Supply Entertainment or Oppress Thoughts
This one is a different post as it will be from my Master’s program learning about popular culture. This will be the third of five posts that I’ll make while studying the effects of pop culture on society.
While reading through the two schools’ perceptions of popular culture, Frankfurt School and Birmingham School, I was fortunate to go to Universal Studios in Hollywood California. Seeing how pop culture in film drives people to visit one of the studios and get excited to see all the objects from previous films. The main thing that my boys were excited to see was Nintendo World which opened up recently. My daughter was mostly excited to see The Voice sound stage. I’m not going to lie, I was excited to see the city hall from Back to the Future movie.
During our visit, I realized that the whole area was just one big product or commodity. Not only taking our money for visiting them but also for keeping us excited about the areas of interest that my family had. The studio had things for all ages and what people liked. That became my question that I felt does need to be answered: Do studios make movies of what people like or do they make movies that oppress actions?
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer said, “for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.” And that sums up the Frankfurt School of thought with pop culture. It has become a commodity that can be industrialized and produced en masse to suppress any type of discord.
However, the Birmingham School shows that just because studios produce something, doesn’t mean it will do well. People still have a choice in the popular culture that they enjoy. John Fiske pointed this out in his work “Popular Discrimination” where several products do fail even though they follow the same mold as previous films. This is because pop culture is a commodity but one that is overproduced. Leading the populace to decide what they want to watch, listen, or read.
In my opinion, the Birmingham School of thought seems to align with my own. Though I can see that some of the Frankfurt School does have merit, I think that their arguments support more of a “Magic Bullet” theory rather than the more complex world of popular culture. I saw it while at Universal. They know that their business is to please the audience and thus the audience has more power to determine what is shown. Even if that means the culture is suppressive in nature.
What are your thoughts? Do studios make movies based on the audience’s interests or what they want to tell the audience how to think and act?