The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its
own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish, although it
constantly allows gross blunders without which the standard of the exalted style
cannot be perceived. 66. ______. Nevertheless
the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its influence over the
consumers is established by entertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by
an outright decree, but by the hostility inherent in the principle of
entertainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of the
culture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social
process, they are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Demand
has not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well known, the major
reorganization of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material
prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the
public’s needs as recorded at the box-office, a procedure which was hardly
thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen. 67.
______. Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of
work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to
recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time
mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so
profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences
are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible
content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession
of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the
office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure
time. 68. ______. The tendency mischievously to
fall back on pare nonsense, which was a legitimate part of popular art, farce
and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious in the
unpretentious kinds. 69. ______. The idea
itself, together with the objects of comedy and terror, is massacred and
fragmented. Novelty songs have always existed on a contempt for meaning which,
as predecessors and successors of psychoanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of
sexual symbolism. 70. ______. Cartoons were once
exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was
done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed
specimens a second life. A. All amusement suffers from this
incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain
pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the
worn grooves of association’. No independent thinking must be expected from the
audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural
structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical
connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as
possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation and
never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual
scene will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems
dangerous, offering some meaning, wretched as it might he, where only
meaninglessness is acceptable. B. But what is new is that the
irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one
end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry.
It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never
anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the
system. It is with good mason that the interest of innumerable consumers is
directed to the technique, and not to the contents which are stubbornly
repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited. The social power which the
spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the
stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the
ephemeral contents stand in. C. The same opinion is held today
by the captains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more or
less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to the judgment of
truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their ideology. It is quite correct
that the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a
manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were
one of complete power and complete powerlessness. D. Today,
detective and adventure films no longer give the audience the opportunity to
experience the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the genre, it has also
to rest content with the simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to
be linked in any way. E. This tendency has completely asserted
itself in the text of the novelty song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons,
although in films starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-
psychological case study provides something approximating a claim to a
consistent plot. F. Often the plot is maliciously deprived of
the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern.
Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking
effect in the particular situation. Banal though elaborate surprise interrupts
the story- line.