Followers of Apple TV+’s Severance, your day is about to be improved: Apple has launched eight chapters of The You You Are, the fictional self-help guide by Dr. Ricken Lazlo Hale that’s central to the plot of the present. If you wish to learn it, you possibly can even obtain it totally free, or hearken to the audiobook model, narrated by Ricken himself (actor Michael Chernus).
The transient excerpts from The You You Are which have appeared in Severance are among the many funniest bits within the present, however the guide as launched is not only for laughs: It is also an incredible illustration of how propaganda works, each within the Severance universe and in actual life.
Within the “outie” world of the present, The You You Are is a joke, a pretentious self-help guide solely fools take severely. However on the earth of the innies, an ill-gotten copy of The You You Are is seen as a piece of towering genius with the ability to alter lives and alter the world. That is solely as a result of the only different guide within the Lumon workplace is The Compliance Handbook, a ponderous, quasi-religious textual content that exists solely so Lumon can preserve management of its workers. The innies’ response to Ricken’s work jogs my memory of these individuals who learn half a guide (or a single headline) and out of the blue suppose they know all the pieces a few advanced matter, and who hasn’t met a couple of of them?
What’s The You You Are about?
Ricken’s guide excerpt is hilarious and consistent with the present’s darkly comedian model. It opens with, “It’s stated that as a toddler, Wolfgang Mozart killed one other boy by slamming his head in a piano. Don’t fear. My analysis for this guide has confirmed the declare unfaithful,” and continues in that vein.
Ricken’s guide purports to be a sensible information to self-improvement, the place readers are supposed to achieve self-knowledge by following a collection of steps:
-
Determine your YouType (extra on that under), write it on a bit of paper and affix it to your vainness.
-
Write your title on one other post-it and tape it subsequent to your YouType.
-
Select a theology and add a “totem” of it to your YouShrine. “This may very well be a Christianman’s cross, an An-Ra Scarab, or a Masonic sq. and compass,” Ricken writes, additionally suggesting you possibly can “use a photograph or etching of me.”
-
Add one thing you contemplate attractive. Because the creator places it: “One thing that whispers to your nethers in a voice solely they’ll hear. This can be a pinup photograph from wartimes of yore, a beloved undergarment, or a nonetheless lifetime of a sinewy gourd.” Ricken additionally recommend you should use an image of him for this step.
-
Consider an insult you’ve got heard. Write an acrostic poem utilizing the letter of every phrase of the insult and add it to your vainness. Ricken goes with “Everybody laughs at you the second you stroll out of the fucking room,” which was as soon as stated to him by Severance major character Mark S.
-
Print out a replica of a poem that Ricken wrote and paste it to your vainness.
-
“Conceive and located a charitable group primarily based on a trigger that you just maintain expensive…Whether or not you want to curtail bear populations, bathe the infirm, or ship bottled water to astronauts, keep the course till the group is procedurally viable. Then, as soon as your licensing paperwork is available in, affix it to the vainness amongst your different totems.”
That is the place the excerpt ends. Too unhealthy; I hear web page 197 slaps.
Does The You You Are embrace any clues concerning the plot of Severance?
In Chapter 3, Ricken mentions going to a theater to see “an American non secular satire movie which I contemplate to be probably the most over-celebrated piece of business cinema ever produced,” a movie we all know as Sister Act. There’s different proof within the present, however the Sister Act bit confirms that Severance takes place someplace round now in one thing like our world, regardless of the traditional computer systems and everybody driving vehicles from the ’80s and ’90s.
The You You Are additionally offers us a ton of backstory about Ricken’s character and historical past. As an example, he was conceived and born as a part of a “nine-month efficiency artwork piece originated by [his] mother and father titled ‘Smells Like Afterbirth, F**ker.’”
There is not any details about how, precisely, Ricken has sufficient cash to afford his comparatively lavish way of life. It actually is not from gross sales of his books, and his mother and father had been efficiency artists, so it isn’t more likely to be household cash both—except, as some have theorized on-line, that Ricken is definitely a black sheep member of the Eagan clan.
Possibly an important factor in The You You Are are the passages the place we study Ricken’s emotions towards Mark’s (possibly) lifeless spouse Gemma. When Ricken writes about Gemma, he appears to be in love together with her. This may very well be a crimson herring, however as Severance unfolds, I would not be shocked if Ricken’s emotions towards Gemma turn out to be a significant plot level.
The deeper which means of The You You Are inside the Severance universe
The “large thought” behind Ricken’s guide is the “YouType,” the type of made-up psychological idea frequent to self-help books, pseudo science, and cults—suppose “love languages,” the Myers-Briggs character stock, and Scientology’s “emotional tone scale.”
In response to Ricken, everybody matches into one among 5 YouTypes: The Coward, The Warrior, The Dove, The Scribe, and The Vestal. This mirrors the thought behind Lumon’s Compliance Guide. In response to Kier Eagan, there are 4 “tempers,” Woe, Frolic, Dread, and Malice, and everybody else are outlined by the ratio of every inside themselves. Kier’s ponderous religiosity and Rickens’ brain-dead aphorisms look like two sides of the identical coin.
Within the present, when the “powers that be” at Lumon uncover the guide has impressed the innies to revolt, their response is not to ban or discredit The You You Are. As a substitute, they method Ricken with a suggestion to put in writing a brand new model of the guide, particularly for innies. Ricken, ever the egotist and a spotlight seeker, is keen to go forward with the venture so no less than somebody will take his guide severely. Lumon’s plan is little question to coopt the (unintentionally) subversive concepts in Ricken’s guide and twist them to help the Lumon establishment. It is not a heavy raise, given the guide incorporates passages like, “A society with festering employees can’t flourish, simply as a person with rotting toes can’t skip.”
That is all a sly commentary on how revolutionary concepts are routinely manipulated and co-opted to serve the ruling class, and the way simply individuals may be tricked into feeling like they’re “sticking it to the Man,” even when the Man is without delay profiting and defending itself by taking the tooth out of harmful concepts. Suppose Wal-Mart promoting Che Guevara t-shirts, or one of many richest companies on the earth making a TV present concerning the dehumanization and distress of company drudgery.
