In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Horkheimer and Adorno write about the way in which producers of films, radio, television shows, and many other forms of media, push dominant ideologies onto their audiences. Horkheimer and Adorno describe how filmmakers create films with predictable plots based on many other movies, such as the male and female protagonists falling in love at the end, or the hero saving the day. They write about how producers of music also fall into this pattern of predictability by how catchy songs seem to all have similar musical structures. Horkheimer and Adorno criticize this sameness with, “to be entertained means to be in agreement. Entertainment makes itself possible only by insulating itself from the totality of the social process, making itself stupid and pervasively renouncing from the first inescapable claim of any work, even the most trivial: in its restrictedness to reflect the whole” (Durham, Kellner, 2012, p. 64). Those who are consuming entertainment are agreeing with these recurring themes within entertainment. Entertainment moves away from the social process because it does not reflect the lives of everyone, as it predominantly represents those subscribing to the dominant ideology of being white, straight, rich, and able-bodied, likely due to the vast majority of media producers holding privileged identities. It makes itself stupid because it does not address deep societal issues, likely to maintain their privileged audience. These powerful identities that white, straight, cisgender filmmakers hold prevent them from understanding marginalized experiences, causing them to avoid representing those experiences in their art.
While enrolled in my Critical Media and Cultural Studies introductory class, and my Introduction to Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies class, we discussed the role of identity in film, specifically the lack of women directing, writing, and acting in films. In the majority of films, women do not have as many lines as men, and even when they do have lines, many of those interactions between female characters revolve around men. If more women directed and produced films, it would disrupt this “agreement” in entertainment about women, and challenge the dominant narrative that a woman’s goals and dreams solely revolve around a man. I have attached a link to an image that demonstrates how little progress has been made in increasing the number of women behind the scenes of famous films, and just how outnumbered they are in the industry by men. Being aware of these disparities in media production can help us to understand Horkheimer and Adorno's criticism of dominant ideology within art and entertainment.
Link to image:
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16579.jpeg
References:
Kellner, D. M., Durham, M. G., (2012). Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Wiley-Blackwell.
Your comment about the entertainment industry reflecting the lives of the (more often than not privileged) individuals within the industry reminded me a lot of our discussion of Marx in class yesterday. It specifically made me think of two quotes; "He who has the gold, rules!" and "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production". While Marx is referring to labor structures, I would argue in a late-stage capitalist society that is so saturated with media production and consumption, Hollywood has the gold. Through their mode of production (in this case media) they are able to spread narratives that definitely influence our mental production. With their focus on white, cisgender, straight, and able-bodied individuals, they push the narrative that this is the norm and that it should be our reality even though it's not the reality for a large number of people who are consuming this media. I think the media is definitely a social being we are shaped by. It's not a coincidence we view heterosexuality (or any of the other examples) as the norm when this is all we are exposed to through media growing up. We've talked extensively about how our views of love have been at least in some way shaped by Disney movies, so clearly media has the ability to spread ideology, or in Lyotard's terms, totalizing metanarratives. I wonder if by consuming media that pushes these themes we are passively supporting them. I think Althusser would probably say yes as he believes "the author and the reader... both live... 'naturally' in ideology".
ReplyDeleteThis isn't necessarily related to my comment, but I also really appreciated the statistics you included. I knew there was a disparity between how many men and women are in the film industry but I can't believe so little has changed in those numbers from 1998 to 2018. I think it would also be interesting to see how few of these women ( and men as well) are people of color or hold "othered" identities (such as being disabled or trans/gender non-conforming).