Lecture 5 – The concept of the culture industry

The culture industry is essentially the culture of the mass society. It is offering an empty ideology of “fun” in order to make bearable the masses' routine. Advertising for example operates as a “magical” promise of equality in an unequal world. Soap operas sell illusions of life-style while their real function is to invite the poor to identify with “dramas” of the rich, thus reinforcing the social status quo.

The commercialisation of art constitutes the basis of the culture industry. Art is produced as a commodity to sell in the market and this affects its character and its meaning. Art is longer about the search for the beautiful beyond the confines of the existing world but teaching its consumers how to live in the existing world. Cultural products are standardised, packaged and sold to the masses who are left with no other choice but to consume them. The pressure to conform to the authoritarian society is unbearable as the masses cannot conceptualise any alternative. It is a vicious circle: the lack of alternative pushes them into the culture industry and the culture industry ensures that there is no space for alternatives. The people are thus entrapped into the logic of the commodity and the law of value.

The function of the culture industry. It is incorporating the people into a homogenising system which prevents critical thought. The culture industry constitutes the equivalent of factory organisation as its prime function is the regimentation of the workers even in their free time. It indoctrinates ideologically the people and converts them into passive consumers. The culture industry is about style, not content. Its only message, repetitive and fairly simple is the inculcation of obedience to the social hierarchy. The key function of the culture industry is to serve as an outlet for their internal repression. But the repression of totalitarian society is not transcended through art but reinforced by commercialised art. The spectators come to worship the social power enforced through the stereotype which serves the function of homogenisation. The audience is not expected to do any independent thinking but consume the ready-made sensation which is prescribed on the product. This brings about the one-dimensional man (Marcuse).

Hollywood industry: Booming industry attracting actors and directors from all over the world – the first and still the most important global film industry. Exporting cinema productions everywhere. Cheap as well as expensive movies, variation and multiplicity but common elements in all Hollywood productions. In the 1930s to 1960s the Hollywood was dominated by gangster and crime films, westerns and musicals. Epic films and comedies continued to develop while thriller and horror films also appeared. Ideological and aesthetic aspects: family values and norms, individualism and the American dream. Ethnocentrism and patriarchal tendencies, especially in older movies, anti-communism during the Cold War and post modernism in the last decades. Mass entertainment in a commercialised context and oligopolistic film production. Conventional narrative structure, usually light in terms of content, simple and straight forward, easy to follow, and possible to predict the classic happy ending. Calling upon the spectators to identify with the individual hero, the protagonists, immersing into the context of the story and projecting specific lifestyles, tastes and ideas.