The Grim Barbarity of Capitalist Designs: Class Conflict, Corporate Dystopia, and the Sacred Gaze in Severance

The cult at the heart of Lumon is founded on the carefully constructed scripture surrounding its first CEO, Keir Egan. Lumon’s administration knows that the scripture of the Compliance Handbook alone is not enough to ensure worker belief and loyalty, and so creates cultural objects that root the Handbook in a historiographical narrative of Lumon’s past. This essay addresses the visual culture of Lumon’s civil religion, centering on the collection of paintings hung by the Optics and Design (O&D) department throughout the otherwise sparse and sterile Severed Floor. Providing a visual culture concretizes the company’s self-determined collective memory in the minds of the Severed labor force, using the power of images to construct and maintain the social order. Yet no system has a totalizing effect on the ideological perspectives of the communities they are integrated into; even looking devoutly offers a range of understandings negotiated between viewer and image.