Ready Player One and the Indoctrination of Capitalist Virtues
By: Megan K
Tags: Culture Industry, Film Analysis, Nostalgia, Ready Player One, Herbert Marcuse

Spoilers for the film and book ahead!

Ready Player One (2011) is a science fiction novel by Ernest Cline, which has recently been adapted by Stephen Spielberg into the film Ready Player One (2018). Both the novel and the film begin with a similar premise: it is the year 2044/45 and the narrator describes the world as an ‘ugly place. We’re out of oil. We’ve wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty and disease are widespread’ (‘About the book’, p. 1). The story immediately presents itself as a dystopian future, a bleak and unfruitful planet, but then offsets the desolate ‘real world’ by comparing it to the OASIS:

‘like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets’. (‘About the Book’, p.1)

Opening shot of the stacks

One can compare this ‘sprawling virtual utopia’ to the opening shots of the film where the camera roams over the inhabitants of the ‘stacks’ — motor homes piled on top of each other — in cramped conditions with grey smog clouding the sky. We then see inside the stacks at the inhabitants, showing everyone donning visors and masks, immersed in the OASIS.

A still from the opening sequence showing a resident connected to the Oasis

In both texts, the real world is bleak, grey, metallic, a place where ‘people stopped trying to fix problems’. In both screenshots above, the real is shown in metallic colours, and the women boxing in the OASIS is shown through her dusty window suggesting that the real is unclean and desert-like. In both the book and the film, Wade narrates that this bleak ‘reality is a bummer. Everyone is looking for a way to escape’. Thus, the escape is the OASIS, an online virtual multi-planet utopia where you can become any avatar you like and spend your time doing anything you like. The film uses bright colours, deep purples and bright sunshine to emphasise this contrast to the grey real world.

Opening shot of the OASIS universe

Though the physical world is referred to as the ‘real’, it is evident that the bright virtual world is where reality actually takes place.

The story follows Wade, an American high school teenager on the brink of turning eighteen, orphaned and living in poverty, as he searches for the long-sought-after Egg. The maker of the OASIS, James Halliday, has died in 2044 and left a series of clues and keys which lead to his Egg, the grand prize of his entire vast fortune and ultimate control of the OASIS. Everyone, of course, becomes obsessed with finding the Egg, hinted to be found through the study of Halliday himself. Halliday becomes a messiah figure, a ‘hero’, cherished by the masses and envied by the bad guys.

Halliday giving Parzival the copper key

In the OASIS, Halliday’s avatar is Anorak, a grand wizard with total knowledge and power. Though Halliday is dead, his avatar seems to live on in some mystical and magical way inside the OASIS which emphasises his God-like image. The antagonist of the film is the evil corporation IOI, Innovative Online Industries, known as the Sixers because the employees have ‘no names, just numbers’, highlighting their corporate manner which allows for no individuality or personality. Most important is their leader, Nolan Sorrento.

The Sixers

IOI want to take over Gregarious Simulations Systems (GSS) and the OASIS to charge higher fees and build in more advertising. Wade, known in the OASIS as Parzival, and other Gunters (Egg-hunters) want to keep the OASIS free to use, so the story becomes a fight against corporate greed by the teenage underdogs. Wade finds the first key, leading to instant worldwide fame and drawing attention from IOI who make it clear they are willing to murder their competition. Quickly after, Wade’s best friend Aech, his love interest Art3mis, and two other Gunters, Daito and Shoto, follow him in finding the key. They become the High Five, the leaders of the Egg scoreboard, become celebrities, form a friendship and end up leading a resistance against IOI. Wade ultimately wins the Egg, gets the girl and the bad guys are defeated, a classic Hollywood ending, and hints at the possibility of a sequel.

This article will examine how products in popular culture, such as Ready Player One, attempt to critique its own economic system. Ready Player One explores the intersection of economic inequality and capitalism mainly through the differences between Halliday’s OASIS and Sorrento’s IOI. This essay aims to dismantle this juxtaposition to show how Halliday built the OASIS in a capitalist economic model with capitalist values at its heart and, therefore, is not the opposite of Sorrento as they both express capitalist values. This article aims to prove that even seemingly anti-capitalist narratives are merely examples of how ingrained capitalist values are in contemporary society, using theories of the Frankfurt School to support this claim, especially the theories of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Finally, I will articulate how the film itself is a product of the culture industry that capitalism produces, reveal why the text uses nostalgia so heavily, and argue that critical theory can expose and question the ways that narratives do not question the status quo but work to reinforce it.

Before the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers described as “Marxist”, began their critiques of capitalism, the original Marxist, Karl Marx, wrote the foundations on which generations of philosophers, economics and political theorists would later build. Marx was a German sociologist, economist, historian, philosopher, political theorist and most notably, socialist revolutionary, famous for writing highly influential anti-capitalist critiques during the Industrial Revolution of the West during the nineteenth century. He and his colleague, Frederick Engels, wrote both Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1883) illustrating their various theories. They argued that all societies in history are comprised of class struggles, and at the capitalist moment of his writing that struggle exists between the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, and the working class, the proletariat. They argue the proletariat are exploited, that the bourgeoisie taking profit for the labour of others is enslavement and they foresaw a socialist uprising when future proletariats gained class consciousness. Marx in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 describes his theory of alienation that proletariat workers have nothing to sell in capitalism but their own labour, so they are forced to sell this labour in exchange for wages. They often become part of the factory line where their humanity is reduced to a kind of mechanical function. They do not control and create, but merely serve a function for wages; the factory worker ‘in his work […] does not affirm himself but denies himself’. This creates a sense of alienation from their work, from fellow workers and themselves as creative human beings. He describes how workers are alienated from their Gattungswesen (species-essence), a human need to create, to produce their means of subsistence, to create their environment and be free to create their future. Under capitalism, workers must either starve or be enslaved to the bourgeoise.

Marx and Engels continue the theme of dehumanisation of workers in the Manifesto of the Communist Party by illustrating the commoditisation of the worker who ‘must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce’. In this context, they mean that workers are commodities at the mercy of the market which dictates their worth. This objectification of human beings, seeing them as means to profit, leads to the alienation of the worker, they are alienated from their work of which they have no meaningful influence, from all the workers they compete with and alienated from their creative self. The Frankfurt School, active during the interwar period (1918–33) with some thinkers writing into the 1950s, go even further than Marxist criticism of capitalism, though were often inspired by his initial critiques. This was a school of thinkers who were critical of Marx and Engels’ prophecy of class revolution. They investigated why capitalism kept flourishing in Western societies rather than being overthrown. The Frankfurt School ranged from analysis of psychology, sociology, history, economics, cultural studies, philosophy and critical theory development. The Frankfurt School acknowledged that class consciousness never developed in the Western working classes as Marx predicted and that instead, capitalist development had indoctrinated the members of Western society into accepting capitalism as the norm. As capitalism developed through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the school traces how social norms continue to alienate and dehumanise the worker in more ways than Marx and Engels initially recognised. Major writers of the Frankfurt School articulate the ways that human identity is comprised of being a worker and consumer, that the rise of mass media indoctrinates these norms in society, how capitalism creates false needs that keep the population consuming, the ways that alienation of the worker is furthered, and the ways that the illusion of freedom is created to keep the population feeling like free agents rather than cogs trapped in a self-perpetuating machine. This article will focus on the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, all major Frankfurt School thinkers, and will support their claims with other postmodern philosophers like Fredric Jameson who provide a useful analysis of Western capitalist culture. This article will articulate what capitalist norms and values are expressed in Ready Player One, even though the narrative is about the fight against large corporations, and will argue that narratives like Ready Player One exist to further support capitalist values rather than challenge them.

In both texts of Ready Player One, the company IOI is very firmly put into the “bad guy” category, the book explaining that:

‘IOI believed that Halliday never properly monetized his creation, and they wanted to remedy that. They would start charging a monthly fee for access to the simulation. They would plaster advertisements on every visible surface. User anonymity and free speech would become a thing of the past. The moment IOI took over, the OASIS would cease to be the open-source virtual utopia I’d grown up in. It would become a corporate-run dystopia, an overpriced theme park for wealthy elitists’ (p.33).

Sorrento debuting his new advertising plans

As shown above, the film also illustrates the nauseating amount of advertising Sorrento wants to put in place in the OASIS and is shown holding boardroom meetings to discuss the profits generated by IOI ‘Loyalty Centres’. These are debt repayment centres where detainees are monitored and worked until their debts are repaid, including the cost of being detained. In the book, Wade makes the point that detainees ‘were never able to pay off their debt and earn their release […] you would probably remain indentured for life. A lot of people didn’t mind though. They thought of it as job security. It also meant they weren’t going to starve or freeze to death’ (p.278). The centres are illuded to as both prison and office, Wade describing detainees as ‘corporate slave[s]’ (p.279).

Loyalty centre in the film

Art3mis in a loyalty centre showing the invasive measure put on detainees

The centres are prison-like as detainees are in small, secluded cells and their function is to provide slave labour in the guise of debt repayment. This is similar to a Marxist critique of capitalism where the proletariat is exploited, and the profit is reaped by the bourgeoise. The film shows the indents provide physical labour in the OASIS. The book, however, has indents provide many services. For example, Wade is detained for a short while and works as a technical support assistant. He describes having a ‘cubicle’ to do the office work assigned to him, in a plain and empty box-like room where he:

‘wasn’t permitted to have any decorations […] because I hadn’t earned that privilege yet. If I obtained a sufficient number of “perk points” by getting high productivity and customer approval ratings, I could “spend” some of them to purchase the privilege of decorating my cube’ (p.283).

The detainees are treated like prisoners as they are physically captured and invasively monitored, but this is alluded to being a ‘corporate slave’ in a modern office where the values of buying office décor to signify individualism are encouraged when such acts merely mould such individuals into the identifying as “worker” even further. Buying the ‘potted plant or an inspirational poster’ (p.283) works to falsify individualism and perpetuates the alienation of the worker who, though encouraged to feel like a free agent though this illusion of choice, is merely stuck in the grip of high capitalism. The IOI is portrayed as the corporate evil, only concerned with profit and power, with disregard to their employees and continually take advantage of the working class who have nothing to exchange but their labour. The texts provide a classic Marxist critique of capitalist greed and the inability for the working class to better their working conditions as they are trapped and chained to the factory line.

Whilst Sorrento and IOI’s motives for profit and power, capitalist exploitation, and general disregard for fundamental human rights are immoral, the book and the film attempt to juxtapose Halliday as a Godlike figure of goodness. His “biography”, ‘Anorak’s Almanac’, is described as Wade’s ‘bible’ (.p.61), and the OASIS itself is continually called a ‘utopia’ (p.59). Halliday’s obsession with 1980s popular culture leads to a ‘global fascination’ (p.7) with the era, and for Wade, 1980’s video games are described as ‘hallowed artifacts [sic]. Pillars of the pantheon. When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence’ (p.13). Halliday is a God in this world, and he is the literal creator of their virtual escape and haven. Halliday stands as a figure of celebrity which is used to replace God and religion in high capitalism, as suggested by Theodor Adorno:

‘In an age of spiritual disenchantment, the individual experiences the need for substitute images of the “divine”. It obtains these through pseudo-culture. Hollywood idols, soaps, novels, pop tunes, lyrics and film genres such as the Wild West or the Mafia movie, fashion substitute mythologies for the masses’ (p.29).

The obsession with Halliday alludes to the way that real-world celebrities are cherished and used as replacement Gods that one can adore and follow religiously. In high capitalism, all one must do to follow one’s leaders is to consume goods and products that are endorsed by such celebrities, be it videogames, movies, songs or the OASIS itself; these are the products that followers of Halliday must consume to continue their worship of him.

Halliday and fellow founder of the OASIS, Ogden Morrow, created the OASIS as a utopia which ‘only costs a quarter’ (p.58) and creates the guise that it is a free and equal place. They create the appearance of virtual social mobility: by winning quests and challenges you can become a higher-level avatar which can give you access to OASIS money, or “coin”, and access to more parts of the OASIS itself. However, the book in particular details the ways that the OASIS is built in the model of capitalism. For instance, in one of the opening chapters where Wade is describing the initial launch of the OASIS, he mentions that new businesses began to open virtual stores in the OASIS and so Gregarious Simulation Systems began ‘selling land that didn’t exist’ (p.59), and ‘made a killing selling virtual objects and vehicles’ (p.59). The popularity of the OASIS meant that ‘the lines of distinction between a person’s real identity and that of their avatar began to blur’ (p.60) and selling virtual objects, weaponry and clothing became ‘status symbols’ (p.59) for users; acquiring goods for one’s avatar become signals of wealth and power. Again, these symbols are not free and though the ‘real’ world is crumbling around them, this capitalist utopia is still possible: ‘even in the throes of an ongoing economic recession, the OASIS allowed Americans to continue engaging in their favorite [sic] pastime: shopping’ (p.59). The virtues of capitalism persist in the OASIS, even though it is designed to be a free and equal space that anyone can access, though there are monetary obstacles to jump over to actually access this space.

Wade describes his initial situation as living with no money or parents in an abusive household and trapped in a crumbling economy. He manages to get a job as a technical consultant in the OASIS by using a fake account. The only reason he has a visor and gloves to be able to access the OASIS are because they are school-issued as he goes to school within the OASIS, and if he fails school he will need to give back his only way to access the OASIS. Wade relates his frustration at the lack of money he has to travel around in the OASIS, complete quests and level up, all requiring money, stating that he ‘felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play’ (p.51). Though the OASIS allows for free schooling and has archived vast libraries of information which are free to access, money and the accumulation of goods are built into the world and are required to access most of the OASIS. Those who can afford to travel around the OASIS can and those who are not able to afford this are limited in their ability to access this utopia. Money still equals access.

Whilst Ready Player One is a narrative fighting against IOI and corporate greed, the heroes only goal being the protection of the OASIS as an open-access space, the values and structure of capitalism itself are not challenged, but rather, endorsed. The theories of Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), an American-German political theorist and philosopher, illustrate the various values and influences of advanced capitalist societies and the ways these are indoctrinated in individuals. Marcuse published his highly influential work One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society in 1964. In the book, he discusses the ways contemporary Western societies create what he termed ‘false needs’ in people through mass media and advertising:

‘“False” [needs] are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. […] Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs’.

Marcuse is arguing that capitalism uses media to create false needs to keep the population consuming beyond mere necessity. Not only this, but false needs are so well indoctrinated in the masses that they now accept these false needs as natural needs:

‘No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning — products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression’.

Marcuse compares the chains of capitalism to that of totalitarianism and argues that members of Western capitalist societies are not free agents making free choices, they are as trapped as those factory workers that Marx described in 1844. Just as those workers had no choice but to work in exchange for wages, the workers of the 1960s are equally chained to the capitalist ideology that forces them to identify as workers and consumers.

‘Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets’.

Marcuse identifies that workers are encouraged to purchase ‘modes of relaxation’, leisure time, which only works to ‘soothe and prolong’ the work in the first place. Man lives to work and consume. The choice to participate in work and consumption is a mere illusion as ‘economic freedom to sell one’s labor [sic] power in order to compete on the labor market submits the individual to the slavery of an irrational economic system’ (p. xxxii), one soothes oneself in leisure time by selecting products designed to further entrench one in such slavery, and political freedom is also equally an illusion presented as democracy, as ‘political freedom to vote for generally indistinguishable representatives of the same system is but a delusive ratification of nondemocratic political system’ (p. xxxii.). Western capitalism is designed to create the illusion of choice, but those choices have been picked out for one already by ‘social controls’. Social controls are any dominating force of control, identified by Marcuse as predominantly mass media. Media dominates what brands and gadgets you should buy, and what news shows and soap operas you should watch to guide your morals. Media guides unconscious social norms, they:

‘indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And as these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life’.

In Ready Player One, Halliday has monopolised the whole of commodity culture into one commodity: the OASIS. The OASIS has created a false need, the need for the OASIS above all else. In the real world, people live in stacked motorhomes, barely afford to eat yet still manage to find time to immerse themselves into the online utopia. Not only this, but all of identity and meaning is attributed to the virtual self. Users of the OASIS identify themselves in the product of the OASIS and all the identity signifiers they can purchase and attach themselves to. The false need for the OASIS is so well indoctrinated that it is taken as a natural need, ‘a way of life’; it is the only way of life.

Marcuse argues that capitalist Western society is totalitarian:

‘by virtue of the way it has organized its technological base […]. For “totalitarian” is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests’.

Marcuse believes that society is dominated by its interest in technological innovation and its need for capitalism as a social order to prevail. Thus, society is controlled to accomplish those needs. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) describe such social controls used to indoctrinate the masses into choosing to participate in capitalist exploitation, again, the theme of the illusion of choice is continued:

‘The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type’.

Choice is manufactured through advertising a variety of different products when products have been made and marketed specifically for each ‘type’ of person. That person chooses that product thinking they have freely chosen it, when, in actuality, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it, ‘the man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him’. Products on ‘offer’ vary from televisions and cars to newspapers, television shows and other identity signifiers. In Ready Player One, products on offer no longer range from refrigerators and cars, Halliday has monopolised the whole of commodity culture into one commodity: the OASIS. People behave as if they chose to use the OASIS, but in reality, they are indoctrinated by their culture to use and rely on it. Most people go to school or work in the OASIS, Wade’s mother earning a living as a virtual call-girl and Wade himself as a virtual technical assistant for the OASIS itself, after leaving school he describes that ‘I now worked forty hours a week, helping morons reboot their OASIS consoles and update the drivers for their haptic gloves. It was gruelling work, but it paid the rent’ (p.206). This job pays for real-world ‘rent, electricity, food, water. Hardware repairs and upgrades’ (p.206) but more importantly, virtual ‘spacecraft repairs. Teleportation fees. Power cells. Ammunition […] My search for the egg required constant travel, and my GSS kept raising their teleportation fares’ (p.206). Wade works to consume, though he chooses to buy more products to help find the Egg, his choices are not freely willed: ‘the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls’. Wade works to pay off the debt of the haptic suit the culture has convinced him that he needs to take part in the world. The capitalist virtues of work and consumption are built into the model of this virtual utopia. People work to pay for OASIS, a place of pure consumption, indulgence in acquiring virtual goods, playing games, and spending money. Though users work to consume, people also consume to work.

As Wade and the rest of the High Five get more famous, though they stand against IOI and corporate greed, they are still represented as a worker and consumer, as both these aspects of the characters are highlighted and cherished. They both consume the OASIS, buy the haptic suits and consume the 80’s trivia needed to hunt for the Egg, they also work as celebrities. For example, Art3mis ‘launched her own successful clothing line for full-figured female avatars, under the label Art3Miss’ (p.202), Wade uses his own OASIS TV channel ‘to sell commercial time to my various sponsors’ (p.202), and provide entertainment for the masses as they quest for the Egg. Wade narrates the difference between his frugal real life and his luxurious virtual life:

‘standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an anti-social hermit. A recluse. A pale skinned pop culture-obsessed geek […] wasting his life on a glorified videogame. But not in the OASIS. In there, I was the great Parzival. World-famous gunter and international celebrity. People asked for my autograph. I had a fan club. Several, actually. I was recognized everywhere I went […]. I was paid to endorse products […]. I was a pop-culture icon, a VR rock star’ (p.198).

Wade embodies the alienated worker, lost in a perpetual consumption mode to fill the voids of his existence, as Marcuse argues ‘free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear — that is, if they sustain alienation’. Wade is disconnected from the world and uses capitalist signals of success, money and fame, to justify his feelings of alienation.

Halliday’s Egg hunt turns consumption of his product, the OASIS, into work as the Gunters dedicate their lives to it. Halliday creates a mode of constant work and consumption where users are consumers but also workers for the OASIS, and work to perpetuate the cycle. People think they are free agents in the OASIS when in reality they are chained to a product that uses their consumption for profit. As Marcuse argues,

‘the people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced’.

In high capitalism, the self as product is only taken further than Marcuse suggests here. In Ready Player One, people identify themselves as users of the product of the OASIS, their avatar is their “real” self, they work to consume and consume to work. We might draw a parallel here to users of social media in our real world. Users both consume content and create content for free, acting as workers and consumers, who see their online selves as representations of their lives that need constant upkeep and work to maintain the image they have created. Users are simultaneously workers and consumers. This same dynamic is represented well in Ready Player One and illustrates the various ways that capitalism turns consumption into work and work into consumption, fulfilling artificial needs that were created by the culture in the first place.

Marcuse argues that identity is signified through products, which is an important theme in Ready Player One. Wade narrates to the reader how ‘the lines of distinction between a person’s real identity and that of their avatar began to blur’ (p.60) and as discussed previously, avatar weaponry and vehicles became ‘status symbols’ (p.59). Users see their virtual goods and products as signifiers of their identity, and the choice of one’s avatar itself seen as a projection of a true inner self. Both film and novel place emphasis on the variety of choice a user has in creating their avatar, what worlds they play in, and generally paint a picture of the OASIS as a space of free expression. However, in Halliday’s utopia, choice is limited to Halliday’s repertoire of 1980s pop culture references.

Opening scene of the OASIS showing a Minecraft World

In both texts, the importance of the 1980s to Halliday is continually highlighted, with a huge number of media references found in both the film and throughout the novel, ranging from small details like how the transportation devices in the OASIS are modelled after Doctor Who TARDIS’, to the way that all the gates in the Halliday hunt are either 80’s videogames or acting out songs and films from that period. The world of Ready Player One is comprised of Halliday’s obsessions, where characters ‘are capable of arguing endlessly about “Star Wars” trivia, [while] they’re also living in a 27-sector virtual-reality world arranged like a Rubik’s Cube and where the “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” realms are right next door to each other’. This domination of culture by Halliday leaves little room for choice or freedom in the OASIS, and this obsession with nostalgia for the past is explained by Adorno and Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception and by Fredric Jameson in his critique of postmodern societies.

Adorno and Horkheimer published The Dialectic of Enlightenment ‘which traced the rise of fascism and other forms of totalitarianism to the Enlightenment notion of “instrumental” reason’. In this book, Adorno and Horkheimer coin the term ‘Culture Industry’ in the chapter The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In this chapter, they outline the ways that products have been standardised for mass appeal, and how works of art have gone under this process too, thus birthing the culture industry where art is made into a product for sale and consumption.

‘A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller’.

Here they argue that creative risk is obsolete in the culture industry, which instead produces the same product ready for consumption over and over. They argue that culture becomes another commodity in modern Western society, devoid of political or artistic meaning.

‘Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic’.

By only producing “safe” products, by only being concerned with economic output, reduces works of art to commodities for consumption, they are as standardised as products on a factory line. Fredric Jameson, literary critic and political philosopher and theorist, develops the concept of the pastiche in the culture of postmodern society:

‘Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour’ (p.5).

Whilst for a cultural art piece to parody another work of art means to copy or mimic to critique or comment on it, be it political or cultural commentary on issues of the day, pastiche is merely to mimic without such depth or insight. Jameson also argues that contemporary mass culture is obsessed with nostalgia, he writes that ‘innovation is no longer possible’ (p.7) and therefore ‘all that is left is to imitate dead styles’ (p.7). Both ideas of repetition and imitation are important factors in his analysis of mass culture, which can be read together with Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that mass culture is the same standardised product resold on loop. In the world of Ready Player One, Halliday seeks refuge in the 1980s and the world of videogames, and the whole world would rather escape than invest in the real world. No one develops anything new in the destroyed world of the future and so is stuck reminiscing about the past. The obsession with the past, as Jameson laments, signals how we are ‘condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about that past, which itself remains forever out of reach’ (p.10). The OASIS is called a utopia, the word utopia defined as being ‘no place’, which articulates both how the 80s is ‘out of reach’, whilst also suggesting that the OASIS is merely a representation of cultural products forged in the first place to be a representation of culture, a simulacrum, an image. The OASIS is not a time machine into the past, but merely replays cultural products of the past, representations of past that are not even themselves real. Not only in the story world is this obsession with nostalgia and inability to create anything new a reality: the film itself is a mere remake of the book, a product which filmmakers made ‘reassuringly backed by a bestseller’. The film is just one more remake that Hollywood continually produces as it is guaranteed to make a profit. Ready Player One signals the inability of our current capitalist society to innovate new tales, all that is left are different Disney remakes, live actions, sequels, prequels and origin stories.

Whilst Ready Player One is not a call to arms for the proletariat uprising, it is merely another product of the culture industry sold to us from Hollywood studios, it still retains an anti-capitalist message that the large corporation is the greedy, power-hungry bad guy and cannot to be trusted. Mark Fisher’s book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), argues that even narratives against capitalism end up reinforcing it. He states that ‘anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the “evil corporation”. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it’ (p.12). Ready Player One is a narrative which casts the villain as the corporation, yet still embodies the various ingrained values of capitalism. It is an example of ‘what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity’ (p.12). We can passively consume such films as Ready Player One, or even a film like Purge (2013), which describes a future America where the problems of crime, poverty and homelessness are solved by allowing one night a year to legalise all crime in a purge-like manner. The film critiques the ways that money allows one to buy safety, that black people and working-class citizens are the most affected by the purge and that wealthy elites pay to kill as a way to cleanse the nation of the homeless and working class, under the guise of moral cleansing. The film’s message seems to be rebelling against the way our capitalist societies are structured: the allowance of police brutality, structural racism, that money can buy power and influence in politics and even allow wealthy elites to buy their way out of punishment. However, the film endorses the status quo by showing lawless society as evil and terrifying, as we need to be protected against other people. The film concludes that we need government, police and a legal system to keep us safe, echoing Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651), and arguing that our system, though not perfect, is best in comparison to a world without police and government. So whilst the film recognises a feeling that the legal system is broken, we can consume the film’s performative rebellion and continue to leave the world unchanged, as the film concludes that the current system is still the best system we have. This process also happens in films like Ready Player One which critique capitalism only to still champion its values, ‘so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange’ (p.13.). So long as we know the big corporation is bad, we can continue to participate in capitalism because we are at least aware of our chains. And this is indicative of a variety of ways that capitalism can identify rebellion against the status quo, buy, package and sell it:

‘intellectual freedom of expression is ineffectual when the media either co-opt and defuse, or distort and supress, oppositional ideas, and when the image-makers shape public opinion so that is is hostile or immune to oppositional thought and action’ (p. xxxii).

Any critique of the system, the ways that things are, are often suppressed or co-opted by capitalism; feminism becomes buying a “Future is Female” t-shirt, anti-racism is posting a black square on Instagram, and anti-capitalism is watching the latest Netflix documentary about how algorithms are bad. All work to ‘soothe’ the individual, perform rebellion for us and allow us to leave the system unchanged.

In conclusion, Ready Player One is a text which depicts the fight between teenage underdogs and capitalist bad guys. However, the world of the OASIS still perpetuates the capitalist structure, and the values of capitalism are still cherished in this world. The values of the self as worker and consumer, identification of the self in products, the idealisation of celebrity, the illusion of choice, and the obsession with nostalgia are all evident within the OASIS. Ready Player One also both shows how the culture industry perpetuates more of the same, investing in the success of nostalgia, and is itself a product of the culture industry, as the film itself is a remake of the book. The film and book act as ‘interpassive’ vehicles in which the film can act out some rebellion against capitalism, while still allowing the viewer to enjoy and consume within capitalism. Both book and film end by encouraging people to spend more time offline. In the film, Wade and the High Five close the OASIS on Tuesdays and Thursdays to encourage people to participate in reality, and the book has Halliday encouraging Wade to engage in reality, as it is ‘the only place where you can find true happiness’ (p.364). Both texts suggest that time with loved ones is enough to fight the system and encourages the viewer to identify that they merely need to take a day off here and there to escape capitalism. This simplistic answer to the problem allows the capitalist order of Western societies to go unchallenged, the texts perform a weak sense of rebellion and allows the viewer to leave the cinema, or put down the book, and continue to participate in capitalist systems. With critical engagement, however, it is possible to analyse the products of the culture industry and identify the ways that seemingly rebellious texts work to perpetuate the system.