The Coming-Of-Age Teen Movie That Inspired Severance Season 2's Big Musical Scene

At the end of "Severance" season 2, Lumon office wonk Mark S. (Adam Scott) finally realizes that a project he has been working on — a mysterious number-crunching assignment — is nearing completion. Mark doesn't know what that means, really. Indeed, viewers don't either. Lumon, up to this point in "Severance," has been enacting very mysterious, ineffable plans that are never explained. Notably, the company has been playing sadistic memory games with Mark's presumed-dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), forcing her to undergo horrid physical and psychological abuse only to "sever" her memories of the experiences. Lumon keeps its employees in line by offering small, meaningless rewards for accomplishing tasks. They sometimes get dance parties or fruit plates.

Mark's reward for completing his assignment, as announced by his boss Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman), is a prolonged performance by an enormous marching band. It's surreal to watch Mr. Milchick lead the marching band into Lumon's 1960s-inflected, fluorescent-tube-illuminated office and hear their noisy, noisy instruments perform in such an enclosed space.

Of course, Mark has been working on a season-long plan of his own: He aims to flee the marching band performance and trek into the company's sub-basements to free Gemma. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Mark and Gemma don't remember each other while inside the Lumon building due to their severance brain chips. While Mark flees, his co-workers, Helly (Britt Lower) and Dylan (Zach Cherry), trap Mr. Milchick in a bathroom. He pounds on the door and screams while Helly and Dylan prop a vending machine against the door. To make the scene even stranger, the marching band doesn't stop playing for one second during the fracas.

"Severance" composer Theodore Shapiro commented on the marching band sequence in an interview with Bandcamp. As he went on to reveal, the whole thing was actually inspired by "Drumline," a 2002 coming-of-age teen flick that the show's executive producer and frequent director, Ben Stiller, is a big fan of.

"Drumline" was a modest success in theaters, arriving amongst a vast wave of teen-friendly competition dramas that were in vogue at the time. It made over $56 million at the box office on a $20 million budget, and its star, Nick Cannon, was nominated for multiple Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards. The film also boasted an early performance from future Oscar-winner Zoe Saldaña, then better known for her appearances in films like "Center Stage," "Crossroads," and "Get Over It." The movie follows recent high school graduate Devon Miles (Cannon) as he moves from New York to a university in Atlanta. There, he butts heads with the school's marching band experts as he fights to win drumline competitions and, along with them, acceptance. A sequel came out in 2014.

Shapiro recalled hearing about the concept of a "Drumline"-inspired "Severance" finale back during the 2023 Writers Strike. It seems that the marching band was Stiller's idea, so Shapiro simply rolled with it, noting that "Drumline" was "the musical reference he [Stiller] gave me." Shapiro added that the marching band music had to play into a few mysterious liturgical pieces that were, by the composer's recollection, not sharply defined. Lumon, after all, demands a cult-like devotion from its employees to both the company and, especially, its fictional founder, Kier Egan — something Shapiro's music needed to reflect. As he put it:

"On top of it, we wanted to weave these things that I think of as Egan religious anthems. First, 'The Kier Hymn,' which we've heard before in season 1. And then the script called for the second piece to be called 'The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel.' We don't know too much about who Ambrose and Gunnel are yet, but I wrote something that I think of as another entry in that canon of religious hymns. Trammel did his incredible choreography, and the whole thing really came off."

Ambrose and Gunnell will, we might assume, appear in "Severance" season 3, which is currently in pre-production. Mysteries abound.