| | | | | | has kept other works from being created, disseminated, and enjoyed by audiences. | | | | | | | | | Workers (today, white-collar as well as blue-collar, everyone really because we all drink from the same well) are thus kept from using their re-creation/recreation time to reflect upon their life situation. Insofar as culture "is the very material of our daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings," not to find characters, situations, conflicts that could be helpful in defining one's life deprives viewers of a truly valuable support at a time when assistance from the immediate community (family, friends, church, etc.) is on the wane. 18 The distraction offered by the culture industry can therefore be said to be a flight not just "from a wretched reality," still quoting Horkheimer and Adorno, "but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is [actually] freedom from thought and from negation. . . . [Moviegoers] are assured that they are all right as they are."19 Insofar as such works take for granted the existing social and political state of affairs rather than question or oppose it, viewers are comforted into accepting their lot.20 Understood this way, movies and the rest of the mass media television and pop music mostly shortchange their consumers, keeping workers on a short leash, delivering them back on the job Monday morning without a harmful idea in their heads. In Paul Tillich's view, the system aims at nothing less than to "standardize'' human beings, to keep them consistent seven days a week, to make them, in the long run, as reliable as machines.21 | | | | | | | | | For the system to work, entertainment must be brilliant. There is no doubt that a lot of talent, effort, and work go into the making of many commercial ventures. Typically though, in each case, the film itself monopolizes the attention. And that is true even in the work of a great director like Alfred Hitchcock. The suspense and the mise en sc ne of North by Northwest (1959), for instance, can surely thrill us. One can appreciate the visual wit that permeates the project and comparisons can be made between this film and others like it. What such a film does not do, however, is open possibilities outside itself. That is to say, it does precious little for the viewer's own life apart from keeping reality at bay for two hours. By its very presence, this film may even render inoperative the | | | | |
