonating with. The brain is a strange place sometimes. But hey, maybe keep an eye out.))

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