dmariel, 3/25

The most striking quote from Horkheimer and Adorno that we went over in class on Tuesday was “Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At it’s root is powerlessness”. When I first read this quote in the reading, I didn’t think twice about. After discussing it as a class, there is so much more meaning behind it. I think it almost defines our culture as one of ignorance and naivete. We ignore the deepness of things in order to enjoy them. Movies about the end of the world may not just be fictional. Many people believe that the world will really end in 2010, but until that may happen, these movies are entertaining to us. Another perfect example, which we touched on in class as well, is South Park. South Park is successful for exactly this: putting the important issues behind and presenting them as comedy and entertainment. They take cultural stereotypes and important political occurrences, turn them around and make us laugh at them. The powerlessness is found when we push the seriousness behind without asserting authority over the situation...
This directly relates to Bejamin’s idea that “mankind’s self alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience is own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order”. Our culture is so manipulated that we enjoy destructive images, suffering, and things which take us out of our comfort zone. This example reminds me of the September 11th media that was being played over and over on the TV everyday to the point where average Americans were enjoying the images before them.
Just the other day in CMC200, we read a research project on the film Rush Hour 2 and the stereotypical messages within the movie. A study was done in order to see if people felt that the stereotypes were offensive. Almost all of the participants thought that since the racial slurs were for entertainment that they were not offensive to the race at all. These people are the exact example of powerlessness, pushing away seriousness to salvage entertainment.