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German social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, reflecting on
Hollywood’s culture industry in the post-WWII period, maintained that comedy,
musicals and the “happy ever after” dramas of mainstream cinema serve as
distractions. “Fun is a medicinal bath”, they wrote. “The pleasure industry
never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud
practiced on happiness.” The culture industry functioned largely, they thought,
to divert people’s longing for a society of genuine happiness into the
transitory emotional satisfaction and false joy of narrative certainty. For
those concerned with changing the world, however, it’s better to examine with
sobriety the ills of society than succumb to the garish Technicolour illusions
of mainstream cinema.
Present day cinema, even more than when Adorno and Horkheimer were writing, is
an obscene and exploitative industry. It trades in pat clichés and the
regurgitation of tired narratives. The endless remakes of superhero films
suggest that something is rotten in the state of California – a crisis of
imagination reflective of the broader malaise of a capitalist system consuming
itself in its own excesses. Every now and then, however, something brilliant,
challenging and disturbing appears. Todd Phillip’s Joker is one of those films.
https://redflag.org.au/node/6924
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