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hellyrossum · 4 months ago

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bits of r.u.r. that remind me of severance (or are otherwise interesting)

r.u.r., also known as rossum's universal robots, is a czech play from the early 1920s that i first heard of years ago. it's notable in the canon of science fiction for introducing the word "robot" to the english language, derived from the czech word "robota" meaning "servitude / forced labor". it's a play about artificial life made to be workers, and what happens when those workers rebel against their masters. and it features a woman named helena.

that's how the play was recently brought to the forefront of my mind. between the releases of s2 eps 2 and 3, i was looking up the meaning of the name helena and other people/characters who have been given that name, in search of any potential inspirations for severance's helena having been named as such. when i found this play's helena, helena glory, the bit of context i read seemed so insane a coincidence that i decided to read the full play (thank you project gutenberg), in case of any other connections. and, well.

(this is going to be less a proper analysis of the play than a summary that highlights particular sections/ideas. if you're a fan of severance's capitalism critique and philosophical exploration of what makes someone worthy of being considered a person, i highly recommend reading / listening to / watching r.u.r. for yourself!)

backstory for the play: the og mr. rossum invented a substance that could serve as the building blocks of artificial life. he wanted to pursue the further development of this artificial life for philosophical reasons, to see if humanity could effectively replace god, but his nephew took over and was only interested in using them to get rich. by the time of the play proper, robots are used all over the world as cheap labor.

in act 1, a young woman named helena glory goes to a factory that makes and "employs" robots. helena is the daughter of an industry titan, but she reveals that she's here as representative of the Humanity League, a group that wants to liberate the robots. (you see why reading just this on the wikipedia page caught my brain on fire, right. the double life of it all.)

at the factory, helena proves to be not actually that knowledgeable about the robots; her initial response to seeing one, a secretary named stella, is to insist she must be human because she's too lifelike, and then when the managers of the company come in she assumes that they must also be robots (and makes her case to them for their own liberation), only to learn they're not. harry domin, the chief manager, told her that the employees and officials are robots, but then (after they all have a laugh at her expense) he says of course the managers aren't; a robot could never. bosseshumans are still necessary, as the top of the hierarchy, telling the workersrobots what to do. (but isn't the fact that managers could be confused for robots telling in itself? looks at people's early theories about cobel and milchick. and miss huang.)

the six men all insist that the robots are simply tools/machines, but helena belives they have souls — or, if not, then they should get to have them. this is the philosophical conflict that essentially fuels the rest of the play, and so here is where i start posting screenshots.

guys. is this not. the literal philosophy behind creating innies (as workers, at least). you make a worker who only knows work, will forever only know work, and they will only think of work (right?).

there's something very lumon to me about this bit also:

(i'm not going to screenshot it but. would you believe me if i said shortly after this there's a reference to pineapples.)

and then. the bit where a certain someone's name started blaring in my head.

i don't even need to say it. you're thinking of her too, aren't you.

immediately after this we learn that the head scientist is currently working on developing pain nerves for the robots, which is. so normal. so normal to build the experience of pain into your artificial workers so they don't gum up your production line with their injuries. so they learn how to behave correctly. so normal.

in the interest of not including every moment of the play in this post, we'll skip ahead to when the act ends: dormin says he's fallen in love with helena and traps her into an engagement with him, saying that if she doesn't accept his proposal on the spot, one of the other five men will have her. yeah. as it turns out, this story is not only about how workers are treated like property/resources, but also how women are. another thing it has in common with severance :)

in fact, if that last plot point has you thinking about some disturbing implications that were brought to the forefront in the latest severance episode (s2ep9), you are not alone. neither are you alone if it has you thinking of s2ep7. put a pin in that.

now for act 2, we skip ahead 10 years and find ourselves in domin's home, on an island. the men are waiting for a certain ship to arrive at the harbor that will be their ticket to safety. see, after years of the robots becoming more and more central to the economy — and the military — the robots have, who could've guessed, started a world-wide revolution. the ship will be the men and helena's arc, so to speak; a safe place for them to wait out the violence.

(they plan to take control back from the robots, in the end, and part of those plans includes making them "national" robots instead of "universal" ones, essentially designing different races of them, for the sake of creating divisions between them. which is pretty on-the-nose social commentary... and also reminiscent of the way lumon seeded fear and resentment between the different severed departments.)

helena has not yet been informed of any of this. we see her have this very noteworthy (imo) exchange with her nurse nana:

but then she reads the news and learns not only of the uprisings and assassinations, but also that, in the past week, not a single human being has been born. importantly, even as some of the robots have somehow developed human emotions and the desire for self-determination, the one thing that has kept them distinguishable from humans is their inability to reproduce; they require the manuscript from the original rossum to be able to make more of themselves. the manuscript that helena, upon realizing that humans have stopped having kids precisely because the robots are making them superfluous, burns.

before that, though, she speaks with one of the in-house robots, radius, who's been having "episodes" of destroying things.

this convo, in addition to making me foam at the mouth, establishes something very important that we later learn is true of the robot revolution as a whole. the robots don't want to coexist as equals with humans; they want to conquer humanity. they carry the human's belief in domination and seek to pay back the cruelty that has been shown to them in kind.

("What I want is for her to wake up while the life drains out of her and to know it was me who did it.")

[screenshot from much later but to prove the point:]

speaking of that cruelty. some more lumon ass testing floor as shit:

DR. GALL: [...] do you know, I don’t believe the rascal is a Robot at all any longer. HELENA: Doctor, has Radius a soul? DR. GALL: (Over to couch) He’s got something nasty.

and it's after that that helena thinks to ask about dr. gall's other experiment, and i drop the bomb i've kept hidden from you all:

yup :) there's an innierobot helena too :) modeled after the real one :) "If you were to wake up only for a moment you would kill me for having made you.” yeah. yeah she would. yeah.

here is where i remind you of the pin we put in the men all treating human helena as property, no more a person than the robot workers. of the similarities to the subtext of jame and helena-helly's dynamic in s2ep9, and of dr. mauer and gemma in s2ep7. this man who (like every other guy in the play) is infatuated with helena made a version of her who's literally property. he experimented on her. he continues to monitor her. he sees her as braindead and useless, but lovely. she's a failure.

there's a lot of interesting stuff that happens / is discussed in the next act and a half but i'm going to try to stick to highlights. tl;dr the robots raid the island; domin laments that he was trying to create a world where man was free of labor with the robots (to which i say: there are plenty in history who've said they're acting to free all of mankind from drudgery by assigning that drudgery to a group they consider nonpersons); he has a vision of exactly how he and his friends are going to die(???); and then dr. gall confesses:

DR. GALL: I changed the character of the Robots. I changed the way of making them. Just a few details about their bodies. Chiefly—chiefly, their—their irritability. [...] I was transforming them into human beings.

(remember that helly r core line about the soul? does it first show itself with the gnashing of teeth?)

the thing is, he did not have this idea on his own. helena (human helena) asked him to do it.

perhaps it was a noble pursuit, from a certain point of view. but you could also argue that it wasn't, that she only wanted it for selfish reasons — for the robots to understand and accept humanity, out of fear of what they would do otherwise — not for the sake of broadening their own horizons and possibilities. (remember that it's been ten years since her activist days, and now she lives in a house where multiple robots are "employed" as servants.) i'd say it's reminiscent of milchick's attempted reforms in season 2, in a way.

it also makes me think about the end of s2ep9; how mark, devon and (presumably) cobel are betting on innie mark understanding and helping them with saving gemma without really taking his own wants and agency into account. same applies to reghabi; for all her talk in s1ep6 of mark having brought his innie into this world for his own convenience, she sure doesn't do anything in s2 to advocate for getting innie mark's consent for the reintegration procedure or just. considering what his perspective on this will be.

of course, since helena, human as she is, is still considered property by the men around her, they don't ask her perspective either when deciding how they'll deal with the robots at their door — and when she points it out, her husband calls her a child. and yet, the men go on to say this:

queen of the final human empire, eh. queen in name only, most likely, right. that doesn't sound familiar at all :)

we're basically at the end now, i promise. the act closes with the robots breaking in and all the humans getting killed — not just the ones we know, but all humans on earth. all minus one: alquist, formerly the rossum company's builder (the closest of all the men to a standard worker).

we see in the final act that he's been put by the robots to the task of recreating the formula for producing more robots, more artificial life, and has had no success. in desperation, the robots volunteer to let alquist dissect them to find the answers, but he recognizes their fear of death and can't bring himself to do it.

(compare this fear of death evident in the robot leader flinching away from alquist even after he volunteers himself for dissection to this bit from all the way in act 1 (which reminds me in an agonizing way of mark and ms. casey's convo in s1ep8):

DOMIN: You see, Miss Glory, the Robots have no interest in life. They have no enjoyments. They are less than so much grass.

one of the robots chastizes alquist for his failure, for not being as "strong" as them. he falls asleep. and then, two different robots enter the scene. one we know, one we don't. they speak of the beauty of the sunrise; and an abandoned cottage they found with two dogs who licked their hands; and each other. they laugh.

laughter makes you human, or is at least a sign of humanity. finding humor, joy in something other than your purpose. (thinks about helena laughing at helly's coupon-cutting joke. thinks about helena letting herself laugh out loud at the dieter story.)

now, here is where we return to that pinned point one final time.

thankfully, helena is spared. primus offers himself in her place, which moves helena to tears. she then offers to go instead of primus, threatening to kill herself otherwise. to which primus responds:

and that's the end.

... so. it's not like anyone at lumon (minus maybe possibly milchick?) is just going to let mark and [gemma] [helly-helena] leave together. certainly dr. mauer, or jame eagan, wouldn't be so magnanimous.

maybe this is more a vision of the end of the series as currently only exists in dan erikson's head than of the finale we're getting in a few days. or maybe it's nothing to severance at all.

but. i have heard what that final shot of ep10 is going to be. and for those who know... do you see it? how it's both an echo and the opposite?

that's going to be my final word on this play for now, because i spent nearly my full work shift on this and i suspect i'm nearing my word count. i hope you severance fans got something out of this*, even though it was more summarizing and pointing at things than active analysis. tl;dr you should read / watch / listen to rossum's universal robots

*specifically @kendrysaneela since you asked for this. hope you enjoyed :)

#severance #severance season 2 #severance spoilers #rossum's universal robots #r.u.r.#(when i read out r.u.r. in my head i often think of “the you you are”. just a little bonus probably not intentional allusion)#posts from the severed floor

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