Column

Awe and wonder

Creed

Film & TV

Re-enchanting

4 March 2025

4 min read

The great pie mystery

Some unusual graffiti give insight into reality’s mysteries.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A green bridge spans a motorway, on its side is graffiti that reads 'PIES'

The view on the M6.

drgillybean, Creative Commons.

Do you have a favourite piece of graffiti? I used to.

If you're travelling on the M6 around Cheshire, at some point you’ll come to one of those green motorway bridges. And on the side of it, overlooking the tarmac, you'll see in massive writing the word “PIES”.

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by this. It raises so many questions. Who wrote the graffiti? How did they do it? Was this person in favour of pies or against them? Was it about all pies or just some pies? What had happened in this person's life to make them have such strong opinions about pastry?

And it was just me. For nearly 30 years, people were left nonplussed about the graffiti as more and more instances of it began to crop up across the North-West of England.

And then, in 2016, the mystery was solved. Apparently, it wasn't really to do with pies at all. It was all the result of a Liverpool band called The Pies trying to promote their music. After getting stuck on the motorway one day, they decided to write the name of their band on the side of the motorway bridge because, well, what else are you going to do when you’re broken down?

It's fair to say, I was a little bit gutted to learn about the origins of the graffiti.

What was once an intriguing mystery that kept me up at night and haunted my every thought (okay, perhaps a slight exaggeration) was revealed to be something so … boring. With hindsight, I wish I'd never learnt the truth about what happened. I thought wanted to know the origins of the pastry-based vandalism but, as they say, ignorance sometimes is bliss.

You see, we sometimes need a little bit of mystery in life.

Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

This is evident in lots of different ways, but perhaps most apparent when it comes to entertainment and art. TV series Lost, for example, was a huge hit when it first came out. Why did the plane crash? What is the island? What is the smoke monster? Viewers were hooked and demanded answers.

But then answers came and everyone was upset. As Lost went through series after series, and explained more and more about what was happening, the audience slowly became more and more disenchanted with the program. The finale – where the programme’s biggest mysteries were finally revealed – was almost universally panned.

The same to be said of the recent HBO hit Westworld. Its first series was by far and away its best. But season two and three trailed off significantly as there was simply no mystery left in the programme after its spectacular first series. I wonder if this is precisely why the works of the late David Lynch were as compelling as they were? The still-incredible Twin Peaks holds up so well precisely because it categorically refuses to explain itself.

Elsewhere there is a growing tendency in video games, for example, for the narrative of the story to be hidden away, shrouded in mystery and atmosphere. Think of From Software games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, massively successful in part because they are so mysterious. In both instances, it’s entirely possible to complete the game and have no clue whatsoever that there was even a story in the game, let alone to understand it. The player becomes captured by the mysteries of the worlds they find themselves in, and it’s these mysteries, rather than any answers, than compel them forwards.

The reason why programmes like Lost and Westworld begin to lose their allure as they explain more and more about their world is that this jars with the reality of the world around us. Peel back the world in Lost or Westworld and you see there’s actually only a thin layer of reality masking a great chasm of nothingness.

Peel back the world around us, however, and reality goes all the way down. And this is precisely what we would expect from a world created by a God, who is infinitely Infinite. Reality is not paper thin; goes all the way down. It is mysterious, unfathomable, and resists easy answers.

And so, when we get disappointing explanations about a plane crash in a TV programme, or the origins of our favourite graffiti, it rightly leaves us feeling unsatisfied. Because we are made to be at home in a world that is deeply real. We are made to be at home in a world where the reality has unfathomable, unimaginable depth to it. A world that cannot simply be explained away.

And this is why mystery is so important in our life. In the post-Enlightenment culture in which we find ourselves, a culture that demands every question be answered and every Scooby-Doo villain be unmasked, the notion of boundless mystery might seem somewhat disquieting.

But we are made for mystery. And this is why the best works of art trade more on the mysteries they introduce, rather than the answers that might be behind them. And this is why mystery can be found all around us. Even in a pie.

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Review

Culture

Film & TV

Trauma

Work

4 February 2025

4 min read

Severance: the ins and outs of seeking oblivion

We can't contain trauma to just one sphere of our lives.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

In a retro-future styled office, workers stand or sit around a pod of desks.

Apple TV.

How far would you go to stop yourself doing late-night emails? Or what would you be willing to do to escape those painful memories? Severance, returning for its second season on AppleTV+, explores an extreme solution to both.

The show follows a group of office workers at Lumon who have had their memories severed: when outside of work they do not remember what they do at work and when at work they do not know anything about their lives outside. The work-self, referred to as an 'innie', enters the elevator at 5pm and immediately finds themselves back in the elevator at 9am the next day. They feel rested without any memory of the rest. Their "outie" blinks at 9am and then it is 5pm.

Adam Scott's protagonist, Mark, joined Lumon Industries as a severed employee working in "Macrodata Refinement" (MDR) as a result of losing his wife. In an episode early in the second season, one character recounts Mark telling them that he applied for the role because it felt like he was "choking on her ghost." Being severed offers Mark hours each working day where a version of him can work oblivious to this grief.

Of course, Mark's employer is up to something sinister, though exactly what remains unclear even to the innies. Lumon is at times terrifying, at times goofy and always unsettling. Innies are mistreated but cannot communicate with their outie beyond what Lumon allows. Even in these conditions, the small MDR team, each with no more than a couple of years' worth of memories, find purpose in their relationships with one another and in seeking to understand their bosses' designs.

Severance has attracted a lot of attention and reflection. Writing for the Financial Times, Emma Jacobs concludes that the show points us to our impossible longing for a boundaried life. The Northeastern University academic Tomas Elliot proposes that Severance can be read as an inversion of The Matrix: employees knowingly placing themselves in a state of naivety. Jacobs and Elliot both read the show as pointing to the paradoxical nature of modern work as both the cause of discontentment and the place many look to for a sense of purpose and fulfilment.

Instability cannot be contained to one sphere of life. Life is hard and so is work. Neither can offer escape from the other.

At the heart of many of the questions that Severance raises is the relationship between work and identity. Most of us live with a sense that who we are is found in our relationships. Work means something because it is one of the places we are most powerfully shaped by and shape relationships with colleagues, competitors, consumers and everyone else. Work becomes destructive when it cultivates destructive relationships in the workplace or when it displaces other forms of community and sources of identity.

The process of severance protects outies from the formative power of workplace relationships: their strains and their joys. No doubt we could each imagine benefits to this. However, it leaves Mark's outie paralysed by grief because he has denied himself a key source of relationships through which he could begin to heal, integrating that grief into a new sense of self.

Just as Mark's innie is protected by the outie's grief, the outie is protected from discovering who he could be without his wife. As the series progresses, it becomes less clear whether Mark's motivation is the fear of grief's crushing burden or the fear that one day the burden may ease.

In his book Resonance, Hartmut Rosa writes:

Time and again, human beings come to discover that they can become "different people" in different contexts. And under the highly dynamic conditions of late modernity, the task of finding out who we really are collides… with repeatedly having to "reinvent" and creatively redefine ourselves. That said reinvention also should be "completely authentic" is surely one of the more pointed paradoxes of the present age.

As Rosa notes, the dynamism of contemporary market forces produces a dynamism in our sense of identity, which can be experienced as instability. One response to this instability—and all the other humiliations and challenges of living at this time—is to look for ways of separating "work" and "life", to carve out a space where I can be free from constant performance and reinvention. And yet, as Severance shows us, whatever part of ourselves we designate as "life" or "outie", it cannot be free from pain and sometimes we will escape to, rather than from, "work".