Dialectic of Enlightenment

From Dialectic of Enlightenment, I think I found a lot of interesting pieces throughout the reading.  Before I read, I googled Horkheimer and Adorno just to get a little information about them.  After reading a little bit about each Horkheimer and Adorno, I jumped into the reading.  I found this piece actually pretty interesting and it seemed easy for me to follow, yay! 

From this piece, I got a sense that the idea of film and life continue to run in a cycle.  Life imitates different films while films are recreating events from everyday life; and this cycle continues to go on and on.  On 1226 it is stated “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.”  To me, it seems that movies used to be an idea based around the imagination.  They were “make believe”.  They had superheroes, monsters, and scenarios and situations that would let an individual explore their imagination.  Sure, there were movies that were based on actual stories and real life but to me, the idea of a movie used to be seen as “make-believe”.  Now, I feel that movies and everyday life have become so close that they are becoming intertwined and its not so much hard to tell which is which, but they relate to each other so much that they are almost becoming…hmm, a whole (if that makes any sense).  “Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements” (1233).  Members of society are depicted in movies with their personality, characterists, personal traits, jobs, etc. while actors and actresses are played out by the individuals that make up a society.  (These always sound so much better in my head).  Although it may seem a little…all over the place, that’s basically what I gathered from this piece.  One section that I found interesting was on 1225.  This might be a little out there so please, bear with me.  This page states “…depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers.”  When I first read this, I thought about the idea of labeling society.  Women and men and said to be labeled by their gender, because different roles (such as housewife) go along with different genders (relating to a bunch of theorists we’ve read…Cho, Foucault, Rubin).  Sometimes gender is the only thing that is seen and what’s on the inside isn’t seen.  I’m not sure if Horkheimer and Adorno are talking about movies in this section, but it seems that they are talking about only what is on the outside.  People don’t care what is on the inside; they are only concerned with putting a label on someone or something, and placing that person or thing into a specific category.  That might be a little over the top hehe.  

As for relating this to some theorists that we have studied, no concepts here really jumped out at me.  I did find a small relation to Jameson on 1231 with the idea of parody.  “Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity.”  Although I can’t put much explanation behind it, it was really the only thing that caught my attention when it came to the theorists.  Although I seemed to understand this a lot when I read it, I realized that it’s a lot harder to understand what I’m writing down, than it is to understand what’s in my head.  I’m excited to see what the class has to say, I think the discussion will help me out a lot here. 

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