brookes77, 3/24/09

“ The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry…. The more… completely its film’s techniques duplicate empirical objects, the more easily it creates the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the cinema”.

This quote shows that everything is being made into a commodity to make it more appealing as we talked in class. As I thought about this quote I remembered examples of CMC 200, a Harry Potter reading. Harry Potter once use to be a book and now has become a movie, website, clothing line, jelly bean, the idea of “Harry Potter” has become completely commodified in order to become more appealing to its audience. This is an book example, but clearly as we have talked about in previous classes and as Horkheimer and Adorno restate in the past reading it is getting out of hand. This can relate to Dick Hebdige when he explains “strategies to deal with the other” is to either Trivialize or to transform into exotica. The idea of Harry Potter was very erotic, different, weird, at first. No one had written a book, or series, like this before. It was soon transformed, naturalized, normalized and the theme of Harry Potter became available in every form to consumers, taking away its’ significance in the book, turning this idea into an obsession.

The last quote that was displayed during class was “Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness”. We then talked about South Park and how this goes against this quote, how South Park makes amusement, what we think is humorous in the show a crule and inappropriate humor that we feel bad about after we make fun of it. I never really though about how this quote is utilized in South Park. The amusement they display is very out in the open almost avant guard in a way that we can not ride our minds of this unethical amusement. This is why this show appears more inappropriate, it brings cultural, ethical and many other issues to the table; without hiding them, making us forget, and our minds become powerless in seeing wrong from right in amusement.