an eye to the film) to the last sound effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose
title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the
employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the
production team may have selected. 
The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old
experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film
he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday
perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his
techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to
prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented
on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since
the lightning takeover by the sound film. 
Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far
surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on
the part of the audience, who are unable to respond within the structure of the film,
yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the
film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-
media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced
back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes
to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most
characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers
of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet
sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless
rush of facts. Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no
scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the
movie – by its images, gestures, and words – that they are unable to supply what
really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics
during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry
which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically. The
might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainments
manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when
the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic
machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure –
which is akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast programme the
social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The
culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in
every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s
clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced
or extended in any way. 
The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in
the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped
appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical
reproduction surpasses the rigour and general currency of any ‘real style’, in the
sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic precapitalist past. No
Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved