As Bergson describes the loosely defined rules of comedy, he reflects upon the innate comedy of the man acting as a machine—the repetition of an absurd act absent-mindedly, unbeknownst to his role as a mere puppet. These ideas can be reflected in slapstick films like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), which examine the consuming materialism of the post-industrial era through the image of the alienated assembly-line worker’s body and the consequent irony of inserting the Tramp archetype within the greater machine. Bergson’s assertion that “the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine” is paralleled in the opening credits of the Apple TV show, Severance’s first season. This sequence, crafted by 3D artist Oliver Latta employs surreal and unsettling imagery to explore the tension between the human condition and a mechanized consciousness—a pivotal theme in both Bergson’s musings and the dystopian series, too.
This sequence reminded of some of the snippets I have previously become familiarised with, from Jacques Tati’s filmography, and particularly of its typically cold, sterile, and hyper-modern settings, which inspire levity in the character’s awkward, albeit human attempts to navigate these rigid structures. The flaccid gestures and clay-like movement of the many repeated bodies in Severance’s opening credits, however, do not provoke laughter. Instead of escaping from the confines of corporate life, the character played by Adam Scott only further devolves into the inanimate objects around him. I hypothesize that is because, as the sequence continues, the figure of the man becomes less and less recognizable as a man—being sucked through a metal syringe, or liquefied into black sludge. Bergson argued that “something mechanical I encrusted on the living will represent a cross at which we must halt, a central image from which the imagination branches off in different directions”. Evidently, as witnessed in this sequence, the pendulum can swing too far into the uncanny, stripping the marionette figure of its association with a living entity.
I also thought Bergson’s musings about the ceremonial aspect of mass culture indicated this limbo between the absurdly funny and the absurdly ominous, as he wrote about the seriousness that we attach to our daily rites and rituals—like the commute to a 9-5 job. It also revealed to me that interjecting the real with the surreal can often have dichotomous, deeply polarizing effects.