What does alienation look like? Perhaps it resembles the elevator used by employees at Lumon Industries in Severance. The series, Apple TV+'s biggest hit, depicts employees who, in order to compartmentalize their personal and professional lives, have agreed to split their personality into two distinct consciousnesses, called "outie" and "innie." The "outie" comes to life when leaving the company, with no memory of work life. The "innie," on the other hand, becomes active at the office, condemned to spend its entire existence performing meaningless digital tasks.

The transition between "innie" and "outie" occurs in the elevator at Lumon Industries. The employee takes precedence over the human, explains Mehdi Achouche, a lecturer in Anglophone cinema and American studies at Université Sorbonne-Paris-Nord: "The moment is visualized by a dolly zoom, illustrating on screen the separation and discomfort between the character and the surrounding world. This effect, invented by Hitchcock, is also found in La Haine (1995) by Mathieu Kassovitz, when suburban youths go to Paris, demonstrating how much they don't belong to that city."

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