Study Task 3: Theodor Adorno - How to Look at Television

In How to Look at Television, Adorno critics capitalism in the film industry through its effect of the audience. He deemed that it is the product of a ‘rigid institutionalisation’ which transforms the popular culture into a means to control the masses to conform. In other words television and other mass culture is characterised by ‘the repetitiveness, the selfsameness, and the ubiquity’ (Adorno,1954) targeted to annihilate individual was of thinking. The priority of marketisation has made TV films as commercial entertainment caters its content to validate the audience’s expectation to the plot, where tension is a maintained superficially to make the audience’s ‘longing for ”feeling on safe ground”’(Adorno, 1954). Genre cliches exploit infantile security of knowing that the protagonists will eventually overcome the ordeal. ‘The outcome of conflicts is pre-established, and all conflicts are mere sham. Society is always the winner, and the individual is only a puppet manipulated through social rules.’ (Adorno, 1954)  The effect of the cliched mass culture does not only give the audience false reassurance of their security, but also have given the producers profit-driven incentives to make films which leads them to be reluctant from taking risks. Therefore, the intellectual content of the commercial entertainment have always been ‘continuously lowered’ (Adorno, 1954) to maintain the status quo in the capitalist system. Adorno (1954) also observed the tendency for conflicts in films are vulgarly exposed, leaving no ‘accents on inwardness, inner conflict, and psychological ambivalence’, and therefore allowing this mass culture to be passively consumed by the audience. 

A perfect example of animation suits Adorno’s description of the mass culture would be Disney’s Animated Feature Robin Hood. Robin Hood tells a story about a thief that steals money from the impudent tax collector in a village ruled by a monarch to save the whole village from poverty. Despite the radical background of the protagonist, Disney have developed formulas which ‘pre-establish the attitudinal pattern’ of the spectator when confronted by the protagonist’s appearance against the middle-class traditional norm of being ‘good’. Throughout the story, Disney established Robin Hood as a ‘hero’ that everybody in the village looks up into, and therefore, any rebellious act dulled the audience capacity to discern the real quality to the experience, instead their capacity to pull out objective issues from the character’s journey throughout the narrative have been dulled by the passivity of the consumption of this mass entertainment.