I’m not sure why, but the blog I posted last week for this reading didn’t show up. I didn’t realize it until tonight when I went to go write next week’s blog. So I apologize to anyone who was wondering where it was. So now to recap what Horkheimer and Adorno were all about.
Ah, Germans and their poorly-structured sentences. This piece was an interesting one to read in my point of view.
They state, “If most of the radio stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street unto the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so,” (1230). They feel that the movies that are created are no longer that different from reality. They were supposed to be for pleasure, to help people forget, but now they are too life-like and if they were taken away, it wouldn’t matter because they depict real life instead of dreams.
I did wonder in the next couple of sentences how why they talked about the dim-whited and then went right into discussing a housewife. This made me a little angry, but then I remembered they were writing this back in the 40s.
Like we discussed during class last week, it seems that we are told what is popular and what is not. I know that we talked about how movies are reproduced plots that bore us, and yet we continue to go see them. Why? It’s comforting and we know it. I brought up the point that if Oprah says one week that “place book title here” is going to be her new book club book, then guaranteed the next week it will be in the top 10 on the best sellers list. It might be a good book, it might not be. But, because Oprah thinks it is the masses rush out to buy it. Individualism has been crushed here. What ever happened to someone going out and finding a book on their own and liking it because it’s well written?
Now, I’m not going to lie. I’ll admit that I’m as guilty as the next person for liking trendy things. I’m a big Harry Potter fan (I don’t dress up though, don’t worry!) and I enjoy the X-Men movies and other ones of that nature. (I blame my boyfriend). But, I do still hold a sense of identity and singularity. It kind of reminds me of that old saying that parents tell their kids all the time when they say, “But everyone else is doing it!” “Well if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you it too?” People need to realize that we are blending ourselves into one giant mediocre society.
