No phone, no watch, no problem: should we all be more like Severance's Christopher Walken?

The Guardian

28-01-2025

Perhaps the buzziest show on TV is Severance, a twisty-turny workplace drama that is available to anyone with a subscription to Apple TV+. Of course, there are ways to watch Severance without an Apple subscription. The primary one is: be Christopher Walken, because then they will send you DVDs of it.
Talking to the Wall Street Journal, Walken explained: 'I don't have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I have seen Severance on DVDs that they're good enough to send me.' The reason Walken receives DVDs is because he is actually in Severance, which dramatically raises the bar for people who would also like to watch it on DVD.
Walken didn't stop there. 'I don't have a cellphone,' the actor went on. 'I've never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered. I've never had a watch either. But if I need the time, I just ask somebody. Likewise, once in a while when I need to use a phone, I just ask if I can borrow one.'
This last bit is key. Perhaps you thought the reason Walken didn't have a streaming subscription was age-related. After all, he is 81, and the time inevitably comes in someone's life when the flood of new technology simply becomes too overwhelming. For my grandmother, it was the microwave. At first glance it seems as if Walken's came at some point in the mid-1990s, when DVDs and emails became commercially available.
But that isn't the case. Walken also says he has never owned a watch. Not a smartwatch; he has never worn any form of timepiece on his wrist. It is one thing shunning technology invented during your middle age, but quite another to shun things that were invented more than a century before you were born.
Perhaps we should admit to ourselves that Walken has got it right. The great hand-wringing debate of the day is whether or not we are too in thrall to technology. We get jumpy if we leave our phones out of sight for more than 30 seconds, because they dictate our lives. They're how we communicate. They're how we navigate. They're where we store our memories. And, of course, they're how we tell the time. We've come to rely on them so much that they've become a burden.
But not Walken. When he leaves his house, he's as free as a bird. He gets to go wherever his whims dictate. And if he gets into trouble along the way, guess what? People are nice. They'll tell him the time, or lend him their phone, or transpose digital media on to a physical format for him. This is exactly the way to live.
I mean, it isn't the way I should live. Because I need to watch Apple TV+ for work, and when I've finished writing this piece I need to email it to my editor, and I need to know what the time is because I'm on a deadline. My whole life is a nonstop litany of things that Christopher Walken has never done. But you? You should totally do it.
It's easy. If you want to live the simple, pure life that Walken does, you just need to embark on a 50-year career as a globally renowned star with a fairly substantial entourage of people who have a financial stake in your happiness and are willing to lend you their phone whenever you want because their livelihood depends on it. Be so instantly recognisable that strangers will be giddy at the opportunity to tell you time, and not so glumly anonymous that the request will be met by surly suspicion. That's achievable, isn't it?