compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder
in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery.
Both escape and elopement are predesigned to lead back to the starting point.
Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. 
Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only be the antithesis
of art but its extreme role. The Mark Twain absurdity with which the American
culture industry flirts at times might be a corrective of art. The more seriously the
latter regards the incompatibility with life, the more it resembles the seriousness of
life, its antithesis; the more effort it devotes to developing wholly from its own
formal law, the more effort it demands from the intelligence to neutralize its burden.
In some revue films, and especially in the grotesque and the funnies, the possibility
of this negation does glimmer for a few moments. But of course it cannot happen.
Pure amusement in its consequence, relaxed self-surrender to all kinds of
associations and happy nonsense, is cut short by the amusement on the market:
instead, it is interrupted by a surrogate overall meaning which the culture industry
insists on giving to its products, and yet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in
the stars. Biographies and other simple stories patch the fragments of nonsense into
an idiotic plot. We do not have the cap and bells of the jester but the bunch of keys
of capitalist reason, which even screens the pleasure of achieving success. Every
kiss in the revue film has to contribute to the career of the boxer, or some hit song
expert or other whose rise to fame is being glorified. The deception is not that the
culture industry supplies amusement but that it ruins the fun by allowing business
considerations to involve it in the ideological clichés of a culture in the process of
self-liquidation. Ethics and taste cut short unrestrained amusement as ‘naïve’ –
naïveté is thought to be as bad as intellectualism – and even restrict technical
possibilities. The culture industry is corrupt; not because it is a sinful Babylon but
because it is a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure. On all levels, from
Hemingway to Emil Ludwig, from Mrs Miniver to the Lone Ranger, from Toscanini
to Guy Lombardo, there is untruth in the intellectual content taken ready-made from
art and science. The culture industry does retain a trace of something better in those
features which bring it close to the circus, in the self-justifying and nonsensical skill
of riders, acrobats and clowns, in the ‘defence and justification of physical as
against intellectual art’. But the refuges of a mindless artistry which represent what
is human as opposed to the social mechanism are being relentlessly hunted down by
a schematic reason which compels everything to prove its significance and effect.
The consequence is that the nonsensical at the bottom disappears as utterly as the
sense in works of art at the top. 
In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the
standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his
complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is
rife: from the standardized jazz improvization to the exceptional film star whose
hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality. What is individual is no more
than the generality’s power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted
as such. The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is mass-
produced like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of