Work is Hell: Notes on the Sterile Corporate Liminal Nostalgia Aesthetic

So, Severance, right?

I was terribly late to the party, only binging season one right before the finale. I think it’s a masterpiece, unfortunately regulated to AppleTV instead of a more accessible platform. It’s one of those perfect melding of style and storytelling that does not come around often.

But the style is what has haunted me the most. The aesthetics of the show are grounded in a design tradition that has lasted over fifty years. It does a lot to ground these characters in a certain vibe, one that lends to a general air of paranoia.

I believe that online communities such as r/LiminalSpaces on Reddit have given us a good introduction to the concept of a liminal space. Eerie photographs, usually lit by harsh florescent bulbs, but all with this sense of oddity. It is the idea of having evidence of the world as it exists without any people in it. It’s voyeuristic, as if we are witnessing things that should not be seen.

In corporate culture, these liminal spaces are usually shown by immaculate office spaces at the height of modernism but completely abandoned.

In shows such as Severence, this is familiar but unsettling, not only because of the historical roots of the design elements, but because it has recently been co-opted by other similar “man vs. corporate diety” stories in the last ten to fifteen years.

I have started to call this aesthetic “sterile corporate liminal nostalgia.” It is rooted in hypermodern design trends that began in the 1960s and solidifying in the corporate design of the 1970s. At the time, it was reflecting a utopian ideal of the future that technology was going to give us, with the space race having us look to the stars. This isn’t a grimy cyberpunk dystopia, where the world is human, lived-in, and dirty. It is elevated, something that seeks the pinnacle of human achievement.

We can see this hypermodernism reflected in the movies at the time, such as THX 1138, Westworld, Star Trek, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Minimalist environments, with clean, efficient lines and harsh florescent lighting that leaves nothing in shadow. But even then, as seen in Westworld and 2001, this utopian ideal was hiding something rotten under the impeccable style.

When we place these images into a 21st century context, we as the audience are immediately suspicious. The details give us a sense of nostalgia, a harkening back to that simpler, pre-Internet age where technology was advanced enough to make hard sci-fi believable but still distant.

Today, though, we recognize this as a naive ideal. The technology shown is actually archaic, more deserving of a museum display than an actual sci-fi future. We, with the benefit of hindsight, are aware that the future on display is one that never-would-be and couldn’t-possibly-be. We understand that the characters that populate this world are naive to trust this world and its systems, because we are automatically looking for the cracks in the pristine walls.

We know something is wrong, and we are on the alert.

While I think that Severance is the prime example of this trend, it is not new. A lot of 21st century media relies on this, from Black Mirror’s “White Christmas” episode, to 2018’s Maniac (an underrated Netflix original) and 2020’s DEVS.

It also is used to great effect in online-based media like Kane Pixel’s The Backrooms and to a certain extent Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared. Adult Swim has made an entire brand identity around this sarcastic liminal vibe, and in fact what is in my opinion one of their most criminally underseen originals, Dream Corp, LLC, exists in a grimy sideroom of this very aesthetic.

One unifying thread to every story that establishes this aesthetic is how it plays into stories of corrupt corporate structure and how it contributes to cultural feelings of alienation. It is the individual against the machine and all the ways that it crushes us, setting us against our fellow man for the benefit of the bottom line. It is about living authentically in a world of conformity, and discovering yourself through the discovery of the dystopia rotting away under the utopian veneer.

And while it is a dystopia, I think that in these stories we can find the hints of the classic science fiction hope. The triumph of humanity against terrible odds. We want to root for the underdogs. We want to believe that if we fight, that things can actually get better.

Myths teach us how to live. And these myths tell us that even if we find ourselves living in these corporate hellscapes, there is a way to carry on with our humanity intact.

And I don’t see that as a bad thing.