wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room
for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty. The triumph over
beauty is celebrated by humour – the Schadenfreude that every successful
deprivation calls forth. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at.
Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It
indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic.
Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind
overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of
power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry
never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on
happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films
portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as
devoid of humour as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has
attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at
something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in
laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-
assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion
arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads,
all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone
else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false
laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight
is austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that not asceticism but
the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative
confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the
fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain
found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy
their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every
product of the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilization is once
again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to
deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films.
Precisely because it must never take place, everything centres upon copulation. In
films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted
without the parties being punished than for a millionaire’s future son-in-law to be
active in the labour movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialized as well
as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat
of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organized acceptance of the
uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is
decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of
women’s organizations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the
customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is
possible. The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of
fulfilment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to
be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make
him believe that the deception it practises is satisfaction, but it goes further and
implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The
escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be