Event

Michael Szalay

Overcoming Severance, from Lumon to Foxconn

This talk will read Ben Stiller’s Severance (2021-), and Apple TV+ programming generally in light of Apple’s unique position in the streaming ecosystem. A service provider as well as a device maker, Apple brands its media productions as exactingly as it does its phones, tablets, computers, and watches. As a result, its content is branded in ways that Netflix and HBO Max’s, for example, is not; indeed, Apple’s still relatively small stable of film and TV content expresses the firm’s manufacturing interests in ways that even Sony’s content, say, does not. This talk establishes the coherence of Apple’s TV branding and asks how it should matter to a materialist critical practice. Specifically, it asks if the very coherence of Apple’s trans-corporate branding makes it possible to glimpse in Apple content the otherwise hidden, outsourced, upstream production processes upon which the company still depends.

Michael Szalay is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He teaches 20th- and 21st-century fiction, television, and film, as well as courses on World-Systems Theory and the origins of capitalism. His first two books (Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party and New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State) examine the relationship between literature, liberal governance, and economic crisis. His forthcoming book, Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television (Chicago, 2023), defines a new television genre—the black-market melodrama—that has driven the ascent of TV as a cultural force over the last two decades, and that continues to mediate the ongoing effects of deindustrialization on a changing U.S. middle class.